Greatest Films of All Time List 2015

Dear Friends and fellow Cineholics,

For over two years, I have had a pet project that I have been picking at and today I would like to share it with you. If you are receiving this, it is because you have demonstrated that you have some enthusiasm in cinema and may be interested in what I have attached. But before you downloading at what it is, let me tell you a story that best explains why I have done what I have done and its meaning. Then I will tell you about what is attached above.

STORY

Thrice in my life I have had the privilege of having practically unlimited access to cinema, which I abused to no end. Once these periods were over, the same feelings and ideas would cross my mind. Two years ago, such a period was ending and I needed to make conclusions on what I could do about these ideas.

1)       I learned that the films that would successfully get me to the theatre and take my money would not be the films I would necessarily enjoy (See Spider-man 3). All it means is that the marketing people did their work and attracted me with shiny things, whether it be a certain plot point, actors, directors or big boom effects. I feel that I can no longer trust my own judgement to pick films.

2)      At the same time, films that I would never pay money to see (films I have never heard of or films that are perceived to be not worth watching on the big screen) would deserve to be seen and watched because they were beautiful and worth my time. Last Love or Hachi are films like this that I very much enjoyed.

3)      The films that make ridiculous sums of money (Twilight), that have all the hype (SW Ep1) and that become crazy popular (Troy with over 300,000 Votes on IMDB) have no consistent basis to depict quality. The new rising garbage is Noah.

How can you find films that you will enjoy if you can’t trust yourself due to marketing, hype, success, or popularity? Many have said that this is what critics are for. I have become disillusioned with critics as I rarely find one that I agree with. I personally love the way Empire Magazine reviews their films. They’re entertaining and usually quite fair, but I don’t necessarily agree with their final verdict (Superman Returns got five stars).

Perhaps awards? The Academy Awards are the most prestigious in the film industry. However, most people know that there are a lot of politics involved and that what is popular today may prove to be average years later. For example, Chicago won Best Picture and yet I doubt one critic today would say it was the best film of 2002. Some films of that year worth mentioning are Infernal Affairs, City of God, Catch Me If You Can or Bourne Identity. All of these films of 2002 have ratings on IMDB that are considerably higher than Chicago. There is merit to the Best Picture/Best Foreign Language Film and Best Director awards but this is not the end all say on what is good. More on this later.

There are a number of other lists, companies, critics and such that are worth talking about but I will give them merit later.

The story of the attachment above really begins when I moved to rely on IMDB’s ranking system. IMDB does have its flaws but of all the platforms out there, this is the one database that is the most complete. There are other websites such as Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes but their interfaces are significantly biased. The score on Metacritic can be based on just a handful of reviews and the database is quite limited. Rotten Tomatoes primarily leans towards culminating what critics think, which I care little about. As far as I’m concerned, if you rate a film on either IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes you are a critic and your vote is worth just as much as Roger Ebert’s. Rotten Tomatoes only works if you look up the user score of the individual film. There is no search tool yet available on their website that allows you to search by user score. Thus, Rotten Tomatoes too becomes limited.

IMDB is primarily used by men. For action films like Bourne Identity, over six times the amount of men vote compared to women. For Romance films like Silver Linings Playbook, it’s a bit more than double. Thus, I encourage all women to go out there and vote to balance this all out. Nonetheless, IMDB allows one vote per user, and the average makes the score. This seems fair to me. I will also dispel the myth that it is mostly used by Americans. If you examine the ratings of the two films above, you will see three to five times the number of votes coming from non-US users. As I am not a Pro Member, I cannot tell you where they come from. Nonetheless, I would say that this suggests that IMDB is universal as well as complete and fair.

METHODOLOGY

The IMDB top 250 should be the best list of quality out there, but it too has its limitations. Part of its formula requires a film to have over 25,000 votes. Only 3,450 films meet that requirement from a database of over 300,000 films. Thus, it is highly biased towards wide releases and popular films. If this requirement does not EVER change, then eventually, maybe the other films can catch up.

I thought 25,000 votes was too high so I lowered it to 9,000 votes, giving me 6,065 films to work with. However, if I were to lower it to 1,000 votes, it would result in 19,467 films. Films under 500 votes, in all practical sense, don’t exist. In time, I believe all the films that have at least 1,000 votes will eventually be brought up to 9,000 votes but this may take some time.

The second basic criterion is a film’s IMDB rating. My baseline is 8.0/10. A rating of 8.0 or more means that people who watched it loved it. From personal experience, anything I rate above 8.0 has personal bias attached to it. The highest ranked film is the Shawshank Redemption. Does this make it the greatest film ever made? Of course not. What it means is that if we were to ask 100 people what they thought of the film, presuming they saw it, more than 90% would give it a score between 9.0 and 10. It’s not the greatest film ever made, it’s the film that we can all agree is very good.

In time, I developed one further point. A film’s rating on IMDB is limited at least until a film is one year old. Within that one year, the score is heavily biased by all sorts of factors. Only after a full year does a score stabilise. Really it should be two years but let’s see what happens. What is interesting are the films that hold an 8.0 or more for years and years. If a film is watchable and enjoyed for many years after its release, then these are the films that I should be watching. Presumably, I have the highest chance of liking them regardless of personal bias.

ATTACHMENT

Over the last year, this project has expanded to include other factors into the list in order to be more complete or thorough. I also thought it shouldn’t be limited to feature films so I expanded it to include TV-movies, Direct-to-Video and shorts. This didn’t add much, but I wanted to be complete. The three listed rules tallied up to 572 films/shorts/TV/Direct entries (60.6% of the list). After that things get more complicated. I needed to develop a clear way to explore the limitations of the first two rules.

1)      Votes – As mentioned there are plenty of films that don’t have 9,000 votes but do have at least 1,000 and still hold the rating of 8.0 or higher (currently 476 films). I needed a way to fish out the golden nuggets and this is where I use other lists, critics and organisations to help me identify which of these under-represented films should be given a chance. 118 more films were identified (12.5% of the list). I got into more detail on which organisations and such within in the list.

2)      8.0 – What about the films that are just shy of making 8.0? Well I noticed some 7.9 films would be teetering sometimes into the 8.0 zone. Therefore, I decided that the top ten 7.9 films would also be added (1.06% of the list).

This totals to 700 films. We can call this the List Proper.

At that point, I looked at the remaining films that won Best Picture at the Academy Awards and decided to make one exception in this case. I figured if you’re going through a list like this, I might as well as the remaining 40 films that didn’t make it with the above rules. As much as I did dismiss the awards earlier, they are a key part of annual film identity. This makes a total of 740.

The remaining 204 films fall under the final criteria that I set out. I noticed that certain personalities had already succeeded in having multiple entries within the above parameters, for example Stanley Kubrick has 9. Thus, I decided that, for any actor/actress or director who has over three entries already on the list, their 7.8 and above films would be added. 26 of these films have a score over 8.0 or above. Thus, 178 films are on the list with a score of 7.8 or 7.9 simply because the personality attached to them has already proven to be talented.

2015 LIST

Today, I submit for your approval a list of 944 films that has been compiled without personal bias. It is a compilation of statistical data and factors gathered over two years and cross referenced and double checked. If you find any mistakes or ideas for further expansion, I would welcome them for next year’s list. 
Please use this link to download the list http://www.filehosting.org/file/details/482915/2015.xlsx
This year’s list adds entries up to 2013.

Since my wife and I have committed to watching films from this list, we have noticed our cinema enjoyment has increased significantly as we are discovering many films that are partly unheard of yet stand up to the test of time and above all else are excellent. I invite you to create a column on this list, tick off the films you have seen and enjoy discovering excellent cinema from all over the world and from any point in time. We have been watching them partly thematically and partly randomly.

If you wish to unsubscribe to related updates, please reply and tell me. If you think other people would be interested in such emails, please let me know and I will add them to the mailing list.

I hope you will join me and discover what amazing cinema there is out there.

Thank you to all who have supported this project.

Looking forward to your comments

Best

Michael

PS. 2015 Challenge = How many of the 88 Academy Award Best Picture films have you seen?