Sight & Sound’s The 100 Greatest Films of All Time (2022 edition)

Posted on December 2, 2022 by badblokebob

Well, well, well — the latest iteration of Sight & Sound’s decennial poll is here, and if you thought the last one upset the applecart by displacing Citizen Kane at #1 for the first time in 50 years, this edition has flipped the cart over, set it on fire, pushed it off a cliff, and dropped a nuke on it for good measure.

Okay, maybe that’s a slightly exaggeration — the previous top two are still both in the top three — but the new #1 is a bit out of leftfield. Sure, it’s a film that’s fairly well known in cinephile circles (though I’ve seen multiple people on Film Twitter confess to never having heard of it), but to normies it probably sounds like something that’s been made up as a spoof of The Kind Of Film That Tops These Lists: it’s a 3-and-a-half-hour Belgian film about a woman doing household chores.

While I imagine regular folk are getting mad about that in comments sections across the internet (it’s also directed by a woman, which will undoubtedly have set off a certain kind of comment section dweller), Film Twitter seems to have largely taken the news in its stride, instead choosing to get worked up about the inclusion of very recent films, like Portrait of a Lady on Fire at #30, Moonlight at #60, Parasite at #90, and Get Out at #95. Can any film so new be already deserving of a place on a list of the greatest films ever made? Some people think not, reckoning a movie needs a good length of time to settle in to a place in ‘the canon’. Others say why wait? A great movie is a great movie.

Personally, I tend towards the latter; especially in a poll like this, which is the results of thousands of individual top tens, not of a group of people sitting down together to hash out every inclusion and their relative merits. I mean, if you saw Get Out on its release five years ago, but only watched Citizen Kane for the first time last week, which do you have a longer-considered personal opinion on? Sure, you know the latter is a long-assessed Great Movie, but how much should that matter in your personal assessment? Such external knowledge isn’t necessarily a negative when processing your own reaction to a movie, but if we were only ever allowed to consider certified classics as classics, nothing would ever change. If enough individuals consider Portrait of a Lady on Fire to be in their personal top ten movies that, when all the votes are added up, it places 30th overall, why is there anything wrong with that?

On a personal note, despite a raft of changes throughout the 100 (a good many previously-well-established films have plummeted out of the list, replaced by brand-new entries), the number I myself have seen goes from 72 to… 73.

The issue of Sight & Sound with their full write-up of the poll is out next week, and can be preordered here (with four covers to choose from). The full list, and at least some of the related writing, can be found online here — and summarised below, of course. As with last time, I’ve copied Sight & Sound’s ordering for ties (still don’t know their methodology), I’ve used the same titles as them for non-English films (some have changed since the last poll), and any links are to my own reviews (either here or on Letterboxd).

1 Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

(1975)

2 Vertigo

(1958)

3 Citizen Kane

(1941)

4 Tokyo Story

(1953)

5 In the Mood for Love

(2000)

6 2001: A Space Odyssey

(1968)

7 Beau travail

(1998)

8 Mulholland Dr.

(2001)

9 Man with a Movie Camera

(1929)

10 Singin’ in the Rain

(1951)

11) Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
12) The Godfather (1972)
13) La Règle du jeu (1939)
14) Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)
15) The Searchers (1956)
16) Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
17) Close-Up (1989)
18) Persona (1966)
19) Apocalypse Now (1979)
20) Seven Samurai (1954)
21=) The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927)
21=) Late Spring (1949)
23) Playtime (1967)
24) Do the Right Thing (1989)
25=) Au hasard Balthazar (1966)
25=) The Night of the Hunter (1955)
27) Shoah (1985)
28) Daisies (1966)
29) Taxi Driver (1976)
30) Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
31=) 8½ (1963)
31=) Mirror (1974)
31=) Psycho (1960)
34) L’Atalante (1934)
35) Pather Panchali (1955)
36=) City Lights (1931)
36=) M (1931)
38=) À bout de souffle (1960)
38=) Some Like It Hot (1959)
38=) Rear Window (1954)
41=) Bicycle Thieves (1948)
41=) Rashomon (1950)
43=) Stalker (1979)
43=) Killer of Sheep (1977)
45=) Barry Lyndon (1975)
45=) The Battle of Algiers (1966)
45=) North by Northwest (1959)
48=) Ordet (1955)
48=) Wanda (1970)
50=) The 400 Blows (1959)
50=) The Piano (1992)
52=) Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
52=) News from Home (1976)
54=) Le Mépris (1963)
54=) Blade Runner (1982)
54=) Battleship Potemkin (1925)
54=) The Apartment (1960)
54=) Sherlock Jr. (1924)
59) Sans Soleil (1982)
60=) La dolce vita (1960)
60=) Moonlight (2016)
60=) Daughters of the Dust (1991)
63=) GoodFellas (1990)
63=) The Third Man (1949)
63=) Casablanca (1942)
66) Touki Bouki (1973)
67=) Andrei Rublev (1966)
67=) La Jetée (1962)
67=) The Red Shoes (1948)
67=) The Gleaners and I (2000)
67=) Metropolis (1927)
72=) L’avventura (1960)
72=) Journey to Italy (1954)
72=) My Neighbour Totoro (1988)
75=) Spirited Away (2001)
75=) Imitation of Life (1959)
75=) Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
78=) Sunset Blvd. (1950)
78=) Sátántangó (1994)
78=) A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
78=) Modern Times (1936)
78=) A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
78=) Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)
84=) Blue Velvet (1986)
84=) The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
84=) Pierrot le fou (1965)
84=) Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1998)
88=) The Shining (1980)
88=) Chungking Express (1994)
90=) Parasite (2019)
90=) Yi Yi (1999)
90=) Ugetsu Monogatari (1953)
90=) The Leopard (1963)
90=) Madame de… (1953)
95=) A Man Escaped (1956)
95=) Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
95=) Tropical Malady (2004)
95=) Black Girl (1965)
95=) The General (1926)
95=) Get Out (2017)

Sight & Sound’s The 100 Greatest Films of All Time (2012 edition)

Posted on November 12, 2022 by badblokebob

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…

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.)

Sight & Sound September 2012 issue, featuring the results of their 2012 poll on the cover

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.

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).