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Today, we let you in on another explosive concept that will unlock your minds to new levels of movie criticism: the benchmark movie.

A benchmark movie stands right on the border between two different classes of movies. Consider the blended genre of “dark comedy.” Serial Mom might be a good example of a benchmark movie for dark comedy. Anything darker than Serial Mom is an outright dark movie; anything funnier than Serial Mom is a straight-up comedy. Serial Mom is the benchmark of dark comedy: the signpost on the border.

You can also use benchmark movies as a standard for movie quality. Anything worse than your benchmark is “bad”; anything better than your benchmark is “good.” The benchmark movie is the perfect median.

A benchmark movie is inherently personal, however. Everyone has different tastes. So the Overthinkers will each contribute some benchmarks of their own. Once you’ve read through ours, post your own in the comments!

Today, we enter the Think Tank to do battle with guns while holding a baby. Read the entries and vote for your favorite at the end.

Sheely, Battleship Potemkin and The Untouchables

The greatest gunfight (while holding a baby) is actually one in which no one is holding the baby:

Although the famous Odessa Steps scene in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is considered a cinematic milestone largely because of Eisenstein’s groundbreaking use of montage techniques, it also deserves special mention for being the first baby-centric-gunfight in the history of film. Of course, to call the (possibly fictional) confrontation between the Tsar’s Cossak troops and the crowd that had gathered for a demonstration on the Odessa steps a “gunfight” is also a misnomer. Rather, the central point of Eisenstein’s depiction of the event is that the soldiers provoked the riot by using deadly force to disperse a peaceful demonstration. As the baby carriage hurtles down the stairs, it is impossible to doubt that this is a regime is willing to pull guns when the citizens challenge its legitimacy at all — because that’s the Odessa way.

If this scene looks eerily familiar, but you aren’t a connoisseur of Soviet propaganda films (or have never taken an intro film studies class), that is probably because a stroller rolling down the stairs is central to another famous filmic gunfight…