Drive My Car through the Summer of Soul to see The Wizard of Oz before there's No Way Home

Aaaaaand, we're back!

2022 is almost half-way over, and we've finally got some new Official List adoptions for you all. It's taken much (much much much) longer than any of us had anticipated or hoped for, but we're ready to bring a new batch of lists into the fold.

We've got four lists to showcase for you today. Three of them did well in our recent user poll of lists, and the fourth is one we've been wanting to adopt for while but wanted to wait until the list was robust enough to become Official.

You voted and we listened! In an adoption pulled from one of the top vote-getters of our last user poll, we present the list of Academy Award Winners for Feature Documentary. While we already have a handful of documentary-focused lists, the Oscars bring a different approach to appreciation of real life as cinema, shining a focus on many films that have courted little to no attention from other lists by academics and critics. From early wins by World War II documentaries to capturing important cultural events like Woodstock and the Vietnam conflict, from stunning films that showcase nature in action to biographical documentaries of the rich and (in)famous, and from true crime horror stories to films that purport to present an important message, you can find it all here in the Academy Award - Best Documentary Feature Winners. Adopted from flaiky.

Japan is arguably among the top five film-producing countries any way you look at it: critical acclaim, popularity, longevity, output, or notoriety. While we have a wonderful comprehensive list of the Top 200 Japanese Films from Kinema Junpo, the lack of an official Award list from Japan has been a glaring omission for years. With a handful of prominent awards to choose from, we ultimately decided to go with what we think is the most prestigious, as well as the one that's been around the longest (longer than even the Oscars). Containing well-known favourites from the likes of Kurosawa, Naruse, and Ozu, hard-to-come-by classics little-seen outside of Japan, and recent arthouse hits from auteurs like Koreeda and Hamaguchi, there may be something for everyone in the Kinema Junpo Award - Best Japanese Film list. Adopted from PeacefulAnarchy.

When one thinks of experts in cult cinema, the British Film Institute may not be the first name that comes to mind, yet this distinguished organization has released a book written by well-regarded film professors Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik, who have compiled 100 Cult Films that illustrate the breadth and richness of cult cinema, spanning across multiple genres and decades. They have applied their own personal expertise to create an ideal beginner’s guide to the wild and woolly world of films with vivacious followings that can act as a smaller, more manageable counterpart to our already official 500 Essential Cult Movies list. If you are looking to immerse yourself into one of the many strange and unique film subcultures out there, look no further than BFI's 100 Cult Films. Adopted from Timec.

Our final list will help to plug the gap in films that are most overlooked in official lists: recent releases. With the pandemic throwing the entire industry into confusion, many release dates were pushed back numerous times in the past two years, and it's only now that we finally have enough films at or near the typical 1500 check threshold for the imdb decade lists. Big blockbusters feature prominently here, but smaller films that have slowly built up a broad base of appeal have almost managed to earn their place in this list... for now. Given that there are still 7.5 years left in the decade, we expect this list to drastically change over time, but that's part of the fun. How many of the films currently on the IMDB's 2020s Top 50 list do you think will still be around in ten years' time?

Scott Tobias, formerly at the A.V. Club, has revived his New Cult Canon at The Reveal. As such, we've added his recent reviews to the list (5 so far), and renamed it Scott Tobias's The New Cult Canon to reflect this update.

Finally, we'd like to extend our appreciation to two users who answered our call for icon design: mterry1988 and mcgaburi. Our icons this round were designed by mterry1988, and we're very pleased with how they turned out. We look forward to working with both artists for future list adoptions, and maybe more. This was one of the biggest roadblocks to list adoptions, so we breathed a huge collective sigh of relief after seeing some of the proposals from these talented individuals.

And that's a wrap! In recent months we also saw the annual updates to most of the award lists, the TSPDT and DTC refreshes, and the continued growth of the Criterion list. Sight & Sound have also indicated that the results of their once-a-decade poll will be published in their November 2022 issue, so we're excited to see how that list shakes up later this year.

Many thanks,

The iCheckMovies team