Pretend you have a ballot for the 2022 edition of Sight & Sound's top 10 movies of all time list

Even those among us who, you know, actually may get one.

Pretend you have a ballot for the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound's top 10 movies of all time list
Pick only one Sight and Sound Top Ten Poll.
Which Sight & Sound all-time top 10 list is the best?

Like how conservative or how totally idiosyncratic would you let your list get?

I'd be tempted to only list movies from the last 20 years, just because recent movies have been underrepresented since the 1972 poll.

I continue to wear out my favourite films--last time I watched Nashville, I knew I'd crossed the line (which doesn't mean I think it's any less great, I just lose that feeling of discovery or elation or whatever)--so I'd have to think about this. I know for sure Zodiac would be very high this time.

Based on my two ballots for Film Twitter's annual "SHMIGHT & SHMOUND" polls, I'd likely be culling from this shortlist:

MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (McCarey)
DAISY KENYON (Preminger)
UN CHANT D'AMOUR (Genet)
DUCK AMUCK (Jones)
THE LADIES' MAN (Lewis)
LA JETÉE (Marker)
UNSERE AFRIKAREISE (Kubelka)
FEMALE TROUBLE (Waters)
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (Hooper)
TANGO (Rybczynski)
A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (Yang)
SHOWGIRLS (Verhoeven)
TASTE OF CHERRY (Kiarostami)
OUTER SPACE (Tscherkassky)
YI YI (Yang)
INLAND EMPIRE (Lynch)

Aside from there being no Sirk or Dreyer there.

THE LAST LAUGH (Murnau)
CITY LIGHTS (Chaplin)
THE MIRROR (Tarkovski)
JEANNE DIELMANN (Akermann)
HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA (Godard)
CLOSE UP (Kiarostami)
WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES (Tarr)
UNCLE BOONMEE (Weerasethakul)
STRAY DOGS (Tsai)
AMOUR FOU (Haussner)

w/out thinking much, first draft;

SHERLOCK JUNIOR
DUCK SOUP
L'ATALANTE
THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK
FIRES ON THE PLAIN
THE LEOPARD
BLACK GIRL
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
TRISTANA
THE MIRROR
A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE
MULHOLLAND DR.

I'd be tempted to only list movies from the last 20 years

I wouldn't, bcz narrative filmmakers are kinda out of ideas.

A list of non-narrative filmmaking from the last 20 years would be awesome, though

Duck Amuck 💜

This reminds me of some ilx polls with 50 options, of which 32 each receive one vote and the poll winner receives two votes.

FIRES ON THE PLAIN

Good choice, but I was thinking The Burmese Harp would get my Ichikawa spot.

my list would be absolute nonsense

This reminds me of some ilx polls with 50 options, of which 32 each receive one vote and the poll winner receives two votes.

― A is for (Aimless), Monday, February 24, 2020

more like seeing ilxors' individual choices in the year-end polls, which I think is interesting

Duck Amuck 💜

― Swilling Ambergris, Esq. (silby), Monday, February 24, 2020 2:49 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

The best film mentioned in this thread thus far.

really like Tscherkassky's Outer Space

alternate list bcz really, no Hitchcock on the last one

THE CROWD
LA CHIENNE
MODERN TIMES
LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN
EUROPA '51
NORTH BY NORTHWEST
THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE
POINT BLANK
CHINATOWN
FOX AND HIS FRIENDS
MIKEY AND NICKY
THE KING OF COMEDY

idg Duck Amuck, or why anyone would particularly care about it, fwiw.

Tscherkassky, yes!

/I'd be tempted to only list movies from the last 20 years/

I wouldn't, bcz narrative filmmakers are kinda out of ideas.

Sorry, 18. Point taken.

BAD TIMING
SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK
NEWS FROM HOME
TASTE OF CHERRY
CALIFORNIA SPLIT
IN A YEAR WITH 13 MOONS
SHADOW OF A DOUBT
LIFE IS SWEET
DISHONORED
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
THE DEER HUNTER
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (Schrader)
PERSONA (Bergman)
REPULSION (Polanski)
LA JETÉE (Marker)
STALKER (Tarkovsky)
LA RÈGLE DU JEU (Renoir)
MELANCHOLIA (von Trier)
LIQUID SKY (Tsukerman)
UNDER THE SKIN (Glazer)
THE WHITE BALLOON (Panahi)
ORPHÉE (Cocteau)
BLACK NARCISSUS (Powell and Pressburger)

Oh look, we only have three films in common! But one of them is Liquid Sky and that's what counts

2001: A Space Odyssey
Arabian Nights
Celine and Julie Go Boating
Hard To Be A God
Liquid Sky
Penda's Fen
Rear Window
Stalker
That Obscure Object Of Desire
The Rules Of The Game
Toni Erdmann
Watership Down

Penda's Fen! right on

ty ty but as is clear, tt is the film expert in our house

yes Eric, you see more recent greatness than I do*, that's why youre still in the arena

*do you? really? I can't even call Certified Copy great. It's... enough already.

I don't understand why you *wouldn't* make an idiosyncratic list

Mishima is more or less my favourite movie so good work tt

A Brighter Summer Day
Lancelot Du Lac
Kiki's Delivery Service
Johnny Guitar
Le Rayon Vert
Late Autumn
Stray Dogs
Workers, Peasants
Rio Bravo
No Home Movie

prediction for the poll: the searchers falls out of top 10, a brighter summer day enters the top 30

Jeanne Dielmann should be top ten, more Akerman should enter the top 100

Are all your 'ballots' ordered? Mine's alphabetical

Good old Lancelot would be on my longer list, nice choice

Rewatched Andrei Rublev the other night and it's right up there

Andrei Rublev
Mishima
The Assassin
M or Mabuse the Gambler
For a Few Dollars More
Weekend
The Big Sleep
The Gospel According to St Matthew
Vertigo
Kikujiro

I dunno, top of my head, not ordered

Mine was attempted chronological. I only now realized I forgot A Matter of Life and Death. So delete either Boonmee or Amour Fou, I guess. Good thing I still have a couple of years.

Jeanne Dielmann should be top ten, more Akerman should enter the top 100

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna svp

If I'd put any thought in there'd probably be a P&P in there, Black Narcissus or The Red Shoes

News From Home and No Home Movie could as well

Eh, it'll change tomorrow/five minutes from now but fuckit:

Mulholland Drive (Lynch)
Tree of Life (Mallick)
Hausu (Obayashi)
Possession (Zulawski)
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman)
Phantom of the Paradise (De Palma)
Stop Making Sense (Demme)
Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson)
The Innocents (Clayton)
Robot Monster (Tucker)

mine was unordered

Mine was unordered too, but yeah - Mishima pretty much top of the pack.

Le Rayon Vert v. close to making mine

I've watched Mishima more than any other film and I will never tire of it

Summer Hours
Vagabond
The Turin Horse
The Lady Eve
Los Olvidados
Early Summer
Dead Ringers
Certified Copy
Strangers on a Train
The Merchant of Four Seasons
Pandora's Box

Oh shit I missed out L'Age d'Or and an Ozu to be decided

Late Spring?

Rublev and The Assassin are amazing to me in their ability/attempts to recreate the texture of the past, presentation of other worlds without trying to mediate them for modernity. Really love King Hu's Legend of the Mountain for similar reasons. They are transportive in amazing ways.

oh what the hell

Sunrise
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Grave of the Fireflies
Les Rendez-vous d'Anna
Inland Empire
The Long Goodbye
Stalker
Point Blank
The Thin Blue Line
Audition

this is a ludicrous mind game

New board/life description

but mind games are fun

you gotta let it
you gotta let it go

acknowledging that nothing matters makes listing extremely easy

let it go

― imago, 25. februar 2020 15:16 (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Aw fuck, now I have to redo the list again :(

2001
Aguirre
Birth
Close-up
Day of wrath
Don't look now
Jeanne dielman
Love exposure
Maborosi
Le Rayon vert
The red shoes
Shadows of forgotten ancestors
Vertigo

Sort of...

Fuck, forgot

To live and die in LA
Sorcerer

Morbs! You forgot JFK! Where would it land on your list??

The Mirror
Ugetsu
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
A Day in the Country
Spirited Away
The Green Ray
The General
Smiles of a Summer Night
Sans Soleil
The End of Evangelion, fuck it

how disgusting

If I remember when I get home tonight and can access my Letterboxd account, I'll try to put together a S(hm)ight & S(hm)ound ballot. Spoiler alert: Footlight Parade and The Music Box will probably top this list.

An interesting question would be is there anything from more than 9 years ago that you wouldn't / didn't put on then but would now? More so if you've not rewatched it since.

("If I thought it was one of the best 10 films of all time, why would I not have rewatched it in the last decade?" is if course a very fair question)

Thing about time is you're always seeing something new, either literally or re-seeing because you're older and your values have changed

Probably half of my all time top 10 would be films I only watched once.

I've never watched many of the greatest movies I've seen.

I'm too old to care about what should be on these lists and what shouldn't. Alphabetically:

Advise and Consent (1962)
All the President's Men (1976)
Lost in America (1985)
Mad Men (2007-2015)
Malcolm X (1992)
Nixon (1995)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Rosemary's Baby (1968)
Welfare (1975)
Zodiac (2007)

I think one of Jia Zhangke's might be up around my personal list too

Last Year At Marienbad (Resnais)
Melancholia (Lav Diaz)
Mulholland Drive (Lynch)
That Obscure Object of Desire (Bunuel)
Woman in the Dunes (Teshigahara)
Don't Look Now (Roeg)
Céline and Julie Go Boating (Rivette)
Love in the Afternoon (Rohmer)
Taste of Cherry (Kiarostami)
Stalker (Tarkovsky)
Carnival of Souls (Harvey)
The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman)
Ugetsu (Mizoguchi)

here's my absolute dumbass version of a ballot for this

The End of Evangelion (Anno, 1997)
Kiki's Delivery Service (Miyazaki, 1989)
Possession (Żuławski, 1981)
Prince of Darkness (Carpenter, 1987)
Sans Soleil (Marker, 1983)
Showgirls (Verhoeven, 1995)
Speed Racer (Wachowskis, 2008)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
Three Colors: Red (Kieślowski, 1994)
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (Lynch, 1992)

sorry for almost no movies before 1980

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972)
Duck Amuck (Jones, 1953)
Fanny and Alexander [TV version] (Bergman, 1982)
The Long Goodbye (Altman, 1973)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, 1962)
Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959)
The Shining (Kubrick, 1980)
The Shop Around the Corner (Lubitsch, 1940)
Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958)

LBI we should hang out and do a movie weekend at some point haha

i can't see how one can just do the sound era choices thing

Orson Welles thought they were the purest cinema

One of the on pointiest comments about early Hitchcock I ever read is that he mastered the new technique of introducing sound in a way that mattered I think.

(silents, that is) xp

Arguing for cinema as purely visual is wrong-headed imo

LBI we should hang out and do a movie weekend at some point haha

― imago, Tuesday, February 25, 2020 4:40 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

A lot of tears and a lot of confusion, see you on Friday! :D

well "purely visual" is a subjective term

ie there was always music w/ silents

"You brought the wrong Melancholia, dammit!"

Haha

Morbs I agree it was a general ramble. I sometimes feel like sound design is a better argument for modern movies in a theatre than the visual sense.

Surprised no one else has Synecdoche

2001
The Burmese Harp
Certified Copy
Crumb
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Late Spring
Le Mépris
Mulholland Dr.
News from Home
Uncle Boonmee

Archers left out because I couldn't decide btw 7 films

xpost I have an unwatched copy of Synecdoche that I might finally be done waiting for my gf to feel like watching with me; will update.

This Sporting Life
Goodfellas
Wild Strawberries
Stroszek
Rear Window
Sweet Smell of Success
Bigger Than Life
Barry Lyndon
Come and See
Meantime

I could easily put Peeping Tom or Psycho in either of my previous two lists

wow. Citizen Kane's taking a pounding in this thread. call off the dogs!

not very thorough, just the stuff I'm in the habit of naming or have loved most in the last few years

Ninotchka (1939)
The Gang’s All Here (1943)
Hester Street (1975)
Killer of Sheep (1977)
Losing Ground (1982)
Love & Basketball (2000)
Bad Education (2004)
Poetry (2010)
Cameraperson (2016)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

The Third Man
2001
A Brighter Summer Day
News from Home
Winter Light
Black Narcissus
The Devil, Probably
Robocop
Maborosi
Safe

ah god fuck it I can't not do another one

THE APARTMENT
FRIDAY NIGHT
SHANGHAI EXPRESS
THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
I'M STILL HERE
THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE
ZABRISKIE POINT
HEATHERS
ZOOLANDER
EYES WIDE SHUT
THE IMAGE BOOK
THE HUMAN SURGE

I have yet to watch A Brighter Summer Day or Yi Yi but I own both. I am saving them for....something. I'm not sure what yet.

both of them are great, especially A Brighter Summer Day. I still haven't seen Taipei Story, but it's on the Criterion Channel so I will have to watch it

His most realized imo

Don’t forget Terrorizers, it’s streaming a few places.

the Through a Glass Darkly - Winter Light - The Silence trilogy is fantastic, there are so many great Bergman films

have to go with Wild Strawberries and Fanny and Alexander in the end, though

re yang, that day, on the beach is also a must see

yes Eric, you see more recent greatness than I do*, that's why youre still in the arena

*do you? really? I can't even call Certified Copy great. It's... enough already.

I do, absolutely. And it is great, absolutely.

The goodness of most of the lists on this thread is kind of proof that lists are nonsense.

The inability for many on ILX to count to 10 justifies Morbs' contempt.

lists are great, everyone should make lists

just don't call them the "best" anything, my end of decade list was just a list of some movies from the decade, I'm an idiot and shouldn't be ranking dick

nah that's more what i meant tbf

Looks like at this early point, 2001 is the most-mentioned, with 5.

no cinephile can meaningfully confine a list to 10 w/out playing "electability"-style Family Feud

(or usually, 'let me vote for what others won't')

If I were to vote strictly on the "electability" index (i.e. movies that were already solidly in the top 50/100 last decade), I guess my ballot would be selections from these:

The Rules of the Game (1939)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
Late Spring (1949)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Imitation of Life (1959)
L'eclisse (1962)
La Jetée (1962)
Gertrud (1964)
Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Nashville (1975)
Close-Up (1990)
A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
Sátántangó (1994)
Mulholland Dr. (2001)

The trick is to have three classic films to establish that you've seen the basics, three strategic votes for something you want to see move up on the list, and three votes for something no one else will vote for, so that you seem like you have a personality. And a joker.

The Art of the Listmaker

Aren't there 12 picks on each ballot?

Has there ever been a favourite-films ILX poll? Maybe before I got here, but I don't remember one since. You should run one, Eric, in advance of the S&S poll. At least there won't be arguments over what qualifies. Everything does.

I mean... You should definitely run the poll, but there will be arguments when The Return of Twin Peaks wins it...

Let's wait a few years until there's Netflix films that don't appear in the cinema :)

Bird Box doesn't count?

Limited theatrical run in December 2018 (and a festival before that)

Huh. The more you know

For the most part avoiding S&S films (many of course objectively better or more influential):

Woman in the Dunes (Teshigahara, 1964)
Aguirre: The Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972)
Come and See (Klimov, 1985)
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Schrader, 1985)
For All Mankind (Reinert, 1989)
Underground (Kusturica, 1995)
Happiness (Solondz, 1998)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr & Hranitzky, 2000)
Devils on the Doorstep (Jiang, 2000)
Synecdoche, New York (Kauffman, 2008)

I don't mind running an all-time poll as soon as I can come up with something better than Schmight and Schmound.

sought and signed

Devils on the Doorstep is a very good film

The trick is to have three classic films to establish that you've seen the basics, three strategic votes for something you want to see move up on the list, and three votes for something no one else will vote for, so that you seem like you have a personality. And a joker.

― Frederik B, Wednesday, February 26, 2020 11:47 AM (two hours ago)

Actually, I think we cracked the code on the 2012 ballots thread:

for younger crix the alogorithm is usually

1 x silent film that isnt potemkin sunrise or w/e
1 x bresson/dreyer
1 x japanese
1 x godard else maybe eustache or markers or suchlike
2 x ford/hawks/sirk/&c
2 x hitchcock/welles/kubrick
1 x tsai/breillat/&c antiseptic post 95 arthouse
1 x avantgarde

― The term “hipster racism” from Carmen Van Kerckhove at Racialicious (nakhchivan), Wednesday, April 25, 2012 1:59 PM (seven years ago)

1 silent, preferably in which an elephant dies on camera
1 fruity early sound musical
1 first wave a-g
1 newer a-g, preferably a horror movie in disguise
1 golden age of horror
1 French 60s (maybe Bresson)
1 French 70s (maybe Bresson)
1 movie with men kissing, but they're actually killing each other unless one is underage
Satantango
2 girls, 1 cup reax YouTubes

― jungleous butterflies strange birds (Eric H.), Wednesday, April 25, 2012 2:04 PM (seven years ago)

1 silent, preferably in which an elephant dies on camera
1 fruity early sound musical
1 first wave a-g
1 newer a-g, preferably a horror movie in disguise
1 golden age of horror
1 French 60s (maybe Bresson)
1 French 70s (maybe Bresson)
1 movie with men kissing, but they're actually killing each other unless one is underage
Satantango
2 girls, 1 cup reax YouTubes
― jungleous butterflies strange birds (Eric H.), Wednesday, April 25, 2012

add 1 ounce Campari and/or Averna
add 1/8 ounce Noilly Pratt sweet vermouth
stir

for younger crix the alogorithm is usually
1 x silent film that isnt potemkin sunrise or w/e
1 x bresson/dreyer
1 x japanese
1 x godard else maybe eustache or markers or suchlike
2 x ford/hawks/sirk/&c
2 x hitchcock/welles/kubrick
1 x tsai/breillat/&c antiseptic post 95 arthouse
1 x avantgarde

replace "avantgarde" with "Lynch" and this is perfect

Right, at this point one slot on each ballot is reserved for Mulholland Dr. or Inland Empire or Twin Peaks: The Return. No question.

https://media2.giphy.com/media/qPLjY64Y1qeNG/giphy.gif

I don't mind running an all-time poll as soon as I can come up with something better than Schmight and Schmound.

I Have No Sight, and I Must Sound

Milm and Foovies

The sights are alive with the sound of movies

Peace on Earth (Harman 1939)
Night and the City (Dassin 1950)
Playtime (Tati 1967)
Eraserhead (Lynch 1977)
Possession (Żuławski 1981)
Pee-wee's Big Adventure (Burton 1985)
Goodfellas (Scorsese 1990)
Safe (Haynes 1995)
Ghost World (Zwigoff 2001)
The Social Network (Fincher 2010)

All male directors and only two not in English, I know.

sound + vision

Blind, deaf, and mute.

Footlight Parade (Bacon, 1933)
The Music Box (Parrott, 1932)
The Scarlet Empress (von Sternberg, 1934)
UHF (Levey, 1989)
Seven Years Bad Luck (Linder, 1921)
Justin de Marseille (Tourneur, 1935)
Eliso (Shengelaia, 1928)
The Valley of the Bees (Vláčil, 1968)
Was Frauen Träumen (von Bolvary, 1933)
Razzia sur la Chnouf (Decoin, 1955)

Interesting list, I haven't seen any of them!

The Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1975)
Oslo, August 31st (Trier, 2011)
Mulholland Dr (Lynch, 2001)
The Green Ray (Rohmer, 1986)
Etre et avoir (Philibert, 2002)
The Graduate (Nichols, 1967)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1969)
North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959)
Singin' in the Rain (1952)
Billy Liar (Schlesinger, 1963)

Just read the thread and reailse I've shared three with Morbs, what a creep.

I'd always have picked Vertigo until now but the last time I watched it didn't quite churn me up as much as before so I wonder if I've just grown out of it. Or whether I'm just put off by it climbing to #1 in the S&S list. Anyway, North by Northwest is as enjoyable a watch as any film I know.

Seems like progressing from loving North By Northwest to loving Vertigo is what goes with the river of life's current.

I've become less anguished with age.

Talking of which, not Taxi Driver so far.

I don't mind running an all-time poll as soon as I can come up with something better than Schmight and Schmound.

Spite and pwnd

Spite & Stanned

Anyway.

I could just as soon put LE RAYON VERT on mine too, Alba

sorry

Chronologically:

Duck Amuck (Jones 1953)
Yojimbo (Kurosawa 1961)
PlayTime (Tati 1967)
Repo Man (Cox 1984)
Home Alone (Columbus 1990)
Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants (Mamet 1996)
The Prince of Egypt (Wells/Hickner/Chapman 1998)
The Matrix (Wachowski/Wachowski 1999)
Spirited Away (Miyazaki 2001)
Lady Bird (Gerwig 2017)

Etre et avoir (Philibert, 2002)

The final fillum cut from my own list, but I'd probably wedge it in there somewhere if this wasn't all just for pretend.

Women In Revolt (Morrissey)
Come and See (Klimov)
Safe (Haynes)
Andrei Rublev(Tarkovsky)
Syndromes and A Century (Weerasthakul)
Quiz Show (Redford)
La Jetee (Marker)
Mulholland Dr. (Lynch)
Days of Heaven (Malick)
The Elephant Man (Lynch)
Night of the Hunter (Laughton)
Code Unknown (Haneake)

Quiz Show hell yeah

+ Beau Travail (Denis)

& delete Days of heaven, I suppose.

yeah Silby!

A canonical Jewish movie imo

“I’m acquainted with rugelach.”
“How’d a guy like you get in to Harvard?”

amazing scriptwriting throughout that one.

Etre et avoir--liked it a lot, great ending (a career in teaching punctuated with a sigh), but I thought the teacher was a little too idealized; he was the perfect teacher anyone who's done it rarely is.

- What's the special?

- It's the Reuben.

- The Reuben sandwich is the only entirely invented sandwich. Won the National Sandwich contest two years ago.

-A salient point.

-Who invented it?

-Uh, Reuben kay, at a poker game in Omaha.

- I knew there was a ''k'' in Nebraska.

-Unfortunately they have the sandwich here, but, uh, they don't seem to have any Reubens.

Touche.

I love that you love it, ALS.

Oh, Jesus, I just realized -- we watched your show.

the green ray / LE RAYON VERT... needs a US release. I understand there is a lovely Region 2 boxset. it's a beautiful film. what is the hold up? only Rohmer in print in the US is the Six Moral Tales set (and that's only recently back in print).

ok but maybe just one drawing from the critics & directors 2012 pool

L'AVVENTURA
PLAYTIME
HISTOIRE(S) DU CINÉMA
NASHVILLE
CHINATOWN
VERTIGO
PERSONA
CLOSE-UP
TAXI DRIVER
THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE

eliminating all cinema before 1960 or 1970 seems to be a thing; not cool, if it mattered

A ballot without one movie from the 20s or 30s is suspicious. As is a ballot without one movie from after 1980.

If you made a list of your favourite albums, how many Dylan/Beatles/Velvet Underground/Chuck Berry/Creedence Clearwater/Neil Young albums would be on there? If there weren't any, would your list therefore become suspicious?

Yes.

I don't get that. That's the mindset that produces these horribly rote greatest-ever Rolling Stone lists.

Oh, you meant if my list didn't have any of those on it, not yours. In that case, the answer is obviously no.

You're dodging the question artfully and humorously. If the answer is, "Things should be done this way--by everybody else, not me," then okay, I'm guilty of that too sometimes.

Is the suspicion that the listmaker failed to engage with those works at all or that, having engaged, they weren't strongly compelled to include them among their wafer-thin ten-item list of the all-time greatest films among the 849,291,193 films in existence?

I haven't looked at everyone's lists, but if the lists of a couple of acquaintances under 30 I've seen on Twitter are any indication, I'd question their devotion to film if only one film in twenty is international.

Exactly what I wanted to say. In 1970 or whenever, I can maybe see John Simon or somebody superciliously assuming that the absence of such films indicates someone never having seen them. Which is irrelevant anyway, but if such things bother you, whatever. In 2020, start with the assumption that everybody's seen everything, or at least as much as they choose to...(xpost)That really pushes a button with me. "Devotion to film"?--jesus. Please explain what that means. I've been watching films for 50+ years, have a degree in film, have contributed to film magazines, and have zero international films in my Top 10. Am I not sufficiently devoted?

(I meant that OL's post was exactly what I wanted to say.)

I am not devoted to film but mostly because I am a dilettante who spreads himself too thin to claim devotion to any of his innumerable areas of interest. But I do like me some movin' pictures!

That really pushes a button with me. "Devotion to film"?--jesus. Please explain what that means. I've been watching films for 50+ years, have a degree in film, have contributed to film magazines, and have zero international films in my Top 10. Am I not sufficiently devoted?

― clemenza, Thursday, February 27, 2020 9

Ah! I swear I didn't even see your list. But you're the writer from whom I wouldn't expect the total exclusion of those films because of your pedigree, which, yeah, I do find peculiar, in the same way I'd find it peculiar if a rock critic included not one R&B/hip-hop album in a top ten or twenty. We'd still get drinks and talk, though, as I press Dreyer and Ohio Players.

Uh, you have ten international films in your top ten, clemenza

They haven't been excluded--they're just not among my 10 favorite. A few are close, but so what? You're trying to quantify something that can't be quantified. If I move one from just outside the top 10 (or top 20) into the top 10 (or top 20), that's the magical key that changes everything? Suspicion of my devotion is lifted? I'd be a lot more suspicious of one of those some-assembly-required lists under discussion last night. But as I get older, I try not to waste time even doing that--people list what they list.

I probably shouldn't have a drink in my hand in this scenario, Alfred.

Qualification for inclusion in my top ten was extended to films that made me say 'wow' or 'whoa' or 'gee' or left me speechless or made me weep like a newborn infant. There are more than ten of those films, my apologies to those excluded.

This is why I ask the question in the first place. The thing about me and lists and this exercise in particular which seems to me should be self-evident is that what's exciting to me about making this list is how it can be used to communicate the crucial bigness of the medium, how many movements, genres, eras its explored in just 125 or so years. To do that in only 10 movies requires, yes, some strategizing.

I have no qualm with doing the entirely rational thing of just instinctively grabbing at the 10 titles that most float your boat. Just as I would assume my opinion that doing so can potentially communicate ossified provincialism is no skin off your nose.

Come and See (Klimov)

I just watched a trailer and this is going to ruin me.

clem, I'm sorry for impugning your tastes, which was not my intention. Like I wrote, I hadn't even seen your list. I had in mind far younger fans for whom films not in English are like eating cauliflower or spinach.

I love list-making because doing so is a mix of instinct, posturing, and calculation. When I participated in P&J I'd on occasion omit favorite albums of the year because I knew they'd place anyway and I wanted to prop up something cool. In my state film critics circle's second ballot I'll form ad hoc coalitions with others to rally behind performances and films we may like a little less than what made our own lists but are way better and less predictable than the consensus picks. This is fun.

(xpost) If you treat your list as a project, then I guess I can see that...I just don't know why you'd want to do that--or even try to do that--in a list of 10 films. People write books when they want to communicate all those things. To me, it's a list of your 10 favourite films, the 10 films you most want to see right now. And how much a list interests me is in inverse proportion to how tied it is to TSPDT's Top 100. If it's yet another reshuffling of Hitchcock and Ozu and Renoir and Kubrick, that's fine, I'm not questioning the person's honesty, it's just, you know, another reshuffling of something I've seen a million times before. I don't get any sense of the person, and I don't learn anything.

(xpost) Don't worry--I've been impugned before, and will be impugned again.

It's just different for different people, I guess. My ten favorite films definitely aren't the ten films I want to see right now.

I picked ten films I quite like and would happily argue each one is Great if pressed.

I’m def the least knowledgeable “voter” itt so far!

If it's yet another reshuffling of Hitchcock and Ozu and Renoir and Kubrick, that's fine, I'm not questioning the person's honesty, it's just, you know, another reshuffling of something I've seen a million times before.

This is a valid point: the greatest hits tossed around a bit. But! Lists are educational too. If, say, Chimes at Midnight or French Cancan appear on a list instead of Kane or Rules of the Game, I might, depending on the person, be tempted to give those films a second look.

Anyway, when I look at Eric's list right at the beginning of the thread, it's a very idiosyncratic, interesting list--reminds of the one B. Ruby Rich stuck in the middle of all the Godfather-Nashville-Taxi Driver lists in James Monaco's American Film Now--so I'm not sure what we're arguing about.

And how much a list interests me is in inverse proportion to how tied it is to TSPDT's Top 100. If it's yet another reshuffling of Hitchcock and Ozu and Renoir and Kubrick, that's fine, I'm not questioning the person's honesty, it's just, you know, another reshuffling of something I've seen a million times before.

On this I agree.

I'm still unclear as to how a mindset that elides Dylan/Beatles/Velvet Underground/Chuck Berry/Creedence Clearwater/Neil Young results in "horribly rote greatest-ever Rolling Stone lists" when those are exactly the artists that used to clog greatest-ever Rolling Stone lists when Rolling Stone was relevant, but I'm fine letting it be.

Sherlock Jr.
Simon of the Desert
Andrei Rublev
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Commando
Cobra
Robocop
John Wick
Paddington 2
Mandy

Mandy I feel is one that we can expect to see creeping into more and more of these lists. Might be in my 11-20.

the first list with two films by father and son!

Mandy would be on a longlist of mine too but I think Cosmatos Jr has even greater things to come

(Just checked, and it wasn't B. Ruby Rich, it was Michael Goodwin and Naomi Wise. They had Coogan's Bluff and Petulia and The Legend of Lylah Clare and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls; that list used to fascinate me.)

I'm not arguing that you should have those albums on your list; I'm saying that I know (from my sense of your ILM posting) that you wouldn't, but that I therefore wouldn't deem your list "suspicious." And that including such albums on a list because it's the "correct" way to approach pop-music history is what produces those Rolling Stone lists. "We're the gatekeepers of official pop history."

sometimes filmmakers are in a 'canon' cuz most devotees think they belong there

(or a plurality, BernieBro style)

OK, I did misread you on that one then.

I still think that Morbs is right that lists of the top ten movies "of all time" at least owe a debt of consideration to the full span of time.

xp

and to the full span of the globe xp

zero international films (or none before 1980) in your Top 10 just means i'm not interested in it

xp and space! Do they owe a performative gesture to prove you've made that consideration, though?

If filmism is the movie equivalent of rockism, I'd say there's a lot of filmism in this thread about list-making and canon.

Roughly how many Bollywood films are we expecting in the theoretical rollout?

Oh most of my favorite films perform, alright.

"We have returned your ballot as you have not ticked the box to indicate that to the best of your knowledge and/or recollection, these films fuck"

Depends what you mean by Bollywood, but I could see some classics from the forties-fifties make it in. As in studio classics, not Pather Panchali etc

All ballots for this scale of poll should be at least 25 films long tbh

The longer the exercise goes on, though, the more interesting the challenge becomes.

Gripe & Frown

10 is plenty, adapt to constraint.

An all-time films poll, as opposed to carving out a genre or era to focus on, seems impossibly broad. We'd need a hell of a lot of voters.

the essential problem is that ten (or 12) is a very restrictive number

this board would be poisoned with recency bias, as always

xp S&S thought so too, which is why it went from about 140 ballots to, like, 850 in 2012.

xp as opposed to your anti-recency bias?

read that as "anti-decency"

S&S thought so too, which is why it went from about 140 ballots to, like, 850 in 2012.

S&S OTM

c'mon Eric i'd likely include MOMENT OF INNOCENCE and MULHOLLAND DR. Fairly recent as these things go.

More recent than that, i need to let them marinate another decade.

I *really* have considered if any films i've seen since '01 could generously be called one of the ten greats, and i'd just be lying if i pretended i thought so.

I do think if we made any attempt at an all-time poll, ballots of up to 50 (or more!) would produce more interesting results

yes

what about weighting though

As the poll runner-elect, I would probably resist my inclination to NOT consider weighting (as S&S doesn't). But this is ILX and ties are boring, so.

also, rather than a poll with a final rollout, what might be better if workable would be a mutable, ever-changing tabulation of our aggregated top 50s, which we could go back to and change at any time. is there some sort of data aggregation service which could serve such a purpose?

but yeah a poll is easier haha

I suggest we all submit detailed ballots and blurbs, and then Eric just chooses the noms he likes best and reassigns the blurbs to totally different movies

Letterboxd API is in private beta but once it’s public an easy way to do a perpetual poll would be to have people make ranked lists and then scrape and tabulate those lists. Takes care of data quality issues.

A perpetual ranking would deflate the moment I think.

If we want to avoid ties, weighting and longer ballots pretty essential given how few people will be voting compared with S&S

Somebody explain weighted ballots to me; I've carefully avoided all polls that had them up to now.

Unless that just means ranked ballots like most ILM ballot polls are.

Yeah that's it

eliminating all cinema before 1960 or 1970 seems to be a thing; not cool, if it mattered

― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Thursday, February 27, 2020 6:59 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Whatever, my real list is above, starting with Bad Timing and ending with Domestic Violence.

they say he lived as he listed

tough to pick, skewing a bit more subjective than objective in some cases. Not in order:

Black Narcissus
Repo Man
Light Sleeper
Kiss Me Deadly
Two Lane Blacktop
Fallen Angels
Memories of Murder
Taxi Driver
Once Upon a Time In the West
Sherlock Jr.

there are several dozen other films i could switch out but i like to rep for a few underrepped

hell yeah, Two Lane Blacktop is probably my favorite movie ever, but didn't make my list cause I arbitrarily limited it to title characters for some reason.

arbitrary limitations are great, we should all have them

what are the ten greatest films of all time released in prime-numbered years

at some point I'll make a ballot of the ten greatest films I haven't seen

One of my favourite lists of this kind was the one Greil Marcus drew up for the second Top 200 Albums book compiled by Paul Gambaccini. It was all ground-level UK punk: the Adverts, X-Ray Spex, Wire, etc. I think the earliest thing he listed in terms of when it was recorded was a Buzzcocks bootleg from 1977. It was almost as if he didn't feel the need to assure everyone he'd heard Blonde on Blonde. (His list for the first Gambaccini book in '78 was much more in line with the conventional canon, although that first Gambaccini book was one of the things--along with the RS Record Guide and Christgau's '70s book--that helped create that canon, so that's something of a circular statement.)

(The second book came out in 1987.)

yeah, that's one of my favorite all-time top 10 lists also (similar, i think, to the list of the best punk records he gives in the prologue of lipstick traces). someone asked him about the list on his website and he said his personal favorite was when he'd just answered the question by listing 10 jan and dean records.

Come and See (Klimov)

I just watched a trailer and this is going to ruin me.

I rented this last night. Incredible, I don't know why I'd never heard of it before.

I had no idea it existed until I started seeing it parked very high in every other all-time films list from the past like five years.

TCM aired it about a month ago, but I wussed out and didn't record it.

Come and See may be the only film Truffaut would consider anti-war.

It's also coming from Criterion later this year.

I will watch it one day. Its just one of those that I have to psych myself up for.

Yeah, it's the epitome of "great movie I hope I never see again."

it's really better to watch it with a supportive friend.

I can't believe I failed to put Distant Voices, Still Lives on my list.

Please distract from coronavirus, Biden-Sanders, and the market crash by launching this.

If I opened this poll this early, I'd have to leave it open for at least a year and offer people the opportunity to change their ballots throughout.

no more polls, ever

If filmism is the movie equivalent of rockism, I'd say there's a lot of filmism in this thread about list-making and canon.

― Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 27 February 2020 bookmarkflaglink

I don't think the canon in cinema operates in the same way as in music at all. You never see it weighing down current efforts in the way it is with certain types of music or in criticism, which is one of the issues with rockism (?)

i would say canon in cinema gives ppl the wrong idea of what constitutes real cinema and what constitutes a bad movie, which is v similar to how the music canon gives people the wrong idea of what constitutes real music and what constitutes bad music

I don't really want to unpack that.

Do you mean seeing, say, Rear Window or a Sturges film beside a Tarkovsky or Bresson? xpost

idk i didn't put a lot of thought into that post beyond "when i look at a letterboxd page of a trashy movie i enjoyed i mostly see unthinking one star reviews"

just tryin to stay out of the politics threads folks

Maybe the situation has gotten more like music since Marvel films, but I always quite impressed (despite all the pre- and post- Star Wars/Spielberg whatever) at how convivial the discourse was between a lot of Hollywood output and arthouse. At least in the UK.

i think the solidification of a canon in film is a bit more understandable just in terms of the amount of time people have to watch films vs the amount of time they can listen to music, and how much more music is widely available vs the availability of films. i think for some people films are more accessible now, and for others maybe less so. less access to rental stores, for one, and despite streaming options i think a lot of films just get lost in the shuffle of algorithms.

On topic:

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Favorite Films. pic.twitter.com/0NtSf9FCAG

— Films to Films (@FilmstoFilms_) March 5, 2020

Weird punctuation.

big daddy

Weird alphabetization too.

He's cheating there with those Jenkins rankings.

He was having a ball in 2017.

Confirming what I already knew from decades' worth of S&S directors' polls. Directors may know how to make movies, but they have no idea how to make lists.

I revisited House of Games recently. It's.....fine.

Making lists is an art form

That's the basic premise of this thread, yup.

He put his own movie on there?

Tsai ming-liang put Goodbye Dragon Inn on his last sight and sound ballot too

A justifiable move.

2001: A Space Odyssey
Last Year at Marienbad
8 1/2
Apocalypse Now
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
It’s a Wonderful Life
Blade Runner
In the Mood for Love
The Red Shoes
Andrei Rublev

What the hell is "the Kubrick Quartet"? Any block of four seems like a pretty arbitrary categorization.

Was wondering the same. Also, no Altman on PTA's list?

I didn't even notice that. What a dick!

prefers John Krasinski

I'm something like 98% sure this list of movies wasn't generated from the prompt "name your all-time favorite movies, PTA."

Warming considerably to PTA over here.

I googled the phrase and the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque had a program called A Stanley Kubrick Quartet in January. Killer's Kiss, The Killing, Barry Lyndon and Full Metal Jacket.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/paul-thomas-anderson-favorite-films-movies/

Allegedly the quartet is: Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining.

Which, madness.

He becomes even less the good Anderson

Regarding the conversation above re: canonization in film vs. music... I think film is inherently more democratic and universal because it has always been a popular art first. the cinema is a territory that a wider group of people share than any record store or venue. dozens upon dozens of sources and scenarios to see bands or hear their music: live concert, record store, friends bedroom, friends car, etc. but everyone m/l goes to the same movie theaters. there isn't as much aversion to "popular movies" as there is/was to "pop music" (and "popular movies" stretches from Star Wars to Schindler's List to They Shoot Horses, Don't They?). correct me if I'm wrong but I doubt many people ever said "I don't see popular movies" vs. "I don't listen to pop music."

So much of a musical education is actively seeking, groping in the dark, and discovering. One doesn't have to try as hard to seek out independent/arty/foreign cinema as say, a specific Wolf Eyes EP released in 2002. who would Bergman's equivalent be in the rockist canon? Lou Reed?
I agree that, at least in my experience, film fans are more open, convivial, and understanding than Fugazi punks or w/e

I'll give this a go, why not

HARD BOILED (Woo)
THE THIRD MAN (Reed)
BEAU TRAVAIL (Denis)
VERTIGO (Hitchcock)
LONDON (Keiller)
FUNNY GAMES (Haneke)
TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA (Friedkin)
TOTAL RECALL (Verhoeven)
AMERICAN PSYCHO (Harron)
THIS IS SPINAL TAP (Reiner)

American Psycho, ok flex on them

when Buttigieg was still in the race, I couldn't stop thinking of Patrick Bateman's "woke speech" early on in the movie & book.

My recollection of House of Games was great script and character actors, let down by the lead and cinematography/production design. I wouldn't mind a remake.

xp: Buttigieg + "Well, we have to end apartheid for one..." found its way onto my feed months ago...

PTA not having a Scorsese or Altman film on there is either comically brazen or comically delusional.

I thought The Master inclusion played the comic role.

Where is that list from, anyway? it's not his S&S ballot

I don't want to sound like I take umbrage or anything; as I said (or tried to say) above, lists are lists, and--to quote someone who's nowhere near my own--everyone has their reasons. I was just thinking of Magnolia in relation to Altman, and Boogie Nights in relation to Scorsese (he does list I Am Cuba, so he's not playing hide-and-seek with his influences).

that list reads like someone asked him what his favorite movies of the moment were. there's so much from the last couple years, anyway where did it come from

PTA not having a Scorsese or Altman film on there is either comically brazen or comically delusional.

― clemenza, Friday, 6 March 2020 23:36 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

qft

Should people like their influences?

He has more movies from 2017 than movies made before 1964

Not from 2017 on just from 2017

I had look up qft--yes, quantum field theory, that's exactly what I had in mind! I would think normally a director or writer or musician would like his or her influences? I mean, it's not a rule or anything, but it doesn't seem like a far-fetched assumption. Anyway, again, it really and truly doesn't bother me at all. Just caught my attention and seemed a little odd. Maybe Altman made his 35th favorite film and Scorsese his 36th. (Loved seeing Jaws there. Maybe he'll resurrect that franchise, with Joaquin Phoenix as Sheriff Brody.)

qft = quoted for truth

the list obviously isn't comprehensive

(Using my own detective skills, I actually thought it meant "quit fucking talking"...)

the list is just culled randomly by indiewire from interviews and comments over the years

https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/paul-thomas-anderson-favorite-films-movies/the-birdcage-1996-3/

a taste of honey (richardson, 1961)
chimes at midnight (welles, 1965)
vagabond (varda, 1985)
modern times (chaplin, 1936)
a girl walks home alone at night (amirpour, 2014)
2001: a space odyssey (kubrick, 1968)
valerie and her week of wonders (jireš, 1970)
daisies (chytilová, 1966)
his girl friday (hawks, 1940)
an angel at my table (campion, 1990)

Girl Walks etc is a powerful pick

i saw it for the first time just a few months ago and was blown away by how much i liked it. virtually a silent film for long stretches, but just incredibly visually powerful and haunting.

PTA establishing himself with films that ripped off Scorsese and Altman was comically brazen

(his recent Kubrick-Hitchcock phase is far more muted)

PTA has remained horny as well

Maybe now IS the time to do this!

yes

Yes. Yes.

I've been idly working on a list in anticipation.

I'm surprised by how much love Jeanne Dielman gets here and elsewhere. I watched in on youtube last week and thought it was 3 hrs 10 minutes of housewifery with a bit of messiness at the end. Anyway, here are mine:

The Wizard of Oz
Murmur of the Heart
Claire's Knee
Taxi Driver
Naked
Mulholland Drive
The Last Picture Show
The White Ribbon
Spirit of the Beehive
The Virgin Spring

Only seen most of those films once, so not too confident in one or two choices down at the bottom.

"3 hrs 10 minutes of housewifery with a bit of messiness at the end"

This should be on the DVD cover

Housewifery

La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc
The Shining
Persona
In the Mood for Love
Citizen Kane
Close-up
Days of Heaven
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Rushmore
The Phantom Thread

I like your list cajunsunday. also like many others here

it's hard to choose all-time favorite films. the only thing I'm sure about is that 2001 and Taxi Driver would be at the top of my list

“what's exciting to me about making this list is how it can be used to communicate the crucial bigness of the medium, how many movements, genres, eras it's explored in just 125 or so years” (Eric H)

“I love list-making because doing so is a mix of instinct, posturing, and calculation” (Alfred)

I like these comments

I have this weird hunch that 2001 will top the poll next time. Feels like a solid consensus choice for "best movie ever" -- Vertigo is undeniable of course but it feels weird at the top of such a list.

(I say this and yet Vertigo would be on my list and not 2001...)

I'm thinking (no order):

The Passion of Joan of Arc
M
Vertigo
Throne of Blood
8 1/2
The Passenger
Eyes Wide Shut
The Thin Red Line
can't choose one by Ozu
Au Hasard Balthazar or L'Argent

Reviving because I do intend to spin this off into a ballot poll. I expect all of summer to be the nomination/campaigning period, followed by ballot collection in fall.

thus begins my campaign for Dirty Grandpa

anyone who doesn't vote for any animation is a coward or a chauvinist

I might vote for some animation if we get 100 places on our ballots

Here's what I'm leaning toward. Either 10 or 25 ranked or unranked top-tier picks that would be weighted much more heavily, and then 40 to 75 unranked extra picks to round it to 50 or 100. I want people to make tough choices a la Sight & Sound, but I also don't want endless ties left and right.

aww was I excited to just see people's 10-item ballots

make people make hard choices darn it

How about 10 top-tier choices and then up to 90 other nowhere-near-as-many-points choices?

Either way, Duck Amuck is in my Top 10.

I mean u do what u want Eric by all means but lists of 10 movies are much more interesting than lists of 100 movies imho

a long voting period + the ballots of lurkers would probably generate some interesting aggregate results, and 10 is a lower commitment level than "up to 100" that's for sure

this is the way the world ends, eh

but u do u

what better way to end it

than a contentious ilx ballot poll

The world ended a long time ago, Morbs.

Absolutely not voting for animation lol.

By this thread's mentions alone, Duck Amuck has anywhere from 3 to 7 votes.

xp out of 10 or out of 100?

Out of 10, definitely nothing.

Can't think of anything out of 100 right now. I'd need 3-6 months of watching and reading to understand anime just so I could properly place anything in a list of 100.

submitting a ballot of 9 animated films and Airplane!

So exactly 300 movies have been mentioned in this thread so far: https://pastebin.com/LwvpYQ1A

two tiers with top 10 weighted more heavily sounds like a good idea to me. I don’t know if I could choose just 10 films

the 2012 lists and mentions also include a lot of classic films that don’t overlap here

Pretend you have a ballot for the 2012 edition of Sight & Sound's top 10 movies of all time list

Good point, I can trawl that thread for "nominations" before unveiling the campaigning/nomination thread that really means nothing because people can vote for whatever movies they want, as always.

Now that I've got Janet behind me, turning back to this. I count 570 titles mentioned so far... https://pastebin.com/LwvpYQ1A

I'll fire up an actual campaigning/nomination thread sometime in the next few weeks.

I'm remembering some magazine cover, and I think it's better to have Janet in front of you.

Sorry, world.

this will be a massive poll, hope we will take our time and will get everybody involved

If it's favourite films, would you need nominations? Everything ever is eligible.

"Nominations" are mostly a courtesy, in any ILX poll, and people are free to vote for what they want. And while I have reservations over voting for, say, a TV series in its entirety, I also admit I have no problem with that 2002 S&S voter's citation of the British Airways commercial, so.

On a related note, Joel D's defense of his immortal 2002 list has somehow slipped by me until now: https://amauteurish.com/2014/05/30/sight-sound-2002/

(Takeaway headline, S&S apparently came close to rejecting that ballot, until he swapped out his Michael Snow selection for a third porn title.)

putting a riefenstahl film in your top 10 is more indefensible than voting for three porn films imo

I wonder how Leni Riefenstahl's technically accomplished porn movies would be assessed today she'd gone in that direction.

That Joel David blog post links to our previous S&S thread as an example of the discussion that his list generated at the time, though oddly I only see like two mentions of it in the thread (both by Eric).

You're welcome.

Whether it gets counted or not--the final list in any poll always interests me, but is never important to me (why would it be, to me or anyone else?)--I'll definitely vote for one television series.

if there is any 'television series' included I hope it will be Twin Peaks: The Return

That did get theatrical screenings, so people who normally wouldn't go near TV will be okay for voting for it. Mine is a straight-up TV show.

I validate Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

sticking with Dekalog, you apostates

Dekalog was pretty great

2001: A Space Odyssey, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Taxi Driver, Close-Up, Sátántangó, In the Mood for Love, Mulholland Drive, Uncle Boonmee, Twin Peaks: The Return, Zama

films I will love forever

I don't see Zama or Twin Peaks: The Return on the pastebin list, they should be included. Or Burning, such an incredible film

Added all three.

It's time: It's the ILX All-Time Milm and Foovies Poll! -- Nominations Thread

Found this weird and interesting: a guy who voted in the '72/'82/'92 polls asking for an invite to vote in 2022.

http://tonymacklin.net/content.php?cID=936

Fucking Shane.

Movies in which Jean Arthur is oppressed/depressed/repressed.

haven't seen Shane but I really like westerns from the 1948-1960 era

Leone's films were a few years after that but were all pretty great

I like Shane, don't love it, consider it part of film history--it's almost simultaneously a revisionist western itself and the context against which revisionist westerns from The Searchers to the later ones in the '60s and '70s make sense--and it doesn't seem to be particularly out of place on that list. (Philadelphia strikes me as the anomaly.)

> In 2022 there's a new world

and then doesn't list anything that's not ~30 years old

I appreciate him giving us his rationale for adding and subtracting films from previous lists, but that is very much the list of a man who once made a list in 1972.

Lol, exactly

Also, merry Sicilian.

This reads like this guy got divorced by cinema and now cinema won’t let him see the kids

omg

Savage.

lol of course he has to weigh in on fucking Birth of a Nation even though he isn't voting for it.

I want to be on this guy's side, but I also think that the main point of doing these polls every 10 years is to track how tastes change with time. And he's really not selling that.

Yeah I wasn’t trying to be mean, I think his perspective is potentially interesting & would like those reminiscences without the note of sadsack self pity; it’s especially rich because he’s basically like “I guess there’s just no room on this ol’ rock anymore for a guy who votes for vertigo and citizen kane in decadal polls” and come on

I hope they let him vote so he can immediately disappear among all the indistinguishable ballots. You can do it Tony!

Yeah but also...

of course he has to weigh in on fucking Birth of a Nation even though he isn't voting for it

This.

Yeah that sucked & it was a rather cowardly sort of weighing in too

My final film for the 2022 Sight & Sound top ten is Philadelphia. A movie that opens with music by Springsteen and closes with music by Neil Young is a keeper.

He's 84 so the only film that predates him on his list is The General. I have to admit, on my own list, I probably have at least as many films older than me than not, so I can't point fingers about being out of touch with film culture.

I kind of want to defend him too, although "weird" in my original post may suggest otherwise. I found it weird he would publically lobby for a ballot. I hope he gets one, though. "Hey, I founded Film Heritage"--I guess only someone as stuck in that moment (when it comes to film critics) as I am would find that touching. I also wonder if Andrew Sarris's ballot, if he were alive, would be appreciably different.

Here's the Agee piece on Griffith. Only the first two pages are on Birth of a Nation. Their final paragraph:

(Today, The Birth of it Nation is boycotted or shown piecemeal; too many more or less well-meaning people still accuse Griffith of having made it an anti-Negro movie. At best, this is nonsense, and at worst, it is vicious nonsense. Even if it were an anti-Negro movie, a work of such quality should be shown, and shown whole. But the accusation is unjust. Griffith went to almost preposterous lengths to be fair to the Negroes as he understood them, and he understood them as a good type of Southerner does. I don’t entirely agree with him; nor can I be sure that the film wouldn’t cause trouble and misunderstanding, especially as advertised and exacerbated by contemporary abolitionists; but Griffith’s absolute desire to be fair, and understandable, is written all over the picture; so are degrees of understanding, honesty, and compassion far beyond the capacity of his accusers. So, of course, are the salient facts of the so-called Reconstruction years.)

My final film for the 2022 Sight & Sound top ten is Philadelphia. A movie that opens with music by Springsteen and closes with music by Neil Young is a keeper.
― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, May 31, 2021 9:53 AM (forty-eight minutes ago)

"Who could ask for anything more? It's a film for a Philly guy -- and a human being."

I can read between those lines, old man.

Having watched the full, unexpurgated version of Birth of a Nation last year, can I just say fuck DW Griffith, fuck Jim Agee and fuck Tony Macklin.

D. W. Griffith - "Accidental Racist"

What's o_O about BOAN defenders is that it was widely perceived as provocatively racist in *1915*. To be fair, I didn't know that when first getting into film history in the 90s, but it's a fact that has been broadly established by now (even something as popular-history as Longworth's You Must Remember This mentioned it briefly in the most recent series)

The most amazing leap in that Agee piece is that it's supposedly "contemporary abolitionists" who would "cause trouble and misunderstanding" around the film.

To be fair to Agee, they're still doing it to this day, to hear some tell it.

(Disclaimer: I am being facetious there. It's definitely revisionist history to paint Birth of a Nation as some sort of guiltless artifact that in only the last 40 or 50 years or so has been unpacked for its racism.)

Clicked a few of the reviews on the homepage and got a kick out of his two-star assessment of the PBS Hemingway.

The Old Man and the Sea is a profound, personal vision.

But there's little recognition in the documentary of the importance of going beyond the surface into the art.

Androgyny and suicide are more important in the documentary.

Glibness trumps credibility. It is as though the film was made by the tourists on the shore.

Such is Ernest Hemingway in 2021.

The Old Man and The Old Man and the Sea

Happy New “we get a new S&S fill poll this year” Year!

Went to a screening of City Lights this afternoon and was wondering when exactly this thing comes out.

Starting to feel like later than last time, maybe even December

Obviously, please post here when it does; I never check magazines anymore, and--at least where I am--getting one won't be easy.

I mean, some of us might not have to pretend after all:

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/poll-position-kaned

We invited more than a thousand people last time; the ambition is to at least double that number in 2022.

Gonna go on the record in saying 2001 will win this time around.

The callout for ballots dropped today

hope you will be able to get and submit one, we should have someone to represent us here

Eric, I think your and our collective posts in the last two all-time poll threads (directors, films) have been a significant contribution to the discourse about great films, more than any individual reviews I've read in highbrow publications

S&S voters should read them, and you should vote in this poll

You too Alfred

besos

oh lol I think I misread you. I thought I had contributed.

if you haven't already, you should lobby for a S&S ballot! I mean, you have to qualify

as long as you don't make your top ten all Buñuel films, I mean one is enough

2001: A Space Odyssey has ascended over time in the rankings, and was #6 on the 2012 list. It would be surprising for it to suddenly jump to #1, I don't expect it but I would love it if it did.

It seems like the critics only come around to agreeing what the best films of all time are 50 or more years after they are released. I don't see any other films above or below 2001 on that S&S list that are likely to rise in prominence at this point

The window's less than 50 years, I think. 2001 came out in '68, was tied for 11th 24 years later. Mulholland Drive was 28th in 2012, 11 years after release, probably higher this time. If you really go back, L'Avventura was #2 a year after it was released. Obviously, something like that isn't going to happen anymore, but I'd say the window for ranking high today is more like 20-30 years.

What I'm saying is, School of Rock could be really high this time.

I predict Mulholland Drive is gonna crack the top 10.

air bud
air bud 2
michael jackson thriller video
david at the dentist
field of dreams
barely legal #15
citizen kane
bringing up baby
esteban buttez: the first ten posts
goonies

― ice cr?m, Sunday, 12 September 2010 02:47 bookmarkflaglink

I predict Mulholland Drive is gonna crack the top 10

lol we had someone representing us before = me

and look how that turned out

zizek only placed second as troll but i no longer write for S&S

(this isn't actually official and is mainly a consequence of my indolence and detainment elsewhere)

lol we had someone representing us before = me

and look how that turned out

Agreed.

https://www.facebook.com/1631212662/posts/pfbid02exzLDGsJPE6poE1yLMmgxwYQX3Bwh8izRiPGwDCUTrKHPRRvEyhds3jLWx6K4Tpjl/?d=n

Paul Schrader denied a ballot?!

they told him they would contact him when they were ready for the directors' poll

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2012 votes (ten ghosts)

A Brighter Summer Day 1991 Edward Yang
The Conversation 1974 Francis Ford Coppola
La Captive 1983 Chantal Akerman
Empire 1964 Andy Warhol
Full Metal Jacket 1987 Stanley Kubrick
The General 1926 Buster Keaton
Goodbye, Dragon Inn 2003 Tsai Ming Liang
Rain 1929 Joris Ivens
Sátántangó 1994 Béla Tarr
Valentin de las Sierras 1967 Bruce Baillie

This site is a treasure trove and, if S&S achieve their goal of better representation among women, LGBT, and international voters, Jeanne Dielman in particular has a shot at the top 10.

http://www.phi-phenomenon.org/essay/S&S2012/

it's just an old kazoo with some sparkles

What a body, what a voice!

Interesting appetizer ... a poll of about 120 critics/scholars (mostly from Spain): https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiODhiOWQwMzUtNTVhYy00ZWYxLTk0MDEtNDRmNTQ1YWJjODk3IiwidCI6ImFmM2E0NDRiLTcwMWItNGVkNi05YzhlLTg0ZGE5MmQ0Zjk2OSIsImMiOjl9

When Satyajit Ray died in 1992, I think it was just before the S&S voting took place; Pather Panchali moved into the Top 10 that year. I don't think Godard has ever had a film in the Top 10; much harder, because the votes would be more diffuse, but I could see that happening this year (voting still to take place, I think). (Yes, I realize this is a trivial concern on the day of his death.)

The Queen (Frears, 2006) to displace Vertigo at #1.

Godard could certainly make gains this poll, but fwiw the bulk of ballots were due in August.

(Tho I understand they're being distributed in waves, likely to achieve the intended gender/geographic/LGBTQ representation.)

I saw The Bicycle Thief some 30 years ago and thought it was one of the most profound films I'd ever seen. It seems to have largely disappeared from the conversation.

I thought something was posted on one of the other threads last week that ballots had just been sent out...If August was the deadline, then no, obviously his death won't figure in. (Alba's joke crossed my mind right after I posted.)

Has Kiarostami's reputation been serious damaged by the accusations around Ten?

I don't think so

It seems to have largely disappeared from the conversation.

It's ranked #13 of all-time on THEY SHOOT PICTURES, DON'T THEY?, which compiles a whole bunch of lists til 2020. There might not be much conversation because it's been around and acclaimed for 74 years.

Also it was 33rd in 2012, which might sound far back but ahead of anything by Rossellini.

I guess I just didn't see it itt, or mentioned in other threads, or included in the Spanish list posted above.

It's cachet has faded, and I'm not sure whether it's because the canon has drifted toward experimental, expressionist, and genre, or because other national cinema movements primarily based in humanism have usurped Italian neorealism.

Haven't watched/listened to this yet but someone goes on for over an hour with predictions here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrHAEnzwj_w

Let the countdown begin...

1600 critics voted in the @SightSoundmag Greatest Films of All Time 2022 poll. "Almost double" the number surveyed in 2012, they say. That must make a difference. Either way, we'll find out when the results are revealed on 1st December.

— Michael Leader (@MichaelJLeader) October 26, 2022

Today I turned in my Sight & Sound ballot for THE GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME pic.twitter.com/ccnUzGuvAQ

— Isabel Sandoval (@Isabelvsandoval) November 3, 2022

It's about time Tropical Malady displaced Vertigo/Kane

From a different board and take with a gallon of salt:

Hi Everyone

I became a member of this site today and I have been following this site closely for the last 6 months.

I have been eagerly awaiting the 2022 the greatest films of all time survey of sight & sound magazine for the last 10 years because I made in-depth analysis of the 2012 survey results.

Yesterday, I received a message about the poll from a film writer friend from that magazine. My friend didn't say which film is the 1st movie and I didn't ask because on December 1st, we will see all the movies in the survey result.

My friend only said that : there is a "very surprising change at the top",, about the 1st film.

Based on this news, now I know that the 1st film is definitely not vertigo and of course not citizen kane..

because my friend said there is a big surprise in the 1st film. Therefore, by reviewing the results of 2012, I guess that one of these 3 films was the champion : Tokyo Story (1953) or 2001: A Space Odyssey, maybe The Rules of the Game (1939) ..

Frankly, I know that the film that won the poll was not ''vertigo and citizen kane'' and now my curiosity has increased even more...

We will find out the results online on December 1st and there are only 23 days left.

It's Jeanne Dielman. That's the new #1

If that's right--and the surprising change isn't Kane and Vertigo switching back ("very surprising change at the top" doesn't preclude that)--my guess is 2001.

Finally Ernest Saves Christmas gets the respect it deserves

Are there Vegas odds on this? I feel like making some money

The poster of that blind item above now claiming that the claim of a "surprise" at the top is none other than 1an Chr1st1e

The Jeanne Dielman prediction feels ... pretty decent in the context of the "big surprise" thing from whatever message board that is.

Still doesn't seem likely for a #1 but I guess I wouldn't be shocked for it to make the top 10

I can't wait to read what Owen G. thinks if that comes to pass.

(For reference, he flipped his shit at Vertigo and Mulholland Drive over Citizen Kane and Blue Velvet 10 years ago -- https://ew.com/article/2012/08/07/the-sight-and-sound-poll-is-full-of-it/)

Godard's death is too recent and, as mentioned above, his filmography is too "diffuse" for a big poll like this. If there's any filmmaker whose had a posthumous (and totally justified) reputational spike, it's Akerman. And though a lot of her work is beloved, Dielman is the capital-M "masterpiece" with all the baggage that implies.

The moment seems unusually perfect for a Dielman win. At the very, very least I think it's slam dunk in the top 10.

Or is there another movie you would choose as number one? (If you say The Shawshank Redemption, I will either commit seppuku or delete your comment.)

Now that would be the perfect surprise winner.

I guess that one of these 3 films was the champion : Tokyo Story (1953) or 2001: A Space Odyssey, maybe The Rules of the Game (1939)

Of these three, I feel like 2001 stands the best chance.

I'd heartily endorse Regle at #1 but I fear it's descent is only going to continue

I’m not sure whether one of those three historically lauded films landing at #1 in a massively over-inclusive critics poll really would count as “very surprising”

Jeanne Dielman somewhere in the top 10 would be so great!

After seeing Blue Velvet again, I agree with Owen G that it was a groundbreaking Lynch film and one of his most important

In his rant against Vertigo - it's 2012 position at #1, and the subsequent analysis of it by critics - he makes a good case for how great it really is, and why other critics might see it the way they do

Just sent in my picks for the @BFI Sight & Sound Best Films of All Time director's poll, honored to get to vote!! pic.twitter.com/ijaWV3Bhp5

— Jane Schoenbrun (@janeschoenbrun) November 8, 2022

Genuinely hope Speed Racer tops Citizen Kane in the directors' poll

It sure seems like directors weren't explicitly asked NOT to share their ballots prior to the Dec. 1 unveiling

Thrilled to be asked to submit my picks for the @bfi S&S poll: pic.twitter.com/MfD4MEVtSp

— Rodney Ascher (@Rodney_Ascher) November 8, 2022

Citizen Kane probably is still the best movie though

Eh

Yep, except for Speed Racer.

Go, Speed Racer, go!

seriously though, I'm wondering what the "surprising change at the top" could possibly mean. I can't imagine a film outside of the previous top entries just swoop in to take the top spot.

I think one or more of the three silent films that were in the top 10 in the 2012 poll could easily fall out of favor with the new voters. Probably not Sunrise, but one or both of the other two

*could just

also it seems like The Searchers is due for a reckoning

Hasn’t it, like “Cold Turkey” before it, been slipping off the charts for a while now?

I think The Searchers will be lucky to make the top 25. If it were only Americans voting, likely even lower.

Man with a Movie Camera had an unusually high placement in 2012, at #8. It's at #70 in 2002 and #44 in 1992. Guessing that'll drop.

Shooting from beyond half-court: Mulholland Drive will be #1.

That’s been my outside bet for a while. But 2032 more likely.

So is it challops or something to still like The Searchers or okay just as long as you don’t rate it higher than, say, Speed Racer?

xxp Mulholland was my first thought too, tbh

this hadn't occurred to me before, but seeing it juxtaposed with The Searchers, it's interesting that Speed Racer seems to have evaded being accused of whitewashing its source material

The Searchers is very much underrated in this era, you don't have to be Morbs to feel that way

I agree, and I'm not much of a fan.

With The Searchers out of the way, Ford is going to enjoy the Bunuel conundrum in these all-time roundups -- too many contenders, with none clearly out in front

The Godfather
Raging Bull
L’Atalante
Nosferatu
The Swimmer
Blue Velvet
City Lights
No Country for Old Men
Sunrise — A Song of Two Humans
Playtime

For The Searchers to succeed on the level of its ambitions, you need spectators that see Wayne as a mythic figure, and I don't know if enough of those people exist to rank it highly in 2022.

the Bunuel conundrum in these all-time roundups -- too many contenders, with none clearly out in front

Mexican Bus Ride the surprise #1!!

Why do people think The Searchers is going to fall out of the Top 10? It moved into the Top 10 last poll. The film's politics? They've always been there--I don't think you're supposed to admire the Wayne character. (When it was made, I suppose, but the film is adaptable to time; you can see the character's deranged racism today, and the character is more complicated as time goes on.)

xp absolutely spot-on observation, Halfway

(the first post, not the second) (I've seen Mexican Bus Ride)

I feel like The Searchers is an ur-text for a generation of filmmakers (Scorsese, Schrader, Lucas) that don't have quite the currency that they used to--or at least, aren't as central to film culture as they were a few decades ago. If the film drops in the poll, I think (or at least I'd like to think) that, and not the film's easily-misread racial politics, would be the reason why. That said, I know next to nothing about the demographics of the voters here; still, I'd be very surprised if The Searchers ever topped the poll.

(basically, what Halfway said)

Yes Halfway OTM about the diminishing of Wayne's mythic status. Even in the last ten years, the horrors of the Wayne Playboy interview have been revisited for a new generation of filmists on Twitter etc.

I'd genuinely welcome Liberty Valence suddenly vaulting into the top 10

I've been trying to watch John Ford's films again, in order. There are so many of them, including charming silents like Just Pals and The Iron Horse, as well as many others I had never seen before. I've had to skip a lot of them because of access but so far I'm up through Fort Apache (1948).

I still haven't seen Liberty Valance

I like Liberty Valence, but--unlike The Searchers--it's not much to look at, and there's probably just as much cornball stuff in one as the other.

I've always found The Searchers very, very far from Ford's best, given that My Darling Clementine, Rio Bravo, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon exist.

er, Rio Grande.

Rio Bravo is Howard Hawks, but I assume that most people here know that, and yes, I see that you corrected yourself,

More understandable than if you'd typed in Blame It on Rio.

OMG

I don't know about top ten, but I would not be surprised if "Jeanne Dielman...", "In the Mood for Love" and "Mulholland Dr." all break the top 20 in the critics' poll this time. My guess for #1 on the critics' poll would be "Tokyo Story" (which actually was #1 in the 2012 directors' poll). I noticed it was the only Asian film in the top 10 (top 14, actually) for both polls in 2012.

I'm sure someone has crunched the numbers, but I wonder if my hunch is correct that the vast majority of voters limit one film per director on their lists, which might help boost "Tokyo Story" (Ozu's "Late Spring" was his 2nd highest ranking, #15 on the critics' poll but not even in the top 100 of the directors' poll.) as the Ozu frontrunner. Whereas a director like, say, Coppola has both "The Godfather" (#7 for directors) and "Apocalypse Now" (#6 for directors) in the mix.

I'm poring over this page, btw:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sight_%26_Sound_Greatest_Films_of_All_Time_2012

I think Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, In the Mood for Love, and Mulholland Drive could all end up in the top 20 if not the top 10, and Apocalypse Now is going to continue to outpace The Godfather films in the ranking

I wonder how the silent film canon will fair. I get the feeling that Buster Keaton’s stock has risen in past ten years, so wouldn’t be surprised if ‘The General’ or ‘One Week’, did much better this time.

Jeanne Dielman's appearance in the poll last time surely an effect of it finally getting a dece home video release from Criterion; before that it was very difficult to see at all. I think many of the new arrivals this time round will also be tied to new physical media restorations.

I could see The General taking a hit for centering the Confederate army. Sherlock Jr might be easier to get behind.

I like Liberty Valence, but--unlike The Searchers--it's not much to look at, and there's probably just as much cornball stuff in one as the other.

I disagree on both points. It is very much something to look at tho not as much in the buttes department, and modern viewers' main beef with The Searchers isn't, in general, that it's "cornball."

Apocalypse Now is going to continue to outpace The Godfather films in the ranking

So long as S&S continues to force Godfather fans to pick one or the other or use two of their votes ... which, to be clear, they should continue to be forced to do

I could see The General taking a hit for centering the Confederate army. Sherlock Jr might be easier to get behind.

This is possible ... Sherlock Jr. sure fits nicely into the navel-gazing era Owen G. was railing about 10 years ago.

Maybe I am a late bloomer or something but Liberty Valance and The Searchers have only gotten better for me over the years. Tbh, it took me a long while to get the second one in the first place.

Yeah, as I mentioned above, my regard for The Searchers now vs. when I was exposed to it in college are two very different things

For The Searchers to succeed on the level of its ambitions, you need spectators that see Wayne as a mythic figure, and I don't know if enough of those people exist to rank it highly in 2022.

Isn't Liberty Valence even more invested in that kind of myth-making--not just Wayne, but also Stewart and Ford--especially coming as it does at the very end of that period in American film? Both films undermine the very thing they eulogize (Liberty Valence even more so, yes), but they seem similar to me.

The Searchers needs Wayne to have some of the heroic aura of his other roles from the start, so there's a tension between "heroism" and "racism"; if viewers start out by saying, "of course he's racist, what do you expect?", they're not going to be on board.
Liberty Valence, as you suggest, says "print the legend" but does the opposite.

I've been expecting Persona to take a tumble at some point, and it has dropped out of the Top 10 since the '72 poll, the first one I was aware of (a few years later). I don't want it to--the excitement of discovering the poll and seeing Persona for the first time soon after are synonymous for me--but I think it will.

yes, also I'm wondering if 8 1/2 will fall out of the top 10 and if Fellini's other films will also fade

I’d be fine with that

Maybe the ILX Film Poll will be a bellwether and Fellini won't make the top 100

Fellini reminds me of my early days of film enthusiasm, and his films are so bound up with my young adult yearnings. He was super straight, and male straightness was a focus of his, but he also I think understood sexuality on a deeper level and made it seem like a kind of mask.

I think Godard was similar in that sense, he is one of the straightest ever directors but was also totally queer

although I think Godard was much less sexual than Fellini

Y’all haven’t seen the recent Mexican take on 8 1/2 yet, have you.

Apocalypse Now is going to continue to outpace The Godfather films in the ranking

It baffles me that Apocalypse Now places ahead--well ahead--of The Conversation.

Just not a player, really:

https://www2.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b6a7ea9b8/sightandsoundpoll2012

(OK, I take that back ... 183rd isn't bad.)

That's what I mean: I could maybe see it in the 60s or 70s, not that far back. And whereas I always though Apocalypse Now would date poorly and The Conversation would look better and better with each passing decade, the opposite has happened in the S&S poll.

The Conversation seems made to order for the internet and issues of privacy.

Man With a Movie Camera got a big boost in 2012 from a dvd release, but I think it will fall, and think Battleship Potemkin and L’Atalante will also fall, but I could be wrong

Who knows where Kurosawa or Antonioni stand at this point?

I think many of the new arrivals this time round will also be tied to new physical media restorations.

I wonder if A Brighter Summer Day will get a significant boost on this theory. #84 in 2012, got a Criterion release in 2015, #12 on the 2019 Shmight and Shmound.

I have to think that the newer wave of critics invited will skew more toward Kiyoshi Kurosawa than Akira Kurosawa.

More Claire Denis than René Clair.

Fantasia (1940)
Ikiru (1952)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Bladerunner (1982)
Spirited Away (2001)
City of God (2002)
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Parasite (2019)

if i voted today:

a brighter summer day
double tide
doomed love
stray dogs
from the clouds to the resistance
the quiet man
fuses
doctor bull
the shop around the corner
le rayon vert
kiki's delivery service

+1 extra, because i cant count

Let's do this:

No guts, no glory. These are my final predictions for @SightSoundmag's @2022SightSound critics' poll pic.twitter.com/ad9xw7HbGi

— Eric Henderson (@ephender) November 23, 2022

If S&S succeed in getting a younger, more female, and less English language-centric electorate this year, these are the movies that stand to benefit/outperform their 2012 placements pic.twitter.com/B8sfz4OUjs

— Eric Henderson (@ephender) November 23, 2022

That Taxi Driver split seems strange

Younger voters also tended to love Salo a lot more than older voters, which tracks

(xpost) Makes sense to me; I think that film most viscerally appeals to you when you're young (too young to be a working film critic, but the memory is still vivid).

Some other observations I made on a different forum ...

I had a feeling my tweet would end up in this thread -- this forum is by far the most comprehensive and thoughtful hub for pre-release speculation. It's, in fact, where I first found those lists breaking down the 2012 vote by gender, age, and nationality.

To that end, I do agree that 2001's performance among female voters in 2012 is a major uphill battle, and because of that wouldn't be at all surprised to see Tokyo Story usurp it if, in fact, we're all in agreement that neither Vertigo or Kane are returning to the #1 spot. Who knows, though. Maybe Kubrick is dearer to younger female critics/cinephiles than earlier generations?

On a similar note, an earlier draft had Jeanne Dielman defying odds and coming out on top, so props to the ballot just above that has it at #2.

The main reason I had for including four '90s films in the top 20 is that if feels as though we're at the point where the official canon of that decade is hardening into accepted fact, and also the point where a certain generation of cinephiles (i.e. my generation) are happy to fall in line to affirm that. Absolutely could see A Brighter Summer Day in that mix as well. The Godard was kind of a wild card, the sort of "cinephilia as its own reward" ouroboros outcome that would push the purported "navel-gazing" that drove Owen Gleiberman nuts 10 years ago to its apotheosis.

I personally hope to not see a major PTA surge despite actually liking a lot of his films. Why? It seems increasingly clear that, while overall he's slipping into the Buñuel no-consensus conundrum, in effect those who rate him highly enough to include him on a S&S ballot are of the strain who regard The Master (which I strongly dislike) above all else.

As to Fellini, I admit again that personal bias did factor in my knocking 8½ well outside of the top 10. The chart clearly shows Fellini waaay out in front to do better this time around. But I will also add my purely speculative hunch that the list of 2012 movies that non-English-speaking critics rated higher than English-speaking critics is still reflective of a high concentration of Eurocentric voters, and that this time around they'll achieve a more truly international collection of ballots. That could still mean a big Fellini boost, but for all we know it could also mean more Apichatpong Weerasethakul, more Ousmene Sembene, more Lino Brocka, Memories of Development, Touki Bouki, The Hour of the Furnaces, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors ...

My 10 for today

My Neighbor Totoro
Pather Panchali
The Green Ray
Sans Soleil
Yi Yi
Come and See
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
A Day in the Country
The Mirror

Really truly would like to find out someday how In the Mood for Love, Sunrise, La régle & fucking Mulholland Dr. ever got within a billion miles of this list. And can we ever let the Tarkovsky fans know he also made this movie Nolstalghia that's 4 to 5 times better than Mirror? https://t.co/42bLUm4rxg

— Brian McInnis (@BrianMcInnis87) November 28, 2022

The discourse later this week is either going to be awful or absent; hard to say which would be worse

Why are we posting some guy's predictions

Nostalghia Critic

Really truly would like to find out why he thinks Sunrise and La régle don't belong on the list.

I'm such a film philistine I was confusing "Sunrise" with "Before Sunrise".

Predicting Histoire(s) du cinéma as the consensus Godard film in 2022 is definitely bold, as is including two Dreyer films in the top 20.

I like it

not sure the poll will be forward-thinking enough to include Jeanne Dielman, Mulholland Drive, and Mirror in the top 10, but would like to see it

With about 18 hours left am pretty sure it’s GOODFELLAS, PULP FICTION, SEVEN SAMURAI, and the entire Eastwood-Leone trilogy in the top six

:) your choices are what I hope other voters have also been thinking of for this poll

the death of cinema pt. 95

Someone claiming to have insider info has leaked what it likely a fake version of the lower third of the top 100. Predictably it includes Parasite, Get Out, and two Miyazaki toons.

66 Touki Bouki
67 The Red Shoes
67=The Gleaners and I
67=Andrei Rublev
67= La Jetee
67=Metropolis
72 Journey to Italy
72=L'Avventura
72=My Neighbour Totoro
75 Spirited Away
75= Sansho the Bailiff
75=Imitation of Life
78 Modern Times
78 =A Matter of Life and Death
78= A Brighter Summer Day
78=Sunset Boulevard
78=Satantango
78=Celine and Julie Go Boating
84Spirit of the Beehive
84=Blue Velvet
84=Histoire(s) du Cinema
84=Pierrot le Fou
88The Shining
88=Chungking Express
90Yi Yi
90=The Leopard
90= Parasite
90=Madame de
90=Ugestu Monogatari
95 The General
95= Get Out
95=Tropical Malady
95=Black Girl
95=Once Upon a Time in the West
95=A Man Escaped

Ope, well, probably not a spoiler as it's likely fake.

Doubt there will be as many ties when there are twice as many voters.

The only post-2011 film that I think has a chance is Parasite.

People dropping fake "intel" and "here's my guesstimate" lists for the Sight & Sound Poll really brings into focus that Film Twitter is somehow even lamer than Music Twitter.

Gregg getting texts from his source during the Oscar special: criterion ed

xp you're just learning this?

xp - I mean, it wouldn't be a bad thing if we only had to deal with list making and predictions for music once a decade, so film twitter has that going for it

The Sight & Sound Directors' Poll results will also be announced tomorrow – 480 directors have voted, including Martin Scorsese, @edgarwright, Joanna Hogg, @RealGDT, Bong Joon Ho, Mia Hansen-Løve, @BarryJenkins and @MichaelMann. Will Tokyo Story keep the crown or be dethroned...? pic.twitter.com/aBCRTQDx1y

— Sight and Sound magazine (@SightSoundmag) November 30, 2022

(In 2012, Michael Mann listed Avatar.)

votes vmic

michael mann otm as usual

Michael Mann

Apocalypse Now
Avatar
Battleship Potemkin
Biutiful
Citizen Kane
Dr. Strangelove
My Darling Clementine
Passion of Joan of Arc
Raging Bull
Wild Bunch, The

Coppola evoked the high-voltage, dark identity quest, journeying into overload; the wildness and nihilism – all captured in operatic and concrete narrative, with the highest degree of difficulty. A masterpiece.

With Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein not only laid the theoretical foundation for much of 20th-century cinematic narrative in 1924, but made one of cinema’s great classics, applying dialectics to the collision of antithetical compositional elements and meaning. Its influence in British, Weimar and American cinema is huge.

Citizen Kane was a watershed: a life’s linear history reassembled into a novelistic narrative by investigators querying its meaning. And done with Wellesian brio, to a grand scale.

Upon the foundation of an entirely invented biosystem, Avatar is a brilliant synthesis of mythic tropes, with debts to Lévi-Strauss and Frazier’s The Golden Bough. It soars because, simply, it stones and transports you.

The whole of Dr. Strangelove is a high-energy third act. On American Cold War policy and political-military culture, it is devastatingly more effective through hilarious ridicule than are any number of cautionary fables.

The profound struggle through the lower depths of Barcelona street life of a human soul, Biutiful is resplendent with grace, pathos and love. Pure poetry.

My Darling Clementine is possibly the finest drama in the western genre, with a stunningly subjective Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda). It achieves near-perfection cinematically in many of its passages via its blocking, shooting and editing.

Human experience conveyed purely from the visualisation of the human face: no one else has composed and realised human beings quite like Dreyer in The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Raging Bull immerses us into the failing and besotted life of LaMotta and his need for and pursuit of redemption. The humanity of the picture is extraordinary, as is Marty’s execution.

The Wild Bunch: no other picture captures the poignancy of ‘the last of’, a fin de siècle sense of the west, of ageing, of the pathos of twilight.

And at number 11: Nakashima Tetsuya’s 2010 Confessions – a Japanese masterpiece. Frighteningly, formally rigidly controlled, it’s unheralded high art.

Dang, he's a good writer.

Avatar stays the course in that They Shoot Pictures Don't They Top 1000. People fuckin love Avatar

https://www.newcityfilm.com/2022/09/06/counting-down-cinema-as-a-million-reasons/

2012 saw the addition of “The Searchers”; Dziga-Vertov’s free-associative editing delirium of “Man With A Movie Camera” and the return of “The Passion of Joan Of Arc.” “Battleship Potemkin” and “Singin’ in the Rain” dropped off and “Vertigo” made its hypnotized way to the top of the list. A solid list to muse and sleep upon.

As one should, let’s default to Jean Renoir. Renoir’s character says at the violent climax of “The Rules of the Game,” “The really terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons.” The figures march back into the chateau, back into history, back into the then-present moment, before France was invaded by Germany, and during the War, the laboratory where “Rules of the Game” was stored was bombed by air and destroyed. The shadows lengthen, sticks, sad shuffling Giacometti-like figures, and darkness comes. (As does World War II, presaged in most every movement and moment of the movie.)

The 2022 provocations of note will be from filmmakers whose passions, whether evident in their own work, are reflected in what elevates their pom-poms. I look at a list of titles that could be on a shorter, then shorter, then elemental list of ten, and my instincts recoil from the pedagogic and reach instead for instants that rush to mind, lyrical images or immaculate choreography (of camera or of dance) or brilliantly offhand line deliveries. Here’s where I’ve cut a four-thousand-word rough draft that reads like a book proposal of a roster of best moments, best instants, even, in the movies I treasure. Another time!

However many respondents will bristle within the pages after pages of online lists (although reasonably fat and sometimes sassy, the print edition of Sight and Sound would hardly have room for all), it’s the chatter and static that rubs one list against another, mighty montage, handy bricolage, a chaos unified only by a thousand bundles of urges crushed together. It’s gonna be bigger than any hundred lists of a thousand any old (or spanking new) observer might compile.

That’s how we get dreamy free-association more like the memory of movies than the pattering of rules and disputation of criteria. The great wilderness of lists will prompt the discussion that matters, whether in the mind or in the belly. Everyone has his reasons.

So basically like an ILX poll, then.

I like to Setsuko Hara's in heaven, giving us her "Fuck yourselves to hell" smile.

I'm glad you posted that 'leaked' list, even if it isn't real, it's a reminder to me not to expect too much

A good posture to assume, no doubt

it is time for Airplane! to be in the #1 spot

I'm going to guess... the intel was a lie and Vertigo gets number 1.

Starting to lean toward the notion that it is, in fact, Tokyo Story.

#1 isn't so interesting now that the Kane streak has been ended; there's still only 4, maybe 5 viable candidates for the #1 slot anyway

Out of the hundreds of thousands of films in film history, I hope no film from the last 5 years is included in the top 100

7pm GMT btw

i hope the current editorial direction of the magazine is not reflected in the results

How could they not be?

isn't the editorial direction of Sight & Sound basically just "ok, what's playing at the BFI this month?"

seems to be getting more like empire

Pretty sure Empire has not nor ever will they have a monthly Black film section, though I don't know, I never pick it up off the newsstand.

seems to be getting more like empire

The new(ish) editor has definitely tried to refresh the mag a bit - more listicles, flashier design - but it still doesn't feel very Emapish to me, and yes, it's still the mainstream film mag most likely to have non-mainstream film coverage. The content had to become more diverse, younger, and possibly more sympathetic to eg Marvel movies than under previous regimes.

Agree w/ Daniel that S&S can feel like a promotional arm of the BFI - because it is! But again, the magazine wouldn't survive in any physical form without BFi money behind it. RIP Film Comment (which in its last few years definitely sat somewhere between Empire and S&S in terms of content, accessibility, etc).

As an old fart I would like to see more writing about 'old' movies but that's an increasingly niche part of film criticism/engagement, I know, I know.

The full-length reviews of pretty much anything that gets a cinema release in the UK remains a very handy resource, by far the best of its kind.

Looking forward to seeing the new top 250 this evening. From the 2012 list, I still have 3 films left to view for the first time - The Traveling Players, City of Sadness, Chelsea Girls.

It seems impossible to deny now that Film Comment is never coming back in print

It's JEANNE DIELMAN!

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time

I knew it

Renoir out of the top ten, wow.

and mulholland in!

OMG