The Obscure, the Forgotten, and the Unloved is a 2010 poll of committed cinephiles who hope to find, highlight, and promote films that have received a considerable amount of critical acclaim but have yet to find the audience that their evident quality deserves. It follows on from The One-Line Review Presents “The 50 Greatest Films” and Beyond the Canon, bringing about a logical culmination to my quest to find the best that cinema has to offer.

Partipants were challenged with the following:

"Your task is to select up to 30 titles from a pre-defined pool of 255 acclaimed but little seen films. This pool was created by selecting all of the films from the following sources that have been rated less than 1000 times at the IMDb:

• They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?'s top 1000 films
• They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?'s top 250 films of the 21st Century
• Beyond the Canon: all films (4+ votes)
• The One-Line Review Presents "The 50 Greatest Films": all films (5+ votes)

In addition to films from the pool, your ballot of 30 titles may also include up to 10 movies that don’t appear upon it. These non-pool titles should have been rated less than 1000 times at the IMDb."

These non-pool titles then formed the basis for a second pool, from which each participant was permitted to select a further ten titles, bringing the total number of films on each ballot up to a maximum of 40 films.