UPDATE: The site has now tallied over 850 lists, with more to come.
EARLIER: Despite conducting multiple critics’ polls throughout the year, I tend to stay away from doing a year-end one, since there are already so many out there (Film Comment, Screen Slate, Sight & Sound, IndieWire). But what if we combined all of them—and then added every other list that’s been published? Would the results differ?
Some of the more high-brow curated polls mentioned can only push a film so far, especially as more mainstream publications come into the equation. The result is that Sight & Sound and Film Comment favorites such as “Afternoons of Solitude,” “Caught by the Tides” and “Misericordia” don’t even figure in the below top 20.
In early December, CriticsTop10 started updating its site with 2025 lists. They do this every year, and as far as I know, they’re the only outlet that fully concentrates on this. Bless ’em.
Their modus operandi is simple: tabulate all of the year-end critics’ top 10 lists and turn them into a de facto — and ultimate — poll of polls. Not a bad idea. They’ve been doing this for over 10 years, and have even made it a goal to track down every top 10 list dating back to 1925 (!).
Did you know that was the year King Vidor’s “The Big Parade” dominated critics’ lists? The other three major masterpieces from 1925 — Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush” (#5), F.W. Murnau’s “The Last Laugh” (#8), and Lon Chaney’s “The Phantom of the Opera” (#10) — appeared on six times fewer lists.
This site is further proof of how, in any given year, critics can be outright wrong about certain films, which either age like fine wine or date terribly. Take 1980, for instance: Kubrick’s “The Shining” isn’t anywhere in the Top 20. Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” for my money the greatest film ever made, isn’t in the 1958 Top 20 either, sitting at #22. Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing” are nowhere to be found in the 1982 tally. Charles Laughton’s “Night of the Hunter” didn’t even crack the top 50 for 1955.
You could go down a deep rabbit hole on CriticsTop10, but for now, let’s concentrate on 2025, which has amassed, so far, 700+ critics’ listst, whether published online or in print. Of course, lists are still being published post-January 1, and last year’s final tally was a whopping 1048 lists, but this is as good an estimation as any as to what have been the most acclaimed films of the year. No surprise, PTA’s “One Battle After Another” is #1, followed by Coogler’s “Sinners,” Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident,” and Safdie’s “Marty Supreme.”
What I’m most curious about isn’t the usual consensus around what critics deem the year’s best films, but which films might age better than their current rankings suggest. Many WoR readers will point to “Eddington,” which is positioned to finish in the top five of our upcoming readers’ poll (results to be published next Friday), as a prime example—and to the films we’ll look back on and say, “critics got that very wrong.” Chime in with your thoughts.
