The 2022 version of the once-every-ten-years S&S “Great Movies” poll is out.

So I watched through the top 100 of the 2012 list, right, and did so from a position of knowing basically fuck-all about movie history. And so as I was going through that list at first, I had absolutely no context for anything, but was clearly able to see that most of these were very old movies. So my natural impression was that the list enshrined a very stodgy, unchanging, eternal canon — that the movies on this list must have been on basically every previous list in similar positions, going back decades.

But that was just an illusion. For instance, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera was made in 1929 and was #8 on that 2012 list. But far from being a settled fixture for those long decades, it never appeared on any of the top ten lists (or even any of the occasionally-published longer extended lists) preceding that, all the way back to the first one in 1952. But in 2010 there was a restoration of the movie done for its 80th anniversary, and it toured film festivals with an orchestra. So by 2012, it was fresher in everyone’s mind than it had been in previous years, and shot up the list.

As I eventually came to recognize, even though most of these movies are very old, and even though they’ve all mostly been respected to one degree or another for a while, this list is a lot more fluid over time than you’d think. There’s a lot of motion just due to movies becoming more or less available, along with all the usual vicissitudes of changing tastes and just plain random noise due to their survey methodology.

And so now we come to 2022, where they opened up the voting eligibility a lot (roughly doubling the number of critics surveyed); this is essentially the point where they leaned into the modern internet world, and let their definition of who counts as a “critic” broaden from what it had been in the past. I was really curious to see how that would impact the list.

On the one hand, maybe it would bring newer and more varied works in (as many a comment thread of tedious elderly faux-snobs warned direly). But on the other hand… well, one of the interesting things about these lists is that their canon-enshrining nature hides how much real variation there already has been among voters.

Even in 2012, a small minority of critics voted for the top movie, and then fewer than that for every one thereafter. Lots and lots of critics listed movies that landed outside the top 100, just… different ones from each other. So maybe expanding the pool of voters this year wouldn’t matter — it would just be more froth out of which similarly old classics would bubble up.

But then too, I think there’s been some shifting of awareness in the past decade, such that voters on a list like this are likely to include more movies by women and Black directors. But would that mean that certain consensus picks will shoot up the list? (And if so, who? Agnès Varda? Chantal Akerman? Djibril Diop Mambéty? Spike Lee?) Or would those broadened lists dissipate into a lot of votes spread out among a lot of movies?

Either way, I was curious to see what the results would be. Because the 2012 list was so formative for me, it’s irrationally hard for me to imagine taking out anything from it. Even the movies I didn’t love feel somehow essential, just because of how I encountered them.

Anyway, that’s way too much preamble. Thoughts on the list:

  1. Obviously the big headline is the new movie at number one, Jeanne Dielman. After a half century of Citizen Kane sitting at the top, each of the two most recent polls has had a new number one — Vertigo in 2012, and this year. On the one hand, I think a certain amount of stability gives a list credibility over time, so cycling out winners too quickly feels a bit weird; on the other hand, those previous numbers one are still ranked very highly (Vertigo #2, Kane #3), so this isn’t wholesale revolution. But wow, this movie is coming from waaaaaay back in the list at #36 to jump to #1. It’s hard not to think that every critic was like “I should have at least one movie from a woman on my list” and a majority of them put this one. It’s absolutely an excellent movie, though. But also not as accessible as Kane or Vertigo, which inevitably is going to make this feel more like a list for snobs.

  2. The list is much newer overall. Two movies from this century in the top ten! There are probably people who are going to grump about this, but like: Man with a Movie Camera is still there, and another silent movie (Sunrise) is at #11. So it’s not like some wild neophilia here.

  3. Biggest loser from the top: The Passion of Joan of Arc, which goes from 9 to 21. I dislike that, but I’ll take the trade of Jeanne Dielman for it. Also losing out is La Règle du jeu, which goes from 4 to 13. This is a great movie, and it feels bad to push it down so far. But pushing The Searchers down from 7 to 15 feels not nearly far enough.

  4. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing bursts onto the list at #24, after not being on the list at all previously. File this under “belated recognition of the obvious,” because that movie is great. Also new to the list from Black directors: Moonlight, Daughters of the Dust, Black Girl, Killer of Sheep, and Get Out, joining Touki Bouki which was already on the list. This is definitely going to get some pushback from stodgy traditionalists griping about woke millennials, but… all those movies are strong choices that probably should have been on the list before. Get Out is maybe the “this is awfully early to be on the list” one, but it’s also barely scratching onto the list at the very bottom, which seems like a good place from which to grow or disappear in the future.

  5. Women also are much better represented this time around. Chantal Akerman at number one is the most obvious place, though that was on the list before. Cléo from 5 to 7 appears after being absent in 2012, a fact that I had to triple-check because it seems so unbelievable. File that under “fixing a manifest injustice.” Daisies also wasn’t on the 2012 list, unbelievably. Barbara Loden’s Wanda is here. Jane Campion’s The Piano. Somewhat surprisingly, a second movie from Akerman (News from Home), and a second from Varda (The Gleaners and I, which I haven’t seen). I mentioned Daughters of the Dust already (making Julie Dash the first Black woman on the list). Maybe the most surprising to me is Meshes of the Afternoon, a short film from 1943 that’s at #16 after never being on the list before. I’m intrigued. And the one that I am skeptical about: Portrait of a Lady on Fire at #30 feels way too high, way too early. I think it’s a good movie, and if it were hovering in the 90s, okay, but that just feels like a too immediate judgment to be meaningful.

  6. A lot of the really challenging and weird stuff stayed on the list, which is good. Sátántangó is still there, Shoah is still high-up, Man with a Movie Camera is still in the top ten. Persona’s in about the same place. Playtime, Mirror, Ordet. Tarkovsky is still super-well-represented.

  7. As for the missing movies: I had a moment where I thought that Breathless was off the list, and was shocked, but they just listed it under the French title (À bout de souffle), which thwarted my find button. The Godfather Part II is gone, which seems fine given that the first is there; don’t need two Godfathers on a list of 100. Gertrud, an excellent Dreyer movie, is the only other movie gone from the top 50 of the 2012 list. Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil and Magnificent Ambersons are gone, which seems defensible — they’re interesting movies, but all-time great? Not without his name. Raging Bull, La Maman et la putain, and Pickpocket are all gone and good riddance — the world doesn’t need more movies about misogynistic shitty dudes being shitty. Bergman’s Wild Strawberries is gone, which is disappointing, same for Fanny and Alexander, but The Seventh Seal also going away feels too far — feels like Bergman should have more than one movie on the list, and going down from four feels too far. I’m guessing this is just more consensus around Persona being his single breakout movie. L’eclisse is gone, which seems fine — I’m okay with Antonioni only having one movie on the list. Children of Paradise is a disappointing loss; it’s kind of a wild melodrama, but fascinating; La grande illusion being gone at the same time makes it feel like WW2 is losing some of its grip on critics. Polanski’s Chinatown being gone is a no-brainer, as is D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Altman’s Nashville being gone is one of those “good movie, but I’m okay if it’s not on the list” situations; same for Lawrence of Arabia and Greed. The Color of Pomegranates going away is one of the biggest losses for “weird” movies, and a little surprising since it got a big restoration just recently; at the same time, it was the movie I personally found the most incomprehensible of anything on this list, so I can understand why it wouldn’t make critics’ lists. Westerns take a hit: Rio Bravo and The Wild Bunch both gone. And then some of the froth in the 90s has gone away, while some of it remains.

  8. Long story short, I think a second Bergman should have remained on the list, but otherwise nothing on there is really indefensible to my mind. Even the removed movies I like (most of them), I wouldn’t go to the mat for in a top 100. And on the whole, I think the new movies are stronger than the ones we’ve lost. All in all, this list seems like a stronger list than 2012’s. Good job, critics.