re: 100 Best Films of the 21st Century, BBC Culture

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Isn’t “Training Day” a more compelling movie than, say, Spike Lee’s “25th Hour”

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No. Hell, the final 30 minutes of 25th Hour are among my favorite 30 minutes of any movie, and its compelling as hell. Also, its a crime movie that almost perfectly captured what post 9/11 NYC felt like.

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Why isn’t Ben Affleck’s “The Town” or “Gone Baby Gone” on the list, but two pretentious, pseudo-intellectual Lars von Trier films do make the cut?

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Because Gone Baby Gone is a mediocre movie with "shocking" twist that managed to shock no one. I do like The Town a lot, and hate Lars von Trier even more. So I'll give them that. Lars von Trier is second only to Haneke in directors whose completely hateful worldview I'm pretty much done with. I get it. You hate being alive and you resent others' joy. Duly noted.

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hy are there no Lord of The Ring movies on the list, when they are surely as well done as “Pans Labyrinth?”

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Because they aren't.

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Are fan favorites like “Gladiator,” “The Revenant,” or even “Best in Show” (with a 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) less deserving than middling efforts like “Before Sunset” or “Requiem for a Dream”?

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I've got nothing against fan favorites, and in fact argued in favor of them, but there's nothing middling about Before Sunset or Requiem for a Dream. The experience of seeing Requiem in the theater absolutely wrecked me. The whole Before trilogy is one of the most realistic takes on love/relationships put on film. I'm a huge fan, and watch them often.

But this goes to one of my major points: fans of mainstream films tend to be the provincial ones, not film critics. Nearly every film critic will advocate for some mass consumerist Hollywood films, while almost none of these Critics Are Snobs fans will consider a foreign film or a slower paced indie. As a reminder, critics RAVED about The Avengers and all three Toy Stories, for example.