Have you considered trying to work with Rotten Tomatoes? This kind of functionality should really be built into the site. They actually have top X of each year by category pages, but the categories and years are hard-coded to single values, don't allow drop-down filtering, and don't allow ranges. On the other hand, their rankings are more reliable because they adjust raw scores by factors like the number of reviews and ranking of the critics giving the reviews. You might consider doing something similar if you can scrape that information as well.