Sight & Sound

[swo17]

My opinion is that every item on this list is overrated, but by the exact same amount as any other movie, and so after adjusting for this, the rankings would be unchanged. Or in other words, if given the choice between any one of these movies and, say, a nice sandwich, I know how I'm spending my lunch break

[tolbs1010]

Thoroughly enjoying reading all the comments here.

Can we all admit we do a little bit of "box-checking" when creating these types of lists? I've been working on a Top 100 Favorite movies list for a long time, and I debate with myself as to whether I am including a certain film or rating it more highly because of its status in one way or another. This kind of bias isn't necessarily political or an attempt to reflect the cultural attitude of the time, though I do think that factors in somewhat on this S&S list. Sometimes it's just the result of reading about films so much over the years you find yourself trying/wanting to like certain films, or at least giving then more of a chance with a focused mindset. Sometimes you get there with a film and sometimes you don't. And if you don't get there, it's fun to have your little contrarian opinion knowing that you gave it an honest effort. The S&S list this year is sure to generate a lot of debate and that's a good thing. But until Boom! enters the Top 100 it will never be fully valid to me. I know I can count on John Waters to include it on his list.

[rde]

I don't get this assumption (or preconception, in Ruimy's case) that Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a "woke" choice. One can debate its merits, sure, but it's as close to a consensus pick as there is for greatest film of the 2010s. Unlike some others (yes, looking at you, Get Out), I see no reason to think it won't still be in the top 100 in 2032.

Surely it's not that surprising given that a fiery strain of feminism is embedded in the rhetoric of the film, is it not? The characters make an explicit point of deriding/rejecting the male art canon which excludes them, and the film itself is consciously about superseding the male gaze (a foundation of canons like this) and constructing a feminine utopia apart from what is seen as an oppressive patriarchy. It's a period piece that is pretty carefully calibrated to appeal to modern sensibilities (unlike say Ammonite, which is more interested in the details of the time and place it's depicting, in my opinion).

I once heard someone point out that the so-called 'male gaze' and the straight female gaze are pretty close to the same thing. Straight women gawk at women, too. The same type of women that men gawk at. Sex pots, often enough.

And so maybe that explains why this film, taking that line, is about two gay women? Because I don't think many women have much of an instinctual problem with the 'male gaze'. Marilyn Monroe is on the dorm room walls of far more women than men. Same for any sex symbol you could name. Most women don't just fail to have a problem with the male gaze, they positively agree with it, like it, and look at the (film) world in the exact same way.

Ditto for the 'feminine utopia' that... excludes men. That's a (mostly concocted, university-taught) lesbian thing. Most girls like men, lol. But yes, so far as cramming a mostly concocted, evangelized and niche modern points of view into historical settings, as you say, that film takes the cake. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I suppose.

Really, I'd go farther to say that the male art canon is more apt to exclude people like Valerie Solanas, less because of their politics and more because they're just not fun at all. It might be in a completely pornified guise, but hyper-straight men do not have a problem with lesbians, either, lol. If the canon is hostile to anything, it's gay men, except gay men made great films of their own, so they couldn't be kept out.

'Daisies' is way better. Fun, not angry.

[beamish14]

I'm utterly shocked at Altman's complete absence from both 2022 lists.

Altman is still quite popular, I think, but my guess as to why none of his films placed is the same reason I’d assume for Buñuel and a few other greats, which is that for better or worse there’s no real consensus choice. I suppose Nashville has historically been regarded as the closest to a consensus pick for Altman, but lately I’ve noticed a lot more people opting for McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, 3 Women, or Short Cuts, so it would make sense if vote splitting was to blame for him not being represented in the top 100. When they release the full list, I’m sure he’ll have quite a few votes but distributed somewhat evenly across a several of his films.

The absence of him and Lean are two of the biggest eyebrow-raisers. I think you’re correct in that films like MASH and Nashville may not hold the same sway with young critics today like the titles you mentioned, or maybe even Come Back to the Five and Dime…. Lean really seems to have fallen out of favor, at least with River Kwai onwards

But what about Nagisa Oshima? Paul Verhoeven? Denys Arcand?

[tolbs1010]

As participants appropriately had few hang ups about including recent films that have aged well since the last round, I’m surprised no Wes Anderson made it. There’s seemed to be a highly critical reappraisal of stuff like The Royal Tenenbaums, which was loved by audiences but not exactly swooned over by critics upon release, and yet has become iconic over the last decade-plus

Anderson seems like another Director that is difficult for admirers to agree on which film is deserving for a list like this. He is also polarizing enough--in style more than content--that there are a fair number of voices that would scoff at the notion that any of his films should be considered.

[therewillbeblus]

My opinion is that every item on this list is overrated, but by the exact same amount as any other movie, and so after adjusting for this, the rankings would be unchanged.

Doing a quick check with my loose working personal top 50, I have Do the Right Thing at the same number, so for the time being it’s rated perfectly. Three titles from the back half are in my top ten, but otherwise I mostly agree

[swo17]

I love Akerman, but there's just no way this is how people actually feel. I suspect that quite a few of the people who voted for it did so out of a feeling of obligation, based on some hokey idea like 'good art must be difficult', or because they just wanted to see the list change. And surely some of them have not sat through the whole thing.

I'm willing to bet one thousand eighty dollars and twenty-three cents that everyone that voted for Jeanne Dielman has in fact seen it

[Noiretirc]

I love Akerman, but there's just no way this is how people actually feel. I suspect that quite a few of the people who voted for it did so out of a feeling of obligation, based on some hokey idea like 'good art must be difficult', or because they just wanted to see the list change. And surely some of them have not sat through the whole thing.

I'm willing to bet one thousand eighty dollars and twenty-three cents that everyone that voted for Jeanne Dielman has in fact seen it

And....maybe they did not find it "difficult" either? What's "difficult" about this film?

[therewillbeblus]

I mean, some viewers might find it difficult to play the role of a captivated voyeur to banal routine for three and a half hours

[rde]

I love Akerman, but there's just no way this is how people actually feel. I suspect that quite a few of the people who voted for it did so out of a feeling of obligation, based on some hokey idea like 'good art must be difficult', or because they just wanted to see the list change. And surely some of them have not sat through the whole thing.

I'm willing to bet one thousand eighty dollars and twenty-three cents that everyone that voted for Jeanne Dielman has in fact seen it

And....maybe they did not find it "difficult" either? What's "difficult" about this film?

it's a three hour twenty minute close up of a character whom we come away knowing almost nothing about? it's a character study almost without a character.

I mean, we all like the movie! But we can't pretend it's not difficult. 'Seven Samurai' is three and a half hours and an absolute zip. '2001' is a light show compared to this. 'Jeanne Dielmann', working perfectly, is meant to be a hard, slogging film. If it didn't feel that way, we wouldn't be receiving it properly. It's supposed to be agonizing. And it's worldview is horrible (and exaggerated), even if it's worth telling. The main character is not a well person, regardless of what 'society' has done to her. She lacks imagination, and you share in that for hours.

[swo17]

The bigger issue is that no one in their right mind is going to waste one-tenth of their all-time list on a film they didn't even feel was important enough to finish. No one is going to get their feminism credentials revoked for failing to include one film--they have the perfect excuse: "I only had 10 spots"

[domino harvey]

Denys Arcand?

I do not believe you or anyone else in the entire world sincerely expected Arcand to make the top 100. Gimme a Breaksville

[brundlefly]

It is more difficult to fit Jeanne Dielman into a lunch break.

The biggest problem with this list is that it is too short. When adjusted for inflation, availability, changes in life expectancy, and clickbait expectations, it should at least number 250. You want inclusion, include more. Perhaps then there would be room again for The Louisiana Story.

[swo17]

I have just the list for you

[domino harvey]

I have just the list for you

I thought this was going to be a link to that forum member who posted his Top 100 a few years back

[brundlefly]

I have just the list for you

Any list that does not have The Shawshank Redemption on it is a great list, therefore the new Sight & Sound survey is a great list.

[colinr0380]

Recency bias in one sense is annoying, but show of hands for everyone: regardless of original release date, how many of your favorite films of all time did you see for the first time within the last ten years? It’s not that different than that, so

Re: furbicide on Portrait of a Lady on Fire being the best of the 2010's: I don't think any film from the 2010's deserves to be in the top 100 films ever made. At least not necessarily. Put it high on the best since 2000 list, sure. But this is excessive.

Wong Kar-Wai's The Grandmaster seems like the obvious big one from the last decade for me, and I will be scouring the lists to see if anyone put it on their ballots! Though I am not too surprised that In The Mood For Love is still the consensus pick, despite the recent tinkerings to it.

The lack of Kore-eda is a bit of a surprise too, especially not seeing something like Shoplifters sneak into the lower reaches of the list, but I wonder if this could also be related to vote splitting between his numerous wonderful films leading to a lack of one towering title to elevate above all others.

I think the elevating of Au Hasard, Balthasar in Bresson's oeuvre, as rde comments on, is unsurprising: there have been quite a number of films in the last decade that are using the 'animals point of view' now (Andrea Arnold's Cow most recently, but perhaps War Horse kicked off a resurgence of that trend too. Le Quattro Volte too) that Balthasar pioneered. It's become very trendy, especially because it intertwines with environmentalist/animal rights agenda issues, and maybe because in such a politically fractious world where there is always the threat of being sweepingly insensitive towards the human milieus or characters that they depict by turning them from individuals into representative archetypes, filmmakers have retreated somewhat from engaging with human beings and their environments for the safer territory of filtering their viewpoints and agendas on animals who cannot answer back instead? (Though there was that one earlier attempt during the 90s to 'do a Balthasar' that comes to mind, and that was Julio Medem's Vacas (or Cows) that actually did use the distancing approach in order to comment on human history through the eyes of a herd of cattle)

On Jeanne Dielman, I wonder if the 'intersectionality' of it probably contributed. I would guess that it would have appeared on lots of ballots, both for purely agenda-driven reasons, or because it would be funny to vote for the most austere possible film, but also because it is just a great film. It would be an easy 'wild card' choice too, and the one Akerman film that everyone has heard of (see also: Meshes of the Afternoon and Maya Deren). So you get both considered, activist and contrarians all voting (plus everyone quickly going through the previous list and picking the one film by a female director from the last poll), which then gets flattened out into a single contextless point. Again, the individual ballots will be the most interesting thing, because that will probably have the context lacking from just a monolithic list.

And in some ways the only way anything (or anyone, for that matter) gets to the pinnacle "number 1" spot is always through some kind of mix of the current climate, the agenda of those pushing them into that position and actual merit. Plus access and availability. To acknowledge that is not to denigrate the wonderful Jeanne Dielman (there are the same debates about the relative merits and 'rights to be there' surrounding Citizen Kane and Vertigo too, that can damage a film as much as deify it by putting so much weight on its shoulders to carry the torch as representative for an entire medium), but to suggest that a consensus pick for top positions is always a mix of factors from the most idealistic to the most pragmatic.

[Aunt Peg]

All those female directors but the greatest are missing: Leni Riefenstahl & Doris Wishman.

[Altair]

I'm going to be interested to see the break-down of voters, because I have an instinct that the changes in the list are reflective of the structural shift in writing about film over the past ten years: print film criticism is in serious decline, while academic film studies has been maintained and perhaps even slightly expanded. So now most writing significant on cinema is by someone with an academic posting and combined with the expansion of the voting pool leads to the 'theory over pleasure' trend identified above. That probably explains the diversity of the list, too, the appearance of non-US and non-European cinema to a greater extent than before and the relatively even distribution of films across the decades.

I'm sad to see the de-emphasis on classic Hollywood studio cinema, which means musicals, film noir, comedies, and so on either tumble down the list or are absent entirely. The availability bais (much more significant than recency bias) that has been discussed is unsurprising and shows actually how significant Criterion, Second Sight, Masters of Cinema, still are to film history - Black Girl would, I wager, not be on the list if it had been dumped on Netflix. The careful curation and presentation of unseen cinema by boutique labels still has an impact, which is heartening.

The individual placement of films is perhaps misleading - it's the overall trends that are most interesting, which filmmakers are newly canonised, which ones have fallen out of view. Akerman, Varda, and Denis' strong showing reflect the explosion of writing and viewing of their work in the past decade - part of a push to feminise the canon and an attempt to arrest the astonishing disproption in who makes films. Asian cinema (not just Japan, but Taiwan, Thailand, Korea, and Hong Kong) have made perhaps an even greater showing, at the expense of Italian arthouse cinema and French nouvelle vague.

Orson Welles places high, but only one of his films is there now, all of his others are perhaps too 'obvious' or not enough in the critical conversation to place. I know it would go against how the list has always been constructed, but only one film by one director in the Top 100 would be fun, because my main gripe is the multiple Wong Kar Wai, Billy Wilder(!), Miyazaki, and Kubrick films (The Shining, really? I like it, but that actually seems the most egregiously overrated film here in the context of the overall list).

If voting for this list always has a twist of the polemic to it, perhaps I would only vote for films that feature at least one musical performance in them...

I once heard someone point out that the so-called 'male gaze' and the straight female gaze are pretty close to the same thing. Straight women gawk at women, too. The same type of women that men gawk at. Sex pots, often enough.

And so maybe that explains why this film, taking that line, is about two gay women? Because I don't think many women have much of an instinctual problem with the 'male gaze'.

rde I would gently suggest it might be helpful to read Laura Mulvey's essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', that coined the idea of the male gaze, but also addresses how it constructs the straight female gaze. The PDF is freely available online and it's very short (and well-written).

[andyli]

Are they gonna publish the detailed who-voted-for-which next month? I find the comprehensive list much more interesting and useful. Last time around there are close to 1,200 films that received two votes or more. I've been using it as a reference list for years and waiting to update it.

[tenia]

Recency bias in one sense is annoying, but show of hands for everyone: regardless of original release date, how many of your favorite films of all time did you see for the first time within the last ten years? It’s not that different than that, so

I'm only 35, the last 10 years are thus pretty much half of my "cinephilic" life, so probably most of them. Yet, I only have 4 movies from the 2010s, and 2 are from 2010 and 2011 respectively.
However, I do believe there's a difference between discovering Early Spring in 2018 and finding it to be the masterpiece the consensus is already saying it is, and discovering Parasite in 2019 and instantly thinking "yeah, top 10 of the best movies ever" with the same hindsight than 40 to 70 years of hindsight making sure they're indeed amongst such a list. Personally, that's my grip with including such recent movies in these : such lists are theoretically some kind of crème de la crème that are obtained after years and years of movies sieving through time and we take what's left and that still feels major. What will be left of Get Out and Moonlight in 20 years, and how can we project such a hindsight without the proper time to gather it ? Obviously : how much time is enough time ?, but I doubt 3 years is enough in any case.

I'm going to be interested to see the break-down of voters, because I have an instinct that the changes in the list are reflective of the structural shift in writing about film over the past ten years: print film criticism is in serious decline, while academic film studies has been maintained and perhaps even slightly expanded. So now most writing significant on cinema is by someone with an academic posting and combined with the expansion of the voting pool leads to the 'theory over pleasure' trend identified above. That probably explains the diversity of the list, too, the appearance of non-US and non-European cinema to a greater extent than before and the relatively even distribution of films across the decades.

I'm very curious to see if the shift is due to a larger panel (ie stopping to ask kinda always the same people the same question in order to stop getting kinda always the same results) or due to a concrete sociological shift thanks to this larger panel (ie there's not just more people, but they're also, I don't know, younger, more diverse, etc).

Also : I'm seeing discussion of whether a female-directed movie in #1 isn't just some kind of artificial positive discrimination, but it's also the 1st time since 1952 the #1 of this poll isn't an American movie, nor even just an English-speaking one.

The individual placement of films is perhaps misleading - it's the overall trends that are most interesting, which filmmakers are newly canonised, which ones have fallen out of view.

It's interesting to note, for instance, that Fear Eats The Soul, Touki Bouki and The Night of the Hunter are having a bump similar to Jeanne Dielman's very large one (Jeanne Dilman is +36, Fear Eats The Soul +47, The Night of the Hunter +41 and Touki Bouki +32). Also, Beau travail has, by far, the largest positive bump (+72 places !). These 5 movies have the 5 largest positive bumps versus 2012.

[Mr. Deltoid]

All those female directors but the greatest are missing: Leni Riefenstahl & Doris Wishman.

Kanye finally weighs in!

[rrenault]

If anything, I was often surprised in the past that Fassbinder didn't have a top 100 mainstay on these types of lists. He's never entered the TSPDT top 100 for instance.

[MV88]

It is more difficult to fit Jeanne Dielman into a lunch break.

The biggest problem with this list is that it is too short. When adjusted for inflation, availability, changes in life expectancy, and clickbait expectations, it should at least number 250. You want inclusion, include more. Perhaps then there would be room again for The Louisiana Story.

The individual ballots will be released next month, so I wonder if at that point they will expand the list, as I know in 2012 they did indeed present it as a top 250. Or at least they might provide the option to view the full list of films voted for in order of how many votes they received, which would functionally be the same thing as an expansion of the list. I know I’m definitely curious to see which films just barely missed the top 100 (I’m also quite surprised by that the vote tallies got them to an even 100 considering all the ties).

I also think seeing which films landed in the 101-250 range will be perhaps even more interesting than the top 100, as that’s where it becomes apparent which films are “on the rise” so to speak as opposed to already fully canonized. Someone mentioned Verhoeven earlier in the thread as a director whose stature has increased over the past decade, and I fully expect to see at least one of his films in the 101-250 range — RoboCop being the most likely, but let’s be honest here, Showgirls totally got some votes this time around, and I’m really curious to see how many. I’m also very confident there will be several Cronenberg films in the 101-250 range, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them came reasonably close to the top 100 (though I’ve no clue which one, as he’s yet another director who was probably kept out of the top 100 due to a lack of consensus regarding his best).

[Graham]

Apparently the individual lists (which are infinitely more interesting than the combined lists) is going to be released next month.

The individual lists aren't in the same issue? That's really irritating as I've ordered this edition of Sight & Sound mainly for that reason. I'm sure the last two lists, in 2002 and 2012, included those in the same issue.