zerode – a sensibility

film, music, text, city, spectacle, pleasure

July 31, 2023 • 4:55 pm

“Greatest” films, personal favorites and lists

I’ve posted a page with a list of the 101 greatest films. Not my “greatest films,” but rather an aggregate of 60+ “best” lists from a variety of sources—Sight & Sound polls, AFI lists, various lists by directors such as Stanley Kubrick and Akira Kurosawa, reasonably well-informed lists on specific cinemas like South Korea, Hong Kong and Africa, and so on.

My scoring system weights the Sight & Sound polls (all of them) heavily, with points for their position in those lists, and so in my top 101 list there are not huge differences from their polls. Further down on my full list (which is much, much longer than 101 entries), though, the aggregation of so many lists does provide insights into well-regarded films which have never gotten the nod in an S&S poll.

But let’s digress for a moment or maybe… upgress? Get meta. Boys and lists. What is it with boys and lists, especially pop culture lists? Should we make a list? Seriously, though, go read Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, which is an acute look at the male psyche, and in particular the psyche of males who make lists, structured around… a list of top 5 breakups. The protagonist, Rob, is of the view that “what really matters is what you like, not what you are like,” a view shared by the employees of his record store, “the musical moron twins,” and the three of them are forever making lists and judging people on their lists and likes. But the point of the book (it’s about girls, right? – just kidding) is that this is something we—blokes—need to grow out of. Which Rob does in the end.

Okay, that said…

The top 20 films from my aggregation that don’t appear in S&S, listed below, show a definite science fiction bias, which is interesting, and also suggest something of the disconnect of “popular” from “greatest” (at least as determined by critics and directors that S&S polls). It’s weird, for instance, to consider that neither The Maltese Falcon nor King Kong rank with S&S. These are mostly just very popular films, with the exceptions—like Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast—being films that are popular with film scholars, cinephiles and filmmakers, the kinds of people who make lists of “best” films.

The top 20 highly regarded films on my aggregate list that don’t make Sight & Sound‘s cut:

  • 1. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
  • 2. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
  • 3. Star Wars (aka Episode IV – A New Hope) (1977)
  • 4. Annie Hall (1977)
  • 5. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
  • 6. Alien (1979)
  • 7. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
  • 8. All About Eve (1950)
  • 9. Beauty And The Beast (La Belle et la Bête) (1946)
  • 10. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
  • 11. Brazil (1985)
  • 12. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
  • 13. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
  • 14. Duck Soup (1933)
  • 15. Gone With The Wind (1939)
  • 16. King Kong (1933)
  • 17. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
  • 18. Midnight Cowboy (1969)
  • 19. On the Waterfront (1954)
  • 20. Back to the Future (1985)

My own list of what I think are the “best” films… Well, that would tend to change from month to month, mood to mood.

But I think it’s in many ways more interesting to look at “personal favorites” that are not on any best/greatest list. I mean, it doesn’t really tell us that much about someone if they say that, for instance, Seven Samurai or Vertigo is one of the favorite films. (For me, yes to the first, not so much to the second.) But if they say The Love Bug or—in my case—Kelly’s Heroes, well, that perhaps gives you more insight into their… sensibility. (Or, perhaps more so, into their childhood and teen years and what films they had the opportunity to see then.)

So here, in chronological order, is this boy’s list (random, by no means complete) of 100+ of my personal favorite films that don’t make the cut of any of the Sight & Sound polls and few, if any, other “best/greatest” lists:

It was interesting for me, throwing out that list and reflecting on it a bit. The biggest thing that emerged for me from looking at it was how few recent films there were. I really just don’t watch as many movies as I used to, not new movies at any rate. (I watched three movies this past weekend, but they were old ones, and two of them I’d seen before.) As I suggested above, looking at this list it seems more about what movies I watched from the ages of 13 to 25, a time in my life when I was particularly open to falling in love with films—and records and books and, it must be said, people. I’m not immune to falling in love now, but it does feel like it’s rarer now for something to grab me totally in that way. I miss being open in that way, I think. But also I am more discerning now with the movies I do watch, whereas when I was a kid I’d watch anything. So most of my recent films are already on various “best” lists, or—for instance with The Quiet Girl—seem likely to be so soon.

Filed under: Movies, , ,

One Response

  1. In the Mood for… lists | zerode - a sensibility says:
    August 7, 2023 at 1:08 pm

    […] written about lists a few times (for instance, here and here). And I maintain, as I’ve discussed, a “master list” to which I add […]

    Reply

Leave a comment

Special Pages

Categories

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

The 400 Blows

zerode

is an over-caffeinated and under-employed grad school dropout, aspiring leftwing intellectual and cultural studies academic, and cinéaste. Raised in San Francisco on classic film, radical politics, burritos and soul music, then set loose upon the world. He spends his time in coffee shops with his laptop and headphones, caffeinating and trying to construct a post-whatever life.

What's in a name... The handle "zerode" is a contraction of Zéro de Conduite, the title of Jean Vigo's 1933 movie masterpiece about schoolboy rebellion.