The Lack of Agreed Upon Film Classics Since 1995

[krazijoe]

I just don't think you've actually shown that to be true. Most films find recognition as they age and are then reevaluated with where they fit into the established canon of "classics" as the people who grew up loving them and being influenced them replace the people who were more influenced with older films. It's the natural progression in just about every creative media, and I don't see that changing.

There are exceptions to the rule, like Schindler's List, but they are very few and far between.

True, sometimes it takes time for people to appreciate what someone did on film or how they set a precedent or began a wave of copycats etc (Memento, Requiem of a Dream, PI etc). And then there are ones that just tore it all down and said look at me! And are instant Classics (Schnidler's List, Matrix, The Departed). The most recent one I can think of is actually only a few months old and very few people have seen it, Mad God.

[Mister Mets]

The new Sight & Sound lists may show the impact of gatekeeping, since there is some recent work after they made an effort to be more inclusive.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/si...-all-time-2022

This was made by critics.
There are some films since 1995.
5) In the Mood For Love (2000)- up from 24th place in the 2012 list.
7) Beau Travail (1999)- up from 78th place in the 2012 list
8) Mulholland Drive (2001)- not on the 2012 critics list, but it was 75th place in the 2012 directors' list.
30) Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
61) Moonlight (2016)
70) The Gleaners and I (2000)
75) Spirited Away (2001)
Tied for 90) Parasite (2019) and Yi Yi (1999)
Tied for 95th) Tropical Malady (2004) and Get Out (2019)

They also released an expanded list.
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sou...films-all-time

There Will Be Blood(75th place in the 2012 Directors list) and the Matrix were tied for 122nd place. La Cienaga (2001) was in 136th place. The Watermelon Woman (1997) was in 145th place.
There were more films in the rest of the Top 250.

The Director's List had some additions.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Hidden from 2004 were tied for 93rd place, along with the 1997 Iranian film Taste of Cherry (as well as Parasite, Yi Yi and Moonlight.) 2011's A Separation was in 72nd Place. La Cienaga is in 62nd place, tied with Tropical Malady. Mulholland Drive is in 22nd place. Beau Travail is in 14th place. In the Mood for Love is in 10th place.

So 19 films since 1995 made either the Critics Top 150, or the Directors' Top 100.

Seven of the films were in the English language: Mulholland Drive, Get Out, Moonlight, There Wil Be Blood, the Matrix, The Watermelon Woman, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

This is from a combination of international critics and directors. We get some differences. Portrait of a Lady on Fire was really popular on Film Twitter, but it's not as immediately well-regarded among working directors.

Among American films, Mulholland Drive seems to be the major 21st Century critical favorite.

In the Mood For Love and Beau Travail seem to have really entered the international canon, so it may take a while for people to really discover these types of films. Director Wong Kar Wai's earlier Chungking Express made the Top 100 this time.

The popularity of Get Out and Moonlight corresponds to greater critical celebration of African-American filmmakers (the Sight & Sound 2022 list saw the addition of older classics like 1991's Daughters of the Dust (60th place), the 1977 film Killer of Sheep (43rd place) and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (24th place-, as well as the 1965 French film Black Girl (95th place), the 1973 Sengalese film Touki Bouki (66th place). Previous Sight & Sound films didn't include anime, although the newest one also has My Neighbor Totoro.

One film's reputation declined in the interval.
Edward Yang's A One and a Two was in 99th place in the 2012 list, and not in the Top 250 in the 2022 list, although Yang's Yi Yi is there.

[thwhtGuardian]

Wow, it's almost as if more films get recognized as being "classics" as they age.

Weird.

[JBatmanFan05]

When you look at the top 250 list and ignore a lot of the actual rankings (which always strike me as so arbitrary), you can at least admire that the top 250 is a pretty fair list in terms of being 250 films that are very good or great. There are some films I wouldn't list at all (like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, which I like but is not 250 worthy), but there's not many of those, so that's a credit to the list.

List good, rankings..frustrating, but understandably frustrating since no objective standard enough, it's film, always going to have arbitrariness

[thwhtGuardian]

When you look at the top 250 list and ignore a lot of the actual rankings (which always strike me as so arbitrary), you can at least admire that the top 250 is a pretty fair list in terms of being 250 films that are very good or great.

Yeah, I definitely don't have any real complaints with the lists at all. I'd personally rank many of them differently but I can't say that many don't belong there.

[Mister Mets]

When you look at the top 250 list and ignore a lot of the actual rankings (which always strike me as so arbitrary), you can at least admire that the top 250 is a pretty fair list in terms of being 250 films that are very good or great. There are some films I wouldn't list at all (like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, which I like but is not 250 worthy), but there's not many of those, so that's a credit to the list.

List good, rankings..frustrating, but understandably frustrating since no objective standard enough, it's film, always going to have arbitrariness

These lists are definitely useful for recommendations, but it's also interesting how reputations change.

I'm also curious on the consensus about what recent movies are best. There are potential industry problems if there's a widespread sense that the new stuff isn't as good. This can lead to less opportunities for new talent, and less financing for new projects.

Wow, it's almost as if more films get recognized as being "classics" as they age.

Weird.

I don't think it's just that.

My sense is that older lists (pre-2000) would be much more likely to include recent work, and rank it high.

For example, the first AFI Top 100 came out in 1997 and had Schindler's List, which was from the same decade, in the top ten.

[thwhtGuardian]

These lists are definitely useful for recommendations, but it's also interesting how reputations change.

I'm also curious on the consensus about what recent movies are best. There are potential industry problems if there's a widespread sense that the new stuff isn't as good. This can lead to less opportunities for new talent, and less financing for new projects.



I don't think it's just that.

My sense is that older lists (pre-2000) would be much more likely to include recent work, and rank it high.

For example, the first AFI Top 100 came out in 1997 and had Schindler's List, which was from the same decade, in the top ten.

There isn't a widespread sense that new films aren't as good as they used to be, and you haven't shown anything that illustrates that point. There are always a few stand outs that get acclaim right away, like Schindler's List, but the majority get reevaluated over time. It's literally the same with every single creative medium so why would film be different?

[Scott Taylor]

Well I appreciate that the top 50 are mostly pre-2000 films. These lists should have an eligibility rule that prevents movies from the past 10 years (at least) from even being considered, just due to the Halo Effect that tends to occur with the most recent movies/directors/actors.

So the only one I can really disagree with is Portrait of a Lady on Fire, for that reason. Haven't seen it, don't know what it is about. But its a 2019 movie and has had almost no time to breathe and prove its significance.

[thwhtGuardian]

Well I appreciate that the top 50 are mostly pre-2000 films. These lists should have an eligibility rule that prevents movies from the past 10 years (at least) from even being considered, just due to the Halo Effect that tends to occur with the most recent movies/directors/actors.

So the only one I can really disagree with is Portrait of a Lady on Fire, for that reason. Haven't seen it, don't know what it is about. But its a 2019 movie and has had almost no time to breathe and prove its significance.

They mostly do that themselves with out needing a rule. Showing an obvious recency bias makes readers feel like the list is a sham so for publications looking to posit themselves as authorities they are going to craft their lists in a way that avoids that. There are exceptions of course, films like Schindler's List and Portrait of a Lady on Fire were both recognized as "great" cinema right from the start but those kinds of films don't come out very often.

[Mister Mets]

Well I appreciate that the top 50 are mostly pre-2000 films. These lists should have an eligibility rule that prevents movies from the past 10 years (at least) from even being considered, just due to the Halo Effect that tends to occur with the most recent movies/directors/actors.

So the only one I can really disagree with is Portrait of a Lady on Fire, for that reason. Haven't seen it, don't know what it is about. But its a 2019 movie and has had almost no time to breathe and prove its significance.

It does seem that the Halo effect didn't have as much of an impact as you would expect, especially in recent film lists (the newest Sight & Sound seems to be a bit of an exception, although that was after they made some conscious decisions to change the makeup of the voters.)

It could just be that more critics are aware of the Halo effect, and try to prevent themselves from making these kinds of mistakes, so that they won't be the equivalent of late 90s film voters backing Dances With Wolves. It could also be that there's less of a consensus with newer work, which means more projects will be splitting the vote, while with older movies, there's more of a sense of what other people will vote for. If you like Tarantino, Samuel L Jackson, nonlinear storytelling and 1990s independent films, you might be encouraged to vote for Pulp Fiction, but it's less clear what to vote for with more recent movement and talents. One other factor is that some work is quickly overshadowed by later projects. Reservoir Dogs popped up on a few Best of lists in the late 90s, but it's been surpassed by similar films from Tarantino and others.

[Vakanai]

This is true. It takes some time and generational changes for a movie to really earn its longevity. You can look back at movies that were super popular or even that won best picture and find some of them laughable today. Then there are movies that were very popular and considered classics at the time but haven't aged well due to their racist tendencies, etc. All of that is seen after the passing of much time.

Classics pass the test of time, in other words. Many of us here loved the Joker movie. In 30 years, will anyone still talk about it or the Dark Knight or will they just be set aside as a phenomenon of their time? Same could be asked about Parasite, and all of the superhero movies. We won't know in our lifetimes if any of those end up being classics.

But I do think that the best adaptation of a work is more likely to become an instant classic. Hard to see Peter Jackson's LotR movies even getting topped, and to me they are instant classics. In my opinion, the most recent adaptation of Little Women was the best we have ever seen and is an instant classic. DeCaprio's Gatsby was the best version ever, in my opinion. But the recent Call of the Wild? A dog.

I think we can say on some of these. "We won't know in our lifetimes" is too far. I'd peg it more as a decade~ish really. I was a 90's kid growing up on 80's "classics", as in maybe a decade maybe not even separated release and my first viewing of Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, and some of the OG Star Wars Trilogy. Even then these films were already cemented as popular classics. Likewise today LotR, the first PotC film, The Dark Knight, etc are known classics. We don't need 30 years, if they're still this big well over a decade out, maybe even at or approaching two decades out, the jury's verdict is already in - these films are classic.

[Vakanai]

A couple of points about the different way we experience films:

--Films once had a longer theater run and were built up through word of mouth. They didn't live or die on the strength of the opening weekend. Now a film hits on Thursday and we're talking about the next big thing by Sunday.

--It's harder to conceive of anything like a pre-2000 consensus now that anyone with a social media account or a blog can publicly critique a film. If social media had been around when THE GODFATHER came out, there would have been thousands of "is it just me, or is THE GODFATHER overrated" posts. As it is, any moviegoer that didn't "get" the film just moved on to something else. But who knows how it would be seen if everyone that strongly disliked had been able to keep their distaste in the discussion?

I don't think we'll ever have the same kind of consensus with regard to popular culture again.

Definitely if I had been alive then and had the internet, I would have left one hell of a negative review in the day. I tried to watch it, once. I've never seen a movie that bored me or dulled my senses more. Like I kept getting confused and wondering how the plot got here during the movie because I discovered this new phenomenon - I found the details so boring my short term or long term memory one didn't bother to register them, meaning I kept forgetting things during the movie. It was so boring it couldn't even engage my short term memory! At some point, god it felt like I'd been watching two three hours by then (it couldn't have been that long, but it felt like it), I must have fallen asleep. I don't remember falling asleep, but I remember waking up - and when I woke up the movie was still going on! It hadn't ended yet.

So I turned it off and never tried to watch it again. Not the worst movie I've ever seen, not the movie I hated the most seeing, but by far the most bored I've ever been watching a movie. I can't understand how it's so beloved.
But when I watched it it was already a "classic", and like you said back when it was new you couldn't really critique a film. You could complain to your friends a bit, and if they didn't share your opinion you couldn't critique it long. You'd just have to shut up and move on. Now I can say, "Hey, think this movie sucks." Which won't affect Godfather's oversized shadow on film history now, but if enough people can pipe up now it means future films like it will no longer go down as "universally beloved" because, let's be honest, such films never were universally beloved - just the haters couldn't be heard.