Tag: lists

Determining the best film of a certain historical period is an exercise in futility; an attempt to find an objective answer to an entirely subjective topic.

But let’s do it anyway!

I find there are only two viable ways to approach this sort of thing: Either you pick your own personal favorites — which generates a 100 percent accurate list of an era’s best films according to one individual — or you look to a source where you can compare many different people’s ratings to at least get a good idea of a broad consensus. That’s why I like Letterboxd, where you can sort through their database to see what movies have the highest and lowest average ratings. If you wanted to determine the best films of the 21st century by comparing titles’ average Letterboxd scores, you can do that.

Now you can’t quickly or easily see all the highest and lowest rated movies of the 21st century, but you can see each of the century’s decades’ best and worst movies. If you cross-reference the best movies of the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s, you can then create one master list of the best films. That’s what I did here.

Note that I excluded any TV shows or miniseries, which are included in the raw lists Letterboxd generates but don’t count here, at least as far as i am concerned. Once you take those titles out, here’s what you’re left with, Letterboxd users’ picks for the best movies of the 21st century…

READ MORE: The Worst Movies of the 21st Century, According to Letterboxd

Think physical media is dead? Try telling that to the people who spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on Blu-rays and box sets recently on eBay.

While overall Blu-ray and DVD sales are certainly down from their peak, the aftermarket for physical media is still going very strong. In fact, the wider decline in home video might be helping demand for certain discs. Fewer of these movies get made, and fewer of these movies are sold. That means there are fewer to go around for those that do want them. And that can lead to some higher prices.

Like the ones you are about to see below, which were sold for three or more figures recently on eBay. (The numbers for the best offers on some of the items come from the website 130point.com.) Please note that I did my best to weed out iffy listings. If one person paid $700 for a Blu-ray, but ten other people around the same time all purchased the exact same Blu-ray for $50, it didn’t feel like the $700 was a fair measure of its value, and I didn’t include it.

Similarly, if a box set is currently selling on eBay for $350 but the original list price was $299.99, that didn’t strike me as particularly “valuable” either. (Now, if a box set originally sold for $299.99 and now it’s going for $650, that’s another story.) I also decided to exclude most steelbooks and extremely low-run limited editions, simply because that seemed like a whole other list entirely.

With all of those caveats out of the way, here are 25 Blu-rays, 4Ks, and box sets that are still extremely valuable:

READ MORE: The Weirdest Ghostbusters Merchandise Ever Made

When the topic of the best movies ever made comes up, there are a few respected polls and lists that cinephiles consult. Every ten years, Sight & Sound puts out their best film poll that draws on the expertise of dozens of film critics and filmmakers. The American Film Institute released several well-respected lists of the greatest American films of all time, along with the best films in several specific genres like thrillers, horror films, or musicals.

Those lists are all informative and valuable. But they’re also fixed in place. The AFI hasn’t put out a new 100 best films list in over 15 years, and Sight & Sound only polls their experts once a decade. If you want a more fluid look at the evolving consensus picks for the greatest movies in history, you might want to try Letterboxd, the film-based social media site where you can see a ranking of every single movie in their database — over 900,000 titles! — based on hundreds of thousands of users’ votes.

There are a few different best-of lists on Letterboxd already. If you click the “Films” tab and then go “Browse By” and click “Rating” and “Highest First” you’ll get all 900,000+ titles ranked from the absolute top score all the way to the absolute worst. But that raw list also includes some TV shows, documentary miniseries, and longform anime; titles are are certainly wonderful but perhaps do not belong on a list of best movies ever made.

Likewise, Letterboxd maintains its own “official” list of the top 250 narrative features, but that list by its very nature does not include things like documentaries or concert films which perhaps do belong on a list of the best films of all time. That’s why I made the list of 25 titles below, which is sort of the best of both worlds: It’s all of Letterboxd’s highest-rated films, but only films — including docs and concert films. Take a look for yourself and see what made the cut…

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You never know what’s going to happen on Hollywood’s Biggest Night, and though most of us tune in just to see who wins what, there’s a lot more that goes into making the Oscars happen than simply handing out awards. Having a show to begin with, for example, and a live show of this caliber always needs a host who’s up for the job.

Hosting the Academy Awards is a tough gig, and though they’ve been doing this for almost a century, it’s rare that a host is deemed genuinely great at the job. From the second their comedic opening monologue or flashy musical number begins, the audience in the theater and at home know whether or not they’re going to be able to sit through a whole night of this. There have been a few winners: Bob Hope remains the pinnacle of what an Oscars host should aspire to, Billy Crystal reinvented the form for the modern era during his four-year run, and Hugh Jackman’s musical number still hits 25 years later.

That said, with great pressure comes even more opportunities to fail, and the most talked-about Oscars ceremonies are often the ones whose hosts completely bomb. Maybe their tone isn’t reverent enough, maybe their jokes don’t land, or maybe their chemistry with their co-hosts is off, but whatever the case, Oscars hosts have found seemingly infinite ways to be terrible at their jobs. Below are a few otherwise consummate professionals, experts in their fields, who gave the Oscars and their audience a night we’ll never forget—no matter how much the Academy wishes we would.

1995: David Letterman

“Oprah. Uma. Uma. Oprah.” So begins one of the worst nights of David Letterman’s career, the night he hosted the Oscars in 1995. The comedian and late night star kicked off his gig by playfully berating the orchestra for playing for too long, shot off a quick one-liner about Hoop Dreams, and then skipped from one end of the stage to the other, saying the names of Oprah and Uma Thurman over and over. “Have you kids met Keanu?” he added, to more perplexed laughter. It only went downhill from there, and Letterman, who said afterward that he was “perspiring” the whole night, kept bringing the weird name thing back up! Dubbed the “Oprah-Uma” broadcast thereafter, the 67th Academy Awards nonetheless attracted the highest ratings for the show since 1983, and the Academy even invited Letterman to host again (though he hasn’t taken them up on that yet).

2010: Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin

There was nothing truly terrible about Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin’s night at the 82nd Academy Awards in 2010. They simply had zero chemistry together. After an entrance fit for a Busby Berkeley musical number, with the co-hosts in tuxedos descending from the ceiling atop a shimmering orb, the rest of the night felt like watching a couple of amateurs bomb their first gig. Baldwin seemed nervous and jittery the whole night, and Martin slogged through all of his awkwardly written jokes. Maybe it was something about the audio recording, or maybe it was really that silent in the auditorium, but after the first five minutes no one at the ceremony seemed to be reacting at all to their material.

1983: Walter Matthau, Liza Minnelli, Dudley Moore, Richard Pryor

READ MORE: The 10 Most Shocking Best Picture Winners

The 1983 Oscars ceremony is reason enough to never start your show with an opening musical number if half of your hosts don’t know what they’re doing. It also proved that more does not always mean more when having four hosts wasn’t enough to save the night. Liza Minnelli nearly brought home the show’s terrible opening number, a jazzy show tune called “It All Comes Down to This,” but her professionalism wasn’t enough to wake up her co-hosts. Dudley Moore put up a good front responding to all of Minnelli’s cues, Richard Pryor mumbled through the entire song, and after a few bars Walter Matthau just sort of stood there looking lost.

2015: Neil Patrick Harris

Neil Patrick Harris attempted to punt the Oscars into the modern #woke era, to mostly mixed-to-bad results. His tongue-twisting opening musical number was good, if a little too Tonys, and from there it seemed to spiral out of control. The first joke of the night was a dig at the Academy’s lack of diversity—“We celebrate the best and the whitest—sorry, brightest”—that seemed less like self-aware humor and more like an influential Hollywood institution trying to compensate for itself. An endless stream of ill-timed jokes, including one about a documentary filmmaker’s dress delivered right after she dedicated her win to her late son and another about David Oyelowo’s British accent, gave the night a mean, uncomfortable edge.

1989: Hostless

We’re sort of cheating here, since 1989’s Oscars ceremony famously (or maybe infamously) went without a host for the first time ever, but the opening number is too catastrophic to be missed. A squeaky-voiced Snow White, played by actress Eileen Bowman, sings an Oscars-themed medley while shaking hands with the unlucky audience members in the front row, while a bunch of stars wearing high heels can-can onstage. The bit then segues to the “Cocoanut Grove,” where Roy Rogers, Cyd Charisse, and Vincent Price are trotted out amidst more sequined dancers, and culminates in an awkward duet between Snow White and her “blind date” Rob Lowe, fresh from his sex tape scandal the year prior. Frank Wells, president of Disney at the time, later told the Academy he was “very unhappy.”

1988: Chevy Chase

Chevy Chase was a hit when he co-hosted the 1987 Oscars with Goldie Hawn and Paul Hogan, but bombed the following year when the Academy had him do it all on his lonesome. Opening with a risky “Good evening, Hollywood phonies” that didn’t win him any friends in the audience, Chase and his material were seen as irritating and smarmy, prolonging the event even longer than was necessary. After bantering a bit with Paul Newman before the actor presented Cher with the Best Actress award for Moonstruck, Chase deliberately dropped his pants onstage. “Well, there’s something to be said for comedy,” Newman responded, cringing. It didn’t help that the Writers Guild of America was on strike that year and unable to provide any help streamlining the affair.

2011: Anne Hathaway and James Franco

Listen … Anne Hathaway innocent. She and James Franco were an unusual match for co-hosts, and their onstage chemistry proved completely nonexistent. Though she started the show with an uncomfortably bug-eyed, “Oh my gosh, you’re all real,” Hathaway did her best to save the night when Franco decided he was just over the whole thing. Sullen and sulky, the actor gave absolutely nothing all night, forcing Hathaway to turn her excitement dial up way too many notches. The result is an uncomfortable watch, if you can watch it at all. We don’t recommend it!

2013: Seth MacFarlane

The good news: The Academy learned from past mistakes and got a guy who could actually sing to host their show and deliver a rousing opening number. The bad news: It was Seth MacFarlane. The prince of potty humor was such a risky choice for Hollywood’s biggest night that Captain James T. Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise himself beamed in from the future to stop it from happening in the show’s first moments. Nevertheless, MacFarlane persisted, and his big opening song, titled “We Saw Your Boobs,” called out every accomplished actress in the theater who had ever performed nude. No one could tell whether the reaction shots from Amy Adams and Charlize Theron hiding their faces were staged or not, and you could feel the audience and the public turning on MacFarlane almost immediately. Not even a chipper soft-shoe from Daniel Radcliffe and Joseph Gordon-Levitt was enough to get the host back in everyone’s good graces, and MacFarlane’s effort as host is considered by many to be the worst the Academy ever got.

By now it should be pretty clear: I love Letterboxd. After my email and my homemade Gymkata fan page, it’s probably my most-visited site on the internet. I use it to log my own viewing habits, keep tabs on what my friends are watching, and get ideas for new things to check out. (Right now I’m working my way through my blind spots from Letterboxd’s Top 250 films ever. The Face of Another is incredible! Go watch it on the Criterion Channel right now.)

Letterboxd is also a great place to get a sense of recent films’ reputations, because you can look through the site’s database of basically every movie in history and sort it in all sorts of ways, including by films’ average rating by Letterboxd’s millions of users. You can also sort by decade and then go through ratings that way.

You can’t necessarily see all the highest and lowest rated movies of the 21st century at a glance, but you can see each of the century’s decades best and worst movies and then cross-reference each and compile one master list of the best or, in this case, the worst films. And that’s what I’ve done below; given you the 50 lowest-rated titles of the 21st century, according to Letterboxd users.

Generally there aren’t a ton of surprises on here, except in the cases of a few obscure titles that made cut. Pretty much all the big guns you expect to see on a list like this are on here, like the film where John Travolta played an evil alien in giant platform boots and dreadlocks, or the movie where James Corden played an anthropomorphic dancing cat. Without further ado, here are all the worst movies of the 21st century, according to Letterboxd…

READ MORE: The Best Movies of 2023, According to Letterboxd