Fin: In praise of the New York Times' user-generated movie lists

James Bond gets a director, Social Network gets a sequel, a director's son wins a mayoral primary, and more in this week's notes column.

I’ve gone on the record, relatively recently, as stating that arbitrary lists of the best movies of the decade, or the millennium, or the best active quarterbacks, and everything else, can be sort of dumb, the kind of thing that exists only to start arguments.

The New York Times, this past week, did a way better version: While they indeed released a list of the 100 best movies of the 21st century so far, created from a survey curated by professionals, they also let every reader submit their own top ten list, while spinning it into a spiffy, NYT graphic-design-caliber graphic, for easy social media sharing.

I don’t even think I’ve looked at the NYT top 100 survey yet, but I’ve been devouring all my friends’ lists, and even getting some cool recommendations off of them. Is it the New York Times turning itself into Letterboxd? In a way, yes. But they’re good at this stuff, and there’s a reason they’re the only big newspaper company left that remains unquestionably profitable.

And making a list like that is harder than it sounds! You have to remember all the movies you loved, from the last 25 years, and not forget any major ones. I’m a professional critic, with published lists of all my favorite movies from all of those years, and even I had trouble narrowing it down.

Anyway, here’s my graphic, although if you came to me next week it would probably look very different:

Double-0 Denis

Big news from the world of James Bond: Amazon announced this week that it has finally picked a director for its next Bond film, and it’s Denis Villeneuve, who made (among other things) Incendies, Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, and two modern Dune films.