The British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound Magazine has a decades-old tradition of polling film experts in every field; directors, critics, writers, historians, and other scholars to assemble a list of the greatest films of all time. Census-style, the poll is only conducted once every ten years, cutting out much of the horserace debate and perhaps better reflecting generational shifts in critical mood. The list has always been extremely traditional, and even this year features only two films from the 21st century. In fact, a mere 11 entries represent the last four decades of cinema, with the vast majority of films being released in the 1960s or earlier.
All of this is to say that as far as arbitrarily important, masturbatory list-making goes, this one has about as much credibility as it’s possible to attain, the trade-off being that the list is stuffy as fuck.
So with the 2012 list now assembled and announced, any big news? Absolutely, in that Vertigo has dethroned Citizen Kane after five decades of Welles’ masterpiece firmly sitting at number 1. Hitchcock’s own classic has been on the path to number 1 steadily since it was first included on the list in the 80s (two years after the ‘cock’s death), slowly creeping farther up the list with each passing decade. Now with 191 votes to Kane’s 157, Vertigo holds sway as the film declared as the greatest of all time by the 846 voters.
If you could use some context on the evolving state of Vertigo‘s critical acceptance and rise on the list, check out Eric Snider’s article from a few years ago that does a nice job of setting the stage that empowered its “victory” today.
The magazine has a full 100 list of great films, as well as a Top 10 list chosen purely by 358 film directors, and individual Top 10 film lists from notable directors like Edgar Wright and more. More lists than you could stuff up your own ass and regurgitate back out again!
You can keep up with Sight & Sound’s twitter feed for those releases, while the full Top 50 films are below, followed by the Top 10 as decided by Directors.
Stuffy as the lists may be, these are unquestionably excellent collections of films, and all bullshit ranking aside, you really ought to dust off your disc queue and fill it out with any of these classic you haven’t seen. I’ll certainly be inspired to fill some gaps over the next few weeks, so if there’s anything these feedback loops of artificial import are good for, it’s getting more eyeballs on better movies.
Critics’s Top 50
1. Vertigo
Alfred Hitchcock, 1958 (191 votes)
2. Citizen Kane
Orson Welles, 1941 (157 votes)
3. Tokyo Story
Ozu Yasujiro, 1953 (107 votes)
4. La Règle du jeu
Jean Renoir, 1939 (100 votes)
5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
FW Murnau, 1927 (93 votes)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick, 1968 (90 votes)
7. The Searchers
John Ford, 1956 (78 votes)
8. Man with a Movie Camera
Dziga Vertov, 1939 (68 votes)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc
Carl Dreyer, 1927 (65 votes)
10. 8½
Federico Fellini, 1963 (64 votes)
11. Battleship Potemkin
Sergei Eisenstein, 1925 (63 votes)
12. L’Atalante
Jean Vigo, 1934 (58 votes)
13. Breathless
Jean-Luc Godard, 1960 (57 votes)
14. Apocalypse Now
Francis Ford Coppola, 1979 (53 votes)
15. Late Spring
Ozu Yasujiro, 1949 (50 votes)
16. Au hasard Balthazar
Robert Bresson, 1966 (49 votes)
17= Seven Samurai
Kurosawa Akira, 1954 (48 votes)
17= Persona
Ingmar Bergman, 1966 (48 votes)
19. Mirror
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974 (47 votes)
20. Singin’ in the Rain
Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1951 (46 votes)
21= L’avventura
Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960 (43 votes)
21= Le Mépris
Jean-Luc Godard, 1963 (43 votes)
21= The Godfather
Francis Ford Coppola, 1972 (43 votes)
24= Ordet
Carl Dreyer, 1955 (42 votes)
24= In the Mood for Love
Wong Kar-Wai, 2000 (42 votes)
26= Rashomon
Kurosawa Akira, 1950 (41 votes)
26= Andrei Rublev
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966 (41 votes)
28. Mulholland Dr.
David Lynch, 2001 (40 votes)
29= Stalker
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979 (39 votes)
29= Shoah
Claude Lanzmann, 1985 (39 votes)
31= The Godfather Part II
Francis Ford Coppola, 1974 (38 votes)
31= Taxi Driver
Martin Scorsese, 1976 (38 votes)
33. Bicycle Thieves
Vittoria De Sica, 1948 (37 votes)
34. The General
Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1926 (35 votes)
35= Metropolis
Fritz Lang, 1927 (34 votes)
35= Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock, 1960 (34 votes)
35= Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles
Chantal Akerman, 1975 (34 votes)
35= Sátántangó
Béla Tarr, 1994 (34 votes)
39= The 400 Blows
François Truffaut, 1959 (33 votes)
39= La dolce vita
Federico Fellini, 1960 (33 votes)
41. Journey to Italy
Roberto Rossellini, 1954 (32 votes)
42= Pather Panchali
Satyajit Ray, 1955 (31 votes)
42= Some Like It Hot
Billy Wilder, 1959 (31 votes)
42= Gertrud
Carl Dreyer, 1964 (31 votes)
42= Pierrot le fou
Jean-Luc Godard, 1965 (31 votes)
42= Play Time
Jacques Tati, 1967 (31 votes)
42= Close-Up
Abbas Kiarostami, 1990 (31 votes)
48= The Battle of Algiers
Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966 (30 votes)
48= Histoire(s) du cinéma
Jean-Luc Godard, 1998 (30 votes)
50= City Lights
Charlie Chaplin, 1931 (29 votes)
50= Ugetsu monogatari
Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953 (29 votes)
50= La Jetée
Chris Marker, 1962 (29 votes)
Director’s Top 10
1. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
=2 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
=2 Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
4. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)
5. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1980)
6. Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)
=7 The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)
=7 Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
9. Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1974)
10. Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)