Ranking every movie

You know how this works. Having recently published our list of the best movies of the year, it’s time to rank the rest. And by “rank” I mean clump them into semi-arbitrary tiers. But don’t worry, even though they aren’t individually ranked, nothing’s to prevent you from kvetching that the comedy I slotted into Tier 3 actually belongs in Tier 5, and that the thriller I placed in the “Underrated” tier is Overrated, Actually. That kind of griping is exactly why we have the internet.

Per usual, in addition to identifying each movie’s director, I have also appended the specific service it’s currently streaming on (if any). Note that, given the vagaries of streaming and the gluttony of assholes like David Zaslav, this information is necessarily impermanent. In other words, stream ’em while you got ’em. (Remember, I have stopped including Rotten Tomatoes data because Rotten Tomatoes is trash.)

Here’s the full list of all 134 new releases I watched in 2023, split into tiers that are cogent and precise and totally rigid (where applicable, the hyperlink leads to my review of that particular movie): Read More

Yesterday, MovieManifesto published its list of the best movies of 2022. Today, per annual tradition, we’re ranking everything else, with a comprehensive list of every movie we watched last year. Except we aren’t really “ranking” them, because rankings are dumb and obnoxious and falsely imply quantitative rigidity in a medium that’s fundamentally fluid and amorphous. Instead, we’re breaking out my beloved concept of tiers, which are somewhat nebulous in their own right but which do a decent job striking the balance between the internet’s demand for comparative metrics and my own distaste toward numerical measures.

Aside from serving as an exercise in nerdy recordkeeping, this piece is meant to serve as a primer for readers who invariably ask themselves that age-old question: Hey, what movie should I watch tonight? That’s why I include which service each film is (currently) streaming on—so that you can use this list as a guide as you mull your evening selection. (On the other hand, I’ve decided to omit the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic data that I’ve typically appended in the past; I might elaborate on this in the future, but for now suffice it to say that those sites are bad and stupid, and I don’t want to promulgate their dubious methodology.) [Update: I did, in fact, elaborate on this.]

Here’s the complete list of all 138 new movies I watched in 2022, broken into sensible, not-at-all random tiers: Read More

Rankings are a scourge. They create the illusion of rigidity; if X is ranked 12th and Y is ranked 14th, then X is indubitably better than Y, with zero room for argument or ambiguity. This in turn provokes bafflement, derision, and fury. How could you possibly rank that movie three spots ahead of that other movie, you utter philistine?

Of course, conversation is the lifeblood of criticism, and silly disputes about rankings can lead to more substantive debates about quality. Still, the impression of quantitative inflexibility is distasteful. That’s why, in this annual series, MovieManifesto no longer imposes actual rankings on every movie of the year. Instead, we separate them all into distinct tiers, with no ordering within individual tiers. This will surely eliminate all possible complaints about my taste. Read More

The headline says it all. Every year, in addition to publishing our list of the best movies of the past 12 months, MovieManifesto unveils an exhausting ranking of every release of that year. Except the ranking isn’t really a ranking, because that invites widespread ridicule (or maybe just my own nightmares); instead, we separate everything into 10 distinct tiers. In addition, as part of our ongoing efforts to serve the public, we append certain data to each title: its director, its respective ratings on Rotten Tomatoes on Metacritic, and—most valuably—where it’s currently streaming. This is our gift to you. You’re welcome.

Obligatory disclaimer: The tiers aren’t infallible, if I re-ranked things a month from now they’d look considerably different, appreciation of art isn’t a fixed object but shifts over time, blah blah. The point is, don’t take these rankings too seriously; do use them as an opportunity to search for intriguing films from 2020 that you might have missed. Read More

Each of the past four years, the Manifesto has engaged in a fun and ludicrous exercise wherein we ranked every movie we saw that year. It’s always been a profoundly silly column, one that’s more designed to inspire debate than to operate as any sort of official statement of my opinions; for example, it’s provoked heated reactions like “How dare you disrespect Paddington 2!” and “Dude, you ranked Avengers: Infinity War 40 spots below Aquaman, what the fuck?” While I always enjoy getting yelled at on the internet, I acknowledge that these rankings are flawed, because they give the appearance of an ironclad hierarchy that doesn’t really exist. Last year, I ranked First Man 17th and Hereditary 25th; did I really think that the former was significantly better than the latter?

Still, I maintain that a comprehensive year-end wrap-up has its virtues. For one, it serves as a handy recordkeeping function, allowing me to track what I watched and (perhaps more importantly) what I didn’t. It also features a #servicey component: I always include in parentheses, along with the name of each movie’s director and its respective ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, any service where it’s streaming (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc.). In theory, this is helpful for readers who have the ubiquitous questions of “What should I watch?” and “How can I watch it?” Read More