Pretend you have a ballot for the 2022 edition of Sight & Sound's top 10 movies of all time list

For The Searchers to succeed on the level of its ambitions, you need spectators that see Wayne as a mythic figure, and I don't know if enough of those people exist to rank it highly in 2022.

Isn't Liberty Valence even more invested in that kind of myth-making--not just Wayne, but also Stewart and Ford--especially coming as it does at the very end of that period in American film? Both films undermine the very thing they eulogize (Liberty Valence even more so, yes), but they seem similar to me.

The Searchers needs Wayne to have some of the heroic aura of his other roles from the start, so there's a tension between "heroism" and "racism"; if viewers start out by saying, "of course he's racist, what do you expect?", they're not going to be on board.
Liberty Valence, as you suggest, says "print the legend" but does the opposite.

I've been expecting Persona to take a tumble at some point, and it has dropped out of the Top 10 since the '72 poll, the first one I was aware of (a few years later). I don't want it to--the excitement of discovering the poll and seeing Persona for the first time soon after are synonymous for me--but I think it will.

yes, also I'm wondering if 8 1/2 will fall out of the top 10 and if Fellini's other films will also fade

I’d be fine with that

Maybe the ILX Film Poll will be a bellwether and Fellini won't make the top 100

Fellini reminds me of my early days of film enthusiasm, and his films are so bound up with my young adult yearnings. He was super straight, and male straightness was a focus of his, but he also I think understood sexuality on a deeper level and made it seem like a kind of mask.

I think Godard was similar in that sense, he is one of the straightest ever directors but was also totally queer

although I think Godard was much less sexual than Fellini

Y’all haven’t seen the recent Mexican take on 8 1/2 yet, have you.

Apocalypse Now is going to continue to outpace The Godfather films in the ranking

It baffles me that Apocalypse Now places ahead--well ahead--of The Conversation.

Just not a player, really:

https://www2.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b6a7ea9b8/sightandsoundpoll2012

(OK, I take that back ... 183rd isn't bad.)

That's what I mean: I could maybe see it in the 60s or 70s, not that far back. And whereas I always though Apocalypse Now would date poorly and The Conversation would look better and better with each passing decade, the opposite has happened in the S&S poll.

The Conversation seems made to order for the internet and issues of privacy.

Man With a Movie Camera got a big boost in 2012 from a dvd release, but I think it will fall, and think Battleship Potemkin and L’Atalante will also fall, but I could be wrong

Who knows where Kurosawa or Antonioni stand at this point?

I think many of the new arrivals this time round will also be tied to new physical media restorations.

I wonder if A Brighter Summer Day will get a significant boost on this theory. #84 in 2012, got a Criterion release in 2015, #12 on the 2019 Shmight and Shmound.

I have to think that the newer wave of critics invited will skew more toward Kiyoshi Kurosawa than Akira Kurosawa.

More Claire Denis than René Clair.

Fantasia (1940)
Ikiru (1952)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Bladerunner (1982)
Spirited Away (2001)
City of God (2002)
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Parasite (2019)

if i voted today:

a brighter summer day
double tide
doomed love
stray dogs
from the clouds to the resistance
the quiet man
fuses
doctor bull
the shop around the corner
le rayon vert
kiki's delivery service

+1 extra, because i cant count

Let's do this:

No guts, no glory. These are my final predictions for @SightSoundmag's @2022SightSound critics' poll pic.twitter.com/ad9xw7HbGi

— Eric Henderson (@ephender) November 23, 2022

If S&S succeed in getting a younger, more female, and less English language-centric electorate this year, these are the movies that stand to benefit/outperform their 2012 placements pic.twitter.com/B8sfz4OUjs

— Eric Henderson (@ephender) November 23, 2022

That Taxi Driver split seems strange

Younger voters also tended to love Salo a lot more than older voters, which tracks

(xpost) Makes sense to me; I think that film most viscerally appeals to you when you're young (too young to be a working film critic, but the memory is still vivid).

Some other observations I made on a different forum ...

I had a feeling my tweet would end up in this thread -- this forum is by far the most comprehensive and thoughtful hub for pre-release speculation. It's, in fact, where I first found those lists breaking down the 2012 vote by gender, age, and nationality.

To that end, I do agree that 2001's performance among female voters in 2012 is a major uphill battle, and because of that wouldn't be at all surprised to see Tokyo Story usurp it if, in fact, we're all in agreement that neither Vertigo or Kane are returning to the #1 spot. Who knows, though. Maybe Kubrick is dearer to younger female critics/cinephiles than earlier generations?

On a similar note, an earlier draft had Jeanne Dielman defying odds and coming out on top, so props to the ballot just above that has it at #2.

The main reason I had for including four '90s films in the top 20 is that if feels as though we're at the point where the official canon of that decade is hardening into accepted fact, and also the point where a certain generation of cinephiles (i.e. my generation) are happy to fall in line to affirm that. Absolutely could see A Brighter Summer Day in that mix as well. The Godard was kind of a wild card, the sort of "cinephilia as its own reward" ouroboros outcome that would push the purported "navel-gazing" that drove Owen Gleiberman nuts 10 years ago to its apotheosis.

I personally hope to not see a major PTA surge despite actually liking a lot of his films. Why? It seems increasingly clear that, while overall he's slipping into the Buñuel no-consensus conundrum, in effect those who rate him highly enough to include him on a S&S ballot are of the strain who regard The Master (which I strongly dislike) above all else.

As to Fellini, I admit again that personal bias did factor in my knocking 8½ well outside of the top 10. The chart clearly shows Fellini waaay out in front to do better this time around. But I will also add my purely speculative hunch that the list of 2012 movies that non-English-speaking critics rated higher than English-speaking critics is still reflective of a high concentration of Eurocentric voters, and that this time around they'll achieve a more truly international collection of ballots. That could still mean a big Fellini boost, but for all we know it could also mean more Apichatpong Weerasethakul, more Ousmene Sembene, more Lino Brocka, Memories of Development, Touki Bouki, The Hour of the Furnaces, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors ...

My 10 for today

My Neighbor Totoro
Pather Panchali
The Green Ray
Sans Soleil
Yi Yi
Come and See
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
A Day in the Country
The Mirror

Really truly would like to find out someday how In the Mood for Love, Sunrise, La régle & fucking Mulholland Dr. ever got within a billion miles of this list. And can we ever let the Tarkovsky fans know he also made this movie Nolstalghia that's 4 to 5 times better than Mirror? https://t.co/42bLUm4rxg

— Brian McInnis (@BrianMcInnis87) November 28, 2022

The discourse later this week is either going to be awful or absent; hard to say which would be worse

Why are we posting some guy's predictions

Nostalghia Critic

Really truly would like to find out why he thinks Sunrise and La régle don't belong on the list.

I'm such a film philistine I was confusing "Sunrise" with "Before Sunrise".

Predicting Histoire(s) du cinéma as the consensus Godard film in 2022 is definitely bold, as is including two Dreyer films in the top 20.

I like it

not sure the poll will be forward-thinking enough to include Jeanne Dielman, Mulholland Drive, and Mirror in the top 10, but would like to see it

With about 18 hours left am pretty sure it’s GOODFELLAS, PULP FICTION, SEVEN SAMURAI, and the entire Eastwood-Leone trilogy in the top six

:) your choices are what I hope other voters have also been thinking of for this poll

the death of cinema pt. 95

Someone claiming to have insider info has leaked what it likely a fake version of the lower third of the top 100. Predictably it includes Parasite, Get Out, and two Miyazaki toons.

66 Touki Bouki
67 The Red Shoes
67=The Gleaners and I
67=Andrei Rublev
67= La Jetee
67=Metropolis
72 Journey to Italy
72=L'Avventura
72=My Neighbour Totoro
75 Spirited Away
75= Sansho the Bailiff
75=Imitation of Life
78 Modern Times
78 =A Matter of Life and Death
78= A Brighter Summer Day
78=Sunset Boulevard
78=Satantango
78=Celine and Julie Go Boating
84Spirit of the Beehive
84=Blue Velvet
84=Histoire(s) du Cinema
84=Pierrot le Fou
88The Shining
88=Chungking Express
90Yi Yi
90=The Leopard
90= Parasite
90=Madame de
90=Ugestu Monogatari
95 The General
95= Get Out
95=Tropical Malady
95=Black Girl
95=Once Upon a Time in the West
95=A Man Escaped

Ope, well, probably not a spoiler as it's likely fake.

Doubt there will be as many ties when there are twice as many voters.

The only post-2011 film that I think has a chance is Parasite.

People dropping fake "intel" and "here's my guesstimate" lists for the Sight & Sound Poll really brings into focus that Film Twitter is somehow even lamer than Music Twitter.

Gregg getting texts from his source during the Oscar special: criterion ed

xp you're just learning this?

xp - I mean, it wouldn't be a bad thing if we only had to deal with list making and predictions for music once a decade, so film twitter has that going for it

The Sight & Sound Directors' Poll results will also be announced tomorrow – 480 directors have voted, including Martin Scorsese, @edgarwright, Joanna Hogg, @RealGDT, Bong Joon Ho, Mia Hansen-Løve, @BarryJenkins and @MichaelMann. Will Tokyo Story keep the crown or be dethroned...? pic.twitter.com/aBCRTQDx1y

— Sight and Sound magazine (@SightSoundmag) November 30, 2022

(In 2012, Michael Mann listed Avatar.)

votes vmic

michael mann otm as usual

Michael Mann

Apocalypse Now
Avatar
Battleship Potemkin
Biutiful
Citizen Kane
Dr. Strangelove
My Darling Clementine
Passion of Joan of Arc
Raging Bull
Wild Bunch, The

Coppola evoked the high-voltage, dark identity quest, journeying into overload; the wildness and nihilism – all captured in operatic and concrete narrative, with the highest degree of difficulty. A masterpiece.

With Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein not only laid the theoretical foundation for much of 20th-century cinematic narrative in 1924, but made one of cinema’s great classics, applying dialectics to the collision of antithetical compositional elements and meaning. Its influence in British, Weimar and American cinema is huge.

Citizen Kane was a watershed: a life’s linear history reassembled into a novelistic narrative by investigators querying its meaning. And done with Wellesian brio, to a grand scale.

Upon the foundation of an entirely invented biosystem, Avatar is a brilliant synthesis of mythic tropes, with debts to Lévi-Strauss and Frazier’s The Golden Bough. It soars because, simply, it stones and transports you.

The whole of Dr. Strangelove is a high-energy third act. On American Cold War policy and political-military culture, it is devastatingly more effective through hilarious ridicule than are any number of cautionary fables.

The profound struggle through the lower depths of Barcelona street life of a human soul, Biutiful is resplendent with grace, pathos and love. Pure poetry.

My Darling Clementine is possibly the finest drama in the western genre, with a stunningly subjective Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda). It achieves near-perfection cinematically in many of its passages via its blocking, shooting and editing.

Human experience conveyed purely from the visualisation of the human face: no one else has composed and realised human beings quite like Dreyer in The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Raging Bull immerses us into the failing and besotted life of LaMotta and his need for and pursuit of redemption. The humanity of the picture is extraordinary, as is Marty’s execution.

The Wild Bunch: no other picture captures the poignancy of ‘the last of’, a fin de siècle sense of the west, of ageing, of the pathos of twilight.

And at number 11: Nakashima Tetsuya’s 2010 Confessions – a Japanese masterpiece. Frighteningly, formally rigidly controlled, it’s unheralded high art.