Slowly but surely these last few years, the Letterboxd Top 250 has surpassed IMDB’s own Top 250 as the go-to all-time user list on the internet — at least for the hardcore cinephiles we refer to as “film twitter”.
Then again, I’m impressed by neither of these lists. One can definitely see the mainstream ranking films such as “The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Dark Knight,” and “The Godfather” as the greatest ever, but it all feels like film history -lite as far as I’m concerned.
The Letterboxd list has been turning more mainstream, with “Everything Everywhere All At Once” comfortably sitting in the all-time top 20, what!?
Now you have, this past weekend, the recently released “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” showing up as the #1 film off all-time. I doubt it’ll last long at the top spot, but it is a moment to ponder the absurdity of such lists.
Don’t get me wrong, I really liked ‘Across the Spider-Verse’ which is an eye-popping visual feast fit for the ADD generation of millennial moviegoers. Its 4.7 rating on LB, based on 237k votes, is indicative of the enormous response it has received with both critics and audiences.
It’s universally loved, but it’s still a product and to have such a consumerist film be seen as an all-timer is semi-blasphemous as far as I’m concerned. It just proves what we’ve already known: that film tastes have drastically evolved over the years, for both good and bad.
‘Across the Spider-Verse’ thus becomes only the fifth film to ever be ranked as the #1 highest rated film on the site, following The Godfather, Parasite, Come and See and Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Last year, a milestone occurred on Letterboxd when former champ, Bong joon-ho’s “Parasite,” was dethroned by Elem Klimov’s 1985 masterpiece “Come and See.” I approved.
Klimov’s World War II film was initially not that well-known upon release in the U.S, it took years for it to garner its reputation. What really kickstarted the re-assessment were two notable reviews: A 2001 writeup from The Village Voice’s J. Hoberman and, more importantly, Roger Ebert watching it for the first time in 2010 and immediately placing it on his “Great Movies” list.
The only reason Ebert watched the movie was after filmmaker Rod Lurie had recommended it to him at a film festival: “The last time I saw Roger … he asked "What movie would you recommend I see that you don't think I have seen"? My answer was COME AND SEE, The Russian WW2 film. A few weeks later he wrote one of his last GREAT FILMS column on that movie.”
So now we have an all-time top 3 on Letterboxd consisting of ‘Across the Spider-Verse,’ “Come and See” and “Parasite.” The full top 20 can be seen below.
