Sight & Sound

[Maltic]

Well, Sight & Sound are now well and truly vindicated in their decision to throw the gates open to new contributors, imo – this is a far duller and more predictable list.

The Variety list doesn't have more in common with earlier S&S lists than with the 2022 one though. I doubt Kramer vs Kramer or The Dark Knight would've made it on to the S&S top 100 even if they had kept it at 800 voters or whatever.

[Maltic]

Not the most subtle of swipes in their entry for #78:

Over three-plus hours, the film re-creates tasks that Akerman observed her mother practicing for years, though in this case they’re disrupted by Jeanne’s double life as a prostitute — a feminist twist that builds to a shattering climax. Maddening at times yet never less than mesmerizing, it’s the very best film of its kind. But hardly the best film of all time. 

Lol are they serious?

[swo17]

And then they follow it at #77 with a Connery Bond film!

[Maltic]

Again, not subtle!

[swo17]

61. Passion of Joan of Arc; 60. Moulin Rouge! also feels like a personal attack

[colinr0380]

I don't mind that list too much (I particularly like that Natural Born Killers gets a shout out, as that only gets more relevant even whilst remaining a wonderfully evocative and valuable time capsule of the mid-90s cultural scene), but the commentary attached to the choices is rather annoying. And I had to double-take at no Mulholland Drive, which is both better than and in no way a 're-hash' of Blue Velvet!

But the real head scratcher is My Best Friend's Wedding. Why go for the one Julia Roberts film where she plays against type as an obnoxiously self-centred character trying to ruin a supposed friend's wedding that makes Mickey and Mallory Knox seem respectful in their marriage vows! If wanting to celebrate Julia Roberts why not Pretty Woman, or Mystic Pizza, or even (far better for its ensemble female cast) Steel Magnolias? (Let alone her powerhouse central performance in Erin Brockovich). And why elevate that particular PJ Hogan film over his real zeitgeist (and star making) 90s classic, Muriel's Wedding? At this point we're only a step away from putting the Madonna-Rupert Everett film The Next Best Thing on there to represent John Schlesinger's oeuvre.

(I suppose at least it wasn't Runaway Bride! But even that unsuccessful re-teaming of Roberts and Richard Gere with Garry Marshall is less grating than My Best Friend's Wedding was!)

[colinr0380]

Not the most subtle of swipes in their entry for #78:

Over three-plus hours, the film re-creates tasks that Akerman observed her mother practicing for years, though in this case they’re disrupted by Jeanne’s double life as a prostitute — a feminist twist that builds to a shattering climax. Maddening at times yet never less than mesmerizing, it’s the very best film of its kind. But hardly the best film of all time. 

In the "it's the very best film of its kind" slam, it simultaneously encompasses and dismisses every 'slow cinema' film - fromTsai Ming-liang and Sokurov to Béla Tarr and Andy Warhol and everyone in between - in one fell swoop. Quite impressive to do that in less than ten words!

Now this was the kind of list that Paul Schrader should have been railing against!

[Maltic]

To be fair, he probably would have done that, If the S&S list had turned out like the Variety one.

[MV88]

Kind of makes you wonder if that was the entire point of the exercise: to give the S&S list the middle finger and reassert “traditional” cinema, or something. Hard to imagine some of those contributors (e.g. Kiang) participating in such a reactionary exercise, but it’s also difficult to see that dig at Jeanne Dielman as anything other than an attempt to put it (and Akerman) back in its place. Not a great look, to be honest.

Yeah, why bother even putting it on the list at all if the entry ends with a slight dig at the film unless the point was just to make a statement against the S&S list? Especially when it’s ranked below My Best Friend’s Wedding, which…I mean, maybe they somehow found enough voters who genuinely think that’s one of the greatest films ever made, but even if they did, placing it above Jeanne Dielman seems deliberate.

That said, Saving Private Ryan at #10 got the biggest eyebrow raise from me. I know it was very popular with a certain demographic at one point, but I was under the impression its place in Spielberg’s filmography had fallen considerably in recent years since I haven’t seen anyone go out of their way to single it out in what feels like forever.

[swo17]

It does have the best editing of all time

[spectre]

Another confounding thing about the Variety list that a friend noticed: there’s not a single Russian or Soviet film in there! We can charitably assume that’s not a deliberate political choice (well, I hope it isn’t, anyway), but to overlook Tarkovsky – let alone Eisenstein, Vertov, Dovzhenko, Paradjanov or Sokurov – in even a conservative canonical "greatest films of all time" list is mindblowing.

[Michael Kerpan]

but to overlook Tarkovsky – let alone Eisenstein, Vertov, Dovzhenko, Paradjanov or Sokurov

Not to mention Kozintsev and Barnet.

[spectre]

The list is endless!

[thirtyframesasecond]

It's not really much better than an Empire list which is usually Lucas/Spielberg/Tarantino/Shawshank plus a few token foreign films e.g. violent ones like OldBoy.

[ford]

It's indeed very US white males centered, but the 2nd half of it is quite surprising, with stuff like Bridesmaid or Moulin Rouge or Pink Flamingos, all above Le samourai.

I remember a brief little tiff on social media over the fact that Spike Lee's list of 95 films every filmmaker should watch was also dominated by males, particularly white American ones.

Though I'd call it a pretty healthy and respectable list sourced primarily from the undeniably great capitals of cinema in the last century (which not coincidentally for such an expensive art form are all capitals of...capital): the US, western Europe and Japan.

[tenia]

I read it a few days ago thanks to the Cooley High Criterion release (since the movie is in this list) and actually thought that it was indeed very white.

[ford]

I read it a few days ago thanks to the Cooley High Criterion release (since the movie is in this list) and actually thought that it was indeed very white.

No doubt it's internalized racism on Mr. Spike Lee's part.

[tenia]

Don't know if you're joking or not, but it made me think about how it might just be how decades of "the canon" being mostly generated by a few white males might also be showing though lists like this one.

[therewillbeblus]

Spike Lee may be a vocally rebellious artist who enjoys breaking norms in his own work, but he’s also not film-illiterate and was no doubt influenced by the movies made available to him at a young age. It makes sense that he’d list a bunch of those films that inspired him and that he respects from his peers in a male and white-dominated field rather than set a quota to include X number of films by women, X by black artists, etc. It’s also significantly a list of films for aspiring filmmakers to see- rather than a list of personal favorites. So one could also argue that it’d be unhelpful and hypocritical for Lee to list a bunch of films not representative of the industry’s history and innovate filmmaking techniques in order to be more demographically representative. Many of these are probably films that inspired Lee’s own artistry, including ones made during his active career prompting continuing education, so why offer something different and not experiential when he’s had a wealth of success from using whatever merits he sees in this list and wants to pass that on to other filmmakers? As a champion of black artistry, he seems to believe that young aspiring black filmmakers could use this list to achieve what he has with the same exposure

[ford]

Don't know if you're joking or not, but it made me think about how it might just be how decades of "the canon" being mostly generated by a few white males might also be showing though lists like this one.

I was joking. To me, his list reads like what I'd expect from a superbly talented filmmaker in love with the art form -- not one designed for any kind of agenda or sense of "responsibility," which is more likely to stem from journalists, "intellectuals," etc. He loves what he loves. Because cinema is, for him, paramount. I don't see how someone could make as many excellent films as he has, given as much of his life to the craft (and those developing their own) and not feel that way.

[Mr Sausage]

There’s also a kind of survivorship bias at play. There’s no avoiding that the films most available to be seen by Americans were made by white men.

If I were to make a list of the greatest works of literature pre-1700, there would be next to no women on that list even if it were 200 entries. Not because of my own personal bias; because of the cultural bias that didn’t allow women any opportunities to be writers. And the ones who managed to overcome that were by and large mediocre—because writers in general are by and large mediocre. Greatness is a statistical exception.

The same is easily true for Lee. White men had more of a chance to be great, and Lee had more of a chance to see them at a formative age. There may be other biases at play, who knows. But I wouldn’t discount the cultural one.

[domino harvey]

Agreed. Lee may be brash in many ways, but his list shows he knows the medium (as do scenes from his work like smartly co-opting the film language of Birth of a Nation to further critique it within BlacKKKlansman, something people who refuse to see the Griffith film will not even register). Again, there is nothing wrong with the canon as a starting point, and frankly a lot of the ballots we’ve seen for SS show a lack of baseline and look where that got us

[pistolwink]

The inclusion of Natural Born Killers on the Variety list is a tip-off that this is at least partly Owen Gleiberman's project. He's had a *thing* for that film since it came out as very few other critics have then or since.

It was obvious to me that Gleiberman was a hack back when I was in middle school, reading copies of Entertainment Weekly in my dentist's office.

[tenia]

The same is easily true for Lee. White men had more of a chance to be great, and Lee had more of a chance to see them at a formative age. There may be other biases at play, who knows. But I wouldn’t discount the cultural one.

That's what I meant, not really centered on Lee but on the industry and who/which movies are more usually considered great and thus have more chances to end up in such a list.
I do think that the canon is self-perpetuating in some ways, and that lists like this are part of what helps doing so.

This being written, I don't think that one have to have an agenda or be an "intellectual" or setting willingly a quota to include movies made by people that aren't white and/or male.

[MichaelB]

Again, there is nothing wrong with the canon as a starting point, and frankly a lot of the ballots we’ve seen for SS show a lack of baseline and look where that got us

It depends on how you define "baseline", though. My own personal baseline was "which films had the biggest impact on me", which is why there was a 60% overlap between my 2012 and 2022 lists because it contained some unbudgeable constants. John Carpenter's list is being praised for including lots of Howard Hawks films, but it's pretty clear that he was using a very similar methodology - those films had a very similar impact on him, most likely at the same kind of age - but they didn't have the same impact on me because I didn't watch them in a similar context.