Chantal Akerman’s ‘Jeanne Dielman’ Top’s BFI-Backed Critics’ Poll of 100 Greatest Films
In 1952, the Sight and Sound team had the novel idea of asking critics to name the greatest films of all time. The tradition became decennial, increasing in size and prestige as the decades passed.The Sight and Sound poll is now a major bellwether of critical opinion on cinema and this year’s edition (its eighth) is the largest ever, with 1,639 participating critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics each submitting their top ten ballot.Here’s the results of that poll — from BFI’s site – beginning with “Get Out” in a tie with “The General,” “Black Girl,” “Tropical Malady,” “Once Upon a Time in the West” and “A Man Escaped,” and ending with the No. 1 winner, Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman,” the first female-directed film to top the list.
Get Out
95
A poster film for Black Lives Matter, Jordan Peele’s horror-satire of white vampirism gleefully needles America’s racial malaise.
2017 USA, Japan
Directed by Jordan Peele
The General
95
Buster Keaton’s most lavish production and his warmest, bringing together a boy, a girl and a train amid the maelstrom of the US Civil War.
1926 USA
Directed by Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman
Black Girl
95
Ousmane Sembène lifts the mask on France’s racist post-colonial relationship with Senegal in his small yet commanding feature debut.
1965 Senegal, France
Directed by Ousmane Sembène
Tropical Malady
95
A work that defies straightforward understanding and suggests understandability may be overrated.
2004 France, Thailand, Germany, Italy, Switzerland
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Once upon a Time in the West
95
Sergio Leone’s operatic widescreen elegy to the old American West, with the forces of corporate capitalism coming down the railroad.
1968 Italy, USA
Directed by Sergio Leone
A Man Escaped
95
This prison-break study is Robert Bresson at his most starkly essential: a man, four walls, his ingenuity and the mysterious inflections of fate.
1956 France
Directed by Robert Bresson
Madame de…
90
Max Ophuls’ woozy whirligig tracks a pair of unwanted earrings around high-society Paris – until they bear the weight of lost time and passion.
1953 France, Italy
Directed by Max Ophuls
The Leopard
90
Luchino Visconti’s sumptuous epic portrays the fall of 19th-century Sicilian nobility, its decadent displays of wealth tinged with melancholy.
1963 Italy, France
Directed by Luchino Visconti
Ugetsu Monogatari
90
Kenji Mizoguchi’s bewitching, insinuating Edo-period ghost story renders civil war as a parable of heedless male greed.
1953 Japan
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Yi Yi
90
Urban anomie and multi-generational growing pains are given rich, relaxed expression in Edward Yang’s heartfelt Taipei family tapestry.
1999 Taiwan, Japan
Directed by Edward Yang
Parasite
90
Like Get Out, Bong Joon Ho’s endlessly twisty, blackly sincere class-war thriller is a pop provocation for our unequal times.
2019 Republic of Korea
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
Chungking Express
88
A sense of wistful, romantic longing joins the two stories in Wong Kar Wai’s freewheeling portmanteau portrait of Hong Kong.
1994 Hong Kong
Directed by Wong Kar Wai
The Shining
88
Stanley Kubrick’s much analysed and often spoofed psychological horror spends a chilling and claustrophobic winter at the empty Overlook Hotel.
1980 USA, United Kingdom
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Histoire(s) du Cinéma
84
The apotheosis of Jean-Luc Godard’s experimental era, this sprawling essay film indicts the 20th century through its most popular medium.
1988 France, Switzerland
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Pierrot le fou
84
Jean-Luc Godard’s most effervescent escapade, a primary-coloured lovers-on-the-run blow-out heading south with Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
1965 France, Italy
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
The Spirit of the Beehive
84
Victor Erice’s exquisite impressionistic distillation of childhood fear and wonder in the ruins of the recently ended Spanish Civil War.
1973 Spain
Directed by Víctor Erice
Blue Velvet
84
David Lynch’s adult fairytale follows teen sleuth Kyle MacLachlan’s murder inquiry into the surreal, perverse corners of small-town America.
1986 USA
Directed by David Lynch
Céline and Julie Go Boating
78
Jacques Rivette’s most playful, innovative frolic, in which his irreverent Parisian heroines dissolve worlds, genres, social codes and boundaries.
1974 France
Directed by Jacques Rivette
A Matter of Life and Death
78
Love is rescued from the jaws of the afterlife in the Archers’ delirious World War II air-pilot fantasia.
1946 United Kingdom
Directed by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Modern Times
78
Industrial modernity proves mercilessly madcap in Charlie Chaplin’s final (mostly) silent feature, one of the most inspired and ingenious of all his comedies.
1936 USA
Directed by Charles Chaplin
A Brighter Summer Day
78
Young love and teen delinquency in Taiwan’s early 1960s adolescence, in Edward Yang’s slow-burn, bittersweet epic.
1991 Taiwan
Directed by Edward Yang
Sátántangó
78
As timely as ever in its grim poeticisation of demagogues and doom, helplessness and hope. If music be the food of death, play on.
1994 Hungary, Germany, Switzerland
Directed by Béla Tarr
Sunset Blvd.
78
Tinseltown’s greatest self-satire, a gothic requiem for big-screen bygones and the highs of screen stardom.
1950 USA
Directed by Billy Wilder
Sansho the Bailiff
75
Kenji Mizoguchi’s tragic folk saga of the tribulations of an exiled governor’s family in feudal Japan, tracked with exquisitely moving camerawork.
1954 Japan
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Imitation of Life
75
Douglas Sirk’s melodrama holds a mirror to the hypocrisies of 1950s America with its pairs of mothers and daughters across class and racial divides.
1959 USA
Directed by Douglas Sirk
Spirited Away
75
Hayao Miyazaki’s rich anime fantasy follows its ten-year-old heroine into the labyrinth of a spirit-world bathhouse, teeming with phantoms and peril.
2001 Japan
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
My Neighbour Totoro
72
The storytelling is as simple as Totoro is inscrutable, unfolding in a series of delightful, exquisitely constructed sequences.
1988 Japan
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
Journey to Italy
72
Roberto Rossellini’s plaintively simple portrait of a marriage on the rocks, imprinted with the ghosts of love, cultures and civilisations.
1954 Italy, France
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
L’avventura
72
Michelangelo Antonioni’s high-modernist breakthrough sends Monica Vitti in search less of her disappeared friend than her own self, via images to get lost in.
1960 Italy, France
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Metropolis
67
Fritz Lang’s bombastic, stylised depiction of a future of profound inequality has influenced generations of genre filmmakers.
1927 Germany
Directed by Fritz Lang
The Gleaners and I
67
Agnès Varda’s essay portrait of society ’s scavenger-recyclers – herself included – is both free-radical and infectious.
2000 France
Directed by Agnès Varda
The Red Shoes
67
The feverish Technicolor and astonishing ballet sequences for which this film is so renowned are as spellbinding as they are disturbing.
1948 United Kingdom
Directed by Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
La Jetée
67
The rare short film in this list, Marker’s dazzling photo montage ruminates on memory from beyond the apocalypse.
1962 France
Directed by Chris Marker
Andrei Rublev
67
Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic portrait of a medieval artist may be the most wrenching depiction of belief, creativity and the search for meaning ever filmed.
1966 USSR
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
Touki Bouki
66
A restless young couple dream of escaping Senegal for Paris in Djibril Diop Mambéty ’s stylish, poetic, irreverent expression of post-colonial fantasies.
1973 Senegal
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty
Casablanca
63
Ingrid Bergman rallies Humphrey Bogart’s embittered cynic to the anti-Nazi cause in this classic romance.
1942 USA
Directed by Michael Curtiz
The Third Man
63
Joseph Cotten chases Orson Welles’s agent of corruption through the ruins of divided post-war Vienna in this evocative classic thriller.
1949 United Kingdom
Directed by Carol Reed
GoodFellas
63
The dizzying story of wiseguy Henry Hill, from his seduction into a life of crime to his paranoid, cocaine-fuelled departure.
1990 USA
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Daughters of the Dust
60
Julie Dash’s visionary visual marriage between Afrocentric aesthetics and the rich emotional depth of Black womanhood is a cinematic triumph.
1991 USA
Directed by Julie Dash
Moonlight
60
Instantly heralded as a modern masterpiece, Barry Jenkins’ stunning three-part story of queer identity is both a technical and an emotional marvel.
2016 USA
Directed by Barry Jenkins
La dolce vita
60
Federico Fellini’s ode to Rome presents a lush, vibrant exterior to the swinging city, before revealing its rotting moral core.
1960 Italy, France
Directed by Federico Fellini
Sans Soleil
59
Chris Marker’s speculative travelogue-essay, reflecting on culture and history in narrated letters from Guinea to Japan to Iceland.
1982 France
Directed by Chris Marker
Sherlock Jr.
54
Buster Keaton’s would-be sleuth dreams himself into movie-heroic mastery in this dazzling, evergreen, meta masterpiece of silent comedy.
1924 USA
Directed by Buster Keaton
The Apartment
54
Billy Wilder’s then-risqué romcom, with Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine finding love amid corporate New York’s sea of sexual deception.
1960 USA
Directed by Billy Wilder
Battleship Potemkin
54
Sergei Eisenstein’s renowned agit-drama of proto-revolutionary mutiny and repression, often quoted but still powerful in its montage effects.
1925 USSR
Directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein
Blade Runner
54
Iconic neo-noir in a befouled sci-fi Los Angeles where humans and their machine replicas vie to be predators rather than prey.
1982 USA, Hong Kong
Directed by Ridley Scott
Le Mépris
54
Disillusion in love and cinema in Jean-Luc Godard’s most opulent and emotive production, with lovers and film legends at loggerheads in Capri.
1963 France, Italy
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
News from Home
52
Chantal Akerman’s epistolary film, shot in the grime of 70s New York, bridges the distance from Brussels through dictated letters from her mother.
1976 France, Belgium
Directed by Chantal Akerman
Fear Eats the Soul
52
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s heart-on-sleeve melodrama of a doomed romance across racial and age divides probes social hypocrisy with feeling.
1974 Federal Republic of Germany
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
The Piano
50
This virtuoso drama of a mute woman’s and her daughter’s silent defiance of patriarchy in 19th-century New Zealand still has searing emotional heft.
1992 Australia, France
Directed by Jane Campion
The 400 Blows
50
François Truffaut’s free-wheeling debut, with Jean-Pierre Léaud as his rebel-schoolboy surrogate, is still a banner film for nouvelle vague lyric realism.
1959 France
Directed by François Truffaut
Wanda
48
Barbara Loden’s tough, unsentimental portrait of a woman adrift in the industrial heartlands of the north-eastern United States.
1970 USA
Directed by Barbara Loden
Ordet
48
An austere parable on the power of faith, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s penultimate film culminates in a transcendent resurrection scene.
1955 Denmark
Directed by Carl Th. Dreyer
North by Northwest
45
Insouciant big-screen thrill-games from the Master of Suspense, hounding Cary Grant’s smug adman across a continent’s span of peerless set pieces.
1959 USA
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
The Battle of Algiers
45
A window on Algeria’s wider liberation war, recreating a violent phase of guerrilla struggle and suppression in powerful free-documentary style.
1966 Italy, Algeria
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
Barry Lyndon
45
Stanley Kubrick’s meticulously designed epic recounts the picaresque exploits of an 18th-century Irish adventurer.
1975 USA, United Kingdom
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Killer of Sheep
43
Charles Burnett’s tender and witty tale of a disillusioned slaughterhouse worker and the solace to be found in the simplest moments of life.
1977 USA
Directed by Charles Burnett
Stalker
43
Two men recruit a guide to take them into ‘the Zone’, a mysterious realm where one’s innermost wishes come true, in this metaphysical sci-fi epic.
1979 USSR
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
Rashomon
41
The film that brought Japanese cinema to the world, this 88-minute firecracker proved a seminal assault on the notion of objectivity.
1950 Japan
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Bicycle Thieves
41
The film that topped our inaugural poll in 1952, Vittorio De Sica’s indelible neorealist parable offers a sharp-eyed portrait of Italy ’s post-war privations.
1948 Italy
Directed by Vittorio De Sica
Rear Window
38
The Master of Suspense ratchets up the tension while dishing out insights into obsession, urban living and the dangers of the gaze.
1954 USA
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Some Like It Hot
38
Billy Wilder’s supreme gender-bending comedy has Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as female-posing musicians on the lam, and many knickers in a twist.
1959 USA
Directed by Billy Wilder
À bout de souffle
38
Jean-Luc Godard’s cock-of-the-walk calling card, mixing pulp pastiche and upstart rebellion with Jean-Paul Belmondo’s footloose Parisian delinquent.
1960 France
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
M
36
Fritz Lang’s rack-taut first talkie, with a searing, animalistic Peter Lorre as a serial child-murderer turned manhunt target.
1931 Germany
Directed by Fritz Lang
City Lights
36
A purely beautiful outing from the Tramp, this delightful urban romance features one of cinema’s most heartbreaking smiles.
1931 USA
Directed by Charles Chaplin
Pather Panchali
35
All the mischief, discoveries, joys and tragedies of life are given endlessly lyrical expression in Satyajit Ray’s debut, the first entry in ‘The Apu Trilogy’.
1955 India
Directed by Satyajit Ray
L’Atalante
34
Jean Vigo’s headily poetic portrait of young newlyweds on – and off – Michel Simon’s barge on the Seine.
1934 France
Directed by Jean Vigo
Psycho
31
Alfred Hitchcock’s unsparing wrong-motel shocker starring Janet Leigh is a watershed for mainstream horror and still seminal in its suspense games.
1960 USA
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Mirror
31
Cinema scaled new heights of visual poetry in this deeply personal, elliptical film by the master of ‘sculpting in time’.
1975 USSR
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
8½
31
Federico Fellini’s portrait of the film director as harried ringmaster and unreliable dreamer, spinning gold from his memories and fantasies.
1963 Italy, France
Directed by Federico Fellini
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
30
Portrait of a Lady on Fire demonstrates Céline Sciamma’s ability to make a timelessly beautiful film that also crystallises the gender politics of her era.
2019 France
Directed by Céline Sciamma
Taxi Driver
29
Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader’s high-art vigilante movie for fallen times, with a coiled Robert De Niro as psycho-saviour of an infernal NYC.
1976 USA
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Daisies
28
This feminist milestone is an anarchic comedy of subversion whose approach to montage is as exuberant as the film’s two protagonists.
1966 Czechoslovakia
Directed by Věra Chytilová
Shoah
27
To make sense of the 20th century’s most horrific atrocity, Claude Lanzmann reinvented documentary itself, giving the form colossal new significance.
1985 France
Directed by Claude Lanzmann
The Night of the Hunter
25
Actor Charles Laughton’s only film as director, starring Robert Mitchum as an implacable child-hunting preacher, still leaves an indelible mark.
1955 USA
Directed by Charles Laughton
Au hasard Balthazar
25
Robert Bresson gave us a typically stark vision of humanity as experienced by a put-upon, maltreated beast of burden that passes from owner to owner.
1966 France, Sweden
Directed by Robert Bresson
Do the Right Thing
24
Racial tensions reach boiling point in Spike Lee’s incandescent portrait of a Brooklyn neighbourhood on the hottest day of the year.
1989 USA
Directed by Spike Lee
Playtime
23
Jacques Tati’s most painstaking accomplishment blends deft slapstick, endless visual ingenuity and sonic comedy in a stupendous modern satire.
1967 France
Directed by Jacques Tati
Late Spring
21
The first of Yasujirō Ozu’s great cycle of dramas that place the joys and sadnesses of family life in the context of a Japan disrupted by modernity.
1949 Japan
Directed by Yasujirō Ozu
The Passion of Joan of Arc
21
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s rapturous silent masterpiece, with soulful close-ups of Renée Jeanne “Maria” Falconetti’s tremulous martyr, transcending tyranny and temporality.
1927 France
Directed by Carl Th. Dreyer
Seven Samurai
20
Akira Kurosawa’s monumental, scintillating tale of hired samurai protecting a peasant village: period thriller and moral/political fable in one.
1954 Japan
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Apocalypse Now
19
Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War blowout, a hell-trip through the smoke and dazzle of imperial America’s most grandstanding rogue show.
1979 USA
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Persona
18
Any sense of a conventional psychodrama is constantly disrupted by the experimental, improvisatory filmmaking.
1966 Sweden
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Close-up
17
The more ‘information’ we’re offered about the case, the more we come to realise that there are no easy answers to any of the questions being raised.
1989 Iran
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
Meshes of the Afternoon
16
Had Californian sunlight ever looked as suggestive or sinister before the sharply etched dreamworld of Meshes of the Afternoon?
1943 USA
Directed by Maya Deren, Alexander Hackenschmied
The Searchers
15
This poll’s last western standing, John Ford’s sweeping, stirring rescue-or-revenge quest remains a film of magnificent mystery and poetry.
1956 USA
Directed by John Ford
Cléo from 5 to 7
14
In real time, Cléo becomes more real, more subject than object. She discards her whipped-cream wig and polka dots for a simple black shift. She performs less and feels more.
1962 France, Italy
Directed by Agnès Varda
La Règle du jeu
13
Huge-spirited and sharp-eyed, Jean Renoir’s French-society fresco gathers high classes and low for a weekend of country-house fallout.
1939 France
Directed by Jean Renoir
The Godfather
12
The first of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic trilogy about the Corleone crime family is the disturbing story of a son drawn inexorably into his father’s Mafia affairs.
1972 USA
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
11
The first American film by one of German expressionism’s leading exponents, this lush, atmospheric silent drama is replete with groundbreaking cinematography.
1927 USA
Directed by F.W. Murnau
Singin’ in the Rain
10
Hollywood’s troubled transition from silent to talking pictures at the end of the 1920s provided the inspiration for perhaps the greatest of movie musicals.
1951 USA
Directed by Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen
Man with a Movie Camera
9
Bottomless invention and frenetic, dizzying montage make this city symphony one of cinema’s sharpest, most exciting experiences nearly a century after its release.
1929 USSR
Directed by Dziga Vertov
Mulholland Dr.
8
Hollywood is dark and dangerous, yet alluring, in David Lynch’s acclaimed thriller.
2001 France, USA
Directed by David Lynch
Beau travail
7
Claire Denis’s great gift is to evoke emotion with gesture and juxtaposition. In the desert, water shimmers and ripples, naked shoulders perspire, black mosquito nets recall sheer lingerie.
1998 France
Directed by Claire Denis
2001: A Space Odyssey
6
Stanley Kubrick’s grand vision of mankind’s journey from its hominid beginnings to its star-child evolution is a towering achievement of science-fiction cinema.
1968 USA, United Kingdom
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
In the Mood for Love
5
Wong Kar Wai’s masterpiece is a heartbreaking story of illicit love that pulses with the ache of repressed desire.
2000 Hong Kong, France
Directed by Wong Kar Wai
Tokyo Story
4
Told in Yasujirō Ozu’s simple and elegant style, this story of intergenerational discord is heartbreaking and deeply human.
1953 Japan
Directed by Yasujirō Ozu
Citizen Kane
3
Famously sitting at the top of the Sight and Sound poll from 1962 to 2002, Orson Welles’s masterful debut, about newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, remains an enduring classic.
1941 USA
Directed by Orson Welles
Vertigo
2
A former detective with a fear of heights is hired to follow a woman apparently possessed by the past, in Alfred Hitchcock’s timeless thriller about obsession.
1958 USA
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
1
A magnificent epic of experimental cinema offering a feminist perspective on recurrent events of everyday life.
1975 Belgium, France
Directed by Chantal Akerman