People with highbrow tastes are often academics, professional critics, or filmmakers. In any case, they are people who are educated in film and the history of film. Sometimes, people with this taste come across as snobbish. Many believe that they alone have the right to determine which films are great. In fact, this taste might even be called the snobbish taste if there were not at least as many snobs with popular tastes who believe that only regular moviegoers have the right to determine which films are great.
In both what it includes and what it excludes, the highbrow taste is the opposite of the popular taste. The top-100 highbrow films include 13 silent films, whereas the top-100 popular films include none. On the other hand, the top-100 highbrow films include very few recent films. There is only one film from the last 20 years--Schindler's List (1993).
Perhaps the most striking feature of the highbrow taste is that nearly half of the top films are in languages other than English. The top-100 films for the other two tastes include hardly any films in languages other than English.
There is little diversity in the genres of highbrow films. Of the top-100 highbrow films, over 3/4 are dramas, yet there are only ten action films, eleven adventure films, and three science-fiction films. There are well over twice as many films in each of these genres among the top 100 popular films.