Docs
Can you remember a time without Rotten Tomatoes? Those sightless days of people reaching out and bumping into movies at random, like wandering through a Blockbuster with all the lights off. Those were dark and undirected times. Since the launch of RT in August of 1998, though – the site went live on August 18 of that year – movie fans have had immediate access to the largest accumulation of film reviews ever, distilled for one purpose: to get you watching the best kind of movies you want to see. (Or if you only want to watch bad movies, the site can help you find those more quickly, too.)
As we mark our 20th birthday, we’re looking back on the past two decades with this guide to the 200 best-reviewed movies released since that fateful day in August of 1998. To keep the competition tight, we only included movies that had at least 80 reviews, the number at which wide-release movies qualify for Certified Fresh status; applying that rule, and limiting the total list to 200 titles, the lowest Tomatometer score you’ll find is 95%. The criteria also meant that no films from 1998 made the cut (Shakespeare in Love did come awfully close).
The list, which we’ve ordered chronologically, runs the gamut of movies, ranging from popular blockbusters (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part II, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers) to indies (The Wrestler, Nightcrawler) and the still underseen (Step, Gloria). Some 14 movies come from this very year made the list, among them Mission: Impossible – Fallout and BlacKkKlansman. There are seven Best Picture Oscar winners and 24 animated movies in there – 10 of which are Pixar products, and three of which come from the UK’s Aardman Animations. Documentaries make up a whopping quarter of the movies listed, and include landmark films like Bowling For Columbine and Man On Wire, while 53 of the movies listed are foreign-language, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the first film on the list, Pedro Almodóvar‘s All About My Mother.
A number of directors show up twice on the list – Ava DuVernay, Taika Waititi, Ryan Coogler, and Sean Baker among them – and a handful show up even more than that: Lee Unkrich, Pete Docter, Brad Bird, and Richard Linklater. Meanwhile, series like the Paddington, Before, and Toy Story films appear more than once, along with both films in The Act of Killing/The Look of Silence documentary pairing feature.
So: 200 movies, 20 years. How many have you seen after all this time? And how many are you adding to your watchlist?
Link: https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/freshest-movies-past-20-years/
Capturing truth, life, and reality — one movie at a time. The best documentaries allow us to see the world with a fresh set of eyes, from social experiments (Super Size Me) to quirky competitions (The King of Kong) to political exposés (Citizenfour) to the ultimate cat video (Kedi). Now, we take the top movies of the form (each is Certified Fresh from at least 100 critics reviews) for our countdown list of the 100 best-reviewed documentaries ranked by Tomatometer.
Link: https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/100-best-documentaries/
At many film festivals, the juries come up with a cockamamie category named the Grand Jury Prizes. It finds room for titles that were as good, in one way or another, as the others. Finding them a place in the numerical listing is a problem, because, really, what does such a ranking mean? Here are my ten Grand Jury Prizes, arranged in that frustrating order -- alphabetically.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2012/12/eberts_top_movies_of_2012.html
Rotten Tomatoes - Best of year
Movies rated 8, 9 or 10.
Regularly updated by Tkreimark91
Continued on True Crime #92
I hit the 1000 list limit...
Expanded from original list by Martin Fermor
IMDb movies from 7.5 to 7.9 rating (min. votes = 10k, min year = 2006)
Pulled from https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/bestofrt/?year=2012
A funny thing happened on the way to the Oscars. Not to the Oscars. To me. I sustained a hairline fracture of my left hip. I didn't fall. I didn't break it. It just sort of... happened to itself. Most of the time, it causes me no pain at all. But my left leg won't bear any weight, nor can I walk on it. This pain is off the charts. It has nothing to do with cancer. It's plain bad luck.
The good news is that I've seen the films of one of the best recent years in cinema. I wrote more than 300 reviews in 2012 -- a record -- and it was unusually difficult to leave out many of the quote-unquote "best" films in 11th place.Grand Jury Prizes
At many film festivals, the juries come up with a cockamamie category named the Grand Jury Prizes. It finds room for titles that were as good, in one way or another, as the others. Finding them a place in the numerical listing is a problem, because, really, what does such a ranking mean? Here are my ten Grand Jury Prizes, arranged in that frustrating order -- alphabetically:
"Central Park Five," "Impossible,""In the Family," "Last Ride," "A Late Quartet," "The Master," "Paradise Lost 3," "Rampart," "Searching for Sugar Man" and "West of Memphis."
1-10 are ranked, the rest ist alphabetical.
Source: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2012/12/eberts_top_movies_of_2012.html
Episodes, shows, and movies from the podcast. Does not include Patreon-only episodes.
Missing:
Episode 17 - Captivated
Episode 195 - Escape to Alcatraz
Episode 242 - The Last Call Killer
Episode 300 - Debunking the Myth of Patient Zero (YouTube)
Episode 328 - Catching the Craigslist Killer
Episode 331 - Murder in Mustang
Episode 353 - Australian Story - Looking for Lyn
Updated through 4/24/2024.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20191125-the-100-greatest-films-directed-by-women-poll
https://www.indiewire.com/feature/female-directors-best-movies-directed-by-women-1202045399/
https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/best-movies-directed-by-women-of-the-21st-century/
Politics, Sports, History and Music
Watchlist section for films
Films are non-fictional, "slice of life" factual works of art - and sometimes known as cinema verite. Some films have been termed propagandistic or non-objective.
Documentary
by Jancey