by Matt Barron

Created on: January 17, 2007   Last Updated: May 16, 2007

Take 100 random people, sit them in a cinema and force them to watch a truly awful film. Then, as the film draws to a close, ask those same people to rate the movie. It is fair to assume that the vast majority of them will agree that the film was a complete stinker. Had, for example, the film in question been The Last Days of Disco (1998), one may expect to be greeted by such remarks as: "Stupefyingly nondescript", "Offensive to human intellect and intelligence" or "The most unrewarding 113 minutes of my life".

However, take those same 100 people and sit them in front of a celebrated masterpiece and their individual responses are likely to be wildly disparate. Citizen Kane, for instance, would bore as many people to tears as it would engage them; On the Waterfront, to name another, may bore the people who weren't bored by Citizen Kane, yet captivate those who couldn't have been less impressed by Orson Welles' shady mise en scene. For, while almost everybody can recognise a truly shocking movie, the same cannot be said of a masterpiece. Subjectivity, it seems, grows ever broader and diverse the more so-called quality increases. Why is this? And more to the point, if this is the case, how does one set about identifying the greatest film of all time? What criteria must be satisfied in order for a movie to be labelled the' pinnacle of cinematic achievement?

The American Film Institute has certainly attempted to solve this conundrum, citing the top five films of all time as Citizen Kane, Casablanca, The Godfather, Gone with the Wind and Lawrence of Arabia. Interestingly, each of these films precedes by at least five years the biggest and most successful global film franchise of all time: Star Wars. A fact which leads to the question: How can a film that transcended national, cultural, racial, gender and age boundaries more emphatically than any that have gone before or since possibly be omitted from any list of the top five films of all time? Certainly, it is true that Star Wars failed to have as big an impact on the world's movie critics than countless other masterpieces. However, the world does not comprise only critics; the vast majority of the cinema-going public are anything but. Yet Star Wars remains as popular today as it was thirty years ago, and this is a truly monumental achievement. Furthermore, that Star Wars remains arguably the only film ever to have reached the status of a phenomenon must afford it the honour of being considered among the true greats.

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