THE CRITIC’S CORNERED . . . : The Trials--and Rewards--of Compiling a 10 Best Movie List

What is the attraction of making a 10 best list--since everybody does it (see Page 3) or is forced to do it?

It’s certainly not ease or simplicity, because it’s hard to straitjacket all the tastes and highs of 12 months into 10 tiny notches.

A confession: This year was the first ever that my own 10 best list was actually composed of 10 films. Usually, it’s 12 or 15. Even, on rare occasions, 25 or more. Sometimes I’ve tried to evade decisions by making two lists (one English language, one foreign). Or by sneaking on extra movies: generating three- or four-way ties for No. 10.

But this time, the editors sternly demanded that my five-way tie for 10th place had to be broken. So I kept the lesser known “Taste of Water” in 10th and cut loose “Blue Velvet,” “Vagabond,” “Color of Money” and “Tea in the Harem.”

But the motivation for making lists in the first place? Hard to figure. If I scoured through school day notebooks and relics, I’m sure I’d find lists of science-fiction writers, basketball players, books, the 10 prettiest girls in junior high, the 10 most dishonest politicians (a toughie), the 10 best TV shows, etc. It’s some sort of weird pack-rat instinct: a hoarding impulse. An attempt to glom onto the world, by reducing it to orderly numbered columns.

But it’s fun: a way of expressing your tastes, without, temporarily, having to defend them. And, more than that, of creating ideal little communities of excellence: Woody Allen rubbing elbows with Eric Rohmer, Andrei Tarkovsky hunkering down next to Oliver Stone.

My own ideal is superficially simple: Trying to look at 1986’s movies, not from the perspective of 1987--but, perhaps of 2007. Of course, that’s impossible. But if you try to take the long view, you find yourself discarding a lot of contemporary popular favorites. Though not too many: Most of today’s classics were once popular with a mass audience.

To many people, 10 best lists are pretentious. And pompous. Particularly if they don’t contain enough movies the reader is familiar with. It’s common for infuriated correspondents to denounce, on vitriol-drenched typewriters, lists that contain too many foreign or low-budget American independent films. These letters usually portray the offending critic as some effete snob, picking a lot of movies “nobody’s heard of and nobody will ever see.”

Nobody? Readers like this forget that they’re living on a very large planet, which contains many cultures and countries.

They forget that movies from Europe, Asia or Latin America are the products of a combined land mass that dwarfs our own, and an audience many times larger than ours. (Though, ironically, they have a strong argument: The most popular movies in many of those countries are often, as here, the Hollywood-made hits.)

This kind of reader ignores the realities of film history. America, undoubtedly, has the world’s most dominant movie industry--and it’s probably produced most of the world’s better movies. But a list of excellence from the ‘20s or ‘30s that eliminated France’s Renoir, Denmark’s Dreyer, Germany’s Lang or Russia’s Eisenstein (as many of them did) would look absurd today.

For me, it’s the year-end lists containing only 10 major American movies that can be the most objectionably narrow and “elitist”: elitist because they usually consider only a limited group of films (pop U.S. movies with huge advertising budgets), narrow because the critics don’t get beyond their own borders and homegrown tastes.

Most of my favorites through the years have been made in America--from Charlie Chaplin to Woody Allen, from Howard Hawks to Martin Scorsese. But American movies don’t dwarf the rest of the world’s into insignificance. A list that’s about 50-50 American to foreign language seems to me nearly ideal.

In the end, we probably all wind up picking the movies we thought gave us the best time, made us laugh or cry or get excited. Of course, there are mistakes or omissions in any such list--even extravagant ones. That’s what happens when you try to whittle the many down to the few.

Wilmington’s few: “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “The Sacrifice,” “Summer,” “Ginger and Fred,” “ ‘Round Midnight,” “Mona Lisa,” “Platoon,” “Absolute Beginners,” “A Year of the Quiet Sun” and “A Taste of Water.”