The Best Films of the 21st Century
The BBC vs. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic… which movies survive?
I hate lists. Yet I love lists.
This week, the BBC released their list of the 21st Century’s 100 Greatest Films. They gathered this list by surveying 177 critics from around the world (79 from the United States and only 18 from the United Kingdom). The numbers count down from 100 and I didn’t make it to 94 before having a fit.
The BBC is new to aggregating opinions about films but Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic have been in the game since the (first?) Clinton era. I decided to see how they stack up against each other in raw data using spreadsheets and everything.*
The BBC poll is retrospective (their critics had to evaluate the previous 16.6475 years by recalling their favorite movies) but the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores are like flies frozen in amber: we can see the prejudice of memory in action. Let’s dive in…
10. The BBC poll disregards franchises
There are only 3 movies belonging to a franchise among their top 100: Before Sunset, Mad Max, and The Dark Knight. There are twice that many on Metacritic and a total of 18 on RT. Both the Tomatometer and the Metacritics agree that Toy Story 3, Before Sunset, and The Lord of the Rings (both Fellowship of the Ring and Return of the King) were among the greatest films of their respective years.
9. The BBC critics forgot we’re living in the Golden Age of Documentaries
On the BBC list you will find a scant 3 docs: The Gleaners and I, Stories We Tell, and The Act of Killing.
Metacritic has 15 documentaries in their top 100 and Rotten Tomatoes lists an amazing 18 docs topping their respective years. 4 out of 6 of the highest (weighted**) scores of 2005 alone on RT are documentaries!
8. The BBC folks, in retrospect, aren’t so into animated films
Five animated movies made the BBC list: Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Spirited Away, and Inside Out***.
Metacritic has 10 animated films in their 100 while RT has 13. Both aggregating sites agree that The Incredibles and Toy Story 3 were among the best of their years.
7. The BBC list loves famous directors whose best work is likely behind them
Some names that appear on their list: Spielberg, Lynch, Scorsese, Godard, Polanski, Almodovar, Spike Lee, and David Cronenberg. The bulk of the most highly regarded work by these men was produced from the 1970’s through the 1990’s; I wouldn’t count them out but they’re not exactly doing the 21st century proud.
Of these iconic directors’ work, only Polanski’s The Pianist shows up in another list, among the freshest tomatoes of 2002.
6. The work of “name brand” directors is recalled fondly by the BBC critics
Fourteen directors made thirty-one of the films on the list:
Quentin Tarantino (1)
PT Anderson (3)
Richard Linklater (2)
The Coen Brothers (3)
David Fincher (2)
Christopher Nolan (3)
Ang Lee (2)
Wes Anderson (2)
Terence Malick (2)
Michael Haneke (3)
Abbas Kiarostami (2)
Steve McQueen (2)
Lars von Trier (2)
Kathryn Bigelow (2)
If you combine the films of the “name brands” above, most of whom have current cult followings, with the Iconic Directors from number 7, that accounts for 39 out of the 100 greatest films. According to Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, 25 of those 39 do not merit inclusion in the best of the best.
5. The BBC poll includes some classic arthouse directors
These names all bring up memories of some powerful films that only film geeks would have seen: Jim Jarmusch, Harmony Korine, Julian Schnabel, Todd Haynes, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Leo Carax.
Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Todd Haynes’ Carol both made it onto Metacritic’s best of all time but none of the rest show up anywhere else.
4. Male directors dominate the BBC list, the vast majority of whom are white
Only 8 women directed the BBC’s greatest 100, none making it into the top 20 films. Sadly, the situation is actually worse on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. (Roughly 1/5 of the BBC critics polled were women.)
3. Beloved movies are heavily represented
Part of the appeal of the BBC list is that it includes many of the films that movie lovers watch over and over again. Just look at their Top Ten:
1. Mulholland Drive
2. In The Mood
3. There Will Be Blood
4. Spirited Away
5. Boyhood
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
7. The Tree of Life
8. Yi Yi
9. A Separation
10. No Country for Old Men
Yi Yi (an incredible film for those who missed it) may be too long and A Separation may be too emotionally brutal to watch often but the others would be worn creaky if we still were suffering the medium of VHS tapes.
And there’s plenty where that came from: Children of Men, Pan’s Labyrinth, Lost in Translation, Grand Budapest Hotel, Memento, Talk To Her, WALL-E, Oldboy, City of God, Blue is the Warmest Color, Inception, Moulin Rouge!, Inglourious Basterds, The Royal Tenenbaums, Almost Famous, Her, Ratatouille, Let The Right One In, and Finding Nemo… all these would be playing on loop in a video store if video stores still existed.
2. The BBC critics don’t give any F’s about your average film fan
When looking at the films that both RT and Metacritic list in their top films (but which don’t show up on the BBC list), the average user ratings are barely below those which appear on all 3 lists.
Averaging out the Metacritics users’ ratings, the RT audience scores and the IMDb users’ scores, I found that the average for the 17 films on all three lists to be an 8.3/10. The 15 which appear on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic but are absent on the BBC list average a 8/10.
In terms of viewer satisfaction, the BBC list isn’t reliably superior (statistically speaking).
1. Here are the 17 best films of the last 17 years
These are the films that all of the lists agreed upon, in order of audience appreciation (as voted by users in the notoriously flawed online pools of Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and IMDb):
1. Spirited Away
2. WALL-E
3. A Separation
4. Finding Nemo
5. Inside Out
6. Ratatouille
7. Mad Max: Fury Road
8. Yi Yi
9. The Social Network
10. Spotlight
11. 12 Years a Slave
12. Moolaadé
13. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
14. No Country for Old Men
15. Boyhood
16. The Hurt Locker
17. Lost in Translation
The above are fantastic films that anyone would enjoy (the only one I can’t vouch for personally is Moolaadé and I plan to watch that ASAP). It’s a solid list, but you may want to venture outside of the fanboy BBC critics’ world. I’d suggest checking out the rich selection of documentaries on the Rotten Tomatoes list or some of the more obscure foreign gems found on the Metacritic list.
(All of my data and the 3 top 100 lists can be found here.)
Happy viewing, y’all, and may you ride eternal, shiny and chrome.
* For you data nerds out there, here is how I compiled the lists:
The BBC list is here: The 21st Century’s 100 Greatest Films
Metacritic’s list was culled from the films in their Best Movies of All Time list. Metacritic doesn’t seem to list many films from before their launch in 1999 so this was easy to parse.
Rotten Tomatoes also has a Top 100 Movies of All Time list but it does stop at 100 and many of those are from the 20th century. My solution was to parcel out the 100 over the past 16.66 years which comes out to a nice even allotment of 6 films per year.
Rottentomatoes.com does list the top scoring films for each year so the list I built represents the 6 best for each year (and only 4 from 2016 so far). You may say, “Hey! That isn’t fair… what if a bunch of turkeys came out in 2004 but 2005 was killer? Isn’t that apples and oranges?”. You would be potentially very correct.
Because I’m not privy to the algorithms that RT uses to weight their films, nor is there a comprehensive list of all films by score available on their site, this is the most fair way I can see to making a Top 100 list for the 21st century. And since the critics opinions on Rotten Tomatoes represent a snapshot of the best of each year, it’s a fair representation of the “fly in amber” effect I was going for.
** Rotten Tomatoes is famously tricky to interpret for good reason (sorry for the MTV spam).
On top of the agony of simplistic aggregation, they also weight their scores when creating comparative lists. Here is their statement:
Each critic from our discrete list gets one vote, weighted equally. A movie must have 40 or more rated reviews to be considered. The ‘Adjusted Score’ comes from a weighted formula (Bayesian) that we use that accounts for variation in the number of reviews per movie.
As I understand it (correct me if I’m wrong), films that have fewer reviews have the possibility of more extreme scores. Films that exceed 200 or even 300 reviews rarely approach a 100% because the likelihood of finding a contrarian critic increases (a.k.a. you can’t please everyone). In theory, the likelihood of getting 0% should also decrease.
Therefore based on their formula, a film like Poetry with 100% Fresh from 61 critics can still be beat out by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2 with only 96%… from 309 critics.
*** Pixar made 4 out of the top 6 films according to my aggregate of aggregates, critics and audience scores included.
Pixar is this century’s greatest story-telling machine. Here’s an excellent TED talk by Andrew Stanton, director of WALL-E, Finding Nemo, and Toy Story, all about how to tell a great story.
