I think it falls naturally out of trying to recommend greats to people—at some point you need an, "OK but if you are only going to watch one of these, it should

I think it falls naturally out of trying to recommend greats to people—at some point you need an, "OK but if you are only going to watch one of these, it should be this one...." Not objective, sure, and not authoritative. On a ranked list of, say, 500 great films, what's the difference between 100 and 101? Probably not much and the ordering of them's basically arbitrary... but if you're only going to watch 100 of those 500, it likely is a better idea to watch 1-100 than 401-500. Some truth does fall out of the rankings, especially if you factor in more than one person's opinions. Keep seeing the same few movies near the tops of lists, then they're probably damn good.