This is a really good 'best films of all time' list

Animal House? What a heap of shit.

tbf, he’s compiled this from lists that go back to the 1950s, so it’s naturally going to favour older films.

He says he’s actually modified it to make it less unfair to more recent films:

First-off, I have removed the ‘stood-the-test-of-time’ formula. This formula disadvantaged films released within ten years of the poll or ballot they were listed in. After many years of adopting this approach, I finally concluded, during 2016, that this was unfair. As a result, many recent films have deservedly charged their way up this year’s 1,000 Greatest Films listing. Some of these films include There Will Be Blood (2007), CachĂ© (2005), The Tree of Life (2011), Tropical Malady (2004), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).

All the criticisms made in this list are perfectly valid (apart from Ruffers’s [sorry Ruffers, I really like films]) but, you know, I found lists like this very useful when I was much younger and still nurturing an interest that’s now become an obsession for life.

That sentence was a disaster.

Yes, the canon’s heavily, heavily, heavily skewed, and I would love to see a list that was a lot more representative. But I don’t like the idea that rethinking canons requires a scorched earth approach. Reappraise, yes, but don’t reject outright.

Some good stuff here. Pleased to see some genre films (Evil Dead, The Thing, Night of the Living Dead
) among the arty ones that you’d expect to see. On the other hand, I agree with the comments about the lack of female directors, and it’s certainly over-weighted towards the US and to the past (even if that’s understandable).

Still, treat it as a source of potentially interesting films that I haven’t seen, rather than getting hung up on whether Rashamon is better than Seven Samauri (of course it is you idiots) and it’s quite a useful list.

I would like to work through one of these lists, but it’s not as easy as albums. Need something like a Spotify for films. Netflix/Amazon, etc all have very few ‘classic’ films. Could download them illegally, but I’m not that guy.

Wouldn’t even get into my top ten ‘best films of all time’ list list

2 Likes

no one has actually ever watched Citizen Kane, have they?

7 Likes

I did. I found it really quite unspecial.

Citizen Kane was, is and will always be over rated as fuck.

There was no cane

3 Likes

Not a complete answer, but archive.org has got you covered for the older stuff, because it’s out of copyright:

https://archive.org/details/feature_films

I actually own it on DVD. I only watch it to spot all the bits that have been referenced in the Simpsons.

2 Likes

That’s actually amazing. Thanks.

i met a guy once in paris, i think he was one of the early prototype for a hipster, he was banging on a bit about citizen kane but said something about the film that made me realise that he probably hadn’t watched it so I had to ask if he had, he said no but told me how he imagined it to be. Friendly guy all the same.

I liked it in a kind of history of film way.

1 Like

But if you go through that list, try doing CTRL+F for 200, 199, 198 and 197 and scan the top 100 in each case. Because really if we’re ordering these then the top 100 are obviously being considered ‘better’ by some metric.

But really it’s such a Louis Tacos sort of list isn’t it?

in fact, looking at this list in closer detail, most of the inclusions are old, and therefore shit.

The best bit is when it turns into a musical for 5 minutes in the middle.

As far as I can tell, it’s not really overrated so much as its rating for technical/historical reasons is confused with its rating for story/entertainment reasons.

Same shit is true for Star Wars I guess.

Just noted that In the Heat of the Night doesn’t seem to be in this list. That is fucking BULLSHIT. And it’s a perfect example (in my view) of a film that’s old but is still great and still has total power to interest an audience.

3 Likes

I avoided it for years because i dislike michael caine

true story.

2 Likes

really great bit at the end where he goes ‘MY NAME IS CITIZEN KANE’.