It is a long standing tradition for movie critics to publish an end of the year Top Ten Movies list. I love this tradition and read just about every Top Ten Movies list I can find. This year, I've been keeping tabs as I read and have been entering all of the various lists into a database, which I've summed and sorted to create a compilation master list of the top movies according to the critics, complete with a combined score, for 2008 (methodology and all that boring stuff after the break):

Top Ten Movies of 2008

1. WALL-E    (123.25)
2. Slumdog Millionaire   (70.75)
3. The Wrestler    (62)
4. Milk    (58.75)
5. The Dark Knight   (54.75)
6. Happy-Go-Lucky    (52.75)
7. The Visitor    (44.5)
8. Frost/Nixon    (40.75)
9. Man on Wire    (39.75)
10. A Christmas Tale  (37)

So that's how the critics feel, but what about the ticket-buying public? Or at least a ticket-buying-public-heavily-influenced by massive marketing campaigns and universal distribution deals. If the critics are important, surely their informed reviews, cheers and jeers, thumbs up and down must have made a difference in the bottom line...right?

Methodology

All told, I surveyed 22 critics who together included 82 movies on their lists. The scoring was, more or less, simple, with a movie getting 10 points for a #1 placing on a list, 9 point for second all the way down to 1 point for a 10th place finish. Some critics didn't list in any particular order (like Stephanie Zacharek did with some of her picks) and so I took the liberty of assigning 5.5 points to each of the movies on their lists, which is the average points total on a Top Ten list (unless you had 20 unordered movies - Mr. Ebert - so each only got 2.75 points).

Analysis

All movie reviewers have a bias, for example, more recent films (Slumdog Millionaire) tend to be easier to remember for End of Year lists than older flicks. It is pretty clear that American movie reviewer have a bias too, especially towards Art House (Frost/Nixon) and foreign films (Happy-Go-Lucky) and every critic seemed compelled to put some oddball favorite on their list to prove they were unique. I guess it could be argued that this is an attempt by critics to appear clever and elite, but, honestly, these are professional reviewers: they LOVE movies! Seeing the same old, same old over and over again, day after day as a part of your JOB has got to wear on you.

But why only professional critics? Why not everyone else? There are two reasons. First, the pros do this for a living and their reputations are on the line every time they write. In other words, they take this more seriously than you or I do. Second (and more importantly), the pros see more movies than we do. So while I might think that Let the Right one In is the best movie EVAR, I'd also have to admit that I saw about 150 movies this year and not all were new 2008 movies.

So, while I agree that comedies and action movies generally get the shaft from the professional critics in favor of Artsy Fartsy foreign films, the complied Top Ten list is remarkable in that the animated Wall-E comes out on top by a huge margin and The Dark Knight also ranks very highly. Again, you could quibble that Heath Ledger's death bumped that movie's rank up, but Iron Man is not far down my list either (#15). Not only are both of those action movies (strike one!), but they are also comic book movies (strike two AND three!). This gives me some confidence that the combined list is pretty broad and interesting. This is not the case for all Top Ten lists I surveyed.

Interesting Comparisons

I thought that this Critics' Top Ten list was particularly interesting when compared with some other Top Ten lists I generated. At first I thought this would be simple, but nothing on the Internets ever is. For example, the Rotten Tomatoes Top Ten of 2008 should be an interesting comparison, but the list is bizarre and skewed and will take time to work itself out. Likewise, I figured the IMDB list would be fascinating, since it doesn't just included critics, but anyone and everyone. So we would expect popular movies (by virtue of marketing, distribution, popular hype, personal preference) to do well, but, again, the list is strange and I don't have much motivation to try and figure out why. These sites are, of course, subject to vote-flooding and manipulation. In the end, I found only a few other lists to be particularly interesting for comparison sake.

First, there's the spectacular database on Movie City News that compiles everything and the kitchen sink together into a monster database. I found that their data incorrectly gives ranks to at least a few critics that did not rank their picks and I also chose not to include film societies and other aggregate sources like they have, but I can only pretend to have attempted what they accomplished and am pretty happy that my professional-reviewers only, but still somewhat arbitrary survey ended up almost the same overall.

Movie City News

1. Wall-E
   
2. Milk
   
3. The Dark Knight
   
4. Slumdog Millionaire
   
5. The Wrestler
   
6. Rachael Getting Married
   
7. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
   
8. Happy-Go-Lucky
   
9. Let the Right One In
   
10. A Christmas Tale

The second list that I found very interesting was, the MetaCritic list, which combines the review scores of professional critics into, well, a metascore. Again, I'll grant you that I have a bias and really enjoy metacritic, but I though the comparison kind of teases out the difference between natural reviews done throughout the year and the arguably artificial manufacturing of Top Ten lists in hindsight at the end of the year. (Note: I am not saying one is more valid than the other. I'm just saying it's interesting.)

MetaCritic Top Ten of 2008

1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
2. The Class
3. Wall-E
4. Man on Wire
5. Slumdog Millionaire
6. The Flight of the Red Balloon
7. The Edge of Heaven
8. Alexandra
9. Milk
10. A Christmas Tale

Third, I guess it could be said that the best measure of a film's popularity is the box office and those numbers are relatively easy to come by. This list is the primary reason why I found the Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB lists so strange: it's easy to figure out how to manipulate and flood an online voting system, but Box Office voters vote with their pocketbooks, which is definitely harder to game.

Box Office Top Ten of 2008

1. The Dark Knight
2. Iron Man
3. Indiana Jones
4. Hancock
5. WALL•E
6. Kung Fu Panda
7. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
8. Quantum of Solace
9. Horton Hears A Who!
10. Sex and the City

So the box office kings are a combination of marketing and the number of theaters a movie is released into, but it is pretty interesting to see a huge disconnect. Seven out of ten of the big box office successes this year were not to be found on ANY of the critics' Top Ten lists that I surveyed.

Conclusion

In the end, what does this all mean? Honestly? Nothing. Box Office figures show that marketing works, Internet polls and voting are massively flawed and critics are not irrelevant, but people like what people like. Still, it is fascinating, isn't it?

Data

Here's a summary of the data:

• List of the 22 critics included in this survey.
• List of the 82 movies that were mentioned on the various critic's lists.