It is certainly foolish to expect a populist magazine like Entertainment Weekly to come out with lists that are anything other than populist, but even if we allow that they will never publish “The Ten Best Béla Tarr Films You’ve Never Seen”,* it’s still the case that their recent list of the 100 Best Movies of the Last 25 Years is an exceptionally asinine misfire. For starters, there are only six films produced in a language other than English:
28. Wings of Desire
49. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
56. The Lives of Others
69. All About My Mother
86. Y tu mámá también
95. In the Mood for Love
No Three Colors, no Ran, no Yi Yi (indeed, only one two Asian films altogether, despite the common opinion that China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea all enjoyed their cinematic Golden Ages in the last 25 years), no Run Lola Run, no Amores perros, no City of God, no Paris, Texas – and these are not minor little unknown films that only snobs like.
To say nothing of the absence of deserving American and British pictures like Short Cuts, Mona Lisa, Trainspotting, Mulholland Drive, Dangerous Liaisons, Terence Malick’s Thin Red Line and The New World, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise/Sunset dyad, anything by Spielberg more interesting than the inevitable Schindler’s List and Private Ryan, anything at all by Gus Van Sant or Terry Gilliam or Mike Leigh or David Cronenberg or Jim Jarmusch.
Hell, they couldn’t even get do populism right: Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit is nowhere to be found, and his Back to the Future barely clawed its way on at 91 – one behind Napoleon Dynamite, three behind the first Austin Powers and half a list behind Men in Black. No Jurassic Park, no Princess Bride, no Big Lebowski, Beauty and the Beast, Finding Nemo, Kill Bill…
Not even Showgirls!
But they did manage to find room for Out of Africa, Fatal Attraction and Dirty Dancing on the list, for Pretty Woman, Speed, Rain Man, Shrek and Gladiator in the top 50, and for Titanic in the top 3.
These people are tastemakers, for god’s sake. Couldn’t they have put a little more effort into trying to make people aware of movies they might not have heard of before? Or is that what the unexpected appearance of Crumb at 14 was meant to handle? If not for the presence of Blue Velvet at a shocking 4th place, this list would have essentially no value whatever.
Your own picks for the best films since 1983, your own gripes about the EW list, or you can even try to defend it, if you like, in comments.