Movies That Are Fun for Those of All IQs
Submitted by AJDaGreat on Fri, 07/09/2004 - 12:09
Tags:
- All About Eve (54 / 91)
- The Apartment (81 / 77)
- Apocalypse Now (35 / 38)
- Blade Runner (92 / 46)
- Casablanca (7 / 32)
- Chinatown (48 / 54)
- Citizen Kane (11 / 1)
- City Lights (91 / 26)
- A Clockwork Orange (75 / 64)
- Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (15 / 25)
- The General (95 / 24)
- The Godfather (1 / 7)
- The Godfather, Part II (4 / 14)
- Goodfellas (29 / 94)
- It's a Wonderful Life (26 / 51)
- Lawrence of Arabia (23 / 21)
- M (50 / 53)
- Metropolis (86 / 78)
- Modern Times (74 / 63)
- North by Northwest (21 / 57)
- Once Upon a Time in the West (32 / 81)
- Psycho (24 / 36)
- Raging Bull (59 / 19)
- Ran (78 / 80)
- Rashomon (57 / 12)
- Rear Window (14 / 48)
- The Seven Samurai (5 / 6)
- The Seventh Seal (97 / 39)
- Singin' in the Rain (47 / 9)
- Some Like It Hot (44 / 45)
- Sunset Boulevard (31 / 29)
- Taxi Driver (40 / 23)
- The Third Man (39 / 22)
- Touch of Evil (70 / 20)
- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (66 / 96)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (72 / 4)
- Vertigo (33 / 2)
- The Wizard of Oz (61 / 67)
Lately I've been obsessed with www.theyshootpictures.com's list of the 1000 most acclaimed films in ranking order. This is decided by critics, many of them foreign and / or pretentious. Some of them are absolutely inaccessible to Joe Moviegoer.
I decided it would be an interesting experiment to compare the top 100 films on this list to the top 100 films rated on the IMDB, therefore coming up with a list of films that are not only critically acclaimed but are also accessible to the average modern-day movie lover.
So here it is, I proudly present a list of acclaimed and accessible movies. In parentheses, I have listed first the ranking on the IMDB list and second the ranking on the TSP list. For example, "Citizen Kane" ranks as #1 on the TSP list and #11 on the IMDB list.
The list is biased towards English-language films, although two great foreign directors - Akira Kurosawa and Fritz Lang - both scored multiple hits here. Sergio Leone has one as well. These three are all comparatively American filmmakers, in that they use a fairly straightforward narrative and move the plot along relatively quickly (at least compared to Ozu). Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" seems like an anomaly here, but perhaps it is just that good of an abstract film.
The difference between the numbers is sometimes very telling. Look at "2001" for example; it is ranked far higher on the TSP list because it is not particularly accessible, but it's just so great that IMDB users voted it to #72. On the other side of the coin is a film like "Goodfellas", which seems to be more beloved by IMDB users and slightly less beloved by critics. The numbers for "Singin' in the Rain" surprised me though; I thought it was more entertaining than artistically brilliant, but its TSP ranking is far higher than its IMDB number. Strangely enough, Billy Wilder has three films here, and for all three films, the two numbers are fairly close to each other. I guess Wilder is just a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of director.
The movie with the highest combined ranking is "The Godfather." Indeed, if you are looking for a film that is both wildly acclaimed and wildly popular, it would be hard to go wrong with "The Godfather."
Oh, and the IMDB list changes all the time. This is from what it looked like on 7/8/2004.
P.S. Note that plenty of films on the IMDB list fell just short of the TSP's top 100 (e.g., On the Waterfront, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, Double Indemnity...) and plenty of films on the TSP list fell just short of the IMDB's top 100 (e.g., Notorious, The Bicycle Thief, Once Upon a Time in America, The Searchers, The Night of the Hunter...). This list is by no means intended to be a definitive list of films that are both acclaimed and accessible.