My Most-Read Posts of 2023

Posted on January 2, 2024 by badblokebob

Normally I’d post my December “failures” today, but they’re not ready yet (it takes a surprisingly long time to write that column, you know), so I thought I’d crack on with my 2023 reviews instead.

According to my WordPress stats page, I published just 38 posts during 2023. In some respects, I’m surprised it’s so many, considering for most of the year each month consisted of just my monthly review and my list of failures.

Because I knew there were so few posts to work with, I considered not bothering with this post this year. I only started it (seven years ago) because 2016’s #1 baffled me so much. It’s part of the furniture now, but I’m always trying to question ‘the furniture’ so things don’t become staid for the sake of it (becoming staid because of the quality of my writing or whatever, that’s fiiiine).

In the end, I decided to stick with it (you probably guessed that, given that you’re reading it). Not because the results are anything special or interesting, but because… well, they’re not terribly uninteresting, as these things go. If nothing else, I had the idea to add the year’s most-read post overall to the below graph (in purple), for a sense of scale. That post is from just last year, my summation of the 2022 edition of Sight & Sound’s The 100 Greatest Films of All Time. It’s followed in the chart by a bunch of old TV columns, plus my post on the 2012 Sight & Sound list, before you finally find 2023’s #1 post at #14 overall. The other four are so far down the list, I couldn’t be bothered to count that far.

As for what those posts actually were…

My Top 5 Most-Viewed New Posts in 2023

5) Blindspot 2023

In the absence of actual film reviews, other posts have been able to sneak into this list — an unusual occurrence. Although, there were reviews published in 2023 that didn’t make this list, so… Perhaps it’s because of name recognition, perhaps it’s just a random fluke, but Blindspot beats out the similarly-themed “What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen…?” by two spots (i.e. WDYMYHS came 7th).

4) Silent Shorts Summary

Shorts don’t normally get a look in here either, but reviews are reviews, I guess. This roundup covered eight shorts made between 1900 and 1926, including the first-ever Sherlock Holmes “film”, the first adaptation of Frankenstein, some Georges Méliès trick photography, and a dancing pig. A really, really freaky dancing pig.

3) Archive 5, Vol.6

Remember Archive 5? It was supposed to be a regular feature, but in the last two years I’ve only managed six of them. This one — 2023’s only addition to the strand — featured reviews of 7500, Carefree, The Lie, Paris When It Sizzles, and The Rhythm Section.

2) The All-New 100 Films in a Year Challenge, Mk.II

The post in which I outlined the categories and rules of my Challenge for 2023. Considering this is linked to in all my monthly updates, plus on my Challenge Tracker page, it feels like it shouldn’t come as a surprise to see it being much visited. Well, “much” is a relative term: it came 84th overall, below even the same post about 2022 (who was so interested in 2022 during 2023?! He says, as he begins 2024 with a bunch of posts about 2023…)

1) 2023 | Weeks 3–4

Far and away my most-viewed new post of the year (something I could also say last year — is there always one “break out hit”? I can’t be bothered to go back to find out, to be honest). Feel free to guess which of the five included reviews was the culprit: 1926’s The Magician, 2022’s Glass Onion, Oscar-nominated short My Year of Dicks, then-recent release Shotgun Wedding, or The Banshees of Inisherin, another Oscar nominee. Maybe it was just that particular combination.

Blindspot 2023

Posted on January 11, 2023 by badblokebob

This is my 11th year doing a version of Blindspot (not to mention that various other bloggers do it too… or used to. Do other people still do this? Is there a whole world of it going on that I’m somehow cut off from? Or am I a lone proponent, still plugging ahead with a near-decade-old fad, because I really like it? I don’t know…)

Anyway, if you somehow still don’t know what it is or how it works, the premise is simple: choose 12 films you should have seen but haven’t, then watch one a month throughout the year. (My 12 also contribute to my 100 Films in a Year Challenge.)

Some people just choose their 12 films. I normally do it via an elaborate system of compiling “great movies” lists in various configurations to spit out some general consensus of which 12 well-regarded films I should watch next, rejigging which lists are included and how they’re factored in to provide new results each year. But 2023 is a bit different, thanks to a significant event last month: the publication of a new edition of Sight & Sound’s decennial 100 Greatest Movies poll, one of — nay, the most widely respected list of its kind among cinephiles. There were 27 films I hadn’t seen on the latest edition of the list — more than enough to fuel my Blindspot selections for this year.

I’ll explain how I whittled those 27 down (it wasn’t a long process, but it’s more than just “the top 12”) after listing the films themselves. In the order they ranked in Sight & Sound’s poll, this year I must watch…

Jeanne Dielman…

Beau Travail

Cléo from 5 to 7

Close-Up

Au hasard Balthazar

Shoah

Killer of Sheep

Fear Eats the Soul

A Brighter Summer Day

Pierrot le Fou

Tropical Malady

Black Girl

With just 12 slots but 27 films I hadn’t seen, obviously I had to pare the list down somehow. One method would’ve been to just take the 12 highest ranked — they’re meant to be the best of the best, after all. But that didn’t allow for the fact that, to be blunt, there were films further down the list that I was more interested in seeing. Another method would’ve been to run the 27 films through one of my usual list-of-lists calculations and see which 12 emerged victorious. But in a year where I’d simplified the selection process, it seemed silly to overcomplicated it again.

So, here’s what happened: I already owned some of the films on disc; when the list came out, after I had a look at it, there were a couple of highly-ranked films that I’d already been considering purchasing, so I ordered them; and there were a few more that, for whatever reason, I felt compelled to, um, download. When I stopped to take stock of this flurry of activity, the number of films in my possession added up to 13. They weren’t necessarily the films I had envisioned being in my final 12 (for starters, two from the top 50 were missing), but there we were.

The only remaining question: which to ditch? It was nearly Au hasard Balthazar. I wasn’t sure I’m ready for the “a donkey’s miserable life” movie. I’m still not. But this seemed as good a time as any to bite the bullet and get it seen. What about approaching it from the other angle — which had to be included? Well, I don’t think I’m going to like Jeanne Dielman, but I’ve felt I should watch it for some time now… and, more importantly, it’s #1 — of course #1 had to go in! Then there’s the ones I already owned on disc: Shoah, A Brighter Summer Day, and Black Girl (also Yi Yi, but that was on last year’s list, so I ruled it out on the presumption I’d watch it in December. Oops). Then, the ones I’d freshly ordered: Beau Travail and Close-Up. Even if I hadn’t bought them, both are among the top four I hadn’t seen.

That just left narrowing the remaining seven downloads to six. I could talk you through my process, such as it was, on a film by film basis, but in the end it came down to a gut feeling. You can already see which films made it in — the loser, for what it’s worth, was Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life. I couldn’t really tell you why; it’s just what I decided.

One other thing: I can’t usually have wildcards from Blindspot — it’s a list of 12 films taking up 12 slots; there aren’t any to be wildcards. But this year is an exception in that respect, too: I figure that, as the entire list is chosen from Sight & Sound’s list, then the 15 unchosen films were the only other eligible options, and therefore they could be eligible for wildcard slots. Disagree? Tough, it’s my game. Will I actually watch any of them, when getting through the 12 actual picks can be challenge enough some years? Maybe not. But the possibility is there.

Before we leave Blindspot behind and head to “What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen…?” (or, if you’ve come to this post second, before you head back to your life), here’s a dash of additional info. You see, just because these 12 films were all taken from the Sight & Sound list, that doesn’t mean they don’t contribute towards my completion of other lists — unsurprisingly, there’s some degree of overlap between different “great films” lists. So, in case you were curious (because I was), other key lists that some of these films appear on (at time of writing) include…

TSPDT’s The 1,000 Greatest Films (16th edition) — all 12, ranging from 34th (Au hasard Balthazar) to 869th (Black Girl).

BBC’s The 100 Greatest Foreign-Language Films — Jeanne Dielman; Beau Travail; Cléo from 5 to 7; Close-Up; Au hasard Balthazar; Shoah; Fear Eats the Soul; A Brighter Summer Day; Pierrot le Fou.

BBC’s The 100 Greatest Films Directed by Women — Jeanne Dielman; Beau Travail; Cléo from 5 to 7.

iCheckMovies’s Most Favorited — Jeanne Dielman; Close-Up; A Brighter Summer Day.

Letterboxd’s Top 250 Narrative Feature Films — Jeanne Dielman; A Brighter Summer Day.

IMDb’s Top 250 — nothing (can’t say I’m surprised).

My Most-Read Posts of 2022

Posted on January 3, 2023 by badblokebob

I published 84 posts here in 2022 — that’s up from the 55 in 2021, which is good because that was a major part of the point of my relaunch; but it’s still down from the 120+ I posted in 2020 and 2019, and over 200 each in 2018 and 2017. That said, it’s partly because I’ve been lumping most reviews together into “weeks” rather than posting them individually.

One thing it hasn’t done is reverse the slide in my traffic. I guess people are reading blogs less and less nowadays, maybe? Or perhaps it’s just that I’ve stopped posting my TV columns, which were my big hitters hits-wise. It was insulting IMDb voters’ response to the Game of Thrones finale that gave me my biggest year ever, after all. Whatever the reason, in 2022 my views were the lowest since I started sharing my reviews via IMDb’s External Reviews section in 2017 (IMDb devaluing links to reviews offsite is another possible explanation here). They’re still at more than double where they were in 2016, though, so… um, there’s still further to fall?

Anyway, here are the five posts that attracted the most of those paltry views. #1 stood out in particular, as this graph of the posts’ relative success shows:

Now, you might like to know exactly which those posts are…

My Top 5 Most-Viewed New Posts in 2022

5) Weeks 1–3

Featuring reviews of Carry on Spying, Penny Serenade, The Navigator, In the Line of Fire, Barbie as The Princess and the Pauper, and Free Guy. This is most noteworthy for nearly being a three-way tie: Weeks 1–3 had just a single hit more than each of the posts tied for 6th place, Archive 5 Vol.1 and Vol.5.

4) Ghostbusters: Afterlife

Who ya gonna call? No idea why this one charted so high (my posting wasn’t especially timely to any of its release dates, I don’t think), other than the perennial popularity of its franchise. Plus, like the posts in 5th and 2nd, the fact it was posted in February means it had most of the year to rack up hits.

3) Prey

Another popular franchise with a much-anticipated new instalment. This one I posted on the weekend it came out, which likely helped it gain views.

2) Weeks 4–6

Featuring reviews of Voyage of Time: An IMAX Documentary, L’avventura, She’s Gotta Have It, Don’t Look Up, Jackass: The Movie, and Jackass Number Two. Again, I can’t see anything particularly special about this that would elevate it to second place, except perhaps that reviews of streaming titles often seem to do better — Don’t Look Up is, of course, a Netflix film, while Voyage of Time has been on MUBI. Perhaps the release of Jackass Forever had people looking at writing on the previous films, too.

1) Sight & Sound’s The 100 Greatest Films of All Time (2022 edition)

Far and away my most-viewed post of the year, with 4.6 times as many hits as #2. As I speculated in my December review, the success of this post is likely due to it being both timely (even if it was posted 24 hours after the news broke, people were still discussing it on social media) and newsworthy (being a once-in-a-decade occasion deemed to be important to all cinephiles). There’s no reason my particular piece on it should receive more hits than anyone else’s, so I can only assume bigger sites saw even more traffic from it.

Sight & Sound’s The 100 Greatest Films of All Time (2022 edition)

Posted on December 2, 2022 by badblokebob

Well, well, well — the latest iteration of Sight & Sound’s decennial poll is here, and if you thought the last one upset the applecart by displacing Citizen Kane at #1 for the first time in 50 years, this edition has flipped the cart over, set it on fire, pushed it off a cliff, and dropped a nuke on it for good measure.

Okay, maybe that’s a slightly exaggeration — the previous top two are still both in the top three — but the new #1 is a bit out of leftfield. Sure, it’s a film that’s fairly well known in cinephile circles (though I’ve seen multiple people on Film Twitter confess to never having heard of it), but to normies it probably sounds like something that’s been made up as a spoof of The Kind Of Film That Tops These Lists: it’s a 3-and-a-half-hour Belgian film about a woman doing household chores.

While I imagine regular folk are getting mad about that in comments sections across the internet (it’s also directed by a woman, which will undoubtedly have set off a certain kind of comment section dweller), Film Twitter seems to have largely taken the news in its stride, instead choosing to get worked up about the inclusion of very recent films, like Portrait of a Lady on Fire at #30, Moonlight at #60, Parasite at #90, and Get Out at #95. Can any film so new be already deserving of a place on a list of the greatest films ever made? Some people think not, reckoning a movie needs a good length of time to settle in to a place in ‘the canon’. Others say why wait? A great movie is a great movie.

Personally, I tend towards the latter; especially in a poll like this, which is the results of thousands of individual top tens, not of a group of people sitting down together to hash out every inclusion and their relative merits. I mean, if you saw Get Out on its release five years ago, but only watched Citizen Kane for the first time last week, which do you have a longer-considered personal opinion on? Sure, you know the latter is a long-assessed Great Movie, but how much should that matter in your personal assessment? Such external knowledge isn’t necessarily a negative when processing your own reaction to a movie, but if we were only ever allowed to consider certified classics as classics, nothing would ever change. If enough individuals consider Portrait of a Lady on Fire to be in their personal top ten movies that, when all the votes are added up, it places 30th overall, why is there anything wrong with that?

On a personal note, despite a raft of changes throughout the 100 (a good many previously-well-established films have plummeted out of the list, replaced by brand-new entries), the number I myself have seen goes from 72 to… 73.

The issue of Sight & Sound with their full write-up of the poll is out next week, and can be preordered here (with four covers to choose from). The full list, and at least some of the related writing, can be found online here — and summarised below, of course. As with last time, I’ve copied Sight & Sound’s ordering for ties (still don’t know their methodology), I’ve used the same titles as them for non-English films (some have changed since the last poll), and any links are to my own reviews (either here or on Letterboxd).

1 Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

(1975)

2 Vertigo

(1958)

3 Citizen Kane

(1941)

4 Tokyo Story

(1953)

5 In the Mood for Love

(2000)

6 2001: A Space Odyssey

(1968)

7 Beau travail

(1998)

8 Mulholland Dr.

(2001)

9 Man with a Movie Camera

(1929)

10 Singin’ in the Rain

(1951)

11) Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
12) The Godfather (1972)
13) La Règle du jeu (1939)
14) Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)
15) The Searchers (1956)
16) Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
17) Close-Up (1989)
18) Persona (1966)
19) Apocalypse Now (1979)
20) Seven Samurai (1954)
21=) The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927)
21=) Late Spring (1949)
23) Playtime (1967)
24) Do the Right Thing (1989)
25=) Au hasard Balthazar (1966)
25=) The Night of the Hunter (1955)
27) Shoah (1985)
28) Daisies (1966)
29) Taxi Driver (1976)
30) Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
31=) 8½ (1963)
31=) Mirror (1974)
31=) Psycho (1960)
34) L’Atalante (1934)
35) Pather Panchali (1955)
36=) City Lights (1931)
36=) M (1931)
38=) À bout de souffle (1960)
38=) Some Like It Hot (1959)
38=) Rear Window (1954)
41=) Bicycle Thieves (1948)
41=) Rashomon (1950)
43=) Stalker (1979)
43=) Killer of Sheep (1977)
45=) Barry Lyndon (1975)
45=) The Battle of Algiers (1966)
45=) North by Northwest (1959)
48=) Ordet (1955)
48=) Wanda (1970)
50=) The 400 Blows (1959)
50=) The Piano (1992)
52=) Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
52=) News from Home (1976)
54=) Le Mépris (1963)
54=) Blade Runner (1982)
54=) Battleship Potemkin (1925)
54=) The Apartment (1960)
54=) Sherlock Jr. (1924)
59) Sans Soleil (1982)
60=) La dolce vita (1960)
60=) Moonlight (2016)
60=) Daughters of the Dust (1991)
63=) GoodFellas (1990)
63=) The Third Man (1949)
63=) Casablanca (1942)
66) Touki Bouki (1973)
67=) Andrei Rublev (1966)
67=) La Jetée (1962)
67=) The Red Shoes (1948)
67=) The Gleaners and I (2000)
67=) Metropolis (1927)
72=) L’avventura (1960)
72=) Journey to Italy (1954)
72=) My Neighbour Totoro (1988)
75=) Spirited Away (2001)
75=) Imitation of Life (1959)
75=) Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
78=) Sunset Blvd. (1950)
78=) Sátántangó (1994)
78=) A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
78=) Modern Times (1936)
78=) A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
78=) Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)
84=) Blue Velvet (1986)
84=) The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
84=) Pierrot le fou (1965)
84=) Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1998)
88=) The Shining (1980)
88=) Chungking Express (1994)
90=) Parasite (2019)
90=) Yi Yi (1999)
90=) Ugetsu Monogatari (1953)
90=) The Leopard (1963)
90=) Madame de… (1953)
95=) A Man Escaped (1956)
95=) Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
95=) Tropical Malady (2004)
95=) Black Girl (1965)
95=) The General (1926)
95=) Get Out (2017)

The Greatest Monthly Review of November 2022

Posted on December 1, 2022 by badblokebob

A slightly aggrandised title, and not necessarily an applicable one — I mean, what’s so great about this monthly review? That said, as I won’t review November 2022 again, it is my greatest review of this month.

Whatever — the adjective was actually prompted by my coverage of Sight & Sound’s 2012 Greatest Film of All Time poll (something I’ve been meaning to write up since the blog’s new era began in January) and their release today of the 2022 poll results (due at 7pm GMT).

Putting that aside for now, here’s the regular monthly business…

This month’s viewing towards my yearly challenge

#71 See How They Run (2022) — New Film #11
#72 Come and See (1985) — Blindspot #9
#73 Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) — Series Progression #7
#74 The Mindscape of Alan Moore (2003) — DVD #8
#75 Howard the Duck (1986) — WDYMYHS #9
#76 Killer’s Kiss (1955) — Genre #7
#77 The Killing (1956) — Genre #8
#78 The Blues Brothers (1980) — DVD #9
#79 Enola Holmes 2 (2022) — Rewatch #11
#80 Manhunter (1986) — WDYMYHS #10
#81 A Woman Under the Influence (1974) — Blindspot #10

I watched 12 feature films I’d never seen before in November.
Nine of them counted towards my 100 Films in a Year Challenge, along with two rewatches — one of which I’d only watched for the first time earlier in the month. What larks!
The film in question was Enola Holmes 2, which wasn’t eligible for any category on my first viewing (the “new film” slot having already been taken by See How They Run), but when I came to rewatch it could count as November’s rewatch.
That said, arguably the rewatch slot should have gone to The Blues Brothers, but it was more useful to count it as a DVD. It’s not my disc, so breaks the intention of the DVD category, but as Walk the Line already did that (see last month) it seemed silly to start applying higher morals now. (But if the DVD category continues into 2023, it’s getting reworded. Only I can save me from myself.)
While we’re on specific films, this month’s Blindspot films were A Woman Under the Influence and Come and See. After failing to watch the latter for last year’s Blindspot list, I said I wouldn’t make the mistake of leaving it until December again — and I didn’t! That said, it was the shortest of the four films I had left in this category, so, in that sense, watching it first didn’t make my task any easier. Indeed, having also watched A Woman Under the Influence, I’ve left the two longest-of-all films — totalling over 6 hours combined — for December. Oops.
This month’s WDYMYHS films were polar opposites in terms of reputation: the notoriously bad Howard the Duck, and the notoriously “good but overshadowed by subsequent films in the same franchise” Manhunter. I loved one and quite enjoyed the other, but I’ll leave you to speculate which was which.
From last month’s “failures” I only watched The Lost City.

Now, a more statistical bent…

I reached #100!
…under the old system (i.e. counting all new films, but only new films), which isn’t my actual challenge anymore. Oh well.
But, for what it’s worth, that’s the latest I’ve done it since… the last time I failed to even get there, when I only reached #97 in 2012. The last time it took until November was 2013 (when I got there on the 13th; this year it was the 15th) — every year since has been earlier.
On the bright side, totalling 12 new films makes this the first time I’ve got above my target of 10 per month since June.
It also makes November the first month of 2022 to beat its equivalent from 2021. There has never been a year of 100 Films without at least one month that beat its own tally from from the year before, so I’m glad to have dodged that ignominious all-time first.
It also means I have good news to report in the averages stakes, for the first time in a while, with November beating all the averages I regularly mention: the average for 2022 to date (previously 9.1, now 9.4); the rolling average of the last 12 months (previously 9.9, now 10.3); and the average for all Novembers (previously 10.8, now 10.9).
On a bit of a downer: I’d hoped to get to #85 in my challenge, because I had 30 left to go after October and that would’ve meant a neat 15 in November and 15 in December. Never mind.

The 90th Monthly Arbitrary Awards

Favourite Film of the Month
There were several films I enjoyed a lot this month, and may even find it onto my end-of-year best list (partly because it’s been feeling like a pretty poor year, for whatever reason), but only one prompted me to write “where has this been all my life?!” on Letterboxd, and that was Manhunter. (The answer being “probably being overshadowed by Silence of the Lambs”.)

Least Favourite Film of the Month
Easily the biggest disappointment this month was belated-but-awaited sequel Disenchanted — a disappointingly fitting title for a film that lost the magic of its wonderful predecessor. Maybe “it’s such a shame they never made a sequel to Enchanted” would have been a better legacy.

The Audience Award for Most-Viewed New Post of the Month
There was only a small handful of posts to choose from this month, but the clear victor was my summary of Sight & Sound’s The 100 Greatest Films of All Time (2012 edition). Is that because everyone loves a list? Or because it was a new feature for the blog? Or because the 2022 edition is imminent (the results are out later today, at 7pm GMT)? Who knows. Maybe time — and further entries in this sporadic series — will tell.

Every review posted this month, including new titles and the Archive 5

45 Years	The Bucket List
Tintin and the Lake of Sharks

Sight & Sound 100 Greatest Films (2012 edition)

I’ve got 19 films to go to complete my challenge. That’s bringing back memories of 2008, when I also had to get through 19 films in December to hit my target. I managed it, but only just: I watched three qualifying films on New Year’s Eve to get over the line. Hopefully this year will be less stressfully down to the wire…

Sight & Sound’s The 100 Greatest Films of All Time (2012 edition)

Posted on November 12, 2022 by badblokebob

When I relaunched 100 Films back in January, one of the things I promised was “a new occasional series about various 100-film lists — you know, like the Sight & Sound poll, or all those AFI ones.” I hadn’t intended it to take until November to get started on that feature, but here we are.

And, in truth, I might not even have got round to doing it now, were it not for the fact that the results of Sight & Sound’s latest decennial poll are out next month (or possibly before the end of this one, depending who you listen to). So, before that renders this article near obsolete, let’s look back at their last poll…

For those who don’t know, Sight & Sound is a magazine published since 1932 by the BFI (British Film Institute). Since it integrated the Monthly Film Bulletin in 1991, it’s been the journal of record for films released in British cinemas, reviewing everything that’s granted a theatrical release in the UK (even the kinds of mainstream fare that might not appeal to its average readership), alongside all the film-related news and features you’d expect from such a publication.

Beginning in 1952, every decade the magazine has polled an international selection of film critics and professionals to create a list of the greatest films of all time. Each contributor submits an unranked list of their top ten films, with each named film receiving one vote when compiled into the overall list. The 2012 iteration was, deliberately, the biggest ever in terms of contributors: over 1,000 “critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles” were approached to contribute, and 846 did — up from just 145 in the preceding 2002 poll. (Since 1992, the votes of film directors have been compiled into a separate list. In 2012, 350 directors voted on their list. Maybe I’ll cover that another time.)

Sight & Sound September 2012 issue, featuring the results of their 2012 poll on the cover

The poll has come to be recognised as one of — if not the — most important of its kind. The great critic Roger Ebert once asserted that, “because it is world-wide and reaches out to voters who are presumably experts, it is by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies — the only one most serious movie people take seriously.” You’ll often hear it said that Citizen Kane is the greatest movie of all time, and if you’ve ever wondered just who decided that… well, it was the Sight & Sound poll: Kane was ranked #1 in every iteration from 1962 to 2002. (The 1952 poll was topped by Bicycle Thieves. Kane came =13th.) That was the main reason the 2012 poll made headlines at the time: Kane was unseated! But we’ll come to that in just a sec…

I think the poll’s exalted reputation is both a blessing and a burden that the magazine’s editors are only too aware of, hence the attempt to broaden its contributor base in 2012. How much further — or not — they’ve broadened it for 2022, I guess we’ll find out soon. Reports on social media indicate there are more than double the number of contributors, with an effort to make it truly a worldwide sampling and thus break the traditional dominance of American and European cinema. Surely such a focus is an inevitable side effect of the poll being conducted by an English-language British-based magazine, but there’s still value in trying to overturn the bias.

Below is the full list of 100 films (actually 101, thanks to a nine-way tie for 93rd place). When there’s a tie, I’ve copied the order from Sight & Sound’s own listing. (At first I’d thought they’d gone with chronological rather than alphabetical order (the list’s bias against recency is a whole separate debate), but it doesn’t seem to be either. Maybe it’s just random. I don’t know.)

I’ve done the same for translations of non-English titles. It seems to me that there’s little consistency about whether Sight & Sound used original titles or English translations, so I just copied their list. Depending on your awareness of world cinema and alternate titles, that may mean there are some titles you don’t recognise even though you do know the film, actually. I think that, thanks mainly to the Criterion Collection, it’s English-language titles that are commonly used online by English-speakers nowadays; but, ironically, one of the rare instances that Criterion use the original-language title is for a film here listed by its English-language alternative. Fun times.

Where a title is a link, it’s to my review. You can find Sight & Sound’s own write-up of the poll results here (courtesy of the Internet Archive, because as of 1st December 2022 the original page has been replaced with the new list).

1 Vertigo

(1958)

2 Citizen Kane

(1941)

3 Tokyo Story

(1953)

4 La Règle du jeu

(1939)

5 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

(1927)

6 2001: A Space Odyssey

(1968)

7 The Searchers

(1956)

8 Man with a Movie Camera

(1929)

9 The Passion of Joan of Arc

(1928)

10 8½

(1963)

11) Battleship Potemkin (1925)
12) L’Atalante (1934)
13) Breathless (1960)
14) Apocalypse Now (1979)
15) Late Spring (1949)
16) Au hasard Balthazar (1966)
17=) Seven Samurai (1954)
17=) Persona (1966)
19) Mirror (1974)
20) Singin’ in the Rain (1951)
21=) L’avventura (1960)
21=) Le Mépris (1963)
21=) The Godfather (1972)
24=) Ordet (1955)
24=) In the Mood for Love (2000)
26=) Rashomon (1950)
26=) Andrei Rublev (1966)
28) Mulholland Dr. (2001)
29=) Stalker (1979)
29=) Shoah (1985)
31=) The Godfather Part II (1974)
31=) Taxi Driver (1976)
33) Bicycle Thieves (1948)
34) The General (1926)
35=) Metropolis (1927)
35=) Psycho (1960)
35=) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
35=) Sátántangó (1994)
39=) The 400 Blows (1959)
39=) La dolce vita (1960)
41) Journey to Italy (1954)
42=) Pather Panchali (1955)
42=) Some Like It Hot (1959)
42=) Gertrud (1964)
42=) Pierrot le fou (1965)
42=) Play Time (1967)
42=) Close-Up (1990)
48=) The Battle of Algiers (1966)
48=) Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998)
50=) City Lights (1931)
50=) Ugetsu monogatari (1953)
50=) La Jetée (1962)
53=) North by Northwest (1959)
53=) Rear Window (1954)
53=) Raging Bull (1980)
56) M (1931)
57=) The Leopard (1963)
57=) Touch of Evil (1958)
59=) Sherlock Jr. (1924)
59=) Barry Lyndon (1975)
59=) La Maman et la putain (1973)
59=) Sansho Dayu (1954)
63=) Wild Strawberries (1957)
63=) Modern Times (1936)
63=) Sunset Blvd. (1950)
63=) The Night of the Hunter (1955)
63=) Pickpocket (1959)
63=) Rio Bravo (1958)
69=) Blade Runner (1982)
69=) Blue Velvet (1986)
69=) Sans Soleil (1982)
69=) A Man Escaped (1956)
73=) The Third Man (1949)
73=) L’eclisse (1962)
73=) Les enfants du paradis (1945)
73=) La grande illusion (1937)
73=) Nashville (1975)
78=) Chinatown (1974)
78=) Beau Travail (1998)
78=) Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
81=) The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
81=) Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
81=) The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
84=) Fanny and Alexander (1984)
84=) Casablanca (1942)
84=) The Colour of Pomegranates (1968)
84=) Greed (1925)
84=) A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
84=) The Wild Bunch (1969)
90=) Partie de campagne (1936)
90=) Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)
90=) A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
93=) The Seventh Seal (1957)
93=) Un chien andalou (1928)
93=) Intolerance (1916)
93=) A One and a Two (1999)
93=) The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
93=) Touki Bouki (1973)
93=) Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
93=) Imitation of Life (1959)
93=) Madame de… (1953)

Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

Posted on December 7, 2017 by badblokebob

ICYMI, Film Twitter has been getting itself in a bit of a tizzy over the past couple of days about David Lynch’s return to TV… film… TV… film!… TV!!… FIL— you get the idea.

So, respected British film magazine Sight & Sound went and named Twin Peaks: The Return as the second best film of 2017. Except it’s a little more complicated than that, in the sense that their list is voted for (i.e. no one person or team specifically decided to place Peaks at #2) and that voters were expressly told they could include TV series, or indeed any other form of visual art (although Peaks was the only non-film to make the top ten, Sight & Sound have since tweeted a list of music videos, computer games, and other such things, that also received votes).

Some people seemed to find the very notion of counting Twin Peaks’ third season as a film to be personally offensive. It must’ve been like rubbing salt in the wound when respected French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma went and ranked it 1st on their list.

Many digital column inches have been spun out of this, naturally. Two of the more interesting / accurate ones I’ve read are Matt Zoller Seitz’s 25-tweet thread/rant and Vadim Rizov’s kinda rebuttal at Filmmaker Magazine. For my part, it’s nine years almost to the day (just one day short!) since I wrote this piece on the TV vs. film shebang, albeit from a slightly different tack (TV movies vs. ‘real’ movies). My main point was that it’s a kinda arbitrary distinction nowadays. That’s only become more the case in the almost-decade since.

Similarly, I think most of the handwringing over Peaks’ inclusion in these lists has been stupid. As I said, Sight & Sound specifically okayed the inclusion of TV — The Return wasn’t singled out as “yeah, it’s TV, but it’s so good we’ll count it as a film”, a notion that’s been projected on this news by some commentators (mainly TV critics) so they can then take great offence at it. But if Sight & Sound’s voters had considered any other season of 2017 TV to be worthy of inclusion, it had just as much chance of making it in. I don’t know what Cahiers’ rules were, but I’m going to assume they were similar — and they’ve included TV before (of all things, the first season of 24 made their top ten back in 2002).

Personally, I’m not really sure where I come down on the issue of Twin Peaks: The Return in particular. I mean, it’s definitely a TV series, isn’t it? But it’s also virtually an 18-hour movie, isn’t it? Can it be both? Why can’t it be both? As I said, I kind of err towards the broad position of “why differentiate?” As someone put it in a comment I saw somewhere else, it’s all linear non-interactive visual media. Still, I probably won’t be including it in my own year-end best-of list, but is that because I don’t think it should be on a movie best-of list or because I wasn’t wholly convinced/entertained by it as a work?

And if you were wondering what I did think of it in more detail, here are all the posts I reviewed it in while it was airing: