What makes a movie great?

[Chronos]

Part of what makes a movie great is the same as what makes any story great. Of course, that’s just as hard to pin down, but it’s at least something that most folks (including, I’m sure, the OP) already have some concept of.

The rest is how well it works with the medium. Movies are a visual medium, so a great movie should give us something great to see. This can include, but is not limited to, attractive performers, performers who are able to bring across subtle nuance of facial expression and body language, beautiful scenery, visually-striking patterns, or many other things, but there has to be something to see.

[lissener]

@panache45

If a movie is great, it was probably made between the mid-30s and the late-40s.

That’s pretty close to true. Peak of the bell curve. Some exceptions of course, but certainly in American movies, that was the artistic peak.

[Spoke]

@Roderick_Femm

It should bear repeated viewing, allowing the viewer to discover more in it each time.

That’s the main thing for me. Great movies are the ones I can see again and again and find new things each time. That is not just writing. It can be a subtle gesture by an actor that I hadn’t noticed before, or a symbolic object somewhere in the background of a scene that I don’t notice until the 8th viewing.

One of the things I love about Coen brothers movies is that they are filled with little things like this.

Watching that kind of movie is like wandering into a curio shop that is stuffed to the rafters with fascinating objects. You can’t possibly appreciate (or even notice) them all on a quick walk-through, so you come back again and again.

[zamboniracer]

I think a great movie follows the requirements that Mark Twain set forth in his famous criticism of James Fenimore Cooper here, adopted for movies.

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

2. They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.

5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.

7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt- edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it.

8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,” by either the author or the people in the tale.

9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.

10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.

11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

In addition to these large rules there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:

12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.

14. Eschew surplusage.

15. Not omit necessary details.

16. Avoid slovenliness of form.

17. Use good grammar.

18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.

For movies, they must have these elements plus good cinematography, correography (sp), casting, direction, music and lighting. It can take advantage of the movie form.

Great movies don’t have to follow all these rules, but they sure help imho. I think rule 11 can be be bent in a good movie, in that we like the characters to surprise us in an appropriate case, and the story doesn’t have to necessarily be simple and straightforward, as it can be told in flashback or flashforward.

[Zsofia]

That’s hilarious - I know I’ve read some of Twain on Cooper, but I hadn’t read that list. Recently the boyfriend and I watched that 70 minute critique of exactly what’s wrong with The Phantom Menace, and you could boil it down to pretty much those exact points.

[Horatio_Hellpop]

@Roderick_Femm

Here are some of my off-the-cuff criteria:

It should bear repeated viewing, allowing the viewer to discover more in it each time.

I can think of many movies in the Pantheon of Greatness that I wouldn’t care to see a second time, like Gandhi and Amadeus. I can also think of lots of mid-level movies I watch every time they turn up on cable, like Parenthood and A League of Their Own.