Discussion: On Rating Movies

The Troublesome Art of Rating Movies

I love making lists ranking movies. Which cinephile doesn't. But what makes a movie “great”? It’s the question that every rating, list, star system and Sight & Sound poll has tried to answer, and it is ultimately the job the critic. But the truth is: “greatness” is slippery. A film that feels like a masterpiece today might strike you as overwrought or underwhelming a year from now. And the opposite holds too. Art grows and shrinks depending on when and how you encounter it.

The Sight and Sound poll, one of the most respected barometers of cinematic greatness, stirred conversation in 2022 when Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles topped the list. It was the first time a female director had taken the top spot. But even then, the wider canon remained firmly patriarchal—only 11 of the top 100 films were directed by women, and nearly 70% of the poll’s contributors were male.

Interestingly, Sight and Sound changed its guidance in 2022. In 2012, contributors were told to vote for their “personal favourites.” In 2022, they were asked to consider artistic achievement and cultural significance. The tension between those two approaches—emotional response versus critical appraisal—goes to the heart of what it means to rate a film. Should Paddington 2 be allowed in the same conversation as Persona? Must we always choose between joy and rigor?

Letterboxd, the wildly popular social platform for film lovers, has introduced a more populist dimension to movie ratings. Though still cinephile-heavy, its culture thrives on subjectivity. You can find five-star reviews for Showgirls sitting happily beside half-stars for The Godfather. And while that may horrify traditional critics, it also reflects something true: we want our movie tastes to reflect our identities, our moods, our moments. The urge to rank is not just about declaring what’s “best”—it’s about understanding what speaks to us, and why.

Many directors contributing to the 2022 Sight and Sound poll admitted that picking a “top 10” felt almost ridiculous. As Joanna Hogg put it, “My list would look completely different tomorrow.” And that’s okay. The real value of lists isn’t in settling anything—they’re about continuing the conversation. They’re invitations, not verdicts.

Why We Can't Fix Greatness

Philosophically, the difficulty of rating art echoes questions raised in Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig explores the nature of “Quality”—something both universal and elusive, recognizable but undefinable. He argues that Quality exists at the intersection of subjective intuition and objective standard, “where reality and perception meet”.

Applied to film criticism: a movie that resonates for you today may dissolve tomorrow because your internal expectations, analogues, and lived experiences shift. It explains why a director admits choices fluctuate daily—and why collective polls inevitably reflect cultural and demographic biases

Canons and Culture

Film canons have historically been gatekept by critics, festival curators, and academic taste-makers. But academic study itself shows how public user ratings tend to diverge over time—films initially polarizing eventually converge toward consensus as they become more widely seen or rediscovered.

The 2022 Sight & Sound poll’s shift toward stricter criteria feels like an institutional attempt to anchor Quality in something more tangible: cultural impact, representation, innovation. Yet even with that shift, contributions still skew male, Western, and institutional. That reinforces Pirsig’s point: our perception of Quality is shaped by (“a priori analogues”), namely our backgrounds and expectations.

A Pragmatic Approach to Rating

Perhaps we need a hybrid model. Ratings that combine emotional response (“did this move me?”) with critical context (“does it open new perspectives, question assumptions, or reflect something essential about its time?”). That’s the very impulse behind Sight & Sound’s revised criteria. Rotten Tomatoes in many ways provides an analogue to this, and as a result is my most readily relied upon barometer for gauging the "quality" of a film. The 'Critic' score tends to point towards artistic merit, while the 'Audience' score tends to point towards enjoyment. Like any method, it is imperfect, but generally it hits far more often than it misses

List-making, when done transparently, can also become a cultural exercise in self-awareness. Who makes the list? What’s their reference frame? Who or what has been excluded? Ultimately, cinema is dynamic, and so are we. Films we love or hate today may mean something entirely different in five years, or mean something entirely different to some else. The best lists don’t suppress uncertainty, they embrace it. They’re snapshots in an ongoing conversation that is ever-changing because we are too.

The films we love—or don’t—are shaped by who we are when we watch them. So go ahead, make your lists. But make peace with the idea that they will change. They should.