For decades, Citizen Kane has been considered the greatest movie of all time. You might not enjoy it, or you might think other movies better but I think we can all agree about it being considered "The Greatest".

I've been wondering if any movie will ever take Kane's place as "the best". Will something new eventually take the throne? Or, might an older picture grow into the consensus pick (Vertigo)?

What do YOU think?

No.

Citizen Kane came out at a very crucial point in the formative years of film as an art form. It is considered the greatest because of the comprehensiveness of its technique; it is a Rosetta stone for the language of film. That's not going to happen again.

Interesting question. From what I read, Battleship Potemkin enjoyed a nice run as the "consensus best" pick, then was briefly unseated by Bicycle Thieves before Kane took the mantle. So I wouldn't be surprised if at some point another film stole the show. I doubt it will be Vertigo, though that's certainly been on the rise in film circles. Or Night of the Hunter, which has made a similarly meteoric rise of late. Frankly, I have no idea what it will be. But I think something will take the place.

This would likely require a paradigm shift in filmmaking and/or critical thought, which is unlikely to happen at this stage in film's existence. Perhaps in the hindsight of history studies, but not while film remains on life support.

In the last Sight & Sound critics poll(2002), Vertigo was only 5 votes behind Kane. That's the closest margin Kane has had since it took over the #1 spot in 1962.

1982 was the first year Vertigo was in the top 10 & it has risen in every poll since.

The next poll will be early next year, should be interesting.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/pol ... -long.html

here is a thread where I posted the top 10 for every poll since 1952

viewtopic.php?f=45&t=695&p=12281#p12281

I agree with this, but I do think other seminal films will rise and fall from critical status in the next century. For example, I think praise for Vertigo and 2001 will eventually die down from what it currently is, and that new candidates for best film of all time will come up with age and new perspectives. For instance, I think Jaws will come closer to the top spot in the years after Spielberg retires, and his entire career is in its final position. The Searchers grew immensely in status over the last 10 years, and I think that will only continue; same with The General. My private hope is that El Cid will someday make its way into the objective top 10, but that's just wishful thinking.

Okay food for thought that I was originally going to address at McGamesCook but thought I would ask it more broadly.

Considering everyone's low opinion of RT, why are we talking about critical consensus here? Why do we care about critical consensus? How different is Rotten Tomatoes from say, the Sound and Sight critics poll? Am I missing something? Haven't most of us agreed to some extent that RT is useful pretty much only as a curiosity?

Just thought I'd ask.
-Jeremy

1) its been around since 1952

2) not every tom, dick & harry can vote in it(who are some of these RT critics, anyway??)

3) every critic submits their choices for THE 10 BEST FILMS EVER MADE. and those votes are then tallied up.
that's not quite as subjective as some dude at RT reading a review(which often doesn't even have a star rating) & judging whether its 'fresh' or not.

Well, from what I understand, Sight & Sound holds both a critics and directors poll, which makes it a bit different. Also, the pool of critics they use might be different than simply contemporary film critics.

To me it's pretty much a non-issue whether or not Citizen Kane actually holds the top spot - it will continue to reign as the popular choice for 'Greatest Film Ever', with most any replacement choice seeming almost an act of boredom or questionable revision. I wouldn't go so far as to say Vertigo doesn't deserve to be #1 (although I wouldn't select it), but I would wager quite a bit more that it would be dismissed rather widely and would never gather the eminent level of praise that Welles' film has enjoyed for decades - especially since I'm not even sure that its place in Hitchcock's own body of work has been confirmed.

Really? You think it will NEVER be unseated? Come on, man. In 50 years maybe film will take another quantum leap and a single film will bring it there. Certainly this will happen at some point, no?

Casablanca might unseat it. Then again, maybe not. I agree with the possibility of Vertigo or Night Of The Hunter.

Does anyone consider the possibility of more recent films (meaning from the 60s onward) unseating it. Maybe The Godfather. Apocalypse Now. A lot of possiiblities from the 70s perhaps.

Film as we know it is probably not going to exist 50 years from now, except perhaps as a niche interest like other previously dominant media that film itself displaced from the mainstream.

In 50 years, what is film now (or rather, what it was for the 20th century) will have crossbred with other, newer media and evolved into something that we cannot evaluate on the same terms. It will be difficult to tell when or at which degree this has happened, and the boundary will not be discrete, but it will happen. That medium will inevitably have a Citizen Kane of its own for us to debate.

1) What does age have to do with it?

2) So does the Academy Awards, I don't see a whole lot more love here towards those then RT. Or better yet, not everyone can get to vote in Golden Globes.

3) Objectivity/Shumcktivity. I don't get the difference.



So? Why does holding a different polls for critics and directors make a difference? Also, why does the pool of critics matter? What is so abhorrent about RT's methodology that other groups that poll critical consensus does not?

Here's what I'm getting at. Why does critical consensus matter at all? I think JB had a RT column about it awhile back, basically coming out and saying that he found any list made by a committee boring but those made by individuals to be at least revealing about a critics tastes and preferences. I pretty much feel the same way. I place imdb's top whatever lists, AFI's top whatever lists, RT's fresh rating, Sight and Sound's polls, in the same category of "curiosities, nothing more". I'm curious as to why people here feel some of these lists/methods are more valuable than others.
-Jeremy

The reason why RT is useless is because it tells you NOTHING about how much anyone liked any particular film. All it tells you is whether they liked it or not, and they don't even always get that right (they've often counted Ebert's 2 & 1/2 star reviews as "positive"). There's no methodology to RT other than that. Do you really care if someone has a very qualified reccomendation for a film? IMDB's polls have a different but equally useless system because it doesn't do anything to actually judge one film against another (not to mention that many people are voting on films they haven't actually seen).

With Sight & Sound, you have the bonus of very qualified individuals, but even more than that (as Calvero and others have said), it lists films that people believe to be the BEST ever made. Any thought-out list of the 10 best films ever made is at least interesting to me, while I couldn't possibly be less interested in RT (I haven't willfully been on the site in years). That's the big difference: Sight & Sound is at least trying to get at the best films ever made, thereby eliminating some films from the list. RT and others like it are only trying to rank films as individual items not related to each other.

It has a little more validity because it's more exclusive. Also because it's 100% retrospective, and is an interesting way of gauging elitist critical consensus. It's not a useful tool to build your Netflix queue by any means, but it is interesting. As I stated in that Dark Knight video, RT takes the mentality of Sight & Sound, which was expressly designed for retrospective, and shoehorns it into the new release system. This is no different from a Nolan flick ascending into the top 10 of the imdb 250 on the day of its release; but RT is worse than that because it involves intelligent critics, and is taken more seriously. So RT is more misleading.

I mostly agree with Ken. Vertigo may well eclipse it in the next rankings (I didn't realise it was that close, thanks calvy) but I'd be shocked if this change is ever permanent. Citizen Kane was something of a perfect storm (timeless story, popularisation of several movie shooting techniques, links to Hearst and how he almost successfully suppressed the picture etc.) that will be difficult to re-create.

In short: I don't think any already released movie will ever take its place. I also think that no future traditional movie has a chance. Of course:



Great point. If/when we ever get actual 3D (holograms and not this stereoscopic nonsense) there will be a huge shift in the way movies are made. It stands to reason that someone will do something special in the medium. But (as Ken goes on to point out), will we even consider those things as "films"? Paul Schrader has already started to use the term "audio/visual entertainment". Not really catchy though.



I don't want to derail the discussion but this is false. They include an average score along with the Tomatometer and do list every critic's rating. These things are de-emphasized in favour of the Fresh/Rotten thing so it's understandable that most people miss this.

No worries dude, please always point out when I'm wrong.

And in this case, I'm very wrong: I just checked out a couple pages for new films and the average score is indeed near the overall Freshness score, albeit much smaller as you said. As I said in either this or another recent thread, I haven't used RT for years, so I really shouldn't have been talking about it so ill-informed. Thanks for the heads-up.

Getting back on topic...



I agree with all of this. The internet has allowed so many voices into the critical realm that no new film, record, painting, etc etc will ever be accepted as the best ever, even though some may deserve that title. As several have pointed out around here, the growing thought of not accepting all classics as classics that cannot be overtaken is a very healthy approach, and in many ways goes against the notion that it's impossible for a new film to become the consensus Best Ever. Overall, though, the unavoidable appearance of (sometimes dishonest and sometimes not) contrarians will make this impossible.

some excerpts from Ebert's blog on the upcoming Sight & Sound list:

I would like to ask what the relevancy of this question is in this day and age.

First, consider paintings or music. Each piece is a work of art in itself. We do not judge people based on what they consider to be the "best" painting or the "best" symphony. Because we know that it is all about opinion and taste. We acknowledge that some pieces are much more influential than others, but this does not necessarily contribute to acknowledging a "best".

I think all of us would consider film to be an art form in the general sense. It really fascinates me then that we are so focused on rating them objectively. Even more so, that we have collectively picked out a "best film of all time never to be usurped". It doesn't make sense to me. I understand the usefulness of ratings as a crude method of deciding if a film is worth your time, but worrying about what the best film ever is seems silly.

I think it is because of the time we live in that we do this. We are so dependent on ratings of other things, like cars or hotels, which are much easier to objectively rate and review. I think that this has caused us to attempt to do the same things to film, and it is also why people get so mad about film awards. I think film is now old enough that we should try to separate the art from the rating.

Now again, I'm not saying that we shouldn't rate and review movies. That would be stupid to say on this forum. I just think that we spend too much time figuring out which film is "best" when we all have our own favorite picked out from the beginning. All we really want from these polls of top critics is to have our own personal tastes validated.

Talking about Citizen Kane, I can say that it was extremely influential with the effects and techniques it used. It was also a very well put together film. However, I think in terms of those two things, Star Wars could be considered just as influential. But no one will think of it like that. No one will really consider other movies that could upset King Kane.