Greatest Films by Year

[ManPerson]

How about this?
1. Sinners - Ryan Coogler
2. One Battle After Another - Paul Thomas Anderson
3. KPop Demon Hunters - Maggie Kang & Chris Appelhans
4. Marty Supreme - Josh Safdie
5. Weapons - Zach Cregger
6. Sentimental Value - Joachim Trier
7. Frankenstein - Guillermo del Toro
8. Ne Zha 2 - Jiaozi
9. Hamnet - Chloé Zhao
10. It Was Just an Accident - Jafar Panahi

11. The Secret Agent - Kleber Mendonça Filho
12. Zootopia 2 - Jared Bush & Byron Howard
13. Superman - James Gunn
14. Bugonia - Yorgos Lanthimos
15. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery - Rian Johnson
16. F1 - Joseph Kosinski
17. No Other Choice - Park Chan-wook
18. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — The Movie: Infinity Castle - Haruo Sotozaki
19. Train Dreams - Clint Bentley
20. The Voice of Hind Rajab - Kaouther Ben Hania

[Dubrow555]

Works for me!

[Tim]

Put the 2025 list up for now.

[Dubrow555]

TY - Tim

[Tim]

Reckon Obsession is a top 5 worthy film for 2025 by now.

[ManPerson]

I think it should probably be #2, though we might as well wait until the end of the year.

[Dubrow555]

Dang....that's rather generous. Probably best to wait to see how it does with end of the year critic's lists first.

[ManPerson]

What do you guys thinking about adding the Zapruder film?

[Fido]

C'mon, it's not a film in the same sense as what we are ranking here.

[pauldrach]

Of course it's a film and I would definitely consider it eligible in principle. It's just incredibly hard to rank against most other films we're dealing with here. How do you measure its popularity? What constitutes its acclaim? Its influence may be the most tangible of its credentials.

[ManPerson]

C'mon, it's not a film in the same sense as what we are ranking here.

I don't see how it's all that different from Arrival of a Train or something like that.

Paul raises a good point, though.

[Area Man]

The Zapruder film is in the United States' National Film Registry, for what it's worth. Related to "home movies," would the Patterson-Gimlin film of "Bigfoot" be eligible?

[Fido]

It's not a film in the same sense as what we are ranking here. It's not a work of art or of entertainment, and that's why its popularity is unmeasurable or why it has literally zero acclaim: because it hasn't gone through the same channels every other film goes through. We can include it the same way we can include any single episode of a TV show separately. Would the lists be better for it? No.

[pauldrach]

I don't see how it's all that different from Arrival of a Train or something like that.

This is also a valid point. One might argue, though, that this earliest period still had an approach to filmmaking that was so fundamentally different to what we are used to nowadays that such films should generally be considered ineligible. This would mean that actualities should generally be omitted, which would pose a particular problem for the pre-1920 list. Unless we allow exceptions only for this very early period.

Of course even "L'arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat" was considered a work of entertainment then. So, if we want to make that distinction [EDIT: the one Fido suggests in the previous post], an exclusion of the Zapruder film would seem reasonable.

[Tim]

Think it makes sense to include early actualities as it was one of the only "genres" of film available back then. Excluding later actualities on ground of "not what we refer as film nowadays" also makes sense but you could argue we also don't refer to documentaries and animation as films either though they do retain "work of art or entertainment" part of definition.

[Sherick]

I always see documentaries and animation referred to as film.

[ManPerson]

The Zapruder film is also not listed on Letterboxd or IMDb, which supports it not being listed, I guess.

[Area Man]

I'm not saying Zapruder Film of Kennedy Assassination should or shouldn't be on any lists, but it is on IMDb (here). Not on Letterboxd, to the best of my knowledge, though.