Top Tens: Critics vs. Bloggers

Whether you know me in person, follow me on twitter or read this blog, you might have heard me going on about the Sight & Sound top ten movie list recently. Well just bear with me a little longer and I’ll shut up about it for the next ten years. Promise.

So the Sight & Sound poll results were announced last week, and as expected, Vertigo triumphed. Personally I was happy to see The Searchers return to the top ten but sad to see Singin’ in the Rain go. My biggest disappointment was the lack of any film more recent than 1968 at the top. In The Mood for Love placed highest at 24, but There Will Be Blood not even making the top 100 was a surprising oversight.

Well, not ones to let our opinions go unheard, the ‘Film Bloggers of the Internet’ have gathered together under the guidance of HeyUGuys’ Adam Lowes to put forward our own top tens. Amazingly 120 people contributed and came up with a very different list.

Here are both lists:

Critics (Sight and Sound)	Bloggers (HeyUGuys)
1. Vertigo	1. Jaws
2. Citizen Kane	2. Back to the Future
3. Tokyo Story	3. = The Dark Knight
4. The Rules of the Game	3. = Blade Runner
5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans	5. = 2001 A Space Odyssey
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey	5. = There Will Be Blood
7. The Searchers	5. = Psycho
8. Man with a Movie Camera	5. = Citizen Kane
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc	9. Pulp Fiction
10. 8½	10. = The Thing
	10. = Alien

More ‘mainstream’ than S&S but not as shit as imdb’s Top 250, the blogger’s list makes for an interesting read. What we have managed to do at the very least is establish a consensus on the best modern films, something that Sight & Sound failed to do.

There’s an interesting inversion going on: Where the critics conglomerated around a handful of established classics and threw in a wide variety of modern films to their individual lists, the bloggers were quite happy to agree on the likes of Jaws, Back to the Future and Blade Runner as amongst the best in cinema, but had a scattershot approach to anything made before the sixties aside from Citizen Kane.

The two lists side by side make for fascinating reading – and provide a definitive top twenty  if you like (well, 21 anyway). It also shows that personal film favourites are quite generational.