Opinions on BFI 2022 Sight and Sound Poll

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Also, I just noticed Moonlight and Get Out made it. LOL.
Moonlight's a great ****ing movie, dude.



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
Moonlight's a great ****ing movie, dude.
Dunno, dude. Feels like Happy Together renders it kinda pointless.
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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.



I'm pretty happy with a lot of the list. Though I am a little surprised at some things that dropped off (Bride Of Frankenstein) and some things that have fallen so far (Metropolis, Casablanca).

Where do you think Casablanca was ranked before (because I looked and it jumped up about 20 spots. The opposite of falling)?
The Rules of the Game, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Sunrise all fell out of the top 10. 8 1/2 really dropped out of the top 10.



This time they were right. It's Joe's best.
I think the part that surprised me is, it wasn't on there last time, it doesn't seem readily available, so how did it manage to increase its following by that much in the past decade?


And it looks like Wanda was ~224 last time (for comparison, Woman Under the Influence was ~150, which I reference since I think Cassavetes is the best reference point for that one). fwiw.


I can't remember if you're the person who's the big Edward Yang fan. I was actually a little surprised to see Yi-Yi hang in there from last time and another Yang film get added (Bright Summer Day). Maybe because I've only seen Yi-Yi, his films haven't struck me as being on the tips of a lot critics' tongues for the past 20 years.



I'm not one to complain about stuff being "woke", but this list has definitely been heavily influenced by a lot of the modern discourse around certain films. Obviously, that's natural and maybe I'm going to sound like a pretentious kn*b but I find it slightly odd how stuff like Get Out and Moonlight go so high as if there haven't been important films with similar themes before. People acted like Get Out was revolutionary and I enjoyed it, but this always perplexed me slightly.

Main positive is this will finally give me the push to watch Jeanne Dielman.

@Yoda How about we get rid of the other Sight & Sound list and the new critics/directors list on the site. Not as a point of urgency, but I think they'd make two good additions to the Lists section.

83/100 seen on the Critics list.
78/100 seen on the Directors list.
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Céline and Julie Go Boating worth a watch? never heard of that one
Yes, go see it on the whim. I was stuck saying it was the best film I saw all year(I love this one but needed it to change) until I saw one other Rivette film, La Dolce Vita and Nashville. It has got a story that no normal movie ever has.



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
I'm not one to complain about stuff being "woke", but this list has definitely been heavily influenced by a lot of the modern discourse around certain films. Obviously, that's natural and maybe I'm going to sound like a pretentious kn*b but I find it slightly odd how stuff like Get Out and Moonlight go so high as if there haven't been important films with similar themes before.
Word. I think it perfectly shows that many film critics are normies, too. It really feels like they felt they have to include a female-directed film, a Black film, or even a film on colonialism on their list. Otherwise, I have absolutely no idea how anybody with a grain of good taste would put something like Moonlight on their list.

It's an aggregated list of 1600-something people. I think it very well shows the current state of cinephilic thought in the Western world. Killer of Sheep at #44. LOL. Freakin' Piano. A Douglas Sirk film (why this one and not the arguably more popular All That Heaven Allows?). Also, I thought it was one per director but it isn't. This makes some omissions even more painful.

It's still kinda good because the good movies on it are REALLY good. Of course, they could do better, but hell, it's still better than MoFo's Top 100, I guess!

Anyway, it's only 100 films. Individual lists will be more interesting.



But it is. You just have to know where to look.

Yeah, I love Edward Yang but I prefer The Terrorizers to Yi Yi.

"You just have to know where to look," implies "not readily available," at least, to the general public.



I owe Moonlight a rewatch because I didn't really click with it, found Beale Street intriguing, but a little too distant or something, but really clicked with The Underground Railroad, so I'm not giving the same side-eye to Moonlight you two are. Parasite and the ascent of Goodfellas (I'm feeling you there @Wooley) kind of get to me more. Granted, wrt Parasite, I'm not a huge fan of North by Northwest either, so there might be a Hitchcockian pattern there for me.


I'm also noticing the recent movies are the recent 2010's and not even the early 2010's which makes the sense recency bias in this list feel pronounced (is there anything from 2008-2015?)



Word. I think it perfectly shows that many film critics are normies, too. It really feels like they felt they have to include a female-directed film, a Black film, or even a film on colonialism on their list. Otherwise, I have absolutely no idea how anybody with a grain of good taste would put something like Moonlight on their list.

It's an aggregated list of 1600-something people. I think it very well shows the current state of cinephilic thought in the Western world. Killer of Sheep at #44. LOL. Freakin' Piano. A Douglas Sirk film (why this one and not the arguably more popular All That Heaven Allows?). Also, I thought it was one per director but it isn't. This makes some omissions even more painful.

It's still kinda good because the good movies on it are REALLY good. Of course, they could do better, but hell, it's still better than MoFo's Top 100, I guess!

Anyway, it's only 100 films. Individual lists will be more interesting.




I think every list I have seen included a female director, was it an enforced policy or an involuntary thing that caught on? Either way it's no surprise that because of the smaller pool to choose from of quality films from female directors (because of the sheer size of the pool) that something like Jeanne Dielman has found it all the way to the top.

Written on the Wind is my favourite Douglas Sirk.

Westerns really took a beating and I can't believe Portrait of a Lady on Fire is number 30 on the critics list. A lot of these films are really popular on stuff like Twitter/Letterboxd but I didn't really expect to see them do so well here.

The directors list is more my cup of tea anyway and like you said I much prefer to spend hours trawling through the individual lists than looking at the actual top 100.



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
Yeah, throwing away old masterpieces to add modern filth is not a new thing. That book called 1001 Movies You Have to See Before You Die does the same thing every year.



Victim of The Night
Where do you think Casablanca was ranked before (because I looked and it jumped up about 20 spots. The opposite of falling)?
The Rules of the Game, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Sunrise all fell out of the top 10. 8 1/2 really dropped out of the top 10.
You're right, I think I'm conflating it with old AFI lists where it remains in the top 3 American films ever made way ahead of many films on the Sight & Sound (literally 89+ spots ahead of Blade Runner, Do The Right Thing, and Goodfellas).



Victim of The Night
I gotta say that my take on the female directors is a lot different from what I'm seeing here.
My take is that now that we are actually considering films by female directors seriously for the first time, and I feel that that is true, we are finding that many of them should always have been in the canon.
I mean, not to beat a dead horse, but when I saw Cleo I just thought, "Oh, this is one of the best movies I've ever seen and if this is the only film this Agnes Varda person ever made (because I knew nothing about her since we don't talk about female directors) she should at least be considered one of the greatest one-hit wonders of all time."
I mean, it is not lost on me that I never, ever saw or heard anyone talking about this film for years and years and now that it has seen the light of day and gotten a little shine, people all over are acknowledging its greatness.
As for Black filmmakers, I think some of the same is true. Where was Black Girl all my life? After years of reading books about film and being on numerous film forums, I had never even heard anyone mention it when it popped up out of nowhere streaming (I had never seen it streaming anywhere before until 3 years ago either). I took a flier on it and thought, "Oh, this is like some kind of masterpiece, why has no one been talking about this film?" It's a matter of exposure more than anything else.



Varda and Akerman have been well known and discussed forever and would especially have been among the "programmers, curators, archivists and academics" that create these lists. It seems like there is a conscious decision to push more diverse demographics up to be more inclusive (or is it to not seem exclusive?) and that's fine. It's good really. In most cases at least, some picks are a bit odd. But Jeanne Dielman's jump to #1 now that's gotta be some collusion am I right? And I like the film and all of what I've seen from the director. Conspiracy.
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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."



Sorry if I'm rude but I'm right
Yeah, it's the best one. It has some middling films, too. But at least most of them are far away from the top.
My take is that now that we are actually considering films by female directors seriously for the first time, and I feel that that is true, we are finding that many of them should always have been in the canon.
Nobody gives a hoot. If the film is good, it will find its place there. Unless it's obscure. Cleo isn't. It's Film 101. I really don't know how you could have never heard about it before. I presume you never heard of Chabrol, Gilles, Marker, or Rivette either? It's not like before our times somebody watched a film like Cleo and thought "Wow, this film is a masterpiece but it was directed by a woman and women are stupid and I won't include it on my list". No. The thing is, nowadays "directed by a woman" became a freakin' catchphrase. So of course people are bound to look for movies using this catchphrase and then overrate films based on that catchphrase. It's a process similar to overhyping films like Parasite (incidentally, also featured on the list) or Everything Everywhere All at Once. It's marketing or a form of mass hallucination.

and now that it has seen the light of day and gotten a little shine, people all over are acknowledging its greatness
You're now behaving as if Cleo was some film considered lost until 2020, or something. While it's a pretty basic introductory French cinema movie. Sure, maybe a lot of the "critics" indeed watched it for the first time. And I think it was one of the few things they watched.

But yeah, you are kind of right. It's true that many people decided that some of these films directed by women should have always been in the canon. And so they are now pushing them there. Cleo is a great film but so are many other French films from the 60s.

African Cinema 101. Also very overrated because, you know, bad Frenchies and colonialism and stuff. But hey, at least it's KINDA good.

After years of reading books about film and being on numerous film forums, I had never even heard anyone mention it when it popped up out of nowhere streaming
Happens. But I'm surprised you've never even heard about it. It's really one of the most well-regarded films from Africa. The question is how many films from Africa have you seen mentioned anywhere? Maybe that's where the problem lies. Besides, it's completely alright to leave off the entire continent of Africa on a list like that. I mean, African cinema was never as good as Asian or European cinema.

"Oh, this is like some kind of masterpiece, why has no one been talking about this film?" It's a matter of exposure more than anything else.
I can say the same about countless films. 99% of them are made by men. So, why has nobody been talking about them?