They Shoot the Century's Best Pictures
The class of 2023 titles, the fall of old blockbusters, and a rant about TV on a major acclaimed films list
For movie and data nerds like myself, one of the most fun resources available is They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? The movie listing site is maintained by a couple of Australian film buffs and is best best known for its annual top 1,000 lists that combine as many reputable critics lists as possible to form a broad consensus of the greatest films ever made. The annually updated list of the best of the 21st century posted at the beginning of the month.
Both the overall list and the 21st century list are a regular check-in tool for me. I can get a sense of how large my gaps in cinematic history are and track the major titles I do catch up on. The website includes a smorgasbord of data— movie runtimes, nationalities, previous list histories, the notable rising and falling titles in each re-ranking. After poking around on the main 21st century list and the list of recently-removed titles, there were a few trends and individual titles I wanted to highlight.
The best of 2023
I am apparently in the global critical consensus. Killers of the Flower Moon, my pick for the best film of 2023, is also the highest-ranking new title on They Shoot Pictures’ aggregated critics list. On the overall list it slots in right behind The Departed and the Wolf of Wall Street among the top 200 movies of the current century. Personally I’d bump it even higher than those two, and over time, I think there’s a very good chance it will keep rising.
The run of other 2023 titles that made high entries on the list is a reminder of how strong the European critical community still is. The next new movie that joined the list is Aki Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves. After that we get The Zone of Interest, May December, Anatomy of a Fall, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, Past Lives, Oppenheimer, Poor Things and Barbie. There is a lot of Best Picture overlap on that list, a lot of major European titles, and a splash of Todd Haynes to break it up.
Which years have the best showing?
The simplest measure would show that 2004 has the largest crop of movies on the list with 67 entries. And if you add in the roughly 200 titles that fell off the list in the last two years, it still holds that title.
There’s a fairly even spread of titles across the first two-thirds of the century, especially among the ex-1000 films. 2009 had the most former entrants with 15 movies, but around half of the years had 10 or more titles recently fall out. In terms of the percentage of titles the biggest impact was on 2021, which has nearly as many titles on the list (23) as off it (14).
Other metrics lean toward even older years in the century as the highlight. If you take the average ranking of where each year’s movies fall on the list, 2000 and 2003 pop out as the standard bearers.
Both of these charts also confirm the negative recency bias that this format of modern canonization has to involve. Older years had less competition for space on the earlier versions of the list. Once they got on, they had an incumbent spot that meant newer titles had to actively knock something off or shift things around to join. This has the biggest effect on the most recent four or five years, which may also have something to do with the pandemic.
The fall of blockbusters
Here is a partial list of the major studio blockbusters that have fallen out of the top 1,000 in the last two years: Iron Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight Rises, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Star Trek (2009), Mission: Impossible- Ghost Protocol, Mission: Impossible- Fallout, Skyfall, The Bourne Supremacy, Top Gun: Maverick, Logan, X2, Chicago, Argo, Rango, Coco, How to Train Your Dragon, and A Star is Born.
That is a significant culling of movies that were acclaimed by both critics and audiences. Some of them had been sliding down the list for a bit: Argo was at #179 on the version of this list from 2015 and was completely off the list as of 2023. Some are quick changes like Top Gun: Maverick, which blasted into spot #823 last year and dove out this year.
Young Adult and other outliers
The most interesting story among the movies that came off the list this year might be Young Adult which, fittingly, has had a messy relationship with the list. On the 2015 version of the list it was sitting semi-comfortably at spot #664. It then proceeded to leave the top 1,000 in 2018, come back on the next year, fall out again in 2022, come back on again in 2023, and then fall out again this year.
There were also a few titles that stood out for being included at all. One of the outliers is From the Notebook of…, an experimental short film by Robert Beavers that, based on the information I can find, was first made in 1971 and re-edited in 1998. Not exactly sure why that was eligible for a 21st century movie list in the first place.
The handful of TV shows across the list fall into a similar bucket. I can understand the argument for the pair of Adam Curtis documentaries that recently left the list or O.J. Made in America, which at the very least were single stories that were shown in theaters for festival and award reasons. Twin Peaks: The Return is a stretch but counting that as a movie is known enough to become a punchline.
How, how, how is The Wire eligible for the acclaimed films list? It is inarguably a TV show and was never treated as anything else. It’s the only title on the list that has multiple years of release, from 2003 to 2008, and a hilarious runtime of 3,600 minutes. And yet enough people counted it for it to clock in at #720, just ahead of the great Romanian news documentary Collective, the 2005 King Kong, and Ginger Snaps.
I love this weird list.