All that stupid statistics shit is here.
Let’s start with years. The years with most movies are:
- 2011: 4
- 1992: 3
- 2008: 3
- 2022: 3
- 1954: 3
- 2001: 3
- 1962: 3
- 1995: 3
The movies from 2011: Drive, Turin Horse, Kill List and Nana
In general, the movies are pretty well spread out, as there are no other years with even three movies and those eight entries above are only a quarter of the list.
How do the movies spread out through the decades?
So, I don’t really like the 80s. Also, of course, I identify or relate to movies more easily from my lifetime and the years I’ve been actively watching movies, so that’s why there’s a big increase during the 1990s, but apparently, I’m not stuck in my teenage years, as the number of movies I’ve loved (and made the list) grew in the 2000s and has remained at the same level since (remembering that the 8 movies from the 2020s represents about half a decade).
What else?
There’s 30 new movies on the list and there’s only 22 movies that have remained on the list from the first version in 2005. These would be…
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
Full Monty (1997)
Princess Bride (1987)
Trainspotting (1996)
Fight Club (1999)
Rear Window (1954)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Seven Samurai (1954)
Rashomon (1950)
Unforgiven (1992)
Battle Royale (2000)
Das Boot (1981)
Wild Bunch (1969)
Amelie (2001)
Nuovo cinema Paradiso (1989)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
Das Kabinett Des Doktor Caligari (1920)
12 Angry Men (1957)
The Great Dictator (1940)
Metropolis (1927)
Det sjunde inseglet (1957)
24 Hour Party People (2002)
On top of those, three films were removed in 2010, but returned in 2015:
Se7en (1995)
Ed Wood (1994)
Batman Returns (1992)
I do still find it weird that Batman Returns has maintained it’s position on the list, but I do love it and it is still my favorite superhero movie, even if Nolan’s Batmen did at some point overshadow it for a minute for me.
While the number 1 repeats a fifth time, it should be noted that the number 2 also repeats, although only for the third time.
The longest movie on the list is, as mentioned in the entry, Seven Samurai at 207 minutes, which is 5 minutes longer than Jeanne Dielman. The shortest movie is L’hypothese du tableau vole at 66 minutes, which is 2 minutes less than Nana.
There’s 10 directors with two movies on the list (none with more):
Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Petite maman)
Henri-Georges Clouzot (Wages of Fear, Diaboliques)
Sergio Leone (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West)
Carl Theodor Dreyer (Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr)
Fritz Lang (M, Metropolis)
Luis Buñuel (Exterminating Angel, The Milky Way)
Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai, Rashomon)
David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en)
John Ford (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Grapes of Wrath)
Tim Burton (Ed Wood, Batman Returns)
Spielberg, Tarantino and Kubrick have been on this list of directors consistently from 2005, but Spielberg and Kubrick only have 1 on this version and Tarantino has none.
How many movies by country?
USA: 25
United Kingdom: 17
France: 11
Japan: 8
Germany: 7
Italy: 7
Australia: 3
Sweden: 3
Hungary: 2
Norway: 1
Hong Kong: 1
South Korea: 1
Czechoslovakia: 1
Canada: 1
Czech Republic: 1
Spain: 1
Soviet Union: 1
Belgium: 1
Mexico: 1
Finland: 1
Austria: 1
Greece: 1
Cuba: 1
Romania: 1
Poland: 1
Denmark: 1
Maybe Czech Republic (or now officially Czechia) and Czechoslovakia should have been combined into one, but as I have been to both Czechia and Slovakia, that did not feel proper. At one point I also pondered about Russia and Soviet Union as well as Hong Kong and China in the same way, but then I dropped a couple of movies and that was no longer a problem.
How do other people feel about the movies on my list?
The average score on IMDb is 7.72 with a median of 7.9. Letterbox’d says the average is 4.1 and the median is the same, but I did do rounding up with the average while the median is exactly that. On Rotten Tomatoes, the critics score average is 92.5 with a median of 93, while the audience figures are 85 and 88 respectively. The difference between the IMDb and Letterbox’d might be based on the weighting based on the number of votes IMDb does regarding the score or the audiences are just different. Who knows? Probably a bit of both.
On Rotten Tomatoes the audience score is higher than the critic score in less than 20% of cases. The median is at least slightly higher in all cases than the average, because there are outliers that have very low scores.
Best movies according to IMDb:
- 12 Angry Men (9.0)
- Schindler’s List (9.0)
- Fight Club (8.8)
- The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (8.8)
- Hara-Kiri (8.6)
- Se7en (8.6)
- Seven Samurai (8.6)
- It’s Such a Beautiful Day (8.6)
- Rear Window (8.5)
- Cinema Paradiso (8.5)
I’m delighted how people have discovered Hara-Kiri and It’s Such a Beautiful Day as they were relatively obscure for a while.
With the worst being:
- W (4.9)
- Hagazussa (5.8)
- Flux Gourmet (5.8)
- Relic (6.0)
- Kill List (6.4)
- Nana (6.5)
- Polite Society (6.6)
- You Were Never Really Here (6.7)
- Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (6.8)
- The Vvitch: A New England Folktale (7.0)
I’m still surprised how little The VVitch is appreciated by the general audiences.
The worst films according to Letterbox’d are pretty similar with the exception that apparently the people IMDb enjoy Sita Sings the Blues much more and W hasn’t crossed the number of votes required to get a score. The best films, on the other hand, are somewhat different with La Haine, There Will Be Blood and The Ascent making an appearance.
Then there’s the Rotten Tomatoes, but since those are often more easily manipulated than the other sites, I’ll just list the movies with a 100% critic score: It’s Such a Beautiful Day, Seven Samurai, 12 Angry Men, M, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Wages of Fear, Singin’ in the Rain, Sita Sings the Blues, The Grapes of Wrath, Hara-kIri, I Am Cuba and The Ascent. Of course, 100% doesn’t necessarily mean much, because a movie can get to that score if everyone just kind of likes it. There’s only three movies with a critic score less than 80: Nana with 67 (although it also has only six reviews), Day of the Beast with 77 and Kill List with 78. However, there’s one movie Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t even recognize (W) and one that has no critic reviews (Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting).
Finally, the categorization made by AI mentioned in the introduction. I’m going to go through this one category at a time. The exact question was “Can you group the movies by theme?” I should also note that some of the movies were released after the cutoff date for the training data, so it’s understandable that the AI did not include them.
Animation
Akira
Sita Sings the Blues
The Vvitch: A New England Folktale
The Princess Bride
Mononoke-hime
Allegro non troppo
Okay, animation is not a theme (unless the movie is specifically about animation, so Allegro non troppo would probably count here). Animation is sort of a genre, but it’s not even that here. If you talk about animation as a genre, you think Disney or Pixar, not Sita Sings the Blues, Akira or Princess Mononoke. Akira and Princess Mononoke are clearly representative of a genre different from American animations. Sita Sings the Blues is American, but definitely not in the same category as Disney movies. Allegro non troppo is a parody of Fantasia, so in a sense it’s in the same genre, but it uses the live action segments very differently.
Of course, The VVitch and Princess Bride are not animations in any way.
Comedy/Satire
Batman Returns
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Four Lions
Allegro non troppo
Gosford Park
The Great Dictator
In Bruges
24 Hour Party People
In the Loop
This is actually pretty good list. Not sure it covers all the comedies on the whole list, but yeah, it seems to have actually found something here. Nothing very interesting, but something anyhow.
Coming of Age
Nuovo Cinema Paradiso
Moonlight
La voie lactée
It's Such a Beautiful Day
The first two are pretty good examples of this, although they extend to adulthood, but that the other two… no. Just… no.
Dystopian/Futuristic
Akira
Children of Men
Metropolis
Sure, but how about Mad Max: Fury Road?
Existentialism/Philosophical
The Vvitch: A New England Folktale
Rashômon
W
Det sjunde inseglet
Seppuku
The Ox-Bow Incident
Akira
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Rear Window
La passion de Jeanne d'Arc
The Wild Bunch
Fight Club
Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles
12 Angry Men
Children of Men
I thought there would be no way the AI would be able to figure out the right W, as there are plenty of movies by that name and it didn’t. It assumed it was W., a Bush biopic.
Anyhow, some of these fit very well, others less so. On the other hand, the category here is so vague you could argue for any movie on the list to be included. Even Batman Returns has such themes.
Film Noir/Crime
The Nightingale
12 Angry Men
M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder
Se7en
Sunset Blvd.
Sure. The Nightingale doesn’t really belong here, but the AI did not provide additional information when asked about it.
Historical/Epic
Mad Max: Fury Road
Shichinin no samurai
Schindler's List
Das Boot
The Last of Sheila
Batman Returns
The Grapes of Wrath
Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo
Barry Lyndon
A torinoi lo
4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile
Obviously Mad Max: Fury Road is not historical. Someone, somewhere has probably called in Epic, but has probably used it more as description how they felt about the movie than the themes. Same with Batman Returns. The Last of Sheila, on the other hand, is a murder mystery, so doesn’t belong to either category. Some of the others are historical in the sense that they happen in the past, but I wouldn’t really say something like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a historical movie.
Mystery/Thriller
The Nightingale
The Vvitch: A New England Folktale
Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo
Rashômon
Fight Club
The Last of Sheila
Sunset Blvd.
Rear Window
Some of the movies here are mysteries and/or thrillers, some could be argued to be one, while others just aren’t.
Psychological Thriller/Horror
The Nightingale
The Vvitch: A New England Folktale
M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder
Se7en
You Were Never Really Here
These two categories should not be put together. The VVitch is definitely horror, but the others aren’t, so why would they belong together. I wouldn’t necessarily describe any of these ‘psychological thriller’, even though it might fit in some sense of the word.
Romance
Portrait de la jeune fille en feu
Nuovo Cinema Paradiso
Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain
Nuovo Cinema Paradiso does include romance, but it’s not about romance. The whole romance subplot is more about the main character’s inability to understand real life romance due to his movie fandom and the way he talks about it is all just copying the way movies handled the subject back in the day.
Social Commentary/Critique
Festen
In Bruges
Fight Club
Relic
The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover
In the Loop
Trainspotting
La voie lactée
Les Diaboliques
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Sunset Blvd.
Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles
Drive
Soy Cuba
La passion de Jeanne d'Arc
La Haine
Nuovo Cinema Paradiso
Some of these are clearly exactly social commentary, others are not. Or everything on the original list is social commentary. Relic is just horror, but of course could be read as commentary to modern family relationships.
Surreal/Fantasy
Akira
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari
The Princess Bride
The Vvitch: A New England Folktale
Why would this be a category? There are some surreal movies ont he whole list, but they are not fantasy.
War/Military
Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo
Das Boot
Mad Max: Fury Road
Wait what?
Finally, FINALLY, the number of words on the list: 70528. Yeah, the basline minimum number of words for a novel is 40000, so… yeah. I like writing.