1. This film knocked No. 2 down a notch and reigned supreme this year.
2. This 1941 classic claimed the top spot for nearly 50 years until the most recent poll.
3. This film, set in Japan, claimed the third spot on the list.
4. The Nazis banned this French classic from being shown during World War II.
5. This film came out in 1927.
According to the latest Sight and Sound magazine poll just out August 1st, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece “Vertigo” is now considered to be the greatest film in the history of cinema. The British cinema magazine poll, conducted every ten years since 1962, has been announced and for the first time in the poll’s history, Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” is not atop the list. The thriller starring James Stewart and Kim Novak is.
The full list of the Top 10 films picked this year, as judged by an international panel of 846 movie experts, were as follows (title, director, year):
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock 1958)
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles 1941)
Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu 1953)
The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir 1939)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau 1927)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick 1968)
The Searchers (John Ford 1956)
Man With A Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov 1929)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Dreyer 1928)
8 ½ (Federico Fellini 1963)
“The Godfather”, a film that many critics consider to be easily one of America’s best movies of the last 50 years, did not make the top 10. The logic goes that it suffers from critics splitting their votes between it and its equally revered sequel. Some critics have even put the two films together as one entry on their list of 10 but that’s cheating. They are separate films and should be judged accordingly.
Still, that Francis Ford Coppola classic does better in the polling of international movie directors for the same magazine. Their list has some similar choices as those of the critics but it is certainly a much more modern and recognizable list. It’s also more American, which isn’t surprising considering that more directors hail from the United States than any other country. Here is the directors’ list:
Tokyo Story
2001: A Space Odyssey
Citizen Kane
8 ½
Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese 1976)
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979)
The Godfather (Coppola 1972)
Vertigo
Mirror (Andrey Tarkovskly 1975)
Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica 1948)
Of course, any such list will stir debate amongst film fans. Some will make the argument that many great films deserve to be on that list and shockingly have been excluded. Others will argue that Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and “Psycho” are his best films, or that “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas” are better picks from the Scorsese oeuvre. Nonetheless, there is little argument that the Sight & Sound poll is an honorable and well-chosen list, despite some great pictures not being included. And if every ten years the list gets us to talk and even argue more about the movies, what’s wrong with that?
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