When I relaunched 100 Films back in January, one of the things I promised was “a new occasional series about various 100-film lists — you know, like the Sight & Sound poll, or all those AFI ones.” I hadn’t intended it to take until November to get started on that feature, but here we are.

And, in truth, I might not even have got round to doing it now, were it not for the fact that the results of Sight & Sound’s latest decennial poll are out next month (or possibly before the end of this one, depending who you listen to). So, before that renders this article near obsolete, let’s look back at their last poll…

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For those who don’t know, Sight & Sound is a magazine published since 1932 by the BFI (British Film Institute). Since it integrated the Monthly Film Bulletin in 1991, it’s been the journal of record for films released in British cinemas, reviewing everything that’s granted a theatrical release in the UK (even the kinds of mainstream fare that might not appeal to its average readership), alongside all the film-related news and features you’d expect from such a publication.

Beginning in 1952, every decade the magazine has polled an international selection of film critics and professionals to create a list of the greatest films of all time. Each contributor submits an unranked list of their top ten films, with each named film receiving one vote when compiled into the overall list. The 2012 iteration was, deliberately, the biggest ever in terms of contributors: over 1,000 “critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles” were approached to contribute, and 846 did — up from just 145 in the preceding 2002 poll. (Since 1992, the votes of film directors have been compiled into a separate list. In 2012, 350 directors voted on their list. Maybe I’ll cover that another time.)

The poll has come to be recognised as one of — if not the — most important of its kind. The great critic Roger Ebert once asserted that, “because it is world-wide and reaches out to voters who are presumably experts, it is by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies — the only one most serious movie people take seriously.” You’ll often hear it said that Citizen Kane is the greatest movie of all time, and if you’ve ever wondered just who decided that… well, it was the Sight & Sound poll: Kane was ranked #1 in every iteration from 1962 to 2002. (The 1952 poll was topped by Bicycle Thieves. Kane came =13th.) That was the main reason the 2012 poll made headlines at the time: Kane was unseated! But we’ll come to that in just a sec…

I think the poll’s exalted reputation is both a blessing and a burden that the magazine’s editors are only too aware of, hence the attempt to broaden its contributor base in 2012. How much further — or not — they’ve broadened it for 2022, I guess we’ll find out soon. Reports on social media indicate there are more than double the number of contributors, with an effort to make it truly a worldwide sampling and thus break the traditional dominance of American and European cinema. Surely such a focus is an inevitable side effect of the poll being conducted by an English-language British-based magazine, but there’s still value in trying to overturn the bias.

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Below is the full list of 100 films (actually 101, thanks to a nine-way tie for 93rd place). When there’s a tie, I’ve copied the order from Sight & Sound’s own listing. (At first I’d thought they’d gone with chronological rather than alphabetical order (the list’s bias against recency is a whole separate debate), but it doesn’t seem to be either. Maybe it’s just random. I don’t know.)

I’ve done the same for translations of non-English titles. It seems to me that there’s little consistency about whether Sight & Sound used original titles or English translations, so I just copied their list. Depending on your awareness of world cinema and alternate titles, that may mean there are some titles you don’t recognise even though you do know the film, actually. I think that, thanks mainly to the Criterion Collection, it’s English-language titles that are commonly used online by English-speakers nowadays; but, ironically, one of the rare instances that Criterion use the original-language title is for a film here listed by its English-language alternative. Fun times.

Where a title is a link, it’s to my review. You can find Sight & Sound’s own write-up of the poll results here (courtesy of the Internet Archive, because as of 1st December 2022 the original page has been replaced with the new list).

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11) Battleship Potemkin (1925)
12) L’Atalante (1934)
13) Breathless (1960)
14) Apocalypse Now (1979)
15) Late Spring (1949)
16) Au hasard Balthazar (1966)
17=) Seven Samurai (1954)
17=) Persona (1966)
19) Mirror (1974)
20) Singin’ in the Rain (1951)
21=) L’avventura (1960)
21=) Le Mépris (1963)
21=) The Godfather (1972)
24=) Ordet (1955)
24=) In the Mood for Love (2000)
26=) Rashomon (1950)
26=) Andrei Rublev (1966)
28) Mulholland Dr. (2001)
29=) Stalker (1979)
29=) Shoah (1985)
31=) The Godfather Part II (1974)
31=) Taxi Driver (1976)
33) Bicycle Thieves (1948)
34) The General (1926)
35=) Metropolis (1927)
35=) Psycho (1960)
35=) Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
35=) Sátántangó (1994)
39=) The 400 Blows (1959)
39=) La dolce vita (1960)
41) Journey to Italy (1954)
42=) Pather Panchali (1955)
42=) Some Like It Hot (1959)
42=) Gertrud (1964)
42=) Pierrot le fou (1965)
42=) Play Time (1967)
42=) Close-Up (1990)
48=) The Battle of Algiers (1966)
48=) Histoire(s) du cinéma (1998)
50=) City Lights (1931)
50=) Ugetsu monogatari (1953)
50=) La Jetée (1962)
53=) North by Northwest (1959)
53=) Rear Window (1954)
53=) Raging Bull (1980)
56) M (1931)
57=) The Leopard (1963)
57=) Touch of Evil (1958)
59=) Sherlock Jr. (1924)
59=) Barry Lyndon (1975)
59=) La Maman et la putain (1973)
59=) Sansho Dayu (1954)
63=) Wild Strawberries (1957)
63=) Modern Times (1936)
63=) Sunset Blvd. (1950)
63=) The Night of the Hunter (1955)
63=) Pickpocket (1959)
63=) Rio Bravo (1958)
69=) Blade Runner (1982)
69=) Blue Velvet (1986)
69=) Sans Soleil (1982)
69=) A Man Escaped (1956)
73=) The Third Man (1949)
73=) L’eclisse (1962)
73=) Les enfants du paradis (1945)
73=) La grande illusion (1937)
73=) Nashville (1975)
78=) Chinatown (1974)
78=) Beau Travail (1998)
78=) Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
81=) The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
81=) Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
81=) The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
84=) Fanny and Alexander (1984)
84=) Casablanca (1942)
84=) The Colour of Pomegranates (1968)
84=) Greed (1925)
84=) A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
84=) The Wild Bunch (1969)
90=) Partie de campagne (1936)
90=) Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)
90=) A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
93=) The Seventh Seal (1957)
93=) Un chien andalou (1928)
93=) Intolerance (1916)
93=) A One and a Two (1999)
93=) The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
93=) Touki Bouki (1973)
93=) Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
93=) Imitation of Life (1959)
93=) Madame de… (1953)

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