So after almost six months, I’m at the halfway point on this list, and after engaging with the list this much, I think that I have a different take on it now. Because the thing is… okay, looked at as an attempt to put together a coherent list of The Official Best 100 Movies Ever In Official Order, you can criticize the list in a zillion different ways — it’s stodgy, it’s Euro-centric, it massively under-represents contemporary films, it’s dude-heavy (with only two movies directed by a woman in the whole list).

But that’s not really what the list is structured to be. The way they put it together is by asking a bunch of critics to provide their own personal list of the ten greatest movies, in no particular order and with a deliberately vague definition of greatness (their definition in the letter they send to pollees: “We leave that open to your interpretation. You might choose the ten films you feel are most important to film history, or the ten that represent the aesthetic pinnacles of achievement, or indeed the ten films that have had the biggest impact on your own view of cinema.”), and then they put this combined list together with the most frequently mentioned ones up top, and going in descending order.

So that movie at #1 isn’t the movie that these 1,000+ critics would say is the absolute best movie ever made — it only got mentioned on 191 lists, which means that 80% of the respondents didn’t even think it was one of the ten greatest movies. (Although I’m guessing that most of the people who didn’t mention it on their lists would acknowledge that it’s a great movie; ten’s an awfully restrictive number, after all.)

And as you get further down the list, what you’re seeing isn’t (say) the movie that 1,000 critics all agreed is the 50th greatest of all time as they looked to fill out a slot and provide a balanced list; you’re seeing a movie that 29 critics think is one of the ten greatest of all time. So as you go down the list, there’s less consensus — though there was never much to begin with — but every one of these movies is one that a bunch of critics thought belonged at the very top of the field and were passionate about.

That’s not a particularly sound method for making a definitive ranking of 100 movies. But it is a great method to assemble a list of recommendations, because with every entry in this list, you’re watching a movie that a bunch of people absolutely loved and would rave about — more and more idiosyncratically as the list goes on, to be sure, but even at the bottom of the list, there’s still a double-handful of critics who’d go to bat for the top-notch greatness of that film. None of these movies are on the list because people said “well, that’s a pretty solid film and we really do need something like that on the list, sure, go ahead.”

And so I found that the list works absolutely amazingly as a recommended-viewing list to be gone through methodically. Because not only are the movies on it all potentially excellent, but going through the list straight-through forces you not to skip over things that maybe sound just a little less interesting than other possibilities. A Soviet silent movie with no characters or plot, just a montage of images? A seven hour Hungarian movie that’s mostly shots of either people walking in the rain or getting drunk on fruit brandy? A silly Hollywood musical? A nine hour Holocaust documentary? A stupid ol’ John Wayne Western? An Iranian metafictional documentary about a con man who pretended to be a famous Iranian director?

If I were picking movies on my own, I’d’ve gone a long time before bumping those to the top of the queue, and would have just jumped down to one of the more immediately attractive movies — Metropolis or Rashomon or something else more obviously interesting and accessible. But when I’m going through the list in order, well, they’re on the list where they are, so no choice but to just watch them and get out of even the generous definition of my comfort zone, to often happy results. It’s almost the antithesis of the “if you liked x, try y” personalized recommendation that’s so ubiquitous today: “Here are movies we recommend, and we don’t care who you are or what you think you like, these are worth trying.”

Plus, because the ordering in the list is so coincidental, it provides this wonderfully random sense of jumping around — a Japanese postwar family drama, a French interwar farce, and then a German Hollywood silent-era fable about marriage… and ten movies later, the prequel to that Japanese movie, and twenty-five movies after that, an Indian movie by a director who worked with that French director. It’s this web of influence and inspiration and evolution all in no particular order, so that you hit the French New Wave twenty movies before you get your first look at the Italian neorealism that so influenced the New Wave. And if you don’t like a particular movie, don’t worry, the next one’s going to be completely different.

And so ultimately… I mean, look, I haven’t loved all of these movies. I hated The Searchers, was left cold by L’Atalante, thought Contempt was about 30% too self-indulgent, and didn’t think Some Like It Hot was as witty as it thinks it is.

But the ones that were great were brilliant (I was blown away by Persona and Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and Tokyo Story and Playtime, and I could go on here); most of them were, at the very least, interesting or enjoyable; I found something to like in all of them (even The Searchers had its gorgeous landscapes); and I regret watching none of them.

And I know that just going through a canonical list of the Great Works sounds like one of those midcentury middlebrow Cultural Self-Improvement things[1], and that there’s this natural aversion to that kind of project among modern people of eclectic and individual tastes. And I get that. But like I say, if you just think of this as a list of frequently highly recommended films, it gets at the truer sense of what the list is anyway. And so I’d add my own meta-recommendation, and say that you could do a lot worse than giving some attention to this set of recommendations.

And now, on to the second half of the list.

  1. Which… it kinda is? At least for me. Like, I don’t want to overstate this; obviously it’s not like taking a class in film studies or anything, and fifty movies is not really that many in a larger sense. But at the same time, these tend to be movies that are representative of important directors or styles. After watching each movie, I read up on it a bit, and so kind of inevitably, I started to pick up at least a broad sense of cinematic history and important figures and movements.

    Someone who knew more about film to start with would probably get less out of it from that perspective, but I’ve never been that much of a movie person (I’d only seen an even dozen of the 100 movies on this list before I started, and had never seen a silent film at all), so this has been hugely revelatory to me. ↩︎