All-Time Top Ten - The Agenda

Duking It Out For A Place

It would be entirely fair to say that, more often than not, I have films on my mind and it is a truth universally acknowledged that I’m nothing if not a stickler for an upholding of order when it comes to film-viewing.

A question every serious film fan has to face at some point is “what’s your favourite film?” or “your top ten films of all time?”. I normally skirt around this by saying it’s impossible to narrow down and that the best I can do is maybe a non-committal top 30-40 without any real ranking order. A lot of these films I think of as my favourites, but are they due a reassessment? Am I being honest with myself? Is tokenism or longstanding (possibly outdated) opinion all that’s keeping them in? Are they just there because they've always been there? Are they due a cull? Let’s see if I can narrow this down.

As I don’t want to this blog to be solely about lists and fetishistic ranking, here's the proposal: I’ll try to flesh this out a bit by way of a(n ir)regular series of sporadic postings where I’ll take each film of these 30 or 40 in turn, rewatch them, mull them over, write up my thoughts fairly fully and attempt to hammer this out for good. I'd expect this process to take place over the next year, or more.

This kind of thing is always going to be subject to fluctuation. There’s clearly a lot I’ve never seen and so it’s wide-open for new additions at any time. A top ten can never be a fixed thing. I'll refrain from posting the longlist for the time being, instead revealing each film one-by-one.

One of the most important aspects of this is going to be invoking a discussion with you, dear reader. It will hopefully stimulate and spur my own internal processes and I'll be challenged to come up with decent counter-arguments for their inclusion. Or not. While I definitely welcome, and wholeheartedly beg for, comments this is my list so I’m not really looking for judgement being passed on what is, or isn’t, on the longlist. Just your thoughts on the films as they come.

So, that's the plan. I'll try to start on this quite soon, running concurrently with the yearly challenge and keeping up with the review-writing. However, it is also a truth universally acknowledged that I’m nothing if not lethargic, so my nature may put paid to these machinations. We shall see.