I am someone who loves to say: “This is one of my top 10 films.” I’ve said this about many, many more than 10 films, making it a mathematical impossibility, but at the time, it always feels true. For this reason, I will not be sharing my top 10 films of the 21st century via the New York Times reader ballot. But most of the internet feels no such fear, according to the wave of film lists gracing our social feeds in the last 48 hours. And, while I find this process of setting your best-loved films in stone both brave and mildly horrifying, it also raises some interesting questions about why we love rating and ranking our cultural faves in the first place.

This isn’t a completely new phenomenon, of course. People have been making ‘best films’ lists since at least 1952, and sites like Letterboxd have amplified the conversation in recent years, essentially serving as hot take factories for the rest of the internet to feed on. Even better, they’ve given us a glimpse into celebrities’ viewing tastes (see: Ayo Edebiri’s one-line reviews, or Jeremy Corbyn’s touching takes on Ken Loach), which is a bonus of the recent NYT discourse, too. Luca Guadagnino putting Ghosts of Mars in his top 10? Sofia Coppola going to bat for The Incredibles? John Waters beating the drum for the puppet-starring rock opera Annette? We love to see it! 

Broadcasting the top picks of famous filmmakers and regular film fans also serves a deeper purpose, helping to decide what films we ‘should’ be spending our precious time on – or, as the Times puts it: “Which films have truly stood the test of time?” This includes new entries into the history books, like Charlotte Wells’ devastating debut Aftersun, which appears on multiple high-profile lists that circulate via easily shareable screenshots.

All that being said, there’s a less generous and constructive side to the list-making as well. Across Instagram, TikTok and X, users labour over the curation of their own perfect lists for the public vote, conscious of the image they’re projecting to their audience, even if it’s just their close friends. And there are a lot of factors to take into consideration. Like: what’s the perfect ratio of arthouse classics to semi-ironic pulp? Which David Lynch masterpiece best conveys your deep and abiding fandom? Clearly not the omnipresent – and therefore painfully “basic” – Mulholland Drive. On that note, is it possible to find a collection of films so niche that a film bro won’t call you “basic” online? (No.) Where do you draw the line between a love of “underappreciated gems” and plain old bad taste? What posters look nice together in an Insta story?

In other words, media consumption, like many other facets of our lives, has become a kind of performance in itself. See also: Spotify Wrapped reports, or shoving a paperback in your cargo shorts to post on Instagram (although, as pointed out in the “Brodernism” backlash earlier this year, maybe reading performatively is better than not reading at all). This is partly thanks to the dynamics of social media, where one false step can turn anyone’s private life into a kind of public humiliation ritual, but clearly the self-consciousness has bled into our real lives as well – even the dark, semi-sacred space of the cinema screen. And in many cases, it’s changing our viewing habits for the worse.

Dazed’s own Halima Jibril noticed the shift after using Letterboxd for some time. “I concocted this whole plan while I was in the cinema watching Poor Things, where I’d give it one star on Letterboxd and put it on my IG story [to] cause some drama,” she tells me. And it did get a big reaction. “All the while I loved the film... but [the review] was all I was thinking about in the cinema.” There are many such cases. Pithy one-liners primed for online engagement replace actual engagement with film, TV, music and so on – to the point that, as Ethel Cain says: “Nobody takes anything seriously anymore.” Meanwhile, experimental film fans have been accused of bothering to fake their movie logs to cultivate their cinephile persona.

Thankfully, Halima logged off Letterboxd before things got too far out of hand. “But I do think that when I did use Letterboxd it definitely pushed me into performative consumption,” she adds. “All I cared about was how I would communicate my consumption of films or TV online.”

I feel pretty confident in saying that this is not how David Lynch (a man who had very little time for “your fucking telephone”) would have wanted you to watch his films. And besides, no star rating or crowdsourced hierarchy is ever going to do justice to the feeling of leaving a cinema as the credits roll on an actual classic. Is this to say that a silly little list of the 21st century’s best films so far is going to ruin our viewing experiences forever? Probably not. But maybe it’s a symptom of a bigger, creeping problem – a sign that we might be forgetting how to watch, listen, look and read altogether. Maybe it’s time to log off, and find out what we actually think of In the Mood For Love.