The Measure of a Film

A Note on Method and an Apology

A ranking begins with an embarrassment.

There is a specific hour in the life of a solo website, mine is usually around 1:17 a.m., which I know because the microwave clock is the only light on in the kitchen, when the screen fades on something quiet like Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai, all that amber lamplight and those women not saying what they mean, and you open your laptop to do what the site forces you to do.

You have to put a number on it.

And the whole apparatus feels obscene.

I have a little Muji notebook I keep next to the couch for this. It was supposed to be for Brilliant Observations. Mostly it says things like “check if Criterion spine # is,” “pause,” “cat on keyboard,” “email contractor back.” The external drive where I keep everything, a beat-up WD My Passport I bought in 2019 that clicks when the room gets too warm in July, clicks.

To put Tokyo Story above Mad Max: Fury Road feels insane. Not because one is better. Because nobody watches them in the same mood or for the same reason. You watch Ozu when your parents are getting older and you do not know what to say to them. You watch Fury Road when you need to remember that a movie can still make your heart hammer through your shirt. One dismantles what you thought cinema could do. The other makes two hours vanish. One asks for monastic silence. The other catches you on a Tuesday after work when you are exhausted, your shoes are still on, and you just want to be surprised.

The problem is not that films resist judgment. They beg for it. The problem is they give us too many kinds of pleasure to fit in one digit.

Institutions can spread judgment across committees, polls, and editorial systems. Their consensus has its own value. I do not have that shelter. There is no we. I tried it. “We feel this belongs in the upper tier.” It was a lie. There is only me, the clicking hard drive, a streaming queue that keeps suggesting another film before I have finished thinking about the last one, and the fact that every list I make is an autobiography.

If I put Barry Lyndon over Goodfellas, and I do, I am not reporting data. I am telling you I grew up Filipino in New Jersey, watching Kubrick on a busted VHS where the tracking was off, and I like looking at candles more than I like hearing people shout. That is all that is.

So this is the apology part. I am not going to pretend to be objective. I am going to tell you what kind of encounter took place.

I stopped asking “how good is it,” which is a question that just goes in circles and never lands, and started asking three different questions on the ten-foot walk from the couch to the desk:

What did it achieve? How did it hold me? What does it ask of me?

Greatness: The Criterion Question

Does this film have to exist?

This is the one the Criterion closet asks. Will this matter in fifty years, when my site is gone and that WD drive is in a landfill?

Greatness is necessity. It is that feeling that the film knows more than you do. Not in a smug, film-school way. In the way Renoir’s The Rules of the Game knows more than you do. You watch those aristocrats and their drunken servants at that country house and realize Renoir could see what Europe was becoming, and somehow turned that dread into a farce about a rabbit hunt. It leaves a mark on the medium itself.

On the spreadsheet, that intuition gets broken into less romantic things: direction, form and structure, writing, performance, technical and artistic craft, originality, influence and historical significance, and emotional and intellectual depth. The categories are an attempt to make the instinct accountable without pretending the instinct disappears.

It has nothing to do with whether I liked it. I did not like Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Falconetti’s face for an hour and a half felt like being held underwater. I had to pause it, walk into the kitchen, and stare at the fridge until my head cleared. But I cannot argue it out of existence.

Same with Bresson. A Man Escaped refuses to give you music, refuses to give you relief, and shoots the whole thing like a prison work detail. And when it is over, every other prison movie feels like it is lying to you.

When I was 26, I thought greatness was perfection, every frame composed like a painting. At 49, I think it is simpler: Could this have been made by anyone else, at any other time, in any other way? If every copy vanished tomorrow, would cinema be poorer? If yes, it is great. It will outlive my site. My job is just to notice.

But none of that answers the question waiting back on the couch.

Engagement: The Couch Question

Did it hold me?

This is what the couch asks at 10:30 on a Tuesday: Am I still watching?

Academics call this affective grip, but really it is just whether a film keeps you from abandoning it. People talk about engagement like it is cheap, like it belongs only to Marvel. It does not. Entertainment wants to please you. Engagement wants to hold you.

It is dread, curiosity, complicity. It is Hitchcock’s bomb under the table. It is the silent heist in Rififi, where nobody says a word for thirty minutes and you forget to breathe. It is Tampopo slurping noodles for two hours and somehow making it feel epic. It is Speed, which I have seen fourteen times and I still lean forward when that bus has to jump. It is Jackie Chan in Police Story hanging off a bus with nothing but a pair of cheap gloves.

And it belongs to slow cinema, too. Jeanne Dielman, three hours of a woman peeling potatoes and making meatloaf, and I was gripping that Muji notebook hard enough to bend the cover. That is not light entertainment. That is an engagement so total it hurts.

This is the humiliating one to track when you work alone. There is no one to tell you to pay attention. I started writing down my interruptions instead of themes: 9:14, cat jumps on keyboard. 9:22, thought about email I forgot to send to the contractor. 9:31, pen rolls under the couch.

A great film makes me forget to write them down. A truly engaging one makes me forget I own a phone. If a masterpiece loses me—and they do; Sátántangó lost me for a solid hour in the middle and I had to rewind—I have to write that down. If Sorcerer, which is just four miserable men driving sweating dynamite across a jungle in trucks that should not start, has me bracing my arms against the couch, I have to write that down too.

Greatness may be why I keep a film in the canon. Engagement is why I want to see it again.

Ease: The Doorway Question

Could I give this to someone else without an apology or a syllabus?

I was embarrassed to add this one. Now I think it is the most honest thing on the site.

A friend of mine, whose wife left last winter, asked what he should watch with his fifteen-year-old daughter. They live over in Collingswood, in that apartment where you can hear the PATCO. He did not want a lecture on greatness. He did not want an endurance test. He wanted something that would work without me standing in the corner saying, “Okay, so before we start, you need to know about the French New Wave . . .”

Ease is simply how much translation a film needs before a stranger can love it.

It is not about intelligence, and low Ease is not a flaw. It tracks the height of the threshold: runtime, pacing, bleakness, and how much film history you need. Lawrence of Arabia is not ruined by being long. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is not flawed because its grief will wreck you for two days. But those are not neutral details. That is how the film meets you.

High Ease is Jaws. It works for a fifteen-year-old, an eighty-year-old, a theorist, or someone who has not been in a theater since 2019. No introduction needed. High Ease is Paddington 2, which is formally perfect and never acts like it is hard work.

Low Ease: late Godard, Straub-Huillet, Stalker. I love those movies, but loving them means accepting a life of failed recommendations. You put them on at a party and everyone suddenly needs to go get another drink from the kitchen. The cats will sit through Tarkovsky because it is warm and slow and nothing explodes. Most people will not.

That does not make those films less great. It makes them private. But a website, even a tiny one-man operation like this, is not a private diary. If I am asking you to climb a steep staircase in the dark, the least I can do is tell you that the steps are steep.

The Composite: How the Scores Meet

Why split them up? So I stop making dumb critical assumptions: that a punishing film is automatically deep, that a popular one is shallow, or that a fun one has no brain.

On the site, the final number is not a straight average:

Greatness and Engagement each carry 40 percent of the score because the list is trying to reconcile two things I refuse to choose between: what cinema achieves and what happens when someone actually sits down to watch it. Ease carries the remaining 20 percent. It matters, but not enough to let difficulty become a punishment for ambition.

Once you look through all three, the map gets more interesting.

You get a movie like Casablanca, which pushes all three dials toward the ceiling: studio craftsmanship, effortless momentum, a front door almost anyone can walk through. That is why it seems permanently at home near the top of lists.

Then you have something like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Stalker. Towering, undeniable Greatness, but films that ask for patience, surrender, and the right evening. You do not put them on casually. You have to hike out to where they are.

Mad Max: Fury Road pulls a different trick. It throws the door open and straps you into a kinetic rhythm that never lets up, while still being a masterclass in pure visual direction. Compare that to Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, which gets its monumental power because its long domestic rhythm refuses ordinary comfort.

And then there are movies like Tremors or Speed. They will not alter the course of world cinema, but they are airtight machines that grab you by the collar and ask for nothing except ninety minutes of your time.

Tremors did not make the cut.

It still deserves better, and it knows I love it.

A canon can turn into homework so fast. A list of monuments you are supposed to visit and log just to prove you are serious. I have got enough homework. A good list has to stay porous. It should respect the past without mistaking reputation for a real experience. It should let difficulty be difficult without making it a moral virtue, and it should let pleasure count without making you apologize for it.

The leaderboard has to flatten things. That is what a leaderboard does. The separate scores are my attempt to put some of the texture back. You can pick what you actually need tonight: the summit of the form, two hours where you forget your life, or something you can put on for someone you love without handing them an instruction manual first.

The greatest films do not just survive our judgment. They change how you see everything that comes after them.