Consensus, the backbone of politics, is the bane of art, which is the domain of the extreme and the exceptional, of the passionate and the personal, of danger made beautiful and of the impossible realized. So it’s utterly normal that the Sight & Sound tally of voters (critics and filmmakers) that yielded a list of the ten (and fifty, and two hundred and fifty) best films of all time should have come into the world as an object of controversy and discontent. I’ve written about it as an instant spur to counter-canons (and posted about my own ballot, too), calling attention to its omissions and to my own—including of younger directors, of comedy, of obsessive pleasures, and of titanic artists fallen out of fashion.

This weekend, Jason Bellamy posted, at The Cooler, a sharp critique of the poll and its voters which picks up on several of these themes and extends their implications. Though I disagree with his conclusions, he raises important questions for film critics and, for that matter, enthusiasts of any art. Bellamy first defines the very notion of greatness—“A great movie is one that as you’re watching it, and after, makes you think, ‘This is fucking great!’ ”—and then, on this criterion, wonders why there are three silent films (“Sunrise,” “Man with a Movie Camera,” and “The Passion of Joan of Arc”) in the poll’s top ten, complaining, “I truly can’t remember the last time I’ve come across a mere reference to, never mind a detailed appreciation” of these three films. In short, he thinks that critics trumpet, in their ballots, movies that they think they should like, or movies they want to be identified with liking, rather than those they really like:

We need to ditch this notion of over-praising movies we “respect,” which is almost always code for “I didn’t like it as much as I think I’m supposed to, but I’m not about to look like an idiot by saying so,” and let our heart and our gut guide us. Too many cinephiles that I know feel passionately about too many recent movies, funny movies and completely accessible movies to make me think that the Sight & Sound list is the best reflection of which movies cause even the nerdiest of film nerds to exclaim, “This is fucking great!”

The lists he singles out for praise include such recent and popular films as “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Avatar” (in fairness, these lists also feature such unpopular films as Pedro Costa’s “In Vanda’s Room,” Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” and, yes, Dreyer’s “Passion of Joan of Arc”). But his overall question—about the “heart” and the “gut” and their implicit opposition to the brain—is such a longstanding critical canard, and one that has had such a negative effect on the assessment of good movies that it deserves a new look.

On the one hand, Bellamy takes critics to task for not using their bully pulpits (mainly, he suggests, online ones) to discuss in detail the movies that he thinks unfamiliar enough to require explication and justification. On the other, he wants critics to use their posts for an altogether blunter purpose: “To shout about the movies that move us from the highest mountaintops—regularly and repeatedly. Or, you know, at least name-drop them in our Twitter feeds once in a while.” I agree absolutely that a key function of criticism is to point viewers in the right direction—to exhort simply and bluntly—and that’s exactly what a bare list is meant to do.

On the other hand, Bellamy (rightly) looks for discussion to justify the choices, and that’s altogether different from a whoop of pleasure. I’ve always thought that it’s not enough to call something a classic; I hold by Walter Benjamin’s aphorism about the millipede: that it got its name because no one bothered to count the legs. Criticism is, among other things, counting the legs, and the constant reëvaluation of movies, familiar and arcane, is as important as the rediscovery of hidden treasures and the heralding of new ones. (Not to toot my own horn, but I checked, and I have written online and in the magazine about all the films I placed in my top ten.)

Yet the raucous phrase with which Bellamy defines greatness tends toward the more rollicking varieties of cinema; somehow it seems inappropriate to emerge from Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar” or even from Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” with the declaration that it’s “fucking great.”

The movies I’ve seen most often aren’t necessarily the ones I consider the very best (top on the list: “42nd Street,” followed by “A Letter to Three Wives”). The books we keep by the bedside for a cozy read aren’t likely to be the most substantial; the foods we consider comfort foods—or, for that matter, daily fare—aren’t necessarily the summits of culinary art. I’m not sure why it’s such a problem that critics consider the very best of cinema to be something of a stretch, something that they love but to which they also bring a sense of awe and of distance. This very awe, which involves putting surpassingly colossal accomplishments on a sort of mental pedestal, constitutes a formative act of critical consciousness. And it’s important to distinguish between works of art that are close to us because they arouse our deepest personal feelings and those that are close to us because their achievements, splendid though they may be, are more modest, more conceivable—they’re on a plane of accomplishment that doesn’t surpass our conception, doesn’t make us feel small in their shadow.

For instance, Busby Berkeley’s production numbers in “42nd Street” are indeed breathtakingly titanic, but the rest of the snappy and sassy movie is as casually tasty as popcorn. And I get the sense that Bellamy wants critics, in effect, to put their favorite snack food and street food, comfort food and domestic fare, alongside haute cuisine on their list of the world’s ten best foods. It’s not necessarily inappropriate—but it’s certainly not self-evidently more worthy, either.