The Lords of the Lists: June

It's been a little over seven years since the site went live. A long road with some bumps and changes along the way but iCheckMovies is still as strong as ever thanks to you guys, our users!

We're working hard on the new design and fixing bugs, but for now we want to talk about the lists. In time for summer, or winter for those in the southern hemisphere, we bring you four new lists to work on, discuss or dismiss depending on your tastes. We know not everything will please everyone, but hopefully everyone will find something to their liking.

• June is LGBT Pride month, so there's no better time to add a list for this burgeoning thematic genre of sorts. A list focusing on LGBT issues has been hotly requested for years and while there have been some interesting candidates we often felt an even better list was just around the corner as LGBT issues have moved from the shadows to the forefront in the past few years. A few months ago a relatively large poll was conducted by a British LGBT festival associated with BFI, BFI Flare's Best LGBT Films of All Time, and we felt we finally had a great list to adopt (adopted from PeacefulAnarchy).
• Fantasy has been a popular genre from the early films of Méliès to recent blockbusters like Lord of The Rings. We've been eager to add a list representing these films for a while, and we've settled on adopting Fantasy Cinema: Impossible Worlds on Screen, a varied list of notable and interesting Fantasy films from a book by David Butler (adopted from Gershwin).
• We've got official lists for the big three film festivals, Cannes, Venice and Berlin, and the popular Sundance, but there are other big film festivals around the world that some of users are interested in. Locarno is one of the oldest film festivals, and the most requested, so we felt it was time to adopt its top prize, Locarno Film Festival - Golden Leopard (adopted from marco_n65).
• Due to its particular economic and political history, Portuguese cinema has tended to be overshadowed in European cinema, even as it has produced several internationally renowned directors like Manoel de Oliveira and Pedro Costa. With many of those other European countries represented with their own official iCheckMovies lists, we're giving Portugal a chance to join them by adopting Público's Best Portuguese Films, a selection compiled by a board of 10 notable Portuguese personalities (adopted from lampadatriste).

In addition to the regular updates to the IMDb lists, many lists have had updates over the last few months, so we thought we'd give you a quick rundown:

• Academy Award Best Pictures, Academy Award Best Foreign Pictures and Academy Award Best Cinematography: Late February was Oscar time, and these three lists were updated with their respective winners, Spotlight (2015), Saul fia (2015) and
   The Revenant (2015).
• Bodil Award Winners for Best Danish Film: The yearly Danish best film award was won by Under sandet (2015) in early March.
• César Award - Best Film:
   The French award for best film, won by Fatima (2015) in late February.
• BAFTA - Best Film: The British Film academy chose The Revenant (2015) as the best film of the year a couple of weeks before the Oscars went in a different direction.
• Ariel Award: The Mexican award for best film of the year was recently given to Las elegidas (2015).
• Berlin International Film Festival - Golden Bears: In the first of the big three major film festivals of the year, Fuocoammare (2016) won Berlin's top prize back in February.
• Cannes Film Festival - Palme d'Or: The worlds most celebrated and prestigious film festival gave out its top prize just a couple of weeks ago, choosing Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake (2016).
• The 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films: Following up the February update of its main list, TSPDT released the update of their complementary top 1000 of the 21st century in early March with Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Carol (2015) leading the way.
• Doubling the Canon: This project of highlighting films overlooked by TSPDT's canon, voted on by cinephiles across the web, primarily on IMDb's classic board and iCheckMovies' own unofficial forum, gets updated in the month following the release of those lists. This year's list got several hundred new entries and was updated in early May.
• They Shoot Zombies, Don't They?: The large horror canon which we made official last year got its first yearly update, with 45 new entries led by It Follows (2014).
• Jonathan Rosenbaum's Essential Films: With the arrival of a new Korean edition of his book, Rosenbaum took the opportunity to add 60 essentials to his list from among the films he's watched in the last few years.
• The Criterion Collection and Masters Of Cinema: These two premier DVD distributors have made a few announcements of upcoming releases in the past few months and have been regularly updated accordingly.
• 366 Weird Movies (Certified Weird): The list continues building up to its titular 366 titles with an additional dozen entries over the past four months.
• Best Of Rotten Tomatoes, All-Time Worldwide Box office, All Time Box Office: All three of these lists are regularly updated, and while February to June isn't the most active time for big studio releases, there have still been a number of new entries in these lists, including Zootopia (2016) which has managed to enter into all three

Happy checking!

Cheers,

The iCheckMovies team