It’s one of the about twelve DVDs I own.
I’ve seen The Lives of Others and I agree with its inclusion.
I think I’d also include Rogue One. It might have been slightly late for this list, but deserves some recognition as the best Star Wars movie since the OT.
I didn’t see Slumdog Millionaire on any of those lists! So I judge them incomplete!
mc
Wow. I counted, and I’ve only seen twelve of the hundred on the critics list. Many of the ones they liked, were the kind of film I pass on as soon as I hear about them, because they seem to me to be so obviously created to make certain kinds of people say “oh my! what an important film!” even though they have no real clue what it’s all about, save that it’s overly dramatic.
Some films that are favorites of mine, didn’t appear on any of the three lists:
Stranger Than Fiction
The Invention of Lying
I found the Hobbit films to be mostly dreadful, especially since I had high hopes that they would be designed to match up with the LOTR films (they weren’t at all), and because they added all manner of subplots in, which in addition to having nothing to do with the book, contradicted the whole spirit of the tales. Most especially the love affair between the Elf and the dwarf.
More than anything else, what will make me do a classic spit take upon seeing a film garner high praise, is when the film utterly fails to accomplish it’s own stated goals. In particular, when there is a plot hole the size of a large nation state, and no one appears to recognize it, or worse, ignores it. Several famously lauded films of the last century worked as examples for this (I can’t recall a good example of such a disaster this century) , such as Thelma and Louise (1991) and Blade Runner (1982). In the first, the director never managed to make a case for why both women would choose suicide at the end (fairly important plot element), and in the latter, the director spent the opening half hour emphasizing how hard it was to tell robot from human, and then for the rest of the picture, insisted on showing the robots eyes as glowing in the dark.
This century, Avatar failed this test to a lesser degree, when Michelle Rodriguez’ character decides to turn traitor for no apparent reason, or at least not a sufficient, believable one.
Did anyone say that they weren’t? I’m not sure of the relevance, here.
I have seen 64 of the 100, including 18 of the top 20 and 30 of the top 35 (so only 34 of the “bottom” 65). I should probably try to see those other five toute de suite, since it’s not that many.
Will be interested to hear what you think!
I think you had a trenchant analysis there of what is behind critics’ choices. I almost think maybe there should be two classes of critics? I think there should be scholars who point to “filmy-film” greatness, but also those with good taste and an engaging writing style that can appreciate solid entertainment.
I would say this list is very much a mix of more esoteric and more mainstream choices.
Spirited Away is definitely *my *favorite Miyazaki film, although my teenage kids disagree with me (I think they like *Totoro *best). Here’s my ranking of the six of his films I’ve seen.
I’m very interested in hearing you expand on this. I think I agree that a lot of people took a different message from it than I did; but I adore this film. I wonder though if by your lights, I took the “true” message or the wrong one?
Seems there are several of us here who like it!
Do you have a link to the thread where you complained about it? Because that is one of my very favorite films. I’m dying to see the director’s cut, although it sucks that the “extra” scenes are not in Blu-ray quality.
I agree that more sci-fi would have been nice. I’d agree with almost all your suggestions except Interstellar; and I’d add *Gravity *(although I think that one is only “great” if you see it in 3D on a big screen), Solaris, and Ex Machina, plus Pitch Black and the first Chris Pine Star Trek. I personally really like *Avatar *and *Prometheus *as well, although I know many genre fans do not. In the low-budget indie SF space, let’s include Primer, Moon, and Code 46. Others I really liked from this era that might or might not count as SF: Contagion, Melancholia, Another Earth, Paprika, Serenity, and the aforementioned Rogue One.
And a few of the better superhero films could be on the list, like the second X-Men movie, Deadpool, and The Amazing Spider-Man (yes, I’m the guy who prefers the first Andrew Garfield outing to all the other Spidey flicks). Oh, and the first *Avengers *and Iron Man films.
The year 2000 is in the 21st century if most people say it is. 
(I always wonder if people who take this line were actually insisting on Dec. 31, 1999 that the truly big celebration was the following year, as far as they were concerned.)
The two movies you listed would not be in my top 100. But they are both very interesting films. Under the Skin contains a scene that as a parent I found appalling (and the editor of Slate walked out as a result of it), but which I have to grant contains an incredibly powerful image that haunted me for a long time afterward.
Talk about an obscure one–I hardly ever find anyone who has seen this, even online. It is so cool! But only for very select tastes.
That’s pretty wild. It’s true though that Oscars don’t line up that well with critical acclaim.
I (sorry) thought *Slumdog *was a great example of how the Oscars often get it wrong.
Stranger Than Fiction is a great one. Have you seen Ruby Sparks? It has a somewhat similar premise (an author dreams up the perfect girlfriend, and she suddenly becomes real–and he finds he can rewrite her when they have conflicts, but then wrestles with the ethical implications of this). I liked it a whole lot.
The Invention of Lying, I wanted to like so much, and I found it delightful at first, but it just didn’t sustain itself all the way through, IMO.
Rogue One was a happy surprise for me as well. The only weakness for me was Felicity Jones – she just didn’t provide her character with much “oomph.” (She’s easy on the eyes, but that’s another story…)
Chronos noted all the the Oscar winners that weren’t on the BCC’s 100, and SlackerInc quoted his list of those winners not on the BBC’s 100. They wondered why Moonlight wasn’t on it. Well, it wasn’t even released at the time the BBC’s 100 was created. Look at the date on it. That was three months before the movie was released.
I’m never surprised by the fact that other people’s lists of what they consider the greatest films don’t match my personal preferences or anybody else’s lists. There are no definitive lists of the best films. If you look at vast numbers of such lists, you can get a reasonable idea of what you might find to be interesting, but that’s the best you can do. You will never agree completely with anyone else or with any attempt to combine the preferences of many other people, regardless of whether they are critics, people in the film business, or ordinary filmgoers. That’s how any art form works.
Among other things, it’s very hard work to see even every film that might eventually show up on someone’s list of the best of the year. I see one or two new films every week. Despite this, I’ve only seen about half of the films in the BBC’s 100.
I’ve seen six of the films on that list.
Quite a bit of navel-gazing, isn’t it?
You’ve missed a lot of great movies!
Good but not great, I’d say - although it was interesting to see De Niro and Cooper as father and son, and not as mentor-and-mentee/frenemies/business rivals, as they’d been in Limitless.
Good catches, and I agree.
Also ought to be on the list: Calvary (2014), starring Brendan Gleeson. A very powerful black comedy about a small-town Irish priest whose life is threatened in the confessional by a member of his flock. Gleeson really earned an Oscar for that one.
Well, there’s mundane stuff like the identity of the creatures at the end. I’m pretty sure that they were meant to be far-future robots, but if that’s what they were supposed to be, then they really shouldn’t have made them look like stereotypical aliens, because that’s what a lot of folks thought they were.
But more importantly: The whole point of David was that he was supposed to be a robot capable of love. And a lot of folks seem to think he was a success: They think that he really did love his mother. But his actual emotions towards her were purely selfish, to a horrifying degree, so much so that he’s willing to (effectively) destroy her soul just to be able to spend one more day with her. Meanwhile, the robots that existed before him, like Gigolo Joe, clearly were already capable of love. It’s not explicit, but I think it’s a safe bet that the replacement of loving robots like Joe with loveless robots like David was actually what led to the apocalypse that killed off all of the humans.
On science fiction movies: At least one of Gravity or The Martian should have been on the list, and which one depends on what you’re looking for. Gravity was more of an arty symbolic movie that happened to be SF, while The Martian was more straight-up. The Avengers also deserved a mention, but I guess they figured they’d filled their superhero quota by including The Dark Knight (although TDK was a very good superhero movie, it was also a very different kind of superhero movie than Avengers).
Counted and I’ve seen 88 on the list. But then again, it’s pretty much my job to see films like many of the ones mentioned.
Looking more closely, I’d say hands down the worst film mentioned, IMHO, is Moulin Rouge! (which I know has its perverse following).
Yes. Spielberg and others on his production team have been quite emphatic about that.
Heh. I named Moulin Rouge in another thread as a movie I hate hate hated. It’s rare that I won’t even finish a movie, but that was one.
I’m not remotely surprised that there are many films on this list that I think are pretty good but not great. First, note that there are 102 films on the list. Second, note that the list is apparently supposed to cover everything from the beginning of 2000 to about halfway through 2016. Toni Erdmann is included which premiered at Cannes on May 14, 2016, while no other film from 2016 is included. Since this is a film critics’ list, I’ll assume that they saw any movies that premiered at film festivals before the date of the list (August 23, 2016). So 102 movies over 16.5 years comes to about 6.18 films per year.
There aren’t 6 or 7 great films per year. I would say that there are 2 or 3 great films per year. That’s enough that over the past century (and there are certainly few great films before a hundred years ago) there have been maybe 250 great movies even if we stretch the term “great” a little. A list this long naturally includes a lot of movies that are pretty good but not great. This list is decent but no more definitive than any other.
Here you go , SlackerInc. Most people did not agree with me.
Looked to me like there were several people who agreed with you about Margaret. Or was it just the same person several times?
Anyway, de gustibus…but I was entranced throughout the film. And, again, I would love to see the extended version if it were the same Blu-ray quality, which it’s not…I may see it anyway at some point though. (Oh, hang on: Amazon’s got it streaming in HD for ten bucks! Woo hoo!) I remember wishing while watching it that it had been made as a premium cable TV show instead ofa movie, because I wanted to spend much more time in that universe and with those characters.
Yeah, Luhrman can make pretty images, but I can’t get through his films.
I thought it was clear that the far-future beings at the end were descendants of AI robots.
The rest of what you wrote about AI, we do see differently. David was obsessed, for sure; but I still felt he was a tragic and sympathetic figure. I never got any impression that he was supposed to be the first ever robot to feel love–just that he happened into a weird snafu that others of his kind never faced (either their siblings would not come back from the brink of death, or they’d actually be returned to the factory and destroyed).
I don’t believe in a soul, or believe that I have to suspend that disbelief for the sake of this movie (like I would if I were watching a movie about ghosts or the afterlife), so I’m not feeling your “destroyed her soul” outrage.
And I actually didn’t specifically see a need for an “apocalypse that destroyed all the humans” (or at least, I didn’t recall it that way). I thought humans were simply superseded by the descendants of AI robots. However, Wikipedia says it was only two thousand years that David waited (rather than the millions I was imagining), so I guess you must be right. However, given the flooding in the beginning and the glaciers along the way, I’m seeing it as most likely some kind of self-caused armageddon. (I actually don’t enjoy thinking about that too hard, because I don’t believe global warming or any climate condition is harsh enough to kill off humans–if we do die out, it will be because of the creation of a world-destroying weapon like a super-plague, an artificial singularity, or–most likely–nano weapons that turn us all into grey goo.)
I’m surprised you are calling *Gravity *an “arty, symbolic movie”. I see it as being in the same class as The Martian in terms of being a near-future, hard-SF NASA story (even more near-future than The Martian), but with a lot more action.
The Dark Knight is another widely praised film that I consider wildly overrated. I actually don’t like any of the Christopher Nolan Batman films, and in fact only his first two films (Following and Memento) would get a strong recommendation from me.
Well, the movie doesn’t use the word “soul”, but they do say that there’s some sort of a pattern of a person imprinted on the Universe that can be used to reconstruct that person… but that having once done so, that pattern is irretrievably lost. That sure quacks like “destroying a soul” to me.
And Gravity is arty and symbolic by comparison to The Martian, though there are plenty of movies that are a lot artier than either. They’re a lot more similar than they are different, and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. In fact, they’re similar enough that you can justify putting only one of them on a list like this, whichever one you consider better, and which one you consider better is going to depend on your tastes.
Huh, I don’t see it that way. I mean, that’s definitely one way you could approach a list like this, for sure. At the extreme end, you try to include one example of every genre and subgenre. But if it were up to me, if I believed there were seven movies about gay Argentinian cattle ranchers in the 1930s that were among the 100 best films of the past 17 years, I’d put them all on the list, even if it meant some major subgenre (action comedy, let’s say) got pushed just barely off.
I’ve seen nine of the movies on that list. While several were enjoyable, and 1 or 2 I’d consider seeing again, none jump out as “classics”.
If “Mulholland Drive”'s appearance at number 1 signifies that it was the consensus #1 among 177 film critics, then we need a better class of film critics.
And yeah, picking “best of the 2000s” in 2016 is like citing something that happened in 2001 as the “crime of the century”.