We can nitpick every list that’s online every day of the week and all day, but Variety is a pretty big trade and they’ve released their 100 best movies of all-time list. Attention deserves to be paid.
A gang of Variety staffers — Peter Debruge, Owen Gleiberman, Lisa Kennedy, Jessica Kiang, Tomris Laffly, Guy Lodge and Amy Nicholson — have decided that Hitchcock‘s “Psycho” is the greatest movie of all-time. I won’t complain.
It’s pretty clear that “Vertigo” has emerged as Hitch’s consensus masterpiece in the last few decades, but “Psycho” is still a great movie — save for its aged last 5-10 minutes which needed to painstakingly explain Norman Bates’ schizophrenia diagnosis to its bewildered 1960 audience. That final shot though, wowzer.
Let’s not dissect this list too much, but just to point out that, as with all lists, many great films were omitted from the top 100, and a few odd picks did make it. “Bridesmaids” at #94? “The Sound of Music” at #87? “My Best Friend’s Wedding” #71? The more-recent “Moonlight” is at #42.
“Bridesmaids” was a riot. I laughed hard when I saw it back in the summer of 2011. But 94th greatest movie of all-time? Ha! Even worse, “My Best Friend’s Wedding” managing to make the list and not “Raging Bull,” “Schindler’s List,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “M,” “Taxi Driver,” “Rashomon” …
Following the controversial Sight & Sound poll of a few weeks ago, Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman” (#78) had to show up here, somewhere, it just had to. I actually do like its placement. However, Variety had to throw some shade at it in their blurb:
For three minutes, middle-aged single mother Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) sits peeling potatoes. She washes the dishes. She makes the bed. Belgian director Chantal Akerman radically expanded what movies could and should be with this cornerstone entry in the slow-cinema canon — a rigorous style of filmmaking that emphasizes duration over action. Confined largely to the kitchen, dining room and hallways of a nondescript apartment, Akerman’s debut challenges what the experimental auteur called the “hierarchy of images,” concentrating on mundane domestic rituals associated with women, typically overlooked in movies. Over three-plus hours, the film re-creates tasks that Akerman observed her mother practicing for years, though in this case they’re disrupted by Jeanne’s double life as a prostitute — a feminist twist that builds to a shattering climax. Maddening at times yet never less than mesmerizing, it’s the very best film of its kind. But hardly the best film of all time.
Not the greatest movie of all-time. Ya get it?