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Doubling the Canon 2023 Nominations
Favs/dislikes: 6:0. Voting thread located here: https://forum.icmforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=806917#p806917 -
Crave's Best Political Movies
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. A nation divided. A war of ideals. It sounds a lot like reality and it sounds a lot like a movie. Indeed, the history of cinema is fertile with motion pictures with political storylines and lofty social ambitions. Ever since we discovered that the moving image has a distinct power over the masses, artists and governments have been using films to convey their message… for better and often for worse. Compiling a list of the best political movies in history is a daunting task. We had to allow for films that espouse ideas and ideals that don’t necessarily match our own. We had to consider a film’s quality as a political document and/or statement as a separate entity from its overall quality (the so-called “best movie ever made” only ranks at #49 on this list for that very reason). And we had to cast a wide net, so this Big List was voted upon and written by a half dozen film critics: Crave‘s William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold, The Wrap‘s Alonso Duralde, Linoleum Knife‘s Dave White, Blumhouse‘s Alyse Wax and Collider‘s Brian Formo. They each nominated 50 films, ranked from #1-50, and we tabulated those votes to come up with the following Top 50 Best Political Movies Ever. (Stick around at the end, when we’ll reveal our 50 runners-up as well.) -
Paste's the 100 Best Sci-fi Movies of All Time
Favs/dislikes: 13:0. Much like its close genre cousin (nephew/niece?) the superhero film, the potential of cinematic science fiction exploded in the latter part of the 20th century thanks to technological advances that transformed special effects. Unlike superhero films, which were so stunted for so long that almost every new one makes it onto our updated 100 Best Superhero Films of All Time list, science fiction proved fertile ground for filmmakers before the likes of Industrial Light & Magic supercharged a director’s ability to exceed our imagination. Thus, this list, while filled with films from the ’80s onward, has its fair share of older films. Before we dive into it, though, let’s discuss a few things this list will not have (or at least, not have many of). Superhero films are for the most part absent. Though so many superhero stories involve the stuff of science fiction—aliens, high-tech and strange worlds—there are plenty of great sci-fi movies to include on this list without bumping 20 of them off for DC and the MCU. (We’ve made an exception for one entry because the space opera underpinnings were too strong to ignore.) We’ve also left off, for the most part, the traditional giant monster/kaiju movie for the same reason. If you want a nice roundup of Godzilla’s greatest hits, check out our own Jim Vorel’s ranking of Godzilla’s cinematic oeuvre. (For the real kaiju rank-o-phile, Jim has also taken the measure of every Godzilla monster.) Finally, joining superheroes and kaiju on the sidelines, are the post-apocalyptic (and a few mid-apocalyptic) films. Though, again, there are a few exceptions, for the most part you will not find Mad Max here, or Eli, or even that guy who is Legend. (I see you frowning—“But will there be dystopias,” you ask? Hell yeah, we got dystopias.) -
Panunzio's Top Films
Favs/dislikes: 0:0. -
Time Out's 50 Best Films Set in Paris
Favs/dislikes: 15:0. Romance blooms on a belle époque street corner. A dark-eyed girl in Montmartre runs her hand through a bag of dried beans. In the suburbs, Arabs square up to skinheads. Nicotine-stained tales of sexual misadventure unfold in beds all over the city, while gangsters commit crimes and cartoon rats cook up a storm. Paris, which boasts a higher concentration of picture houses than any other city, has been the inspiration and the backdrop for countless films. Below, we present 50 of the best, organised by era. Be they Nouvelle Vague masterpieces or populist comedies, the capital is always in the starring role... -Time Out Paris This list is organized chronologically. -
Netflix Original Films
Favs/dislikes: 31:0. A list of all original feature films produced and/or distributed by Netflix. -
Paste's 100 Best Martial Arts Movies of All Time
Favs/dislikes: 10:0. List added January 2015 and updated in November 2022 Fighting, whether sanctioned or no-holds-barred, is without a doubt the oldest form of competition that mankind has ever engaged in. At times, it has been a necessary tool of survival—kill or be killed—and that proved an extremely effective motivation and crucible for enhancing mankind’s fighting prowess. Technology rapidly came into play and has been seen out to its inevitable conclusion, which removes man from the equation almost entirely. Today, robotic drones are poised to do much of our fighting for us—whether we ultimately end up in a Robot Jox scenario where wars are decided by giant mech battles is a valid (and awesome) question. And yet, despite all of our sophistication and technology, we still fight by hand as well. Some is driven by necessity. Others fight professionally, and have only continued to expand the complete picture of what a fighter is. Look at the exponential growth in sophistication from the early days of mixed martial arts to how the sport has become in 2015, going from big guys winging punches at one another to a beautiful, scientific system of mixed grappling and striking styles. The audience has never been bigger, because on some level, we love fighting, if only because it reminds us of our most primal roots that have long been shelved and put aside by civilization. And nowhere is appreciation for the beauty of fighting more apparent than in the wide, storied genre of martial arts cinema. Violence is the selling point of these films, but seeing as that violence is achieved through trickery, stunt work and movie magic, it’s not truly the audience’s bloodlust that drives the industry. It’s an appreciation for the beauty of violence, a reminder of the exceptional abilities derived through training and a celebration of ancient, classical storytelling, in the vein of “Avenge me!” No genre reveres classic themes as this one does, because at their root they speak to us like cinematic comfort food, and they provide excuses for what people have really wanted to see all along: The action. And so, let us celebrate the martial arts genre from its top to its bottom, old and new. Epic and modest. Comedic and tragic. Grave and absurd, all represented in equal measure. These films contain many wondrous sights: Monks training their bodies to repel bullets. Men with prosthetic iron hands shooting poison darts. Flying heads. Incredibly silly ninja costumes. It’s all here. But please note, don’t look for Seven Samurai, Yojimbo or The Sword of Doom here. Although they’re all great films, we wanted this list to focus squarely on our conception of “martial arts cinema,” which has little in common with a great samurai drama by Akira Kurosawa. These films are action-packed fighting spectacles, but above all, they’re just plain fun. -
Mark Cousin's The Story of Film: A New Generation
Favs/dislikes: 6:0. Film critic and documentarian Mark Cousins returns to his long running Story of Film project with a new chapter dedicated to the cinematic innovators of the 21st Century. Drawing on a broad range of examples from around the world and across every genre, he expertly interrogates key sequences to reveal the new ideas which are extending the language of cinema. From Frozen to Cemetery of Splendour, The Act of Killing to Lover’s Rock, cinema in the digital age proves to be as valued and versatile as it’s ever been and a welcome return to the big screen. -
Sight & Sound's 101 Hidden Gems
Favs/dislikes: 4:0. 'One vote wonders from Sight and Sound's 'Greatest Films of All Time' poll. The films are presented chronologically. Some films are still to be added to IMDB: 1. Le Chat Qui Joue (1897) 36. 6 et 12 (1968) 51. Mouth to Mouth (1975) 52. Gerdy, the Wicked Witch (1976) 91. Qabyo 2 (2003) 101. The Names Have Changed, Including My Own and Truths Have Been Altered (2019) -
Paste's 100 Best French Films of All Time
Favs/dislikes: 7:0. French language cinema covers vast swathes of history, geography and genre. The best French movies aren’t simply the product of a French person working strictly with a French team, they represent film as entelechy—a century of directors rooting around within the source code of this particular form of storytelling, pushing it into realms equally transcendent and horrifying. For its own sake. Because it is right to do so. If there is anything unifying the films in the following list—besides the French language—it might be that there exists a current of fundamental innovation throughout the many years surveyed. Auteurist visions care of Belgium, Greece, Poland, Denmark, Taiwan, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Senegal course through and inform the prelapsarian innards of French cinema, transforming the country into a hub for international film. This is foundational stuff. With the following we’re trying to provide a primer on French language film from an English-speaking perspective, exploring the schools of thought and exotic taxonomies that have defined what French filmmaking has been since George Méliès first set a moon cackling like a creep in 1902, and what it can be, skin-flaying, cannibalistic Grand Guignol nightmares and all. The Nouvelle Vague—both those of the Left Bank (Agnès Varda, her husband Jacques Demy, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker) and the Cahiers du cinéma crew (Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol)—the erotic French thriller, the mind-bending (and bowel-emptying) horror of the New French Extremity, the colorful musical, the social farce, the sprawling crime film, the experimental vérité, the personal and unflinching documentaries: Even as so many films on this list have irrevocably altered our ideas of what filmmaking can mean, what it can do, so do they exist on the fringes, at the limits, willing to test the boundaries of taste, logic and (in the case of Chantal Akerman) time in order to question and then pull apart the systems and expectations that stagnate art and oppress artists. -
Rateyourmusic.com 250 Surrealist Films
Favs/dislikes: 20:0. Top 250 surrealist films of all time according to members of Rateyourmusic.com -
Paste's Greatest Christmas Movies of All Time
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. While any list of favorites or “best” contain a strong dose of subjectivity, a list of the Best Christmas Movies of All Time is even less constrained by questions of cinematic quality and other, objective criteria. After all, if your holiday comfort food is Last Christmas or Christmas with the Kranks, who are we to judge? Still, that doesn’t mean some films haven’t distinguished themselves over time (and, often, through critical consensus) as go-to holiday fare, and while we won’t judge you, we will absolutely judge—or at least rank—those. Publishes November 2022 -
Paste's 100 Best Western Movies of All Time
Favs/dislikes: 7:0. List published in June 2016 Is the Western the most American of movie genres? You can make an argument for the Western film’s internationality on the names of the directors who have contributed to its iconography: You have your John Fords and your Anthony Manns, your Sam Peckinpahs and your Samuel Fullers, but over in Europe you also have filmmakers like Sergio Leone, Enzo G. Castellari and Sergio Corbucci, among many, many others, as authors of Western offshoots that influence filmmakers even today. (And of course there are those great entries in the Western canon that were lifted wholesale from Akira Kurosawa’s filmography.) Hell, let’s flash from the Western’s glory days to the last decade, where Kim Jee-woon and Takashi Miike have put their individual stamps on its tropes and motifs. For these reasons, there’s certainly an argument to made that the Western is truly “universal.” But no matter where Western movies are made, no matter what subgenre classifications they are individually accorded, and no matter who makes them, the films always engage with symbols, eras and images that are quintessentially “American.” The Western is the domain of the cowboy, the solitary hero. It’s a place where law and chaos are ever in conflict with one another and where the difference between survival and death usually comes down to who is faster on the draw. It’s a testament to the rich, awesome power of the Western as a narrative mode that filmmakers from around the planet have found stories worth telling within its purview, but even the Italian maestros simply added their own unique (and significant) flourishes to a cinematic tradition that is American in its DNA. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that they made the Western their own. Spaghetti Westerns are, after all, a cousin to American Westerns in terms of style, content, themes and morality. The Italian Westerns are literally gritty where American Westerns are polished and clean; they deal in ambiguity instead of black and white. The average Spaghetti Western hero looks like a total bastard next to the clean-cut heroes of American Westerns, who uphold all of the best and most commonly accepted standards of heroism as we know them. Who would you rather save the day for you? Will Kane, or the man with no name? There’s a divide separating the Westerns made by Europeans and those shot by Americans, but if you can sort these movies out by their varying approaches, you can’t keep them all from standing under one umbrella. (A better point of debate: Did the Spaghetti Western become a thing in 1958 or 1964?) Like the wide and sprawling landscapes that are so much a part of the Western’s character as a genre, the Western itself is a big, open canvas for storytelling of all stripes. With that in mind, we here at Paste set about collecting Westerns from all over the map and across the ages to assemble our picks for the 100 best Western films of all time. —Andy Crump -
Platino Awards - Best Film
Favs/dislikes: 2:0. known in Spanish as 'los Premios Platino del Cine Iberoamericano', the Platino award is is given annually to the best Ibero-American film. Beginning in 2013, this award can be granted to films from Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries in South and Central America, the Caribbean, and the Iberian peninsula. -
Paste's 100 Greatest War Movies
Favs/dislikes: 8:0. War. What is it good for? Well, if nothing else, then a tidy template for cinema: conflict, clear protagonists and antagonists, heightened emotions, and a generally unpredictable, lawless atmosphere which—as per the western—has since the dawn of cinema offered an elastic dramatic environment in which filmmakers can explore men at both their best and worst. And make no mistake, the war movie is almost always about men. It’s the most masculine of genres, the fact that armies have throughout history often been almost exclusively male seeing to it that men almost always dominate these things. It’s a genre that emphasizes action and existential angst. It’s also a malleable genre, and one that could broadly include all manner of films that we ultimately ruled out of the running in this list. With this top 100, we’ve made the decision to include only movies whose wars are based on historical conflicts, so none of the likes of Edge of Tomorrow or Starship Troopers. We’ve picked films that deal with soldiers, soldiering and warfare directly, meaning wartime movies set primarily away from conflict, often told largely or exclusively from the civilian perspective—a category which includes such classics as The Cranes Are Flying and Hope & Glory, Grave of the Fireflies and Forbidden Games—didn’t make the cut. Post-war dramas, like Ashes and Diamonds and Germany, Year Zero, as well as films that go to war for only a fraction of the running time, such as From Here to Eternity and Born on the Fourth of July, were also excluded. Some tough choices were made on what actually constituted a “war movie.” Resistance dramas feature in this list, but Casablanca doesn’t appear. Likewise Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped and Sidney Lumet’s The Hill. It was decided ultimately that the war was too much a peripheral element in these films. On the other hand, while both western The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and biopic The Imitation Game feature war prominently, they, like Casablanca (a romance with noir and thriller elements) plus A Man Escaped and The Hill (both prison movies), belong more obviously to other genres. We’ve also decided not to include movies which focus on the Holocaust here; those are set to appear in another feature entirely. Regarding the films that do feature here: our 100 hail from all over the world. These films were released as recently as last year and as far back as 1930. They range from comical to harrowing, action-packed to quietly introspective, proudly gung-ho to deeply anti-war. They are a diverse set of movies; they are also worthy of being called the 100 greatest war movies ever made. Published May 2017 -
Paste's 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time
Favs/dislikes: 11:0. This list has been a long time coming for Paste. We are fortunate—some would say “cool enough”—to have quite a lot of genre expertise to call upon when it comes to horror in particular. Several Paste staff writers and editors are lifelong horror geeks, and there’s also a strong sentiment toward the macabre among several of our more prolific contributing writers. Case in point: We have so many writers focused on horror that we’ve produced huge lists of the 70 best horror films on Netflix, or the 100 best horror films on Shudder, both within the last year. We’ve kept you up to date with the 10 best horror movies of 2017 so far. We’ve even given you the likes of the 50 best zombie movies of all time, and the 100 best vampire movies of all time, if you can believe that. And yet, somehow, despite all that expertise, we’ve never put together a definitive ranking of the best horror films of all time. That ends now, with the list below: a practical, must-see guide through the history of the horror genre. There are classic films on this list, of course. There are also likely a handful of independent features that will be unknown to all but the most dedicated horror hounds. There are foreign films from around the globe, entries that range from 1922 to 2017. In some cases, you will likely be shocked by films that are missing. In others, you’ll find yourself surprised to see us going to bat for films that don’t deserve the derision they’ve received. One thing is for certain: With all the films that were nominated, we could easily have made this list 200 entries long. Horror cinema speaks toward the dark side in all of us, allowing us to confront the most frightening, primal forces we struggle with every day—death, and human malevolence—in a way that is actually constructive in strengthening the psyche. In the oddest of ways, horror movies help us overcome our own fears. Last updated October 2022 -
San Sebastián Film Festival: "Golden Shell"
Favs/dislikes: 17:0. The highest prize awarded at the San Sebastián Film Festival. -
Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film
Favs/dislikes: 26:0. In October 2013, the British Film Institute unveiled an exhibition chronicling the history of dark and macabre films. In an ambitious project, the BFI unveiled a collection of a large number of films spanning four categories, bringing these films to British cinemas over a four month period. Films are arranged chronologically by theme. The Four Parts: - Monstrous (1-26) - The Dark Arts (27-48) - Haunted (49-71) - Love is a Devil (72-99) Although this exhibition includes a large number of plays, professional talks, documentaries, television series' and shorts, this list contains only the feature films presented in the exhibition. -
TimeOut's 100 Best Feminist Films of All Time
Favs/dislikes: 10:0. Let’s hope the seismic waves triggered by #MeToo and #TimesUp result in serious, lasting change—the kind that marks one generation from the next. In the meantime, we're inspired. We're furious. And we want to watch the best feminist movies of all time. From Oscar-winning classics like ‘Norma Rae’ and ‘Thelma & Louise’ to ferocious action movies like ‘Foxy Brown’ and ‘Kill Bill’, we've packed decades of empowerment into our list, along with the landmark accomplishments of women directors, women screenwriters and women documentarians. A promise: If you watch all of these films—and take your time, because they're all worth savouring—you'll become a better person, more aware of the distance we've come and how far we still have to go. List published March 2018 -
Panunzio's 500 under 400
Favs/dislikes: 0:0. -
Time Out's 50 Best Gangster Movies of All Time
Favs/dislikes: 6:0. Call it an offer you can't refuse, a Sicilian message or a pair of cement shoes: The gangster film has an iron-clad lock on the hearts of movie lovers. Some of Hollywood's finest exports are crime sagas, and the indie and foreign-film worlds have followed suit with classics of their own. Gritty or romantic, coolly silent or loaded with tough talk, these movies are five-course feasts, heavy on the red sauce—and make plenty of room for the most notorious mobsters from Chicago, like Al Capone, who appears on our list more than once. If we've forgotten a movie in our countdown, let us know (but we have the corner table, so we'll see you coming). List published March 2015 -
Canada's Top Ten Annual Lists
Favs/dislikes: 1:0. Canada's Top Ten is an annual honour, compiled by the Toronto International Film Festival and announced in December each year to identify and promote the year's best Canadian films. The list was first introduced in 2001 as an initiative to help publicize Canadian films. The list is determined by tabulating votes from film festival programmers and film critics across Canada. Films must have premiered, either in general theatrical release or on the film festival circuit, within the calendar year; although TIFF organizes the vote, films do not have to have been screened specifically at TIFF to be eligible. -
Paste's 100 Best Superhero Movies of All Time
Favs/dislikes: 7:2. Published in January 2017 (updated June 2023) Two things quickly become evident when putting together a list of the 100 Best Superhero Movies of All Time. First, this is the Golden Age for such films, a decade where technology, long-unrequited fandom and surging popular awareness have all combined to thrill moviegoers and make Hollywood billions of dollars. Second, it’s still fair to say that most superhero films are not that good. There’s no real contradiction at play here. The niche just lacks the pedigree of its fellow movie genres. Though superhero comic books may have started to make a dint in popular culture 75 years ago (give or take), technology only crossed over from hindrance to enabling force in the last 20 years or so. As a result, while curating a 100 Best Westerns of All Time or 100 Best Documentaries of All Time list requires the exclusion of arguably good films to select the best 100—for superhero movies? The pickings get slim after 40. In fact, the real challenge for this list was choosing amongst the dreck (some of it beloved dreck!) that would fill out the bottom half. It turns out it’s much easier to argue for or against a top 10 film’s exact placement (and frankly, compelling arguments could be made for almost any of our top 5 as deserving the #1 position), than weighing the relative “merits” of Masters of the Universe, Swamp Thing and Elektra. This also means the bottom half of this list will change swiftly compared to, say, The Best B-Movies of All Time. In fact, it’s a safe assumption if there are 15 superhero movies in the next three years, at least 14 of them will knock numbers 86-99 off this list. (Our #100 is a bit of a wild card.) Finally, some criteria. To be considered for this list, a film must possess at least two of the following three qualities: 1) It must involve costumed shenanigans, 2) It must involve a superpowered protagonist and/or 3) the protagonist must exist in a world where the supernatural/extraordinary is demonstrably present. These criteria are why meta-commentary films like Kick-Ass and Super are not on this list. And it’s also why some films with pulpy characters like Zorro, Tarzan and Conan are not, while others like The Phantom are. (Zane’s costume combined with the Skulls of Touganda do the trick.) Admittedly, the lines gets blurry. Also absent from this list is any consideration of foreign superhero films. That’s not because some are not worthy—especially given the movie quality issue mentioned at the top—it’s just an area we’d rather get better versed in before pouring into this list. Next year, perhaps. The three Matrix films were counted as a single entry in the source list. -
Golden Globe Best Foreign Language Film Winners
Favs/dislikes: 14:0. All of the winners for the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Presented annually since 1965. Between 1973 and 1985, non-American films in the English language were also eligible. -
Empire's 50 Funniest Comedies Ever
Favs/dislikes: 11:0. Voted on by Empire magazine readers.
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