MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > Sight and Sound's Lists of the Greatest ...

Sight and Sound's Lists of the Greatest Films of all time (2022 edn)


Sight and Sound's 10 yearly Critics' and Directors' polls are back for our delectation and consternation:
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/directors-100-greatest-films-all-time
Full analysis isn't possible yet because lots of details about procedure and voting patterns is reserved for the print magazine at this point. So a few general, mostly board-relevant remarks will have to do.

Last time, on the main Critics' Poll, Hitchcock had Vertigo at #1, Psycho at #36= (equal to the new #1 Jeanne Dielman), and NbNW and Rear Window at #53=. This time Vertigo slips to #2, Psycho improves to #31= (w. The Mirror and 8&1/2), Rear Window creeps up to #38= (w. Some Like It Hot and Breathless), and NbNW improves to #45= (w. Battle of Algiers and Barry Lyndon). No new Hitchcocks appeared in the top 100.

High profile ejections from (often far up) the top 100 include Rio Bravo, Nashville, Wild Strawberries, Touch of Evil, Chinatown, Aguirre, Raging Bull, La Grande Illusion, Les Enfants du Paradis, Godfather Part 2, The Mother and The Whore, L'Eclisse, Lawrence of Arabia, Magnificent Ambersons, The Wild Bunch, Greed, Intolerance.

These ejections made room for titles like Get Out (when Rosemary's Baby's isn't on the list and didn't make the top 250 last time so has never been given much respect by earlier versions of this crowd - yet Get Out is *so* much better? Hmmm.), Black Girl, Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Daughters of The Dust, Moonlight, Parasite, News From Home (from feted #1 director Akerman), The Piano (which was down in the 250s last time), Daisies (which was down in the 200s last time and reaches 25= this time - which seems amazingly high to me for something that's self-consciously silly and whimsical and slight), Portrait of a Lady On Fire (which I'm a big fan of but think it's a being overrated at #30 - it's really *not* better than, or as fascinating as Psycho or Mirror or 8&1/2), Wanda and Killer of Sheep (both 200s dwellers formerly now promoted to the 40s). The biggest jumper is Agnes Varda's glorious Cleo from 5 to 7, another 200s-dweller now up all the way to #14. It's now the highest placed film from the whole French New Wave reflecting how Varda's stock rose and rose as she stayed active into her 90s.

reply

A quick remark about The Directors Poll. As usual, it's a more mainstream and traditional arthouse repertory cinema list: all sorts of stuff from Lawrence to Strangelove to Jaws to Godfather Part 2 to Raging Bull is back solidly in the top 100, and come on back Salo, Don't Look Now, Rashomon, La Strada, Vagabond, Come and See, Eraserhead, Fanny and Alexander, and so on. Just Psycho and Vertigo from Hitchcock make the Director's Poll, same as last time, and their places haven't changed much.

Finally a general word of warning about S&S polls. Their methodology is a little crazy. They solicit *unordered* top ten lists from a couple of thousand people. They then construct their polls by counting up how many unordered top-10 lists each film appears on. This is incredibly limited data! Think of the tabulation possibilities if *ordered* lists or much longer lists, or both, e.g., ordered top 100s had been asked for. Or maybe people could have been given the last S&S Critics list to order as they see fit and then been asked to add as many films as they like to that list, say n, and to submit their own revised top 100+n.

As it is, because there's nothing like a 'long-list' procedure narrowing the universe of possible selections, most of the unordered top-10s that people submit barely overlap. I calculated back in 2012 that on average 25% of a voter's personal list never appeared on *anyone* else's list. How this worked out last time (2012) was that appearing on 34 out of the ~850 lists returned was enough to make Psycho 35= most popular overall, and the bottom-ranked films (the 93=) in the top 100 appear on just 17 critics' lists. That is, support by just 2% of critics. (and being officially ignored by 98% of the critics polled!) was enough to get a film into the top 100, and support by 4% (and being officially ignored by 96% of critics polled!) was enough to get into the top 35. This is a crazy way to calculate anything. Rock on 2022.

reply

Meaty stuff in there from you to read, swanstep, and then all the poll stuff itself. A fine feast awaits.

But...

...some thoughts.

ONE: The Vertigo reign ends after just one decade. As I recall, Citizen Kane got three or four decades, yes? I always felt that Vertigo was on shaky ground to get the 2022 nod after getting it in 2012.

TWO: My how quickly a decade goes. I've been feeling that Vertigo is "new as the Sight and Sound Number One" for quite a few years -- perhaps Citizen Kane's dominance for decades made Vertigo seem like that much more the newbie. It feels like Vertigo barely got to be Number One for very long at all, before being knocked down a peg.

THREE: OK...so the new Number One is: ' Jeanne Dielman," a French film from 1975? Hey I was AROUND in 1975, I saw a lot of American studio films and READ about a lot of foreign films(to us Yanks) that year and I have NO memory WHATSOEVER of Jeanne Dielman. So the Greatest Film of All Time is...a movie nobody saw. Says I. Ha. (Evidently, OK I'm favoriing my own weak memory here, but still.)

FOUR: This choice rather tracks with Sight and Sound(whoever they are, whatever the crazy methodology they use) as very, very contrarian folks. Vertigo was not a massively seen hit like the equally well-reviewed(or BETTER reviewed) Rear Window and Psycho. This NEW , obscure contrarian choice is going to sit there for a decade of head scratching. and it thumbs its nose at mass enjoyment of film.

FIVE: After a few decades of American films, albeit arty ones -- Citizen Kane and Vertigo -- S and S now elects to "go internationale." It figures, I suppose, but one does have to get into "the numbers" -- foreign films generally reach much smaller audiences than Hollywood studio product.

Oh, well. Vertigo is at Number Two, still pretty good, Psycho is on the list (and of course should have been Number One) and did better.

Analytical fun ahead.

(I'll be gone for a bit.)

reply

THREE: OK...so the new Number One is: ' Jeanne Dielman," a French film from 1975? Hey I was AROUND in 1975, I saw a lot of American studio films and READ about a lot of foreign films(to us Yanks) that year and I have NO memory WHATSOEVER of Jeanne Dielman. So the Greatest Film of All Time is...a movie nobody saw. Says I. Ha. (Evidently, OK I've favoring my own weak memory here, but still.)
Nothing's wrong with your memory ecarle. While Jeanne Dielman was at least a bit of an arthouse darling in France and did the worldwide film festivals circuit after that, as far as I can tell it didn't really jump out to most film viewers at the time. That is, there were a ton of strange, extreme, masterpieces-to-some that came out in the mid-'70s that were still reverberating around festivals and repertory house in the 1980s when I was around: Julie and Celine Go Boating (1975), Salo (1975), The Mirror (1975), La Grande Bouffe (1973), In the Realm of the Senses (1976), even things like 1900 (1976), Eraserhead (1977) and all the way up to Stalker (1979). (A lot of these other films made it into Sight and Sounds latest Critics' list too of course.) I had chances to see almost all of these in the early '80s, hyped up at Festivals or at some rep. cinema whereas I can not remember Jeanne Dielman getting any push of that sort. The first time I remember hearing about JD was in some academic discussion of important feminist films in the mid-'80s. I heard about Varda's One Sings, The Other Doesn't (1977) in the same context.

reply

For what it's worth, I actually recommend Varda's One Sings, The Other Doesn't (1977) to people as *the* great overlooked '70s feminist film classic that they might actually enjoy watching. It's far less austere than JD: it's a relatively fleet 2 hours, has a bit of historical sweep to it as it tracks two women friends through the '60s and '70s as they engage with the women's movement in France, fall in and out of love, start to have kids, etc.. It's beautifully shot, accessible to everyone I think, is sentimental and moving in more conventional ways than JD. You'll rewatch One Sings, The Other Doesn't with pleasure whereas JD is more like a mountain climbed that you cross off a list and don't repeat.

reply

Nothing's wrong with your memory ecarle.

I think not, because, as you wrote, swanstep:

there were a ton of strange, extreme, masterpieces-to-some that came out in the mid-'70s that were still reverberating around festivals and repertory house in the 1980s when I was around: Julie and Celine Go Boating (1975), Salo (1975), The Mirror (1975), La Grande Bouffe (1973), In the Realm of the Senses (1976), even things like 1900 (1976), Eraserhead (1977) and all the way up to Stalker (1979). .... I heard about Varda's One Sings, The Other Doesn't (1977) in the same context.

...and I know each and every one of THOSE titles, though I never saw a one of them. The reviews for Salo and La Grande Bouffe were enough to turn me off on content alone (like I say, Psycho and Frenzy are about my limit -- I'm a Manchurian Candidate/Charade/Mirage/Wait Until Dark....Marathon Man/Black Sunday kind of guy. When not a Hitchocck kind of guy.

CONT

reply

As far as I can tell, then most of the people who have ever seen JD have seen it on videotape/dvd on college campuses. JD is the sort of film that actually benefits from being required viewing in some course: it's 200 minutes, so over 3 hours,of locked down camera in a single apartment with a very slow cutting style (about one shot per minute). [Update: actually there are a few brief exterior scenes, e.g., of our main character walking in the streets, shopping, and sitting in a cafe. But they're all shot in the same, slow, locked down, front-on rectilinear style as the interiors that they're not much relief.] When you watch it it's clear that JD's brilliant, one of the best conceptual pieces anyone has ever put on film.

You're boring in on mundane 'woman's work' and being asked to think about how every movie you've ever seen before has not showed you this. It's tortuous slow film where finally something does happen, and in the meditative state you're in after 3 hours of intense micro-attention, what happens shakes you and it *is* feminist-consciousness-raising.

Mark Twain once quipped that a classic novel is something nobody wants to read but everyone wants to have read. Jeanne Dielman, Satantango and a few others are the ultimate classic films in Mark Twain's sense! They're painful as shit to watch (it actually helps to be forced to watch to get you over the hump) but you're appreciative at the end. You learn something, and you're glad someone made you watch them or pleased that you were able to grow the pair necessary to get yourself through them.

reply

In a way the full title of JD tells you all you need to know: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. It's going to be a sort of scientific anatomization of a particular life over a particular stretch of time in a very particular place. It's the opposite of commercial film and indeed it owes a bit to art-galleries-only experimental film that explicitly disvows attention (e.g. Warhol's Empire State Building).

JD played an important role in the one of the final eps of the (fairly) recent Cate Blanchett miniseries Miss America (about right-wing extremist anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly). And some recent films have exhibited its influence for those of us with eyes to see it. A Ghost Story (2017) was my fave film that year, and its most notorious scene (which was too much for some people) was a single 5+ minute shot of Rooney Mara eating a whole pie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvlRbZiR-Lc
That's JD in anlage baby. Now imagine that idea stretched out over three+ hours.

Update: there are a number of short interviews with JD's writer/director, Chantal Akerman, up on youtube. The following is particularly useful about her intentions and some of the personal fallout for her from early acclaim:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pSNOEYSIlg

reply

As far as I can tell, then most of the people who have ever seen JD have seen it on videotape/dvd on college campuses.

---

This is historic for the Sight and Sound poll, I think. I always figured that if Vertigo got the boot -- from way back in 1958 after Citizen Kane ruled from 1941 ...that maybe a 60s or 70's movie would get the shot.

But I was thinking 2001 or The Godfather.

I daresay something else is going on with the critics who cast their votes this time.

---

JD is the sort of film that actually benefits from being required viewing in some course: it's 200 minutes, so over 3 hours,of locked down camera in a single apartment with a very slow cutting style (about one shot per minute).

---

Oh, boy. Well, these days I watch three hour/four hour movies in "chapters" like a streaming series. Easier to do.

---

When you watch it it's clear that JD's brilliant, one of the best conceptual pieces anyone has ever put on film.

---

Well, OK. I respect your opinion in these matters, swanstep, but its a world you live in, not me.

I was thinking in responding to this that my parents took us to a lot of movies, and it was really "whatever caught their fancy" and the kids went along.

This mean occasionally we went to movies like The Manchurian Candidate and Dr. Strangelove and Advise and Consent(yep, as kids) but sometimes the movie of the weekend was Doris Day and James Garner in The Thrill of it All or Doris Day and Rock Hudson in Send Me No Flowers or Doris Day and Rod Taylor in The Glass Bottom Boat.

And then we'd go see Modesty Blaise. Or "McHale's Navy Joins the Air Force" (which even I could tell was shot using a sitcom budget.)

CONT

reply

I recall a couple of Doris Day/Rock Hudson like movies that DIDN'T have those two in them, but nonetheless had that great Technicolor fantasy falsity with a tiny bit of sex(nice to file away for later years):

Boy's Night Out. Garner and Kim Novak(BIG crush at the movies for my young self.) Garner is the only single man among four male Mad Men NYC commuters(Tony Randall -- HE's in the Rock/Doris movies; Howard Duff and Howard Morris are the other married ones) who elect to put Novak up as a "blonde on call" for conversation only in an NYC apartment. What a fantasy! How unmakeable today! (Novak is a psychiatry student whose mentor is Oscar "Sabotage" Homolka, and Mrs. Thornhill herself , Jessie Royce Landis is Garner's mother, I think.) Of course only the single man Garner actually GETS Novak.

For Love or Money. Kirk Douglas tries to play Rock Hudson in Technicolor froth. He's got to find husbands for three gorgeous daughters of a rich woman. He does and, of course, bags one for himself. The real twist here is that the "rich dowager" -- in great gowns and wigs and jewelry -- is played as a great gag by Thelma Ritter.
Pretty funny, as I recall.

I linger on all these "pop" movies(among which films like Strangelove and Modesty Blaise inexplicably entered our weekend movie world almost by accident, who knows why?) because that's MY world versus the world of "Sight and Sound." My world and their world never really matched up, they never really will. But at least I had SEEN Citizen Kane and Vertigo.

(I wasn't old enough to see it, but I sometimes try to picture Vertigo as the "weekend drive in movie" that my family used to go to. Would we just accept it "as is" as a pretty mystery movie, and have no sense of it as the greatest movie of all time? I'll never know. Meanwhile, Psycho had QUITE the drive-in reputation -- cars lined up for MILES to get in.)

CONT

reply

In a way the full title of JD tells you all you need to know: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. It's going to be a sort of scientific anatomization of a particular life over a particular stretch of time in a very particular place. It's the opposite of commercial film and indeed it owes a bit to art-galleries-only experimental film that explicitly disvows attention (e.g. Warhol's Empire State Building).

---

Or that experimental film "24 Hour Psycho"(which indeed slows down the movie so it plays over a 24 hour period...I guess they leave the art museum open all night long.) I've always kind of wanted to find that movie somewhere, stand in front of it for , say, 10 minutes, and see what changes. (I expect ol' Arbogast would fall for about four hours...)

---

JD played an important role in the one of the final eps of the (fairly) recent Cate Blanchett miniseries Miss America (about right-wing extremist anti-feminist Phyllis Schlaffley)

---

I watched that whole series and I don't remember that part. Of course, I was reading and doing things while I watched...its hard to watch in depth on home TV.

That brings us closer to the rationale for this movie reaching "the greatest" spot, I suppose. I guess some voters went looking for a female director, and Ida Lupino and Lina Wertmuller didn't make the grade.

---

CONT

reply

And some recent films have exhibited its influence for those of us with eyes to see it. A Ghost Story (2017) was my fave film that year, and its most notorious scene (which was too much for some people) was a single 5+ minute shot of Rooney Mara eating a whole pie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvlRbZiR-Lc
That's JD in anlage baby. Now imagine that idea stretched out over three+ hour

---

Again...OK. But not my cup of tea. Or piece of pie.

I expect that JD will be made available on one of the streaming channels. Maybe it already is. I expect I will look at it some time.

But really...what kind of boost will this vote give this movie?

We shall see.

reply

When you watch it it's clear that JD's brilliant, one of the best conceptual pieces anyone has ever put on film.
---
Well, OK. I respect your opinion in these matters, swanstep, but its a world you live in, not me.
It's funny, there's a whole side of art cinema that turns on slow-down and on inducing a meditative or hypnotized state in the audience. 2001 & Solaris are probably the closest that mainstream audiences have ever got to that sort of cinema, but they were anomalies. If anyone else makes a film like that there's a 99.99% chance that no one except certain earnest film-school types will ever see it. Maybe Jeanne Dielman getting such a prestigious placing in a big List will lead it to break out of the tiny viewership it's had. I guess that I can imagine 'seeing JD and responding to it' becoming something like a Tik-Tok challenge for certain groups of status-hungry show-offy teens. We'll see.

But, yeah, the whole main list is very academicky and plainly very interested in issues of inclusion and representation.

reply

I've got hold of a copy of Sight and Sound's Winter 2022-23 issue (the one with the poll)... I was hoping that the extended top 250 list, voting details (e.g., how many votes was actually required to be at a given position in the main poll), and the like would be in the magazine, but not so. So, the only new info. is (all?) the individual director's lists (i.e., that affected the main poll and settled the Directors poll). A couple of overarching comments: (i) many directors added commentary to their choices but about 50% provided unadorned lists of titles; (ii) sometimes that commentary completely undermined the choices listed, e.g., Wes Anderson both adds an 11th choice - his #0 he says - in his commentary and says he'll otherwise list just his 10 favorite French films because he happens to be drawing up his list in France; (iii) a few Directors egregiously ignore the 'top 10' requirement and in fact submit top 15s (Scorsese) or even top 20s (Brothers Quay), but it's not clear whether S&S just recorded the first ten choices in these cases or whether S&S did in fact reward Scorsese and co.'s rule-breaking.

The Directors who voted for Psycho were Bong Joon-Ho, Abel Ferrara, Edgar Wright, Ti West.
The Directors who voted for Vertigo were Ari Aster, Bi Gan, Bertrand Bonnello, John Carpenter, James Gray, Asif Kapadia, Sebastian Lelio, Horace Ove, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Tilda Swinton, Joachim Trier, Nicholas Winding Refn.
Del Toro voted for Shadow of a Doubt (and offered The Birds as his back-up Hitch choice. Bravo Guillermo!)

So it looks like 13 votes was required for #6= on the Directors' Poll and 4 votes was enough for #46=.

reply

Bump.

reply

Get Out is still benefacting from critical affirmative action I see.

As for the list in general. Woeful. So pretentious.

reply

Get Out is still benefacting from critical affirmative action I see.
I'm afraid so. Get Out's great but to seriously rank it ahead of its obvious influences like Rosemary's Baby let alone ahead of Polanski's actual, near-perfect film Chinatown, let alone ahead of every film ever made by Wyler, Huston, Hawks, Cukor, Kazan, Stevens, McCarey, Lean, Zimmerman, Capra, Ray, Minnelli, Clouzot, Mackendrick, Spielberg, Nichols, Chabrol, Rohmer, Lubitsch, Tarantino, Allen, Penn, Ritt, Rossen, Fosse, both Sturges', Peckinpah, Siegel, Lumet, Malle, Frankenheimer, Coens, Almodovar, Haneke, and so on, well, the list just *does* end up looking strongly political, a matter of who's 'in' and who's 'out' and which groups have been historically under-represented and which over-, etc..

Beneficiaries of this affirmative action from Jordan Peele to Celine Sciamma are likely a bit sheepish about some of this. I'm pretty sure that if they were here with us today they'd assure us that they *hope* to someday make something as good as Chinatown or It's a Wonderful Life or His Girl Friday or Jaws or Annie Hall or Sweet Smell of Success or Best Years of Our Lives or On The Waterfront or A Face in the Crowd or Palm Beach Story or All That Jazz or Kind Hearts and Coronets. Hell, I imagine that Hitch himself would feel a bit overpraised (and his peers undervalued) by the 2022 Critics' List.

reply

Get Out's great

---

I suppose so. I did see it and -- I suppose I've mentioned this before - but all I could think about as the film moved towards its end was something that Hitchcock told Truffaut in their famous book interview.

Hitchcock said that he had been working, in the 60's, on a project from another book by the guy who wrote The 39 Steps, John Buchan.

This book was called "The Three Hostages" and evidently moved forward enough that Hitchcock thought of casting Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren in it...to give them something "lighter" to be in than Marnie. (With Connery as Richard Hannay.)

Hitchcock told Truffaut that he ultimately abandoned the project because:

"...the story centered on hypnosis, and I really don't think that hypnosis holds water. The audience doesn't believe in it."(Paraphrased except for the words "hold water.")

Well, I don't think that hypnosis holds water either. I've been to some "comedy hypnotist acts" with co-worker types and it is as if everybody is faking everything. The hypnotist isn't hypnotizing anybody, the "subjects" are all in on the joke(even if not told to them, they just fake it).

Consequently..."Get Out" didn't hold water for me.

Good otherwise, though, and it launched Mr. Peele just like Blood Simple and Pulp Fiction launched a coupla other guys.

reply

Well, OK. I respect your opinion in these matters, swanstep, but its a world you live in, not me.

--

I didn't quite put that right, swanstep. Its not meant to be dismissive or snobbish, its LITERAL...I don't really live in a world where I KNOW ...let alone SEE...all that international cinema out there as you do.

That said, I've looked at some of those American titles on the list -- Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown -- and sure, I saw those.

---


It's funny, there's a whole side of art cinema that turns on slow-down and on inducing a meditative or hypnotized state in the audience. 2001 & Solaris are probably the closest that mainstream audiences have ever got to that sort of cinema, but they were anomalies.

---

I didn't see Solaris, but I certainly recall the utter silence and stasis of the last minutes of 2001 after the "space gate" sequence and those minutes DID affect me.

There is something to be said for 'slowing down the film to silence" and FEELING how it affects the human nervous system. Our movies move so FAST now.

I have always disdained the way-too-overlong build-ups in Leone scenes(and he does NOT use slo mo) but I found more respect for him when someone wrote that Leone simply felt that movies moved TOO: FAST. So slow it all down and see how it plays. NOW I get it.

CONT

reply

Hitchcock himself liked "air pockets of silence" and the first 10 minutes of Topaz are very much like that, as is the early "Scottie follows Madeleine" part of Vertigo (including very quiet scenes at the art museum and the churches.)

---

If anyone else makes a film like that there's a 99.99% chance that no one except certain earnest film-school types will ever see it. Maybe Jeanne Dielman getting such a prestigious placing in a big List will lead it to break out of the tiny viewership it's had.

--

I realize that -- as with the Oscars -- this wasn't a "calculated vote by one monolithic group" but it DOES seem aimed at giving a particular little known masterpiece its day in the sun of scrutiny. For 10 years! It also advances things to the 70's (hah, only 50 years ago now) and it does bring a "woman's POV" in . (How funny it now seems that when we talk about the Old Masters -- Hawks, Ford, Welles, Capra, Wyler, Hitchcock, Stevens -- hell, they were ALL men, it was a man's field, even Ida Lupino couldn't really get to the top. That is about to change...unless the movies are still meant to be driven by men...you know, "Movies for Guys Who Like Movies."

---

I guess that I can imagine 'seeing JD and responding to it' becoming something like a Tik-Tok challenge for certain groups of status-hungry show-offy teens. We'll see.

--

Yes.

---

But, yeah, the whole main list is very academicky and plainly very interested in issues of inclusion and representation.

---

Well, the academic part has always been part of Sight and Sound, the inclusion/representation part is important today but boy...how they gonna hide all those white male Old Masters? (Let's throw in Lubitsch, Preminger, and Wilder.) I guess they'll just end up like Founding Fathers...

reply

"Get Out" didn't hold water for me....good otherwise, though, and it launched Mr. Peele
Maybe this is a good time to discuss Peele's most recent film, Nope.

It wasn't a big hit but it *did* climb into profit which isn't easy to do these days for original screenplays, and esp. non-superhero properties. I have to give it a lot of props for coming out in Summer and being full of interesting, original storylines (almost like a PTA movie) about quirky characters and full of interesting ideas about black participation in Hollywood and the West and the sorts of spectacle that are the core of show business still and that usually have all sorts of violence and exploitation bound up within them (this is the point of the monkey rampage story).... All that stuff takes up well over an hour and makes you wonder where the movie is going before gradually the action side of the movie that's, Ha-ha, right in front of you all along starts to come into focus and explode. I was pretty indifferent about the film at first but gradually dug it more and more as it went along... I'm not sure that I've ever had quite that experience before: A PTA movie that turns into an imitation Spielberg movie. Peele's an interesting dude. His second film, Us, too had its off-kilter, elusive side. When there's something about a movie that doesn't quite come together or make sense, that can also make the film hard to shake and that makes one want to rewatch to make sure you've understood it. Peele's kind of done this simultaenously maddening and ingenious thing twice now. Neither Peele's follow-ups to Get Out has had GO's narrative drive and economy and genre-specific backbone, but they're both still good and worth seeing. Nice trick. It's probably time for Peele to make another tight-as-a-drum film like GO tho'. Does he have such a script in him?

reply

RE some directors’ film omissions: ecarle says you see international movies and you did mention a lot of directors here that I believe have been omitted. But I also see no mention of Bunel’s Discreet Charm…, Belle de Jour or Melville’s Bob la flambeur and Le Samourai. Completely off the list and out of both of your conversation. And you say the near-perfect Chinatown? To me it was perfect. What would have made it perfect? To both you and ecarle - Were any of these (Bunel, Melville, or Polanski) EVER on the S&S list?

reply

@ letess. S&S haven't yet provided us with their extended, Top 250 list and other analytical info. that they provided (for the first time) back in 2012.

In 2012, Discrete Charm of the Borgeoisie was at #183= and Exterminating Angel was at #202= (and Bunuel and Dali's Un chein andalou was in the top 100 at #93=, but Belle de Jour was nowhere in the top 250)
In 2012 the only ranked Melville film was Army of Shadows at #202= (equal with Exterm. Angel among others).
And in 2012, Chinatown was in the top 100 at #78. No other Polanski films were ranked.

And you say the near-perfect Chinatown? To me it was perfect.
To me too. 'Perfect', however, waves a red flag to many people so I wanted to say something a little weaker that almost everyone could agree on. But I misspoke; I should have written "At least near-perfect'.

reply

The NYTimes' main film critics talk about the S&S List. --s.
__________________

Is Sight and Sound’s List of 100 Greatest Films Too Tasteful?

To our chief critics, news that “Jeanne Dielman” topped the magazine poll was a welcome jolt. If only there had been more room for the weird and messy.


By A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis
Dec. 7, 2022

Last week, the British film magazine Sight and Sound released the results of its decennial poll of what it calls “the greatest films of all time.” In 1952, the first year the magazine conducted its survey, Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist classic “Bicycle Thieves” was voted No. 1. Ten years later, it was supplanted by Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane,” which held that position until 2012, when it was knocked from its berth by Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” This year, Chantal Akerman’s 1975 tour de force, “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” supplanted “Vertigo,” shocking the world (OK, some movie people). The Times’s chief film critics discussed the poll and what it means.

A.O. SCOTT Before the poll results were published, I was prepared to let loose with a rant about the nullity of list-making, the barbarism of conducting criticism by vote and the utter emptiness of the idea that one movie could be the best of all time.

Don’t get me wrong: I still believe all those things. (And also, less high-mindedly, I’ve always been a little hurt that Sight and Sound never asked for my 10-best list.) But the ascension of “Jeanne Dielman” to the top spot was a welcome jolt to the critical system.
(Cont')

reply

MANOHLA DARGIS I never expected that Akerman’s brilliant, formally austere, intellectually uncompromising, three-hour-and-21-minute slow burn about an alienated Belgian housewife who turns tricks — which Akerman directed when she was 25 — would have more support than the usual old-school favorites. I mean, wow!

Still, I wonder what Akerman, who died in 2015, would have made of this. It’s worth noting that she didn’t contribute to the previous poll. The day that this latest one hit, Isabel Stevens, Sight and Sound’s managing editor, tweeted that when the magazine asked Akerman to contribute to a different survey in 2014, she replied, “I don’t really like the idea, it is just like at school.” Akerman said she’d think about it but didn’t understand this desire to classify everything, adding, “It is tiring and not really necessary to do these kinds of things.”

It almost feels insulting to include Akerman in this exercise, and yet human beings are invested in creating and maintaining hierarchies, so canon formation feels inevitable.

SCOTT We do love to rank and sort! This year, Sight and Sound expanded its reach, soliciting ballots from more than 1,600 critics, almost twice as many as in 2012. (The directors’ poll is a separate undertaking, in which Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” captured the top spot.) As with some of the recent Oscar victories, you can see evidence of generational and other demographic shifts. There were two films directed by women on the 2012 list, and only one by a Black director. This time around there were nine women — including two films each from Akerman and Agnés Varda — as well as seven by African and African American filmmakers, including Spike Lee, Charles Burnett, Barry Jenkins and Djibril Diop Mambéty. (Cont'd)

reply

To me, and to many of the voters, I suspect, those movies clearly belong in the company of more established classics like “Citizen Kane,” “Vertigo” and Yasujiro Ozu’s “Tokyo Story.” But the presence of newly consecrated masterworks also changes our understanding of the old ones, refreshing them with new meaning. You see new patterns and affiliations when the poignant household observations of “Tokyo Story” are in conversation with the rigorous attention to domestic alienation in “Jeanne Dielman.”

DARGIS I think that’s exactly right. Akerman and Ozu and Renoir and Burnett are all giants. That said, I think the overall list is too narrowly shaped by respectable, consensus favorites from two familiar traditions: Hollywood and the art film. That pretty much defines my selections, too (I’ll share them below), and I wish I’d made room for weird, messy, disreputable movies, for a genre masterwork like George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” a movie that is forever lodged in my being, and for more avant-garde filmmakers.

Much of this is about the creation of taste and how films are categorized and elevated, packaged and sold, and how and when they cycle in and out of favor. “Citizen Kane” dominated for so long not simply because it’s a masterwork, but also because Welles was a film martyr who legendarily fought Hollywood, and he was a ubiquitous cultural presence as film studies were becoming institutionalized. Importantly, “Kane” was repeatedly shown on broadcast television, and it was a repertory-house staple. Availability also may help explain why “Vertigo” — which was restored in 1996 to wide acclaim — rose to the top in 2012.

(Cont'd)

reply

I assume that availability at least partly clarifies why there is just one silent movie on the critics’ Top 10: Dziga Vertov’s 1929 “Man With a Movie Camera.” Scandalously, there are only nine silent movies total on the entire list of 100 films, none made before the 1920s. If this list looks different than it did 10, 20, 30 years ago, it’s less because critics and directors are now hewing to some phantom politically correct agenda; it’s because of factors like the decline in rep houses, the rise of film festivals, shifts in home entertainment, changes in the industry and in film schools. The mainstreaming of feminist film theory helped “Jeanne Dielman,” but surely so did the fact that it’s now streaming, including via the Criterion Collection.

I also assume that D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” (which tied for 93rd place in 2012) fell off the list not because the poll’s contributors are in P.C. lock step or worried about rebuke. Rather, the kind of spurious formalism that long dominated film discourse — and which insisted that the racism in Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” was less important than his artistry — is no longer tenable to many of us. There are, after all, many other filmmakers to celebrate instead. It’s notable that for this poll, only the directors showed love for Roman Polanski, choosing “Chinatown” as the 72nd greatest — it hasn’t changed in 10 years, but everything else has.
(Cont'd)

reply

SCOTT Back in 1952, when the first Sight and Sound poll was published — heavy on silent films, by the way, since the other kind had only been around for 25 years or so — the academic discipline of film studies did not exist. Like literature before it, film has in the decades since been partly annexed by classroom study. I suspect that many critics under 40 first encountered a lot of these movies that way, including “Jeanne Dielman,” which is a staple of the syllabus in courses on feminist film, European art cinema and the tradition of the avant-garde.

One thing that hasn’t changed, at least among critics, is the tenacity of the auteur idea: the assumption that film is above all a director’s art. The canon of auteurs has expanded beyond the certified Old Masters of classical Hollywood, Japanese and European cinema. Some of those guys have at least for now been pushed into exile — we miss you, Howard Hawks — to make room for new consensus figures like Akerman, Varda, Wong Kar-wai and David Lynch. But the auteur principle remains durable, perhaps partly as a protest against the hegemony of I.P.-driven corporate “cinema.”

The directors’ list is in some ways more populist, with more room for genre. The critics are still a bit wary of horror, science fiction, comedy and animation, which is represented for the first time with two films by the great Hayao Miyazaki. It does seem strange, though, to contemplate a survey of all of film history that leaves out Walt Disney and Chuck Jones.
(Cont'd)

reply

DARGIS I wish that Jones had made the cut, though Warners, his old studio, continues to keep him alive in some fashion, just as Disney makes sure that Walt maintains a grip on our hearts, minds and wallets. The industry takes care of those it can exploit, another reason I contributed to the poll: I want people to discover other movies. So, while I share Chris Marker’s 1992 reservation about the poll partly because favorites change (though mind you, he did single out “Vertigo”), here are my current 10 beloveds in order: “Au Hasard Balthazar” (Robert Bresson), “The Godfather” (Francis Ford Coppola), “Jeanne Dielman,” “Flowers of Shanghai” (Hou Hsiao-Hsien), “The Gleaners and I” (Varda), “Tokyo Story,” “Killer of Sheep,” “Little Stabs at Happiness” (Ken Jacobs), “There Will Be Blood” (Paul Thomas Anderson) and “Shoes” (Lois Weber).

So, Tony, what would you have submitted?

SCOTT I thought you’d never ask! Picking just 10 movies is a brutal discipline, and I’ll try to pretend that I’m voting before knowing how everybody else did. Here’s a list I might have submitted, in chronological order: “The Gold Rush” (Charlie Chaplin); “La Terra Trema” (Luchino Visconti); “What’s Opera, Doc?” (Chuck Jones); “Big Deal on Madonna Street” (Mario Monicelli); “La Dolce Vita” (Federico Fellini); “Cléo From 5 to 7” (Varda); “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One” (William Greaves); “Do the Right Thing” (Spike Lee); “Paris Is Burning” (Jennie Livingston); “Happy as Lazzaro” (Alice Rohrwacher).

Let’s check back in 2032 and see how it all holds up.

reply

Maybe this is a good time to discuss Peele's most recent film, Nope.

It wasn't a big hit but it *did* climb into profit which isn't easy to do these days for original screenplays, and esp. non-superhero properties. I have to give it a lot of props for coming out in Summer and being full of interesting, original storylines (almost like a PTA movie) about quirky characters and full of interesting ideas about black participation in Hollywood and the West and the sorts of spectacle that are the core of show business still and that usually have all sorts of violence and exploitation bound up within them (this is the point of the monkey rampage story)


---

Yes...let's face it, here's a movie that "puts the lie" to the "Marvel dominates" or "sequels and remakes dominate" storylines. Peele "made his bones" and is of a "supported group with their story to tell" and will get more greenlights, I'm sure.

.---

... All that stuff takes up well over an hour and makes you wonder where the movie is going before gradually the action side of the movie that's, Ha-ha, right in front of you all along starts to come into focus and explode. I was pretty indifferent about the film at first but gradually dug it more and more as it went along... I'm not sure that I've ever had quite that experience before: A PTA movie that turns into an imitation Spielberg movie.

--

Well, that sounds fun(and evidently gory) and...I keep reading about the "monkey rampage opening" and I really dig movies that open off-kilter like that and then pay off later.

From the trailers, I have an affinity for Peele's use of those "weird floppy balloon stickmen" often used at used car lots but here given...more sinister meaning. Hitchcockian, you might say.

---
CONT

reply

If I have one worry about Peele, its that he may go the M. Night Shaymalan route: writing his own stories out of his own twist-filled head and then running out of gas(M. Night has had various comebacks, but nothing like his Sixth Sense/Unbreakable/Signs heyday.

On the other hand , QT has successfully written HIS own stuff for decades (but then it is dialogue driven and not terribly inventive plot-wise.)

And this: didn't Peele start out as part of that "Key and Peele" comedy team? I'm reminded of Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale(called "The Two Bobs" by Spielberg) who directed(Zemeckis) and co-wrote(Gale) my 1980 favorite Used Cars and the world's 1985 favorite Back to the Future. But...eventually...the two Bobs broke up. Zemeckis went the distance, Gale was left behind. Key's fate?

Speaking of Bob Zemeckis, QT in his book talks of how, when Zemeckis and QT got dueling Oscar nominations for Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction in 1994, Spielberg took the two men quail hunting with him to "bond" them (no hard feelings.)

QT said Spielberg told them right there, "Bob's gonna win Best Picture and Director. You'll only win Best Original Screenplay this time -- but a little Golden Man on your second movie isn't too bad, right?"

reply

Let 's put the twitter post assessment of screenwriter(Taxi Driver, Number 29 on the list) and director Paul Schrader into the mix:

BEGIN:

"For seventy years the SIGHT AND SOUND POLL has been a reliable if incremental measure of critical consensus and priorities. Films moved up the list, films moved down, but it took time. The sudden appearance of "Jeanne Dielman" in the Number One slot undermines the poll's credibility. It feels off, as if someone had put their thumb on the scale. Which I suspect they did. As Tom Stoppard pointed out in Jumpers, in democracy it doesn't matter who gets the votes. It matters who counts the votes. By expanding the voting community and the point system , this year's S and S poll reflects not a historical continuum but a politically correct rejiggering. Ackerman's film is a favorite of mine, a great film, a landmark film, but its unexpected number one rating does it no favors. "Jeanne Dielman" will from this time forward be remembered not only an important film in cinema history but also as a landmark of woke reappraisal."

END

reply

but also as a landmark of woke reappraisal
Haw-haw. Maybe. JD's a curriculum movie in certain sorts of film survey courses now for sure, and a quorum of voters have seen fit to honor its undoubted significance for them as one of the ten movies that most reoriented their vision of what movies can be. 191 top 10 placings out of 850 voters (so ~20%) was enough to get Vertigo to #1 back in 2012. There were about 1600 voters this around but it's reasonable to assume that something like 20% support for a film was again enough to get close to #1. Call me crazy, but it just is easy for me to believe that 20% of current critics would have been severely shaped and impressed by having to watch JD in college the way earlier generations of college-educated critics were shaped and impressed by having to watch Bunuel and Dali's Le Chien Andalou (one of the many titles that's lately dropped out of the top 100 along with all other Bunuels - feminism gets lots more attention in film classes these days than surrealism). I don't see that there's any conspiracy involved here. Nor does 'woke' seem particularly helpful to me.

reply

And consider all the films with WW2 either in the foreground or background that don't make the S&S top 100 now: Best Years of Our Lives, Children of Paradise, Forbidden Games, It's A Wonderful Life, Rome Open City, Germany Year Zero. Italian neo-realism, and French cinema used to be big in college film courses, but maybe not so much any more. WW2 *used* to serve as a marker of something important for lots of people, & but now it's at long last just become another historical event, not necessarily more important for lots of people than Labor History in West Virginia coal country (Wanda), or Black History in LA (Killer of Sheep) or History of LGBT Dance Trends (Paris is Burning - one of AO Scott's picks!). Times are changing. I can see how it's natural for *some* people to call this 'encroaching wokeness' but for me it's just cultural change and drift.

reply

but also as a landmark of woke reappraisal
--
Haw-haw. Maybe.

--

I found Schrader's overall post here rather badly written for a man who made his name as a writer -- it seems to boil down to "surely JD is a great film and a landmark film but this was too fast and now it will be a tainted film all because of a woke agenda." Its as if the front end of the argument is how great a movie JD is and the back end is how undeserving it is of the honor.

"Woke" is a pretty darn loaded term these days, I hesitate taking it up given how incendiary it is around these parts and frankly I was surprised to see Schrader use it.

I think the irony about "woke" is that the one place where things can be woke continually and endlessly in discussion are, indeed...on obscure academic lists composed of movies that didn't particularly attract audiences or make money. "Woke" can win where the stakes are so low and the arguing class is so small. JD is from 1975. Jaws is from 1975. Which movie had the bigger impact, earned more money , gave more people wealth and power in the movie industry? (The HOLLYWOOD movie industry, where multi-millionaires are made in a way that doesn't happen in France.) And Jaws has a reputation BOTH as a popcorn blockbuster AND as an artfully made film with some fine acting and writing in it. Its an "all guy movie" (those three famous white male leads) which nonetheless has a strong female role(Mrs. Brody.)

CONT


reply

JD's a curriculum movie in certain sorts of film survey courses now for sure,

---

One realizes that it is (indeed and again) from this academic world of specialized student focus on "good but obscure films" that the Sight and Sound list truly emerges. The emphasis on movies from all around the world is important, too.

But here in America we've been exposed mainly and ever and always to "home grown studio product" -- now targeted to release on Netflix, Disney Plus and Apple as much as to movie theaters.

---



and a quorum of voters have seen fit to honor its undoubted significance for them as one of the ten movies that most reoriented their vision of what movies can be. 191 top 10 placings out of 850 voters (so ~20%) was enough to get Vertigo to #1 back in 2012.

---

But one also sensed with the Vertigo win that enough of those voters felt that Hitchcock needed that recognition -- his career so famously is missing a Best Director Oscar win, its criminal and mocks the Motion Picture Academy --53 movies and they couldn't give it to Hitch ONCE? (Whereas Ron Howard has one!) Sight and Sound was the "cool academic place" to award Hitchcock and to give him 10 years of honor.

reply

This list, which comes out once in 10 years, is now more memorable for its omissions than the the list itself. Is Raging Bull actually ejected? Did I get that right?

reply

Is Raging Bull actually ejected? Did I get that right?
You got it. Raging Bull was at #55 last time, but didn't make the top 100 this time. Other 'New Hollywood' ejectees: Nashville, Chinatown, Wild Bunch (Jaws missed last time as well although it continues to make the Directors' Top 100). Not to mention the ejection from the top 100 of things like Touch of Evil (1958) and Pickpocket (1959) that were foundational texts for all of 'New Hollywood'.

It *is* irritating. Jordan Peele's 'Get Out' is a good film but the idea that it's more essential viewing than Chinatown or Wild Bunch or Lawrence of Arabia or Raging Bull or Touch of Evil is pretty absurd (as I'm sure Peele would agree). Ditto for My Neighbor Totoro. Lovely film but... jeez. Or Take Daughters of the Dust (1991). Interesting film, but ranking it as literally the best US film of the '90s as the 2022 list does, does it no favors. It wasn't at the time thought at the time any more essential than lots of other interesting small US films of the '90s from One False Move to Ruby In Paradise, to Eve's Bayou to Bound to Crumb to Slacker. Daughter's of the Dust is an *important* film because (amazingly) it's one of the first features ever directed by a Black Woman. It would take incredible luck for that 'first film' to be seriously better than Goodfellas, Silence of The Lambs, Unforgiven, Schindlers List, Pulp Fiction, Heat, Mike Leigh's Naked, LA Confidential, Fargo, you name it. But that's the sort of judgement that S&S are asking us to entertain. It ain't easy!

reply

By recognizing some of these good little movies and omitting the recognized greats generates negative comments where it wouldn’t be if the film didn’t make the list. It puts the movie out in front. Like liking Crash. Feeling like you got on a list nobody thinks you should have been on makes it uncomfortable for the film, it’s director and actors. I don’t understand Jeanne Dielman. Have you seen it?

One False Move is a great movie. That’s Carl Franklin, director. Writer Billy Bob. I think Raging Bull is one of the greatest movies ever if not the greatest. For me.

reply

I don’t understand Jeanne Dielman. Have you seen it?
Yeah, I've seen JD. I actually didn't get around to seeing it until it first appeared on S&S's list back in 2012 at #34= with Psycho (& Metropolis & Satantango). I actually made a point with the 2012 list to see *all* the titles on it that were new to me, including one of the worst things I've *ever* had the misfortune to see, Godard's farcical/abysmal doc./essay series Histoires du Cinema (1988-1998). That travesty got #49= in 2012, but is down to #84= this time around.

Anyhow, JD impressed me a lot when I saw it, albeit it was a kind of torture to sit through it (it's a static camera, slow-cut, 3 hour 20 mins, with very little dialogue - less than one line of dialogue per minute on average and almost no dialogue at all in its final hour). Overall JD was a film of ideas about women's lives and their representation on film - a very intellectual experience that you have to be in the mood for (and, let's face it, for most people college is the main time they're open to 'eating their wheaties', to challenging themselves with demanding viewing like this). What's perhaps most intriguing about JD is that it's jumped out so far ahead of the pack of *other* very challenging viewing experiences that you more or less have to be in college or be a film super-egghead to have. E.g. 1, Jean-Marie Straub died recently and I've used his death as a spur to track down and finally see some of his famously difficult, obscure stuff, e.g., Jonah who will be 25 in the year 2000 (1976), Class Relations (Klassenverhältnisse) (1984), and so on. None of Straub's stuff bothers S&S's top 100 but I don't quite understand why not? It's doing the same sort of icily intellectual stuff that Akerman is doing but Akerman gets 2 entries on S&S's top 100 (JD & News From Home) where Straub gets bubkiss.

reply

E.g.2, A few years ago I was finally able to track down Serge Gainbourg's Je t'aime mois non plus (1976) starring his wife Jane Birkin. It's a completely bizarre semi-sci-fi, semi-porn where Gainsbourg seems to be working out his feelings towards his wife and maybe women in general. It's *unbearable* but at the same time strangely unforgettable. The obscure corners of the '70s were full of oddities and extremities like this (think in particular of films by Ferreri and Pasolini and Oshima). JD was just one of them at the time but it's really *made it* to the center of film discussion now in a way that almost nothing else like it from the period has. JD was, after all #1 for Critics and #4= for Directors this time around. Truly amazing.

reply

I saw Je t'aime mois non plus at a French film festival a few years ago. I thought it was odd but memorable. It was with Joe Dallesandro. Very strange movie but yes unforgettable. I remember I kept thinking about Jane and Serge the entire time.

I will watch JD because it is no. 1. It is 3 hours. If only I had known about it during Covid…. But there is no Bunel. No Altman. There are several Hitchcocks. Is Chinatown off because of Polanski. At least Taxi Driver is still there. I did like the Schrader trilogy obviously Taxi Driver stands out but interesting still are American Gigolo and Light Sleeper (this one I really liked). Playtime has become one of my favorite movies. And I did like Cleo 5 to 7. I haven’t seen many of the movies on this list. I don’t know how you saw ALL of the 2012 list. Ten years.

reply

I don’t know how you saw ALL of the 2012 list
Oh, I'd seen most of the films on the 2012 list before, so I think I only had about 12 or so new-to-me films to catch up on. So many of those were, however, *very* long [e.g., Histoires something like 8 hours, Satantango 6 hours, The Mother and The Whore, Greed (both now ejected!) way over 3 hours, and so on] that it took me well over a month to track them all down and watch them. I mean, if there's any constant for me over the last 3 or 4 S&S lists, it's the ability of academics to always recommend absolute endurance tests. Fashions come and fashions go but critics and academics can't seem to help themselves always finding the most value in wildly ambitious, overlength monstrosities. I guess we have to be thankful that Rivette's Out 1 (1971) which has accumulated hipster fans over the last decade (and which comes in 4 and 13 hour versions) didn't break through into S&S's top 100 this time (it was at #127= in 2012). It's definitely in the listmakers' wheelhouse of pain though, and should feminism recede a bit over the next decade then look out!

reply

I think there will be new and good movies in next 10. I am curious if you have a favorite film that is recent. Maybe not on their list. But one that you would include on a hypothetical 100 best. Newer classics to be.

For me, the last great movie I really liked was Audiard’s Un prophete. But there may have been others I can’t recall at the moment.

reply

@letess. I liked Un prophete (2009) a lot at the time but I haven't seen it since its release. I rate Parasite (2019) *very* highly so agree with S&S on that one.

Aside from that over the last decade or so my faves have been things like A Separation (2011), Amour (2012), Under The Skin (2013), Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Son of Saul (2015), The Lobster (2016), A Ghost Story (2017), Leave No Trace (2018), The Favorite (2018), The Father (2020), Petite Maman (2021). And among blockbusters/crowdpleasers I've especially liked True Grit, Django Unchained, Gravity, Inside Out, Zootopia, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Spider-man Into The Spider-verse, JoJo Rabbit, and Top Gun:Maverick.

reply

I think I will go by the list you just gave rather than S&S list - I’m mean for the movies I haven’t seen. First of all, I don’t even know where you can find some of these movies that were on S&S. You must have access. Anyway, of all the movies you listed, I like Under the Skin the best. I like Celine Sciamma, but wasn’t crazy about Girlhood or for that matter, Petite Maman - which I felt deeply about when I left the theater but nothing like Brokeback. I do like her gf or ex-gf, Adele Haenel who I think is exceptional. I loved the movie Suzanne and the The Unknown. I didn’t like Django Unchained at all. It was too close to that awful movie Mandingo, for me. But I loved Jackie Brown.

I am trying to recall movies from 2000 on that I liked that would be on my list and this is what I came up with.

The best for me are: Un Prophete, Stranger by the Lake, Shame, Brokeback, Lives of Others

And then, The Piano Teacher, Wild Grass, Titane, Anthony Zimmer, 36th Precinct, Infernal Affairs, The Revenant, Oldboy, French Dispatch. Slack Bay, See You Up There, Moulin Rouge, Gosford Park, Million Dollar Baby, Sideways, Sunshine Girl, Her, Personal Shopper, Read My Lips.


reply

I don’t even know where you can find some of these movies that were on S&S. You must have access.
If you've got tons of money so you can subscribe to a bunch of streaming services including all the standard stuff plus the Criterion Collection Online then the vast majority of stuff on S&S lists *are* viewable instantly. So, for example, one of the better movie people on youtube, Be Kind Rewind, constructed a wonderful companion to the very good tv miniseries Mrs America:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYwufGqkDP4
and she provided (non-sketchy) links to *all* the films she referred to. It really is amazing that that's possible. So many of the feminist classics she mentions (starting with Jeanne Dielman) were, even 10 years ago, incredibly hard to see unless you were on a campus (which often had some battered old videotape copy) and often the only copies floating around online were very poor quality.

If you *don't* have tons of money to afford all the streaming servicse that would be ideal you have to get crafty with the web. (cont'd)

reply

There's really no end to the craftiness that might be required. In effect the web is constantly in a state of flux and techniques that might have worked once quickly go out of date. Here's a technique I currently use. Consider Jeanne Dielman. A pretty jolly good copy of it is currently on youtube. But it has no subtitles. To get yourself a usable copy of JD, then, you (i) need to figure out some way of grabbing a copy of the youtube file (perhaps using some technique specific to youtube, or, better, using a general solution that'll grab video files streamed from almost any web address you point it at), and (ii) you need to get comfortable finding subtitle files from the web. Then you need (iii) to have a video-player on your computer that can put together the subtitles and the video-files you can download.

I use a freely available program called jdownloader2 to grab copies of video files from most web addresses. I mostly use subscene.com as my source for subtitles. And I use VLC as my video-player to put subtitles and video files together. (Cont'd)

reply

Wow….
I do have Criterion.
JD is now on HBO Max.
I don’t know if I can figure this out. I did see a lot of movies I liked on TV5 years ago. For instance, I really liked L’Outremangeur.

I am really going to have to figure out how you get subtitles on a movie.
What is VLC?

reply

What is VLC?
It's a free, open-source media-player that works across most platforms:
https://www.videolan.org/

reply

Each of these 3 key steps takes a bit of getting used to and requires practice & tinkering around. But for me, having done this a fair bit, it would probably take about 30 minutes total work in the Jeanne D. on youtube case to download it then find the right subtitle file (or do any tinkering that might be required to sync up the subtitles - there are websites to help with this) then get everything playing spic-and-span.

If youtube isn't wild westy enough to have what you are looking for, then one is inevitably pushed to more sketchy web-sites for underlying video files. A big one that I have used, albeit with pretty extreme trepidation is a Russian youtube/facebook-ish site called (spelled out) o_k_._r_u which jdownloader2 works fine on. Do a google search on 'Your Film Here (1968) o_k_._r_u' and you'll normally get a few hits. I do fear, however, that Russian intelligence hackers will eventually launch a super-advanced virus through this site (that no normal anti-virus/anti-malware package will stop) and have tried to swear off it for that reason. But, I have to confess, that o_k_._r_u has been a good gap-filler for me over the last 5 or so years.

reply

often the only copies floating around online were very poor quality
I'd like to build on this point a little: the fact is that *many many* films are now quite widely available and in breathtaking, restored quality that were previously available, if at all, only in awful battered prints or a dismal, half-assed video or dvd copy. When I first saw famous early Hitchcocks like The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes back in the 1980s they looked like jumpy, scratchy museum pieces. Ditto for almost all famous silents like Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Nosferatu, Dr Mabuse, Sunrise, Faust, Vampyr, Spion, La Roue, you name it. Now, almost everything I just mentioned has been painstakingly restored, looks the best it ever has, and fundamentally just feels alive as a film you can watch for pleasure. Moreover, it's not just films from the 1920s and '30s that have been revived in this way: an incredible number of films from much more recent times were brutally treated on VHS and early DVDs. E.g., I'd vaguely heard all my life about Deep End (1970) by Skolimowski being a very special film. Well, here's the unimpressive, blurry, drab thing it used to look like:
shorturl.at/ezWZ3
And here's how the same frame looked after restoration, etc. for blu-ray:
https://rb.gy/y5pcyp
Suddenly it was a real film for me & I got it. When you put all these sorts of improvements in quality for old (but not necessarily *that* old) films together with all the new ease of availability [e.g., gloriously restored Deep End is viewable at any time for free (with ads) on https://www.plex.tv/ or through their app] the current moment can actually feel like a golden age for movie lovers. Even Psycho looks far better now than it ever has before. E.g., the literal crud on the image in the Shower Scene in late '90s dvd editions of Psycho was simply unbelievable if you frame-by-framed it:
http://plaguehouse.blogspot.com/2012/07/crud-in-shower-scene-on-psychos-1999.html
We tend to take for granted the pristine Psycho (like the pristine Lady Vanishes etc.) we all have available to us now.

reply

A further thought about the critics' poll: while Hitchcock and Godard still loom over the top 100 with 4 films each, and Kubrick (2001, Shining, Lyndon), Wilder (Some Like, Sunset, Apartment - a new entry up from #127=!) and Tarkovsky (Mirror, Stalker, Andrei Rublev) get three there's a noticeable 'thinning out" of other acknowledged masters' presence on the list.

Not only are Hawks, Lean, Polanski, Peckinpah, Altman, Bunuel, Herzog, Grffiths, Von Stroheim, Eustache (a bit of a longshot in the 2012 poll really) gone; Welles is down to just Kane, Bergman to just Persona, Antonioni to just L'Avventura, Renoir to just Rules of the Game (no Grand Illusion or Party in the Country); and Coppola (no Godfather part 2), Bresson (no Pickpocket), Dreyer (no Gertrud), Powell (no Col Blimp) are all down to 2.

I'd guess that a lot of this 'thinning out' probably isn't due to the peculiarities of S&S's polling but just to the math involved. More films from more countries every year are being made and then assuming no major dropoffs in talent etc. the present will inevitably start to put justified pressure on any top n list drawn from the past. There are only n slots after all, and now there are 1000s more competitors for those slots, standards have to rise. If something like an 9.0 out of 10 score was enough to make it onto an all-time list in 1970 maybe the cut-off will have risen to something like a 9.2 by now. Or at least that's the rough model to have.

reply

One False Move is a great movie. That’s Carl Franklin, director. Writer Billy Bob.


---

Billy Bob Thornton won himself a writing Oscar for Sling Blade(and almost won an Oscar for playing that incredible "slow" character with evidently no make-up at all), and play "funny tempermental guys" to perfection for awhile (Bad Santa, The Bad News Bears).

But in One False Move(written also by him, or co-written?) Billy Bob is one scary mean psychopathic dude. And his partner -- a calm, quiet bespectacled African-American, is even worse. The latter has a thing for suddenly dropping the "quiet man" act and stabbing people to death (women, children, co-worker men) as a matter of business.

The movie puts the two psychos from the city on a collision course with country sherff Bill Paxton(very sympathetic for once.)

It is a great one -- but boy is it vicious. The "quiet knifer" is a reminder that many criminals are psycho -- murder isn't a problem at all for them.

---

I think Raging Bull is one of the greatest movies ever if not the greatest. For me.

---

It was a 1980 film that ended up on some list at the end of the decade as "the best movie of the 80's." Which was funny, because actually felt like a SEVENTIES movie. I respect everything about it as a technical matter, but its lacking in entertainment value for me, and it seemed to continue onward Robert DeNiro's skill at playing rather dumb, animalistic people(and jealous, too -- see also New York, New York and Casino.. Stilll and again, it gets all the respect in the world from me. And hey, on topic, one fight is cut to the rhythms and shots of the Psycho murder scene.

Personal trivia: I saw Raging Bull in December 1980 in West Los Angeles. Ex-Beatle John Lennon had been murdered just a few days prior.

It was a full house. A young man stood up and said, "Hey, c'om...let's give it up for JOHN LENNON!" And everybody applauded and cheered.

So Raging Bull and John Lennon are forever linked in my mind.

reply

I'd guess that a lot of this 'thinning out' probably isn't due to the peculiarities of S&S's polling but just to the math involved. More films from more countries every year are being made and then assuming no major dropoffs in talent etc. the present will inevitably start to put justified pressure on any top n list drawn from the past.

---

As an objective matter, I'm fine with that. Because -- heh -- I have to be. And as the movies of more countries keep getting added to the list, it is a matter of both time(the past) and nation(the United States) that will lose more and more slots on these lists.

But as a SUBJECTIVE matter, I don't know. Though there has always been an international film market(like Bicycle Thieves in the 40s), I grew up on a American movies being "the crème de la cream" in terms of entertainment value and big budget production. The American studio film was a major export, and the world honored American movie stars from Bogart to Mitchum to Newman; from Katherine Hepburn to Doris Day to Barbra Streisand.

Psycho is somewhat of an "indie," and very much a film of rebellion against censorship, but it was also a very American studio film, with its tale of a Gothic mansion and a rundown motel "off the American highway."

In short, it will be hard for me to care quite so much for all the new, international, semi-unknown films that are about to flood this list.

The feeling I get -- as with the Oscars - is that the movies being products viewed and known and loved by multi-millions(Casablanca, Psycho, Jaws) are being replaced on these lists by movies seen by -- hundreds? And known only to the asesthes who curry these lists...intelligent and artistic people to be sure, but a very small crowd of actual audience members.

Many well-known movies of the 20th Century will disappear into the past; many movies of the 21st Century simply won't be much known about, at all, beyond their country of origin, if much even there.


reply

The feeling I get -- as with the Oscars - is that the movies being products viewed and known and loved by multi-millions(Casablanca, Psycho, Jaws) are being replaced on these lists by movies seen by -- hundreds? And known only to the aesthetes
Well, Casablanca and Psycho are still in S&S's top 100 but, yeah, seeing (i) Lawrence of Arabia, Chinatown, Best Years of Our Lives, Rio Bravo, Wild Bunch, La Grande Illusion drop off the top 100 and (ii) excellent, culturally binding things like It's a Wonderful Life, Annie Hall, Jaws, The Graduate, Shane, Kind Hearts and Coronets, etc. miss the top 100 repeatedly *does* shake ones confidence that S&S's 'Greatest Films' lists bear any relation to what people *actually* think of as essential viewing (to understand film's potential and power and history).

Consider even Gone With The Wind. Whatever its problems, if you watch a whole bunch of pre-1939 movies from Hollywood and elsewhere, it's *absolutely clear* that GWTW explodes off the screen in color and scale in a way nothing else had before, and that it has an epic female anti-hero at its center the like of which had absolutely never been seen before, and has barely been seen since. In short, it's completely obvious to any viewer even now, why GWTW (its flaws notwithstanding) *is* amazing and *was* the box-office sensation it was all over the world, why it still defines a whole era of movie-making, and movie-going, perhaps especially for women. But it can never get a look in (probably not even a single vote) in the S&S scheme of things. That feels a little crazy to me. And don't get me started on King Kong (1933) (which was #171 last time)!

Update: In 2012 GWTW actually got 7 votes which was enough to get it the lowest tier in the extended top 250 poll. It came in at #235= (equal with stuff like The Piano which shot up to the #50s this time, Red River, Clockwork Orange, The Big Lebowski, Two Lane Backtop, Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and a bunch of others).

reply

The feeling I get -- as with the Oscars - is that the movies being products viewed and known and loved by multi-millions(Casablanca, Psycho, Jaws) are being replaced on these lists by movies seen by -- hundreds? And known only to the aesthetes

---

Well, Casablanca and Psycho are still in S&S's top 100

---

As well they should be!

---

but, yeah, seeing (i) Lawrence of Arabia, Chinatown, Best Years of Our Lives, Rio Bravo, Wild Bunch, La Grande Illusion drop off the top 100 and (ii) excellent, culturally binding things like It's a Wonderful Life, Annie Hall, Jaws, The Graduate, Shane, Kind Hearts and Coronets, etc. miss the top 100 repeatedly *does* shake ones confidence that S&S's 'Greatest Films' lists bear any relation to what people *actually* think of as essential viewing (to understand film's potential and power and history).

---

There you have it. Not only are most(ALL?) of the movie above inherently "good" as a matter of narrative and style, but most of them were "big hits" which meant lots of people SAW them, lots of people KNOW them, lots of people GOT IN THEIR CARS, drove to a theater, got in a LONG LINE and SACRIFICED time, money and effort to see them.

They were events, "in the air." So many of these new and obscure films listed on the S and S list may have "inherent value" but are remembered by practically no one.

Now there is another issue here. We are told that "history is disappearing,' and that new generations simply have no reason to learn about, watch, or know those "old movies." Oh, well, as a matter of history, Casablanca, Psycho and (very much!) The Best Years of Our Lives WERE major events in their time and even if nobody remembers them in the years to come...they had their time. They WERE big.

CONT

reply

I've noted this before, and I think it is important.

In the 1960s, there were only three networks in the US and a smattering of local channels that mainly showed "old movies." Because the studios didn't want to sell their newer products( in the front end of the 60s) to television, SIXTIES television was FILLED with movies from the 30s, 40s and 50s and so a generation of boomer kids HAD to take Bogart and Cooper and Greer Garson and Jean Arthur as their "movie stars."

I like to note that while North by Northwest was released to theaters in 1959, it didn't reach the CBS Friday Night movie until 1967! 8 YEARS. Modernly, even the biggest hits are available on TV within three months of theatrical release. There is NO TIME for older movies to "take root."

Anyway, a generational matter, I think that decade by decade, younger generations simply haven't been given the incentive to "go back and look at movie history" unless they are in film courses.

You would think that people taking acting courses to become movie stars would know history, but the late Peter Bogdanovich noted that when he advised young actors to think about Bogart or Cagney in a performance...they didn't know who Bogart or Cagney WERE.

A new thought: maybe the movies will now be meant to "mean something" only in the present, only to say, about 20 years worth of a generation and then ...they're gone. In which case, someday "the Marvel movie" WILL be forgotten.

CONT


reply

Consider even Gone With The Wind. Whatever its problems, if you watch a whole bunch of pre-1939 movies from Hollywood and elsewhere, it's *absolutely clear* that GWTW explodes off the screen in color and scale in a way nothing else had before, and that it has an epic female anti-hero at its center the like of which had absolutely never been seen before, and has barely been seen since. In short, it's completely obvious to any viewer even now, why GWTW (its flaws notwithstanding) *is* amazing and *was* the box-office sensation it was all over the world, why it still defines a whole era of movie-making, and movie-going, perhaps especially for women. But it can never get a look in (probably not even a single vote) in the S&S scheme of things. That feels a little crazy to me. And don't get me started on King Kong (1933) (which was #171 last time)!

Update: In 2012 GWTW actually got 7 votes which was enough to get it the lowest tier in the extended top 250 poll. It came in at #235= (equal with stuff like The Piano which shot up to the #50s this time, Red River, Clockwork Orange, The Big Lebowski, Two Lane Backtop, Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and a bunch of others).

---

Hmm. 7 votes. Well, as a matter of -- I guess -- American history, GWTW was pretty much part of the conversation on its release in 1939 and then in every decade through the dawn of the 21st Century. It got theatrical re-releases about once a decade BEFORE it ever got to television. (The only time I ever saw GWTW all the way through was at a theater during its 1970 release -- I didn't much like it, but I made sure that I saw it.)

And now it is deemed unspeakable. And we all know why but the question remains -- why can't the past(properly interpreted AS the past) be spoken of in the present?

CONT

reply

swanstep wrote:

I liked Un prophete (2009) a lot at the time but I haven't seen it since its release. I rate Parasite (2019) *very* highly so agree with S&S on that one.

Aside from that over the last decade or so my faves have been things like A Separation (2011), Amour (2012), Under The Skin (2013), Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Son of Saul (2015), The Lobster (2016), A Ghost Story (2017), Leave No Trace (2018), The Favorite (2018), The Father (2020), Petite Maman (2021). And among blockbusters/crowdpleasers I've especially liked True Grit, Django Unchained, Gravity, Inside Out, Zootopia, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Spider-man Into The Spider-verse, JoJo Rabbit, and Top Gun:Maverick.

letuss wrote:


I think I will go by the list you just gave rather than S&S list - I’m mean for the movies I haven’t seen. First of all, I don’t even know where you can find some of these movies that were on S&S. You must have access. Anyway, of all the movies you listed, I like Under the Skin the best. I like Celine Sciamma, but wasn’t crazy about Girlhood or for that matter, Petite Maman - which I felt deeply about when I left the theater but nothing like Brokeback. I do like her gf or ex-gf, Adele Haenel who I think is exceptional. I loved the movie Suzanne and the The Unknown. I didn’t like Django Unchained at all. It was too close to that awful movie Mandingo, for me. But I loved Jackie Brown.

---
ecarle responds:

I've been reading this dialogue(swanstep/letuss) with great interest, but this is a good time for me to "deal myself out" of trying to keep up with it. I reached a stage in my life in which I must confront that -- " movie wise" -- my tastes run to American studio releases and thus I cannot adequately discuss non-US titles (I do a bit better on British titles -- I saw a lot of 60s and 70's releases in America were "British imports" .)

The Sight and Sound list by its very creation is an international list.

CONT

reply

This is why, for me, the "list that counts" is the FIRST (1997, I believe) American Film Institute "100 Years of Movies" list(i.e. the best 100 movies of the 20th Century less three years.)

That list did a very good job of "capturing" the most obvious and necessary great American films of that century. The list ended up ruling out movies like Saving Private Ryan and The Matrix(after 1997) and I can't recall if my 1997 favorite LA Confidential, got in.

But the list had room for GWTW, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, The Godfather and four Hitchcocks -- Psycho(right after Chinatown), Vertigo, Rear Window and North by Northwest (in that order as I recall) and...yeah, it was MY kind of list. I knew every title on it.

They ran that "100 Greatest Films" list one more time, 10 years later, in 2007 and thus picked up(I think?) Saving Private Ryan and The Matrix(probably knocking some out to do it.)

But I recall this:

The "voters" for the 1997 list included critics AND movie studio workers AND some "outside fans"(like President Bill Clinton) and ended up rather "populist."

The voters for the 2007 list was evidently more "critic heavy" -- "the regular people bowed out" -- and Vertigo sped ahead of Psycho on the list(though the same four Hitchcock movies made it.)

I need to go back and look at that 1997 AFI list. Its rather my Bible.

CONT

reply

AND THIS:

Pretty much as a "TV promotions of the AFI," in the first decade of the 2000s, AFI did "100 best comedies," "100 best love stories" and..."100 Best Thrillers" ("Called 100 Years, 100 Thrills" to capture adventure movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark.)

The Top Four were most pleasing to this Hitchcock fan:

1. Psycho
2. Jaws
3 The Exorcist

4. North by Northwest.

I agree with that list. I've always seen Psycho, Jaws and The Exorcist as "the big three superthrillers" of all time -- earnings wise and impact wise. And for North by Northwest to come in at Number Four seemed most fitting -- it is "ground zero for the action movie" and spawned Bond, Indy Jone, Die Hard and The Matrix (plus direct homages like Silver Streak.)

And as I recall, Hitchocck got more movies on that "100 Thrills" list than any other director. Of course.

Perhaps the "100 Thrills" list was not "scientific enough," but I will go by the 1997 100 Greatest (American) Films of All Time as having MY favorites on it.

Meanwhile: Thanks to HBO Max, I'm working my way through older foreign films right and left. At best, they equate with American indie films -- low budget, realistic, little emphasis on scoring. But I still "came to the movies" for the excitement that a big budget movies -- with big budget stars -- can bring us. From North by Northwest to The Wild Bunch to Star Wars to Indiana Jones...you need the big bucks. Still, I will concede that "old" foreign films were more frank than American films(hey, Toshiro Mifune is showing his full naked buttocks under his top for the entire film) and allowed to take on controversial topics with more controversy.

As for art films - American or Foreign -- its not that I don't like them. Its that they don't like me...

reply

They were events, "in the air." So many of these new and obscure films listed on the S and S list may have "inherent value" but are remembered by practically no one.

In a funny way, the First Academy Awards in early 1929 (for pictures released in 1927 and 1928) tells much of the story of all later film awards and lists. Famously, there were 2 top awards that night: Outstanding Picture (won by Wings (1927)) and Unique and Artistic Picture (won by Sunrise (1927)).

Wings is a blockbuster war epic with fantastic aerial scenes and fx. Dashing pilots kill Germans in the air, and have hijinks with hot chicks (including then 'It'-girl, Clara Bow) on the ground. Sunrise, however, is a full-on, hard-to-interpret arthouse explosion of visuals made by an expatriate German, Murnau. Sunrise's story is literally absurd: rural husband falls for a hussy from the city and then plots (and almost carries out his plot) to murder his wife and run off to the city with the hussy. He sucessfully tries to make up with his understandably shaken wife by having a wondrous lovey-dovey day *in the city* with her. In fact the wife *completely* forgives her husband TRYING TO KILL HER within 5 minutes of getting to the city (which seems to have a narcotic effect on them both).

The effect of the absurdity makes one question just what the hell one is watching. We suspect that he characters are mostly symbols (the film's subtitle is 'A Song of Two Humans'), and that the settings rural and urban are more ideals for living and potentials of the human heart than actual places. You come out of Sunrise blown away by its visuals, mystified by what it's actually saying, but, depending on temperament, sure it's important.

Wings was a big Box Office hit, whereas Sunrise was a loved-by-critics fiasco for Fox. Murnau's Hollywood career never recovered.

reply

Wings was a big Box Office hit, whereas Sunrise was a loved-by-critics fiasco for Fox. Murnau's Hollywood career never recovered.

--

Though I have heard of Wings and Sunrise...and indeed I SAW both of them way back in the 70's when I attended some films in college and revival houses to "get my history"...I did not understand that box office/art film dichotomy between the two films.

Good for the Academy in splitting the categories then -- they tried to do that again a couple of years ago but quit after only the ANNOUNCEMENT met with anger. (Why? Because a Marvel movie would have to win that poplular category every year?)

I'm not sure that this will ever be "solved." I think the Academy Awards made sense back when you might find "Cries and Whispers" and "Airport" both nominated (I don't think they were made the same year, but you get my point?) Mix art and box office into the same show, award art. Maybe.

In America, we have (or had?) the "People's Choice Awards." I don'[t know who votes, but these were designed to make sure that movies like Star Wars and Batman and Back to the Future and Jurassic Park won Best Picture(I think those are real examples) and to make everyone happy.

I've noted that the Oscar nominees anymore seem to "slavishly follow the critics lists" which at once makes critics more powerful but leads to Oscar shows almost nobody watches.

CONT

reply

In the final analysis, I like ALL of these lists. I suppose the AFI will wait until 2097 to check out this century's best 100(I'll try to make it!), Sight and Sound is on the decade...its all good and filmgoers of various stripes can "follow the lists" to their locus.

That said, maybe the truth of the matter is that a film is only TRULY enjoyed and processed at the time of its release or when it had impact on one("My Psycho is Not Your Psycho.") You can put gone With the Wind or Casablanca or The Godfather or the original Star Wars in the DVD player and SEE them, but you don't really feel what it was like to BE there.



reply

You can put Gone With the Wind or Casablanca or The Godfather or the original Star Wars in the DVD player and SEE them, but you don't really feel what it was like to BE there.
Ha, the little-loved-these-days Shakespeare in Love did a *great* job of putting you into the shoes of someone seeing 'Romeo and Juliet' when it was premiered in 1597, and being there when a whole new sort of poetic, explosive, popular melodrama is born.

But, yeah, it is hard to grasp what some thing or some film meant in its own time. I tend to think that you can get *close* but it takes time and commitment that most people don't have. So for example, wanna appreciate King Kong (1933)? Spend a week or two watching what was popular or winning awards in 1930-1932. Wanna appreciate GWTW? Watch a few big dramas - starting with Jezebel (1937) and women's flicks from 1936-1938. It blew my mind when I actually undertook these viewing projects.

reply

Anyhow, as we all know, the Outstanding Picture Award became Best Picture and 'Unique and Artistic Picture' was retired.

Sunrise, however, has prospered as a perennial critics' favorite. S&S used to only release top 10s and in that format Sunrise first appeared at #7= in 2002 (but surely it would have been a nailed on top 25-type film since S&S' first list in 1952). Sunrise got as high as #5 in 2012, and this time settled at #11 and got #33 on the Directors' Poll.

Some of the tensions over Best Picture Oscars in the 2000s have arguably been because the Award has started to veer toward the 'Unique and Artistic' end of the spectrum (maybe beginning with No Country and There Will Be Blood). All manner of seen-by-few, often quite confounding films have been getting nominated and sometimes winning ever since. Indeed, once you commit to effectively a 'Unique and Artistic' standard, there's no natural stopping point. Something that's utterly unintelligible to and simply unseen by the masses *can* be the most unique etc., hence Moonlight, Parasite, Nomadland, and in the S&S setting, formerly freaking Vertigo (I love it of course but it's a downright weird, obsessive art-film about obsession not a crowd-pleaser), and now Jeanne Dielman.

reply

4 Months later the BFI has released lots more information about their poll including their full top 250 (or down as far as the hordes of films that got exactly 16 votes and so came in at #243=):
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time
They've also released *all* the individual ballots together with any comments voters registered about their choices:
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time/all-voters

For example, I really enjoyed getting to see Prano Bailey-Bond's Ballot and remarks. Bailey-Bond did a pretty interesting artsy horror a few years ago, Censor (2021), and, unsurprisingly her Ballot is full of momentous horrors and semi-horrors that have also been very important for me, from The Fly (1986) to Angst (1983) to Wake In Fright (1971). In her concluding remarks she says, "This is very, very difficult - to boil it down to ten ... In the end I’ve been led by emotion – films that caused mini explosions in my heart or my imagination, films that have in some way left me breathless".

Insiders have gone further and compiled all the top 1000 films voted for, i.e., down to the 200 or so films that got exactly 4 votes and so came in at #831=:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15NQFoApM3yKAnho40Z0r4BKPVZIKCf1zgOsPR0ClA10/edit#gid=874752165
This spreadsheet includes columns about where each film came in the 2012 and 2002 polls and how many votes it received those times.

Insiders have also stitched together a list of all the (21K+) votes received across the whole poll, starting with the 261 votes that Jeanne Dielman (1975) received, and concluding with the 2487 films that received exactly 1 vote and from whom, e.g., Hitchcock's Young and Innocent got one vote from comedy of manners (Last Days of Disco, Metropolitan, Barcelona) director Whit Stilman (Sir, I salute you!):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LzqXEhAaBsmpaAlQ7u-VidkO5iC47LjI/edit#gid=1663126226

Enjoy. Data analysts start your engines.

reply