There's another bias, where things are overrated because they're unusually good for their time. For instance, "Battleship Potemkin" is often considered one of the greatest films ever made because it was so innovative for its time, despite the fact that when you watch it now, it's easily a shitty propaganda film. It may have been a greater achievement, but as a film, it's somewhat lacking by modern standards. Likewise, MASH and Seinfeld were groundbreaking, but largely because of MASH and Seinfeld, we can and do make better television series today. I think the two biases largely cancel out.

This has some interesting consequences. For instance, in the restricted realm of science fiction TV, it's clear that Star Trek: The Next Generation is strictly better than the original Star Trek, just as the recent Battlestar Galactica is strictly better than TNG, because these series responded to and innovated on each other.

On balance, I still wouldn't say it's necessarily true that newer series are better than older series. It's still rare that a TV series tops The Prisoner, for instance.

You'll be much happier if you consider every top X list to be a list of stuff worth checking out rather than an absolute valuation of what is 'better'.

The problem with that is there is so much good stuff buried way too far down the list. Outside of the top 5% I could find a fair amount of movies and TV that I know would appeal to many individuals.

I'm generally a seller of the whole "social discovery" web application movement, but for things like movies, I have one or two friends whom I depend upon heavily for "social discovery" (I'll usually email them about what I'm looking for) in having great movies recommended to me personally :).

I very much agree with that approach. A curated monolithic ranking is hard to build up and maintain. Personal recommendations are truly hard to beat.

That's just it though while Doctor Strange Love (1964) was #32 and Up (2009) was #924 there both vary good movies. There was plenty of recent and fun movies vary low on the list, consider:

Bowfinger (1999), Solaris (2002), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), From the Village to the City (1974), Going Postal (2010), Legally Blonde (2001) that's that's 4913 to 4918.

PS: Granted, rating movies is a huge multi dimensional problem, just ask Netflix, but you don't need a lot of accuracy to find a good movie.

There is no enough time in life to check all the crap that made it to the top of that list. This seriously a problem with this tool, the data is so flawed that you cant expect anything good from it.

That's the mass taste. I am not trying to discuss with the mainstream taste, just made the tool. For those interested in getting a personalized movie ranking I created another tool "Movie Galaxy" http://arek-paterek.com/movie-galaxy/

> That's the mass taste.

I seriously doubt that. Just because it's what the available data show doesn't mean that that's the popular taste. If you surveyed 100 people who have seen both The Avengers and Godfather Part 2, I highly doubt a majority will regard the former as a better film than the latter. People are in different moods when they rate films, older films don't get rated as often, the scale with which an individual rates different films may be wildly non-normalized...

Website idea[0]: show two random movies, ask them if they've seen both, and if they have, ask the user which one's better without prescribing what "better" means. Repeat 1 trillion times. I'd be much more willing to trust differential data like this.

[0] - not going to call it a startup idea, because I have no idea how it would make money.

>"I seriously doubt that."

I think you'd be surprised. Though, I also think you'd be hard-pressed to find people who have watched both films (I've only seen one, and it isn't The Avengers). And there's a reason for that: most people don't want to watch a three-hour, epic drama from 1972. Ask people who haven't seen either film which they'd rather see, tonight, and I'll bet they choose The Avengers. Why? Because if you haven't seen GF2 by now, it probably doesn't interest you. So on some level, these rankings speak to the current Zeitgeist.

I can't understand the vitriol directed at these rankings. Sure, there is a definite bias towards modern films in the imdb rankings, but it is what it is. I don't think that it's any different than some crotchety old movie critic telling me which films I should like best.

The fact of the matter is, there is no objective measure of "best". Scan these comments. I can find examples to agree with and disagree with in nearly every single one. But they are all saying the same thing: "This list is wrong!" Based on that, I don't think you or I would have any more success curating a list of movies. This list is as good as any.

Anyway, great tool.

> Website idea: show two random movies, ask them if they've seen both, and if they have, ask the user which one's better without prescribing what "better" means. Repeat 1 trillion times.

http://flickchart.com

Would the two movies be from the same genre?

For example, I would have a difficult time deciding which of the two - "The Secret in Their Eyes" or "Gladiator" - is better.

Having played with the site for the past 20 minutes now, the by far most difficult thing is choosing between two horrible movies. I really wish there was a "they're both equally horrible" button.

That's really neat. It's quite addictive to rank films that way. Annoyingly hard in some instances. The only thing I think is lacking is some way to get a reminder about the plot; when you're talking about movies seen more than a couple of decades ago ...

A "would like to see" button would be useful too.

The tool has no point if the data source is flawed. It is like saying you made a weather forecast website but none of the predictions are accurate: It becomes worthless. If you make a tool that tool has to be able to extract quality data before anything else.

And interestingly, "Research suggests that the best way to predict how much we will enjoy an experience is to see how much someone else enjoyed it." - “If money doesn’t make you happy, then you probably aren’t spending it right” by Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert

Maybe put in an inflation adjustment factor. That would reflect how a movie rates compared to it's contemporaries.

You'd have to be careful not to cap a movies' rating just because scores in that era are more lenient though -- maybe pull movies toward an overall median based on their distance from a 2-3 year moving average.

So say we want the median score to be 50%. And the median rating in 2008 was 63%. Let's take two movies from 2008 -- one scored 98%, the highest score in several years, and one scored 63%. The 98% movie stays at 98%. The 63% movie score becomes 50%.

Out of curiosity, how'd you do feature selection for the clustering (on a high level) for Movie Galaxy?

The clustering was based on the regularized SVD / matrix factorization results. Details in my e-book.

Am I the only geek in the world who wasn't THAT impressed with Avengers? It was a fine superhero film, great ensemble cast, good script and all, but I didn't find it revolutionary. #3 "best" film ever? Come on!

I do not even think it rates as fine! The script was awful, and Loki being beaten up by Hulk was just so wrong. Loki is joking about it but he ia supposed to be a God and way above the Hulk and so on. I could go on and on and nitpick forever on this movie, there were so many thins wrong with it, but the worst is that there was no tension, no sense of urgency, and no reason for the super heroes to team up together. The super heroes should have been going one by one after Loki and their ass kicked so that they realize they need to work together.

Anyway, Marvel really messed up what could have been awesome in the first place.

I thought Avengers was a joke. Wouldn't ever watch it again.

I agree. I don't know how it has climbed up that far on the list!

Perhaps the film companies have finally found a way to alter the minds of movie-goers.

Avengers - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0848228/

IMDB rating is 8.5 only for Avengers. That will place it outside the top 30 here.

If you look at the reviews at IMDB you will see something strange. Most of the reviews are either 1 or 10 stars. I feel like some kind of gaming of the IMDB ratings is happening.

That's not gaming. If a movie is rated 4 stars on IMDB but you think it should be 5, you won't rate it 5, you'll rate it 10 because that pulls the average closer to 5. Likewise, if it's rated 5 stars but you think it should be 4, you might rate it 1.

I see an opportunity here. Is there already a recommendation service around that takes your rating profile into account? Apple has their 'Genius' system, however with respect to movies rentals I think this is lacking a bit: Movies I want to rent are usually movies I only want to see once, not gems like Godfather or Constant Gardener. A personal rating service would have to pose you targeted questions about your movie preferences and drill down into your personal taste.

http://goodfil.ms does worth seeing once and worth rewatching.

Yeah, avengers and dark night better than fight club? C'mon.

Firefly better than Citizen Kane?

I'm not one of those "Firefly is t3h greatest show evar" people but I would still say that, yes, Firefly is better than Citizen Kane. But we would have to define what we mean by "better".

Citizen Kane gets a lot of rightful attention for being historic and groundbreaking in a number of ways, especially by people who have never seen it. Unfortunately, despite often being conflated, "groundbreaking" and "good" are not really the same thing. Now, don't get me wrong, Citizen Kane is a fine film and still worth watching today. But divorce it from its historic role and consider modern audiences. Think about what it would be like if released today. At best it would be critically-acclaimed and lauded by a small audience without ever seeing mainstream appeal, much as Firefly has.

Now, granted, I haven't gone a single shred toward showing that Firefly is actually any better than Citizen Kane though I have gone some way to putting them on roughly the same level. And Firefly has more explosions and space zombies making it more watchable for many people today.

Is Firefly really better than Citizen Kane? It will never be widely thought so by critics but I can definitely see an argument where it is better for modern audiences and I really think that's what matters at the end of the day.

I think you could at least make an argument that Firefly is comparable to Citizen Kane. It makes a lot more sense than saying that The Avengers is the third best movie of all time.

> I think you could at least make an argument that Firefly is comparable to Citizen Kane.

Er, how, exactly?

Citizen Kane is famous for a bunch of different reasons, including advancing the state of the art of cinema and being basically a flawless masterpiece. But probably the thing that stands out the most today is its psychological depth, in that to this day it's arguably still the best character study ever done.

Firefly doesn't have that sort of psychological depth, but it does have a lot of moral ambiguity, something that's virtually non-existant in CK. That's something that would have gone a lot deeper had the show gotten another two or three seasons, but they never got that chance. It also has some of the most clever writing of any TV show, up there with only Arrested Development really. Cleverness might not be as prized by critics as authentic character writing, but it's still at the top of its form nonetheless. The main downside of the show was that it was already starting to get a bit formulaic toward the end of season one when they canceled it. In any event, I don't think you could ever put Firefly above Citizen Kane, but certainly I think it pushed the boundaries of its genre in a way that is rare.

The Avengers, on the other hand, has virtually no redeeming value whatsoever except for Joss Whedon's clever writing during the second half and the amazing effects during the NYC fight scene.

Moral ambiguity is something that passes in and out of fashion, and it's something that Firefly never really delivered on. Where Firefly really shone was as a prototype for the naturalistic science fiction approach that Battlestar Galactica mastered.

Yeah, it's unfortunate that Firefly never got the chance to deliver there. That said, if you pit the first season of Firefly against just the first quarter of Citizen Kane, which is really more fair in some ways, I'd go with Firefly any day.

I don't think "the chance" is what it lacked. Firefly was relentlessly light and couldn't have sustained the darkness necessary for real moral ambiguity to work.

Just think of it as each value being plus or minus 50. I'm sure the idea isn't to determine the best film of all time, it's to expose you to excellent movies and series you may never have seen.

" I can't even find the MASH TV show, only the movie. Pretty weird considering that it's considered the 2nd best TV comedy of all time. #74 'Seinfeld' - considered the 3rd best TV comedy of all time."

Are you really criticizing the subjectivity of this list based on the subjective rankings of your generation?

Also game of thrones is brilliant, imo.

I'm saying you are clearly seeing a generational and tech savvy bias to the rankings. For Avengers to be so high shows it's good movie, and it is. But the fanboyism of the comic-reading, tech savvy audience is skewing the metric way higher than it should be.

The same thing is happening with Game of Thrones. It's excellent but I've seen many, many TV dramas that are just as good if not better.

Comedy is a terrible example to criticize due to it tending to be very cross-generational. MASH, Seinfeld, and I Love Lucy are still shown on TV today. MASH and I Love Lucy on more obscure cable channels, but Seinfeld still is on in reruns for an hour before primetime TV on our CBS affiliate.

Case in point The Matrix at 13th. Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet: 1052.

Once you control for film age, the ratings makes a lot more sense. Films get worse ratings as they get older, so newer films naturally have better ratings.

See also: Doctor Who (1963) (#2272)