The Lord of the Lists: February

Welcome to a new year on iCheckMovies! Today we bring you a present of four new lists:

  • In their September 2014 issue, the prestigious Sight & Sound magazine published the results of a poll of the Greatest Documentaries of all time compiled from the top 10 lists of 340 critics and filmmakers. While we already have two very good and diverse documentary lists, the scope and prestige of this poll made adopting Sight and Sound -The Greatest Documentaries of All Time a rather clear choice (adopted from PeacefulAnarchy).
  • About a decade ago TimeOut put out a book with a unique spin on the idea of a Top 1000 film list. Instead of simply listing a 1000 films or grouping them by genre, they focused on film's emotional and thought provoking power, to group films in categories by the feelings they inspire. With a variety of contributors the list does have some strange entries, but on the whole should provide a diverse exploration of cinema. So we've adopted TimeOut's 1000 Films to Change Your Life (adopted from BaalMan).
  • Country lists. Love 'em, hate 'em, we know there are many of you on both sides of the discussion, especially when it comes to lesser known countries. Do they highlight unknown gems, or show that these cinemas are less regarded for a reason? There's probably a bit of both, so we want to be cautious, but when a source is good we feel they're worth adopting. This time around, we've decided to adopt the Film Critics Association's Best Romanian Films which comes from a poll of 40 critics, film historians, and journalists (adopted from mjf314).
  • The final adoption is a list dedicated to one of the most highly regarded filmmakers of all time, Stanley Kubrick. A few years ago Nick Wrigley, film critic and founder of Masters of Cinema, undertook the task of compiling a list of many films that Kubrick praised highly over the years and published it online through Sight & Sound. Of course such a list will always be incomplete, but the insight into the tastes and inspirations of one of history's all time great directors makes it worth checking out. So we've adopted Stanley Kubrick, Cinephile (adopted from Timec).
In addition to the regular updates to the IMDb lists, many lists have had updates over the last few months, particularly the end of year critics and awards lists, so we thought we'd give you a quick rundown:

Finally, back in October when we adopted TSZDT we also decided to demote the Top 500 Horror Movies to personal list status. This was not a decision taken lightly, we think it's important to get things right upon adoption and don't plan on this becoming a regular occurrence. But sometimes a new list covers so much of the same ground as a previously official that having both be official becomes redundant. With the source of this list not being of particularly great quality and over 90% of its films being included in the newly adopted TSZDT list, it seems this lists relevance for most users has gone. For those interested the list will, of course, remain available as a personal list.

Happy checking!

Date
7 February, 2016
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