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

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.

Dang, he's a good writer.

Avatar stays the course in that They Shoot Pictures Don't They Top 1000. People fuckin love Avatar

https://www.newcityfilm.com/2022/09/06/counting-down-cinema-as-a-million-reasons/

2012 saw the addition of “The Searchers”; Dziga-Vertov’s free-associative editing delirium of “Man With A Movie Camera” and the return of “The Passion of Joan Of Arc.” “Battleship Potemkin” and “Singin’ in the Rain” dropped off and “Vertigo” made its hypnotized way to the top of the list. A solid list to muse and sleep upon.

As one should, let’s default to Jean Renoir. Renoir’s character says at the violent climax of “The Rules of the Game,” “The really terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons.” The figures march back into the chateau, back into history, back into the then-present moment, before France was invaded by Germany, and during the War, the laboratory where “Rules of the Game” was stored was bombed by air and destroyed. The shadows lengthen, sticks, sad shuffling Giacometti-like figures, and darkness comes. (As does World War II, presaged in most every movement and moment of the movie.)

The 2022 provocations of note will be from filmmakers whose passions, whether evident in their own work, are reflected in what elevates their pom-poms. I look at a list of titles that could be on a shorter, then shorter, then elemental list of ten, and my instincts recoil from the pedagogic and reach instead for instants that rush to mind, lyrical images or immaculate choreography (of camera or of dance) or brilliantly offhand line deliveries. Here’s where I’ve cut a four-thousand-word rough draft that reads like a book proposal of a roster of best moments, best instants, even, in the movies I treasure. Another time!

However many respondents will bristle within the pages after pages of online lists (although reasonably fat and sometimes sassy, the print edition of Sight and Sound would hardly have room for all), it’s the chatter and static that rubs one list against another, mighty montage, handy bricolage, a chaos unified only by a thousand bundles of urges crushed together. It’s gonna be bigger than any hundred lists of a thousand any old (or spanking new) observer might compile.

That’s how we get dreamy free-association more like the memory of movies than the pattering of rules and disputation of criteria. The great wilderness of lists will prompt the discussion that matters, whether in the mind or in the belly. Everyone has his reasons.

So basically like an ILX poll, then.

I like to Setsuko Hara's in heaven, giving us her "Fuck yourselves to hell" smile.

I'm glad you posted that 'leaked' list, even if it isn't real, it's a reminder to me not to expect too much

A good posture to assume, no doubt

it is time for Airplane! to be in the #1 spot

I'm going to guess... the intel was a lie and Vertigo gets number 1.

Starting to lean toward the notion that it is, in fact, Tokyo Story.

#1 isn't so interesting now that the Kane streak has been ended; there's still only 4, maybe 5 viable candidates for the #1 slot anyway

Out of the hundreds of thousands of films in film history, I hope no film from the last 5 years is included in the top 100

7pm GMT btw

i hope the current editorial direction of the magazine is not reflected in the results

How could they not be?

isn't the editorial direction of Sight & Sound basically just "ok, what's playing at the BFI this month?"

seems to be getting more like empire

Pretty sure Empire has not nor ever will they have a monthly Black film section, though I don't know, I never pick it up off the newsstand.

seems to be getting more like empire

The new(ish) editor has definitely tried to refresh the mag a bit - more listicles, flashier design - but it still doesn't feel very Emapish to me, and yes, it's still the mainstream film mag most likely to have non-mainstream film coverage. The content had to become more diverse, younger, and possibly more sympathetic to eg Marvel movies than under previous regimes.

Agree w/ Daniel that S&S can feel like a promotional arm of the BFI - because it is! But again, the magazine wouldn't survive in any physical form without BFi money behind it. RIP Film Comment (which in its last few years definitely sat somewhere between Empire and S&S in terms of content, accessibility, etc).

As an old fart I would like to see more writing about 'old' movies but that's an increasingly niche part of film criticism/engagement, I know, I know.

The full-length reviews of pretty much anything that gets a cinema release in the UK remains a very handy resource, by far the best of its kind.

Looking forward to seeing the new top 250 this evening. From the 2012 list, I still have 3 films left to view for the first time - The Traveling Players, City of Sadness, Chelsea Girls.