I have to thank Adam & Matty over at Filmspotting.net for talking about and posting this link to Movie City News(MCN) who give us the granddaddy of all top ten lists for movies for 2008:
- Wall-E
- The Dark Knight
- Slumdog Millionare
- Milk
- The Wrestler
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
- Happy Go Lucky
- Rachael Getting Married
- Man on Wire
- Frost/Nixon
Basically MCN has scoured the Internet, magazines, newspapers and any other media where critics have posted their movie top ten lists for last year and combined them to make this one huge list. I’m not exactly sure how the math works out but I believe just from looking at the data that these two items factor into the equation:
- The number of “list mentions” a film has (how many lists a particular film appears on)
- Where that film appears on that particular list (ranking).
Now I’m not one follow the advice of critics. I believe that we all have our own opinions and personal tastes when it comes to movies so we shouldn’t get too wrapped up in what critics have to say. However, what I do like about this list is what we get out of the combination of 286 different lists. While I generally take what critics say with a grain of salt, if after 286 lists a lot of them are talking about the same thing–then there’s got to be something there. I think a film has to be doing something right if a lot of critics are talking about it. Granted it’s not the definitive answer for what was the best movie of last year, but I think it’s a good measuring stick for films that maybe deserve to be talked about.
What I hope to use it for is to find out what were some of the films of 2008 that I still need to see (I can tell you already that Slumdog Millionare and Milk are already at the top). Having this amalgamation of 286 critics’ choices I’m sure I can find a few more gems that got past me last year and I can’t wait to catch up. What did I overlook?
To check out MCN’s entire list, click on this link.
The Red Band Project 