According to the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, here are the two best films of each decade from the past century:
- 1920s: Man With a Movie Camera (#9), Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (#11)
- 1930s: The Rules of the Game (#13), L'Atalante (#34)
- 1940s: Citizen Kane (#3), Meshes of the Afternoon (#16)
- 1950s: Vertigo (#2), Tokyo Story (#4)
- 1960s: 2001: A Space Odyssey (#6), Cléo from 5 to 7 (#14)
- 1970s: Jeanne Dielman (#1), The Godfather (#12)
- 1980s: Close-up (#17), Do the Right Thing (#24)
- 1990s: Beau travail (#7), The Piano (#50)
- 2000s: In the Mood for Love (#5), Mulholland Drive (#8)
- 2010s: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (#30), Moonlight (#60)
The 1950s appear to be the best film decade of all time—so good that even the #10 film of all time can't break into its top two. The 1930s, by contrast, were surprisingly unloved.
What a terrible list. The Piano was a truly awful piece of self indulgent garbage - it's a good litmus test for a critic's worth. Anyone who liked that movie is a flat out sucker, lacking in sophistication, and probably thinks that awful singing crawdads book is pulitzer worthy.
There's a brand new talk
But it's not very clear, ooh bop
That people from good homes
Are talking this year, ooh bop, fashion
It's loud and it's tasteless
I've not heard it before, ooh bop
You shout it while you're dancing
On the dance floor, ooh bop, fashion
Fashion, turn to the left
Fashion (Right)
Fashion
We are the goon squad and we're coming to town
Beep-beep
Hy
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That used to be the only game in town for serious movie people, but now the list of director's choices are more pertinent--they're the ones who decide what films matter, because they look for what's useful and relevant, and what isn't. There's also their professional cred.
Siskel and Ebert were both Chicago movie critics. Ebert got the job because he lived and breathed movies. Siskel took the job when it was offered because he didn't like the alternative, whatever that was.
John Gregory Dunne was reading Pauline Kael's essay on "Citizen Kane" and realized that she had no idea of what actually happened on a movie set.
And these are the critics you've heard of.
My base assumption concerning movie critics is that they've seen a substantial number of movies and have developed opinions of them. This means that if a critic likes the movies I like, they are a source of ideas for movies I haven't seen yet that I should see. And for 95% of critics, that's their entire worth to me, and I'm OK with that.
Man With a Movie Camera has less to recommend it than Fred Ott's Sneeze.
I agree with you on Office Space. This is fun.
When I was younger I used to look at Paul Zimmerman's picks in Newsweek. I looked at Sight & Sound, Film Quarterly and Film Comment for their favorites. Times and tastes have changed. As far as American films are concerned, I think AFI has a pretty good sense of what's worthwhile. https://www.afi.com/afis-100-years-100-movies/ I think the wittiest critic writing is Anthony Lane of the New Yorker. And he digs deep in his reviews if they are just disses.
If they "aren't just disses."
Another way to look at how movies from past decades stand up is to visit They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (TSPDT), where they do an annual update of their poll of polls, which includes many "greatest films" lists along with all the Sight & Sound surveys. Sight & Sound offers the most prestigious list of great movies. TSPDT is the most comprehensive.
Based on TSPDT's "1,000 Greatest Films" list, here's the breakdown for number of films per decade.
1900s: 1
1910s: 5
1920s: 38
1930s: 67
1940s: 82
1950s: 139
1960s: 170
1970s: 159
1980s: 119
1990s: 120
2000s: 83
2010-16: 17
(The methodology makes it a harder to make the list for new films. That bias becomes less after a few years.)
The 1950s thru 1970s were the top decades for movies, based on this list. How will that hold up in a hundred years? I'd like to think pretty well, and better than our current age of franchise films.
I agree that the 60s and 70s had the best films under some measures. And whether you agreed with it or not, there was sense to the auteur theory. But if your benchmarks for films are CGI, amazing effects or current box office, then the great films of the past are dinosaurs. Well, I'm old and picking the dinos.
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Everyone says Godfather II was better than Godfather.
These lists offer very little to me, because I watch movies, not "films."
http://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/index.html
> The 1950s appear to be the best film decade of all time
I suspect in another generation, 70s flicks will hold those slots.
The operative theory is that contributors to lists like this have a bias towards things they watched when they were very young.
As different_name has pointed out, there appears to be a bias toward the decades that film critics first grew to love movies - 50's, 60's, 70's . Like Bill James comment that most baseball fan's idea of the golden age of baseball turned out to be when the fan was about 12.
I'll note that there don't seem to be a lot of comedies in the list. All those screwball comedies of the 30's are doubly unlikely to make the list.
I'd swap Duck Soup for a lot of the movies on the list.
I generally find that I don't enjoy the movies that are considered "great" by critics. They are generally depressing, self indulgent, or boring to me. There are exceptions of course.
The Piano? Do the Right Thing? Mulholland Drive? Come on people. These are nowhere near to the best movies of any decade. And am I the only one who didn't like Vertigo?
Oh, but the critics review "films", not "movies." Movies appeal to those of us who want stories. Maybe amusing, maybe uplifting, often thought provoking, but with a plotline, memorable characters, and a resolution. You know, that lowbrow stuff.
“Do the Right Thing” jumped out at me as well. I have long been mystified by the reputation of that film. I think it’s one of those emperor-has-no-clothes situations. The film may be relevant or “important,” but it just isn’t very good …
I'm a big fan of many Hitchcock movies, but I've never understood the unusually high praise for Vertigo.
Tropic Thunder was much funnier and utilized the cinematic arts more successfully than Office Space. The subject of movie rankings and the comment about lack of movies from the 1930's on the lists caused me to think of Petrified Forest, a movie that greatly affected me the first time I saw it on a matinee TV showing several decades ago. Affect is the criteria I use to determine if a movie is good. As times change, critics, directors, movie fans are going to experience movies differently than their historical peers, which might explain why the critically acclaimed movies of the past diminish in popularity.
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1) It's pretty great to have the movie discussion not dominated by superhero stuff, if only for a few days, and only because of a once-every-10-years-poll (in other words, we probably have to wait another 10 years for this kind of breather...). When was the last time you can remember the NYT devoting a lot of space to a really boring 3.5 hour French movie about a woman cooking (okay, she kills a guy with scissors in the end, but even that is kinda off-screen...)
2) I remind those of you who hang around these parts frequently that KD has mentioned in the past that his parents wrote a biography of the really arty Danish director, Carl Dreyer.
It's mentioned here, for instance: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/03/my-big-list-o-books/ Which raises the obvious question of whether he has a dog in this fight...
Children of Men, The Revenant, Winter's Bone are all movies of recent years I think would have appealed to these cheerless critics.
No Coen brothers, either, and the only Fellinis are the two most famous.
Scorsese makes the list twice, for Taxi Driver and GoodFellas. I'd replace Taxi Driver with Bringing Out the Dead.
That's a reasonable consensus list for people involved in the business. I remember watching Toy Story with a successful screenwriter. As a computer graphics guy, I focused on the compromises resulting from the limits of computer animation at the time e.g. Bo Peep's static dress. My friend immediately noticed a major story flaw: how did Buzz Lightyear know he had to freeze in those earlier scenes if you didn't realize that he was a toy. We were watching for different things.
I'll come out as a big fan of Vertigo, The Piano, Citizen Kane and Rules of the Game. I just recently rewatched RotG; I had forgotten how good it was, but I'll bet the typical modern viewer would have no idea of what was going on. I'd add a whole lot of other movies to the list, but I didn't get to vote in this survey.
Criterion has about fifty of those top 100 films in this month's lineup, and a screwball comedy lineup of about a dozen films. Wonder which collection will pull more viewers?
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Good to see that the normies on this site are as boring and tasteless as the normies anywhere else. Office Space isn't even the best comedy of the year it came out (Election, South Park and Galaxy Quest are superior).