The 10 Greatest Films of All Time According to 846 Film Critics
We’ve recently featured the all-time-greatest-film-selections from such celebrated directors as Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Quentin Tarantino. Some of these lists came from the grand poll put on last year by Sight & Sound,
the British Film Institute’s well-respected cinema journal. While
scrutinizing the voting records in the directors’ division yields no
small pleasure for the cinephile, to focus too closely on that would
ignore the big picture. By that, I mean the overall standings in this most painstaking critical effort to determine “the Greatest Films of All Time”:
We ignored Vertigo at our peril, and if we now ignore Citizen Kane because of its new second-chair status, we do that at our peril as well. The 90-minute documentary below, The Complete Citizen Kane, originally aired in 1991 as an episode of the BBC’s Arena. It looks at Welles’ masterpiece from every possible angle, even bringing in New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, whose essay “Raising Kane” took a controversial anti-auteurist position about this most seemingly auteur-driven of all American films.
- Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
- Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
- Tokyo Story (Yasujirô Ozu, 1953)
- La Règle du jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939)
- Sunrise (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 Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
- 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
We ignored Vertigo at our peril, and if we now ignore Citizen Kane because of its new second-chair status, we do that at our peril as well. The 90-minute documentary below, The Complete Citizen Kane, originally aired in 1991 as an episode of the BBC’s Arena. It looks at Welles’ masterpiece from every possible angle, even bringing in New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, whose essay “Raising Kane” took a controversial anti-auteurist position about this most seemingly auteur-driven of all American films.
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