IMDb & Indiewire Top Films Mash-Up

MEETS

I was curious to see what would happen if I took the top films on the Indiewire poll of critics from 2012 and melded it with the (now "settled") top rated films from users on IMDb.  It was a pretty interesting list! (I looked at IMDb's 2011 list as well for foreign films that might have been released a year earlier in their country of origin. Didn't apply this year.) Here's the top ten (alphabetically listed):

TOP TEN 2012

Amour

Argo

Django Unchained

Life of Pi

Lincoln

Looper

Moonrise Kingdom

Silver Linings Playbook

Skyfall

Zero Dark Thirty

Putting the lists together eliminates both IMDb's top film (The Dark Knight Rises) and Indiewire's top film (Holy Motors).  It seems to "work" to eliminate the top "popular" acclaimed movie and the top "critically" acclaimed movie. Both of their #2s made the list: IMDb (Django Unchained), Indiewire (Zero Dark Thirty).

In the olden (pre-internet) days, The National Board of Review's top ten (plus foreign film list) was a pretty reliable list.  Melded with the New York Times top ten for any given year and compared against IMDb's users ratings, you get a similar more "accurate" list of the ten-best of any given year [again, shifting release dates as necessary].

Here's two years, to illustrate:

1937
Captains Courageous
The Good Earth
Grand Illusion
The Life of Emile Zola
Lost Horizon
Make Way for Tomorrow
Night Must Fall
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Stage Door
A Star Is Born

1973
Amarcord
American Graffiti
Day For Night
The Last Detail
The Long Goodbye
Mean Streets
O Lucky Man!
Paper Moon
Serpico
The Sting

It's not perfect since some movies were not acknowledged as great films in their day, most famously Touch of Evil and Vertigo in 1958, but in these cases it's pretty obvious when such films are missing, such as The Exorcist from 1973, above.  Does always seem to result in a pretty primo top ten, and a nice place to start for budding cinephiles.

None of this matters, but it's always fun to make a movie list!