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>>tortil+(OP)
I don't trust RT scores, I don't trust IMDB scores and I don't trust Metacritic scores. All can be gamed.

For non-contemporary movies I trust the Sight&Sound poll [1]. Yes, it's mostly artsy-fartsy movies. I love them.

Sure, that can also be gamed, but very much less so: if you are voting you can pick only your top 10 movies ever, and then the next poll is in ten years. It's very difficult to push marketing on it.

I can of course see two points of failure still:

1. Since it's Sight&Sound who picks the voters, they could choose only voters that fits their "ideology". I don't see what this ideology could be. Also, most directors are very well-known, and they wouldn't vote for Marvel Movie #19 since the votes are public [2].

2. A lot of voters could make a deal among themselves to all pick a certain movie. This is in part mitigated by the large numbers of voters, but of course it can happen.

Paul Schrader gave a lot of shit online because the #1 movie in the 2022 edition was "Jeanne Dielman". He sees that as "Distorted Woke Reappraisal" [3].

I think he's full of shit, and the S&S Poll is the most credible snapshot of (art?) movies made every 10 years.

[1] https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-ti...

[2] https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-ti...

[3] https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/paul-schrader-sig...

>>pallas+CH4
To be fair to Schrader, about the S&S poll, BFI did hire someone (a film professor in California) to manage the S&S voting pool, who specifically said in public, very clearly, that he was making it his aim to change the voter list so as to "bring down the canon" and things to that effect. It was heavily implied, if not explicitly being stated, that he was trying to select people on the list specifically because they would choose different films than what had been chosen in the past.

Just for example:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/lousy-listing-on-sight-a... https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2022/12/b9nt3og3xtalyb227h3... https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/jb7gl4mobhpnsn03tc6tek9fzko...

The S&S poll results were very controversial and I don't really want to come across as saying the list was good or bad, or that any film should or should not have been ranked as it was (I'm at a point in my life where I think the whole idea of making lists is flawed and elitist regardless of how the polling is done), but Schrader wasn't the only one complaining about the process. In fact some people were predicting controversy before the list was even revealed because of how the process was unfolding. Having the person who is responsible for the voting pool go into it with the objective of "setting the canon on fire" — rather than obtaining a more voting pool more representative of the cinema community worldwide per se — I think is fairly opening themselves up for criticism.

More broadly, I think even if you accept the S&S poll as fine (which maybe it is), the controversy kind of points to ways in which the process could be gamed. I think that's true regardless of whether you think the poll was better this year or in the past: if it was better this year, it says a lot about how it was implicitly gamed in the past, and if it was problematic this year, I think it says something about how it was gamed that way.

Maybe Goodhart's law is inevitable.

>>derbOa+fq5
>if it was better this year, it says a lot about how it was implicitly gamed in the past, and if it was problematic this year, I think it says something about how it was gamed that way.

I think you're right.

I like the list, but I also don't think that the canon was set on fire.

Yes, there are a couple more women-directed movies near the top. The list is virtually identical to the one from 2012.