Ranking methodology

...or How to distinguish a movie delicacy from a movie fast food.

In order to compile a list of the best films of all time, I have studied all, well, or almost all, existing similar lists and ratings. As a rule, these ratings are based on either audience votes on sites dedicated to cinema, or the opinions of film critics, or the individual preferences of ordinary moviegoers. And none of the published ratings seemed ideal. And here are the reasons.

Let's take, for example, the Top 250 IMDB, Top 250 Kinopoisk lists known to all movie lovers. They are formed on the basis of audience voting. Wonderful! But does a high rating among viewers always indicate that a film has undeniable artistic merit? I think many will agree that not always. Otherwise, there would be no need to form professional juries at every film festival, and even entire national film academies.

There are ratings based on the opinions of more or less large number of film critics, such as Empire, NYT and others. But, firstly, even though the circle of these film critics may be quite wide, in any case, it will be limited. And secondly, film critics are, as a rule, journalists specializing in the field of cinema, or filmmakers who have not reached great heights in film art, and, as a result, are engaged in evaluating the work of their more successful colleagues. In both cases, it is not necessary to rely on the objectivity of assessments and judgments in most cases. But there are also, to be honest, "stimulated" assessments. To one side or the other.

That's why I wanted to create my own and most OBJECTIVE list of the best films. In short, the Ranking Methodology is based on the votes of millions of moviegoers, adjusted by professional filmmakers. A detailed presentation of the Methodology, which may seem boring to someone, is below.

It is clear that objectivity requires a level playing field for the films being compared. And this, in my opinion, means that it is impossible to compare feature, animated, documentary films. It is no coincidence that the American Film Academy, and not only it, uses separate nominations for these films. I have decided to limit the scope of my analysis to feature films only. I also excluded silent films from my field of vision. Again, in order to create a level playing field, I have excluded short films (less than one hour in length) from consideration.

After some thought, I excluded TV movies and series from my list. Only because the disparity between the audiences of film and television films is too obvious. After all, very often even a very average TV movie receives higher ratings from viewers than a movie masterpiece.

Then, after making the above assumptions, I established the first criterion for a film to be included in the original, or "long" list. Since films, anyway, are made primarily for the audience, a film, in order to be included in the total ranged mass, must have a certain, sufficiently high audience rating. And to be specific, a kind of “passing score” was set for inclusion of films in the generated list: the film must have a rating of at least 7.5 both according to IMDB and according to Kinopoisk. Someone will surely say that neither one nor the other site provides an absolutely fair assessment of the merits of films. Quite possibly. But I don't know others. I would be grateful to those who will offer, moreover, reasonably, alternative options.

One important note. Watching the dynamics of movie ratings on IMDB and Kinopoisk for 15 years, I noticed that in the first months or even years after the release of the movie, the film can have very high ratings. And as time goes by, ratings begin to decline. This is quite understandable. Very often, a high rating for a film is created by pre-premiere hype, advertising, hype in the press, scandals that happen at film festivals, etc., etc. Therefore, I decided to include films made at least 5 years ago in my "long" list. Moreover, an outstanding film is a work of art. And the true value of real works of art, as a rule, becomes clear over time.

In order to ensure that the voting on the film is sufficiently representative, I have set the bar for the total number of votes to 10,000 votes. It is necessary to note such a detail: on the IMDB and Kinopoisk sites, films of the 30s and 50s on average received a noticeably smaller number of votes, even though the number of viewers in cinemas is much larger. And this is quite understandable: in those years there was no Internet, and today these films are shown much less frequently than new releases. Therefore, to restore fairness, I set correction factors for films of different decades, ranging from 1 (for films of the 2000s) to 14 (for films of the 30s of the XX century).

For films that meet the above criteria, a weighted average rating was calculated based on IMDB and Kinopoisk ratings.

Based on the above, it would not be entirely correct to form an OBJECTIVE rating based only on the indicators of the audience voting. Or, if you prefer, completely wrong. Therefore, it was decided to supplement audience ratings with a system of bonuses determined on the basis of expert ratings of films. Well, who can act as film experts better than the filmmakers themselves? And where are such peer reviews presented better and more clearly than at various film festivals? But today there are thousands of different film festivals in the world. Are they all equal? I think that anyone who has a minimal understanding of the world of cinema, it is clear that there is not. Therefore, I decided to identify the most prestigious film festival awards and other film awards.

In my opinion, the most prestigious film festivals are held in countries that can be conditionally called cinematic powers. I decided to include among the cinematic powers those countries in which 15 or more films from the so-called "long" list (see above). In each of the cinematic powers, I have identified two of the most prestigious film awards. For example, in the USA it is the Oscar and the Golden Globe, in France - the Cannes Film Festival and Cesar, in Italy - the David di Donatello Award and the Venice Film Festival. Etc.

But I decided not to take any award into account, but only the awards for the best film and for the best director. Further, we are all well aware that the juries of international film festivals or national film academies tend to "support" the film of the host country. Therefore, the awards awarded by the jury of film festivals and national film academies to "my" films, I estimated at 0.1 points, and awards to "foreign" films - from 0.3 to 0.6 points, depending on the prestige of the award.

One caveat needs to be made. There are situations when a film passes what is called a “victory march” through all film festivals and collects all possible film awards and film awards. Therefore, in order to prevent the prevalence of expert ratings over audience ratings, I have set a limit that the total amount of bonus points received in accordance with the professional jury ratings cannot exceed 3.

One more note. I think it's quite obvious that a "long" list, and therefore a list of the "1000 Greatest Films of All Countries and All Time" formed from it, cannot remain unchanged over time. Firstly, movie ratings are quite dependent on fluctuations in the results of the audience's voting, and secondly, new films appear every year. Therefore, the "long" list is reviewed annually, usually in the last months of the year. New 5-year-old films are added to it, and changes in ratings on the IMDB and Kinopoisk sites are also taken into account. Accordingly, those films whose rating will go down in a year are being squeezed out.

Thus, in view of the foregoing, it would be most correct to call the list of 1000 feature sound films produced in all countries of the world with the highest complex audience-expert rating offered to your attention. I hope this list is helpful to anyone interested in cinema. Please note that this list is based solely on objective criteria and is not a list of my favorite films. Also, I'm far from touting it as a list of films that "everyone should see before they die". It is up to everyone what to be guided by when choosing films to watch.

I fully admit that there may be some other system of objective criteria for determining cinema delicacies. I would be glad to get acquainted with such systems.