The recent release of the so-called Best 100 Films of all time by Sight & Sound (bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time), despite the conspicuous absence from the list of brilliant films like Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown, Jia Zhangke’s The World, Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (to name only a few, see others starred below) —at least suggests the continued existence of critical arbiters of taste and discrimination (though I will celebrate the day Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and silly sexist romps like Some Like It Hot fall off future lists.) But Sight & Sound’s prominent omissions are as nothing to those of the New York Times’s chief film critics, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, neither of whom, in this remarkably mediocre year, saw fit even to name Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s remarkable Bardo and Martin McDonagh’s mesmerizing Banshees of Inishiren to their secondary “Make Sure to Watch” lists. Why?

These two reigning arbiters of middle-brow taste have long ago fallen prey to a “what the market will bear” policy, aided and abetted by Scott’s (in particular) animosity towards world-class directorslike Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke, whose acute indictments of upper middle-class hypocrisy he seems to find personally offensive.More charitably, they have also been compelled to review every idiotic blockbuster Hollywood pitches to the taste and intelligence of 16-40 year-old boys, and to pass lightly over more serious film festival favorites that either lack a distributor or fly under the popular radar after making cameo appearances at Film at Lincoln Center, the Quad, or IFC in Manhattan. But there is, in the end, no forgivable excuse for failing to champion and promote films that break with convention and do so in excitingly virtuosic ways, as Bardo and Banshees most decidedly do.

That said, Scott and Dargis are not alone in failing to detect the pleasures and virtues of Bardo in particular, which many other critics have found altogether too derivative of Fellini’s 81/2 and Woody Allen’s similarly derivative Starlight Memories. I suppose they think Iñárritu—deserved winner of a Best Picture Oscar for Birdman—is following too closely in the footsteps of his countryman Alfonso Cuaron in making another self-indulgent, heavily autobiographical film. But Cuaron was rewarded for nostalgically restaging his privileged childhood in Roma with an Oscar for Best Picture. Why hasn’t Iñárritu even been recognized when he’s clearly made (that’s right, no room for opinion) a far more inventive, more self-critical film that goes well beyond Fellini’s misogyny and narcissistic self-regard to embrace his own many US/Mexico border-crossing contradictions—and which even makes space for a tense, mutually hostile conversation with the conquistador Cortés at the top of a pyramid of dead Aztecs, all of whom prove to be extras tired of pretending to be dead. But perhaps the best things in Bardo are its entirely “relatable” domestic scenes that include an imagined meeting between Silverio (brilliantly played by Daniel Giménez-Cacho) and his dead father in a restaurant bathroom, which Iñárritu stages by physically reducing the middle-aged Silverio to the size of a child, and a long conversation with his college-age daughter in an infinity pool looking out over the sea where some real learning is being done by the normally detached father-director.

As in the groundbreaking Amores Perros, and in Birdman, Babel, and 21 Grams,Iñárritu proves a master manipulator of the moving parts of an imagination that is clearly grounded in Mexico but that has long ago extended itself to the visionary understanding that few of us anymore are creatures of a single, unconnected space and time. That, of course, is exactly the difference between Bardo and McDonagh’s Banshees of Inishiren in which only one character seems able to make the crossing between a tiny island eaten up by inexplicable emotions and unexplainable principles to a mainland (really only a bigger island) eaten up during the Irish civil wars of the early1920s by ideological differences that can only be settled at the point of a gun. The critical indifference shown this film seems poised on the very thing that McDonagh—following closely in the path of the great Irish playwright John Millington Synge—has made his stock-in-trade, even in the North American setting of the Oscar winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, that is, the deepening and intensification of (seemingly) small differences. But efforts by some to allegorize the brutality of events on Inishiren with those of the mainland—as well as McDonagh’s penchant for turning them to comedic account–are apt to underplay how deeply McDonagh is probing existential problems that are pressing hard on co-protagonist Colm’s reckoning with despair, which for deep-revolving Christians has been the sin of sins that cannot be forgiven, based as it is both on loss of hope and the conviction of one’s own damnation.

Twice in the film, during caustic verbal jousts with the village priest in the confessional, Colm (Brendan Gleeson) is asked how his continuing battles with Despair (upper-case D in the Catholic playbook) are going, questions that most viewers are apt to pass off as equivalent to latter-day references to depression. At other points, Colm identifies art and entertainment as the only ways to distract one from the emptiness of existence, which may help better explain the urgency with which he insists on making a complete break from his time-consuming bouts of pints and small talk with his best friend, Padraic (Colin Farrell), a self-described “nice man”. Most viewers will likely look at Colm’s resolve as less principled than perverse—how, after all, will two daily hours taken up with small talk with the nicest boring man on the island violate the artistic concentration of a late middle-aged man who does no other work than play the fiddle and compose? But when Colm cuts off the four remaining fingers of his left hand to make his point, no one can fail to notice that he has also cut off the chief (only?) pleasure in his life as an artistic performer. A follow-up scene finds him pounding his bloody hand on sheets of music at the local pub to keep the beat while other fiddlers are trying to read through his latest composition, raising the question of whether this whittled down form of entertainment will serve to keep the emptiness of life and its coadjutant, Despair, at bay. The final scene that plays out between Colm and Padraic on the shore adjacent to Colm’s house, which Padraic has just burnt down in revenge for his pet donkey’s choking to death on one of Colm’s fingers (yes, I hear you A.O. and Manola, this is a pretty silly plot-turn), find Colm no more dejected than usual, possibly because there’s now nothing to stand between him and the emptiness of life than time.

• Similarly prominent omissions from the list include Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, Terence Malick’s Badlands, Orson Welles’s A Touch of Evil, Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga, Carlos Reygadas’s Japón, and Iñárritu’s Amores Perros. Interested parties may find detailed notes on several of these as well as other films identified by name by clicking on the relevant regional links on my Viewing Notes page: in addition to La Ciénaga, Japón, and Iñárritu’s Amores Perros, these include Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Haneke’s Code Unknown, Jia Zhangke’s The World, Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Viewing notes for three films that did make the Sight and Sound cut may also be found there; they include Edward Yang’s Yi, Yi; Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love; and Claire Denis’s Beau Travail.