Show HN: 5000 best movies

by arekp • 14 years ago

150 125 14 years ago

b_emery• 14 years ago

Very cool! I could have really used this a week ago, when the wife and kids were out of town and I had some free time to catch up on movies I've missed from the last 3.5 yrs.

What's the ranking criteria?

Also, being able to exclude based on categories (comedy, no animations, no family for example) would be a great feature.

arekp10• 14 years ago

Thanks.

The ranking criteria - basically, I combined ratings from IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, with additional heuristic tweaks. The ranking method I use for is different than the popular IMDb method aka "True Bayesian estimate", which is not really a Bayesian estimate. I wrote more about how I approach ranking in my e-book http://arek-paterek.com/book/ , for people who are really interested in such technical details.

joelrunyon• 14 years ago

This was my first question too and I wouldn't necessarily consider myself incredibly technical.

I think the first question most people have when they see a "top _____" list, is "according to who?" Having a short description of the way the rankings are done along with a link to a more detailed description, would be great.

Nice job on shipping it!

nollidge3• 14 years ago

This really doesn't seem to solve the main problem that most current ranking systems have - it doesn't compensate for recency. Newer critically-acclaimed movies like The Dark Knight rank higher than much older but just as well-liked movies like Citizen Kane.

arkitaip2• 14 years ago

This is based on IMDB, right? Explains why the godawful "The Shawshank Redemption" and "Avengers" top the chart.

marknutter• 14 years ago

Honestly, this is the first time I've ever heard the words "godawful" and "Shawshank Redemption" in one sentence. We got ourselves a movie hipster, here.

vijayr• 14 years ago

Totally agree. Shawshank is one of the best movies I've ever seen.

Was the GP sarcastic or something, for using IMDB?

sgarman• 14 years ago

This is why we need curated lists like the AFI's top 100. I'm not saying they are the answer rather what I'm saying is truly reflective lists require critical thinking and evaluation.

arekp10• 14 years ago

Yes, mainly on IMDb. The Shawshank Redemption tops the IMDb, and The Avengers have a very high score 4.6/5 on Rotten Tomatoes.

ghshephard• 14 years ago

I think you and I are in a pretty small minority. Maybe it's because I'd already read the novel - but I walked out of Shawshank Redemption thinking "meh" - and discovered I was very, very alone in that perspective.

engtech• 14 years ago

neat idea, I would be interested in how the score is calculated.

I tried restricting it to TV series, and I noticed an interesting trend that anything older than 2000 is pretty far down the list.

This is probably just a factor of pre-Internet TV shows not being well represented by number of reviews.

I see the same bias on sites like Rotten Tomatoes where if you look at an excellent movie before 1995, it will have few reviews (unless there were a bunch of reviews collected for the DVD / BluRay releases)

davidbrent• 14 years ago

I love the simplicity of the data! The alignment of the checkboxes/filters in the top left bothers me though. With everything else aligned so well, anyway you could do the same to those?

getriver• 14 years ago

This is awesome! Only minor suggestion is to improve readability a little more. Font is way too small with too little space in between each entry.

Also, I got this error: http://cl.ly/image/2D2S1E020e0W. I think I clicked on Stanley Kubrick and then came back to the home page.

arekp10• 14 years ago

Thanks for the suggestions and for the bug report.

akkartik2• 14 years ago

Who has the most movies in the top 5000? Does anybody have more than Marlon Brando's 19?

dmix2• 14 years ago

Counted 23 for Spielberg and 30 for Hitchcock.

Almost all of Kubrick's films are in the top 5000 except for one or two.

akkartik2• 14 years ago

Hmm, I explicitly checked Kubrick; http://5000best.com/movies/Stanley_Kubrick shows just 12. But you're right Hitchcock is the one to beat with 33.

guard-of-terra• 14 years ago

If you try to go down this list, your head will explode. Half of top movies are highly bogus comices (sorry guys, they are), the other half are highly epic dramas. You just should not mix them on a single page. This is so wrong.

As the whole idea of an universal list is.

rorrr• 14 years ago

Even if you view them by genre, it makes little sense. Like in sci-fi, Avengers is #1 (which I thought was a boring movie full of cliches), whereas the brilliant Watchmen is ranked #1780.

WTF?

cynest• 14 years ago

And that's even assuming that Avengers should have been categorized as scifi.

sehrope• 14 years ago

Can you add a column that shows if it's available on Netflix/Amazon/etc?

I'm always looking for a new way to find movies/series to watch and this list seems like a good one (I seem to agree with most of the ones I've seen near the top).

allforJesse3• 14 years ago

This. This would make the whole thing dramatically more actionable, efficient, and lovely.

niklaslogren• 14 years ago

I like this! I'm looking forward to the book section.

cema• 14 years ago

How many?!

fwr• 14 years ago

5000.

Zimahl4• 14 years ago

The problem with these rankings (assuming they are from IMDB) is that they are more friendly to contemporary, Internet-age movies and TV. Anything older than about 30 years is significantly down further in the list.

As an example, I can't imagine a world where 'The Avengers' is better than 'Schindler's List', 'Godfather, Part 2', or 'Pulp Fiction' (just 3 examples).

A few stupid entries: #1721 'I Love Lucy' - easily considered by critics as the best TV comedy of all time yet barely in the top 20% of all tv and movies? 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. The internet is more friendly to this one. #15 'Game of Thrones (TV)' - fanboys strike again, or they just really like irrelevant nudity[1].

#1636 'The Constant Gardener' - it is an abomination that this is here, it's lower ranked than 'Super Troopers' (#1626), 'Iron Man 2' (#1610), and 'Soul Surfer' (#1599), just to name a few.

[1] http://gawker.com/5902076/snl-explains-the-nudity-in-game-of...

arekp10• 14 years ago

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/

nollidge3• 14 years ago

> 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.

binarysolo• 14 years ago

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

allforJesse3• 14 years ago

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

Steko• 14 years ago

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%.

ekianjo4• 14 years ago

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.

cutie2• 14 years ago

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

Zimahl4• 14 years ago

Firefly better than Citizen Kane?

angrycoder• 14 years ago

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'.

Zimahl4• 14 years ago

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.

ekianjo4• 14 years ago

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.

Almaviva• 14 years ago

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

diggum• 14 years ago

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!

akandiah• 14 years ago

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.

ekianjo4• 14 years ago

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.

olegious• 14 years ago

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

vijaydev• 14 years ago

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

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

darasen• 14 years ago

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

DeepDuh• 14 years ago

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.

joshka• 14 years ago

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

kevinburke• 14 years ago

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.

philwelch5• 14 years ago

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.

ramblerman• 14 years ago

" 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.

Zimahl4• 14 years ago

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.

pooriaazimi2• 14 years ago

Very good implementation.

But please change the title to "500 best movies according to IMDB & RottenTomatoes".

I mean, look here: http://5000best.com/movies/Stanley_Kubrick

Clockwork Orange is 46th, 2001 is 211st, and Lolita (Kubrick's version), 1018th. Best movie that poor, not-so-much-talented Kubrick has apparently made is Strangelove, which is 32nd "best movie ever made".

It's very informative to know what IMDB thinks (for one thing, you know what movies to skip), but basing our "best movies" list on what they think is not all right.

Simucal• 14 years ago

I wonder what a better metric would be to account for this contemporary bias?

releasedatez2• 14 years ago

my guess is that 500best.com was taken.

leejoramo• 14 years ago

At first I thought this was an awful list, but then I filtered it by date up to 1995 and I felt that the list made a lot more sense. Is this an issue that it takes 15 to 20 years to get settle on what is truly worthy? Or is it an issue with the dawning of the Internet Age?

There are plenty of films made after 1995 that I think are highly deserving. But in 20 years from now, will we look and say Return of the King out ranks Star Wars? Or The Avengers is better than 12 Angry Men? (The Avengers was decent popcorn fun, but what was the plot?)

cutie2• 14 years ago

Good point, a 10+ year cooling off period would definitely help.

yoshamano• 14 years ago

Which is how the National Film Registry here in the States operates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Film_Registry

"The National Film Registry is the United States National Film Preservation Board's selection of films for preservation in the Library of Congress."

"The National Film Registry names to its list up to 25 'culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films' each year, showcasing the range and diversity of American film heritage to increase awareness for its preservation.... To be eligible for inclusion, a film must be at least ten years old."

garethsprice2• 14 years ago

"At first I thought this was an awful list, but then I filtered it by date up to 1995 and I felt that the list made a lot more sense. Is this an issue that it takes 15 to 20 years to get settle on what is truly worthy? Or is it an issue with the dawning of the Internet Age?"

I remember seeing the same thing on IMDB years back, where contemporary movies will appear very high on the list and disappear.

If you read the reviews (and I think IMDB lets you filter by demographics, or used to) you'll see that it's mostly young kids and idiots voting summer blockbusters as "10/10 OMG best movie evar!".

Not sure if there is a solution as it's always been the same way, there's always some hot new art, book, technology, etc. that's "GROUNDBREAKING" "CLASSIC" "AMAZING" that fades away quickly and the items that stick around for posterity aren't necessarily the ones that you'd predict (eg. Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby were initially flops on publication).

dj2stein9• 14 years ago

The scoring system needs to be bell-curve weighted by the release date of the movie.

Avitas• 14 years ago

The HN article title says "5000 best movies" instead of "Fairly decent jumble of 5000 best movies with many of the best TV shows thrown in".

The HN title and site title are both mildly misleading.

I understand that your sources (RT & IMDB) may have these mixed and it will take some time figure out what makes sense.

arekp10• 14 years ago

So which taste the best? I started in the Netflix Prize, and for me a movie taste is a point in a 32-dimensional space or 64-dimensional space. Which point is better than the others?

dundun• 14 years ago

Best movies(and TV shows) by decade (top 100 in parens):

  < 1910:       4 (0)
  1911-1920:    7 (0)
  1921-1930:   48 (0)
  1931-1940:  123 (4)
  1941-1950:  168 (8)
  1951-1960:  243 (10)
  1961-1970:  297 (5)
  1971-1980:  362 (13)
  1981-1990:  583 (7)
  1991-2000: 1030 (21)
  2001-2010: 1937 (27)
  2011-Now:   198 (5)

hastur• 14 years ago

Maybe it's interesting technically, but what's the use of this site, if the movies are rated by retards? I mean, any ranking that puts Avengers in the first 1000 best movies is obviously deeply flawed.

arekp10• 14 years ago

The Avengers has the highest average rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and I can understand it. This movie has a very good script in my opinion, but de gustibus...

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

Oh come on. It's a fine piece of entertainment, but it's hardly the second-best film of all time. Using the raw data like that is an immediate statistical fail, you should be using a high-pass filter of some sort.

tptacek• 14 years ago

The Avengers has a 92% on RT. The Godfather, Part 2 has a 98%. The Avengers leads The Godfather 2 on this list.

steve8918• 14 years ago

How did you get this data? Did you screenscrape IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes?

If so, is there a legal issue with reusing this data? I actually don't know what the answer is, I'm curious if there is or not.

xaro• 14 years ago

Well, Rotten Tomatoes offers an API, and IMDB offers all their data for download in text files.

zevyoura2• 14 years ago

Not sure about RT, but IMDB has some fairly strict rules about how their data can be used. http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions

IANAL but from my reading it sounds like non-commercial use is ok.

waynesutton• 14 years ago

Wondering why 5000? It looks like the scores are based on "IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes." Which means some opinionated data by the "crowds".

Regardless IMHO gladiator ranked at #57 is my favorite.

personlurking• 14 years ago

Sorry this is off-topic but does anyone know why there are no independent Netflix services? I'm thinking back when you could go to your neighborhood movie rental place...well, now imagine that selection is specific (ex. Western) or curated, and also imagine it is online, available for viewing. Is this just too hard to get the rights to? How did local movie rental places get the rights to rent out films?

People sell pirated films on the street here in Brazil and I once heard of a cultured 'pirate' who only sold pirated, high-brow DVDs. It got me thinking

garethsprice2• 14 years ago

Licensing terms are really hard and expensive to get, streaming services are expensive to set up/run and Internet brands are a "winner takes all" situation that make it hard for regional or niche brands to compete.

You can buy a physical media copy of a film licensed for rental quite easily through a standard-ish system (expensive, I think it's a few hundred bucks for the disc?) but there's no standard system for licensing streaming and as long as the studios are scared of the Internet there won't be one.

There's a few indie streaming services out there but they're small. Film critic Roger Ebert runs "The Ebert Club", an online subscription club with limited runs of fairly obscure older movies. I remember one for horror/arthouse stuff too, but can't find it now. LoveFilm is really big in the UK.

glomph• 14 years ago

Also check out mubi.com

combataircraft• 14 years ago

Most of the movies here are crap made for people who don't have any sense of art. If you think the ones with highest scores are best, you don't even know what a good movie is.

Check out this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFfTot3qYMc

This is what a good movie is. It reflects the life as it is. It's not for entertainment. It's for art and people looking for good movie.

rytis• 14 years ago

Well, I don't know if I agree with some statements here... Art does not necessarily "reflect the life as it is". I think art is an artist's expression of his/her view of the world (or life). Some may see the same scene in bright colours, some in gray, if you see what I mean.

EDIT: However I do agree that majority of the "good" movies these days are just targeting the entertainment nerve of a potential consumer...

unpsynd• 14 years ago

Giving more importance to the average rating in RT, rather than the tomatometer, would give a very different ranking. Avengers has more than a 10% lower average ranking than any other movie in the top 10.

allbombs• 14 years ago

i know thumbnails take up lots of space, but I don't remember titles.. i remember movie covers. Adding thumbnails would help immensely, it's an extra click away.. but still an extra click

incision• 14 years ago

Looking at this list renews my appreciation for the Netflix recommendation engine.

Also, I think I'm going to re-watch #1772 - Sunshine [1].

1: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448134/

brianfryer• 14 years ago

Could you add in a filter for "not animation"?

moviewatcher• 14 years ago

I wanted to raise a point here, on the Internets (and I'm sure this will get downvoted into oblivion, but since I am a huge movie watcher [self-assessment based on large amounts of cash spent in theatres + Netflix], I will engage in this conversation anyway).

While some movies are transcendent, they are also highly subjective to their viewers tastes. As tastes change, so does the opinion of each generation and, thus, the ratings of those movies. As each generation disappears, why shouldn't the charts change, as that would be a reflection of the fact that each generation is different from the next one?

For example, I didn't think Star Wars was a great movie, even though I am a huge Sci-Fi fan! Most people would find this contradictory, but I can't argue with my tastes: I watched all of the episodes in 2009 and I said: "meh". Now, I am aware that at the time it had revolutionary graphics and it had a great impact on the film industry (which is why I dedicated the time to watch it in the first place). I can appreciate the impact it had in 1977, but in terms of absolute value it brought to me in 2009 - I can't justify the decision to vote for it as one of the top 10 best movies.

I noticed there is a strong bias coming from people who have watched Star Wars decades ago and only remember how awesome that movie made them feel at the time. I understand, I'm the same about the first 2 Terminator movies (since I'm in my late 20s) - there will always be a special place in my heart for them, but, realistically speaking, if I'd rewatch Terminator 1 or 2 right now, I wouldn't be as impressed with them as I was back then.

Obviously, it is unfair to compare movies from the 70s and 80s with the movies of today, but these charts do exactly this when they place The Godfather on 2nd place. Now the problem is that the placement suggests that Godfather 2 will be more enjoyable _today_ than The Avengers. Well, why should that be the case? My personal experience taught me otherwise.

Another example: the parent post mentions "I Love Lucy" as "the best TV comedy of all time", according to the critics. I'm constantly in search of good comedies and I watched the trailer to assess how much enjoyment I might get out it. I have to say - the IMDB trailer shows a primitive comedy and it didn't resonate with me, even though I'm not opposed to watching old comedies (Noises Off (1992) is one of my favorite "old" comedies). So I probably won't watch it, despite the fact that it was so highly acclaimed. Which then makes me wonder: how accurate are the ratings of the "critics"? If they're all in their 40s,50s and 60s (because it takes time to build a reputation as a critic), why would my generation listen to them and expect an accurate assessment of how enjoyable an old movie would be today ?

In conclusion, I'd like to suggest that maybe some movies naturally die out (in terms of rating) as a fact of life, just as old basketball players have to make room for new players, as they simply can't compete with the young ones. Perhaps there is a similar trend with movies, where modern technology coupled with a great plot simply creates a more immersive experience than old movies can, solely with their plot. If it is so, then we shouldn't disregard these charts just because "epic movie X from 100 years ago" ended up as #XXXXX.

Thanks for reading!

P.S.: Parent post should be Zimahl's "The problem with these rankings ... "

paulsutter• 14 years ago

This would be a lot more useful if I could filter according to what is streamable from Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes.

a3_nm• 14 years ago

I find the "Writer" column strange. Sometimes it's the author of the screenplay, sometimes it's the author of a book from which the film was adapted, or out of which the film was inspired. It's strange to see Tolkien as the "Writer" of the LOTR movies.

drawkbox• 14 years ago

Yes when I saw Stephen King as the Writer for Shawshank Redemption I was surprised, didn't even know that was based on a short story by Stephen King. But the writer or screenplay was by Frank Darabont.

arekp10• 14 years ago

I had to choose one name per movie. If a movie is based on a novel, I believe the author of the novel should be credited in the first place. Usually the script degrades the quality of the novel.

ekianjo4• 14 years ago

Still trying to figure out why Avengers got such a high rating while it was one of the worst Marvel flicks I have seen so far. Even the action scenes are dead boring.

philfreo• 14 years ago

Would be nice to know which of these are available on the various streaming services (Netflix Instant Streaming, Amazon Prime, etc.)

arekp10• 14 years ago

It is doable, but because these companies compete with each other, would they all be happy seeing their streaming links next to each other? They can cut off access to their APIs at any time.

releasedatez2• 14 years ago

Avatar is only 134!?

stinos• 14 years ago

sorry, but: of course. Watch it a couple of times, not in 3D to make sure that hype doesn't affect the regarded value, and you'll be suprised it even makes it to 134.

mavhc• 14 years ago

Could you add the ability to link to a set of combinations of the check boxes? eg 5000best.com/movies/#tv&1930-1965&scifi

arekp10• 14 years ago

It is there, but undocumented and the syntax may change in the future. http://5000best.com/movies?g2=on&y0=1990&y1=2005&...

mosselman• 14 years ago

List is not very strong. As said by many others before me. @Zimahl being the first.

batista• 14 years ago

Avengers, Dark Knight and LoTR on the top 5? FAIL.

scoremotive• 14 years ago

Looks like a useful site. I would consider left aligning the title, writer, director and cast fields. It would help with readability when scanning the list.

amalakar• 14 years ago

A link to the canistrea.it would be helpful. It aggregats availability of movies in streaming/renting sites. Example: http://www.canistream.it/search/term/The%20Shawshank%20Redem...

m1ck• 14 years ago

http://www.top-5000.nl/imdb1.htm

Show HN: 5000 best movies

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