The greatest films ever made, according to Sight and Sound critics

No other list in film carries the weight of the one the British Film Institute's magazine publishes once a decade. The Sight and Sound critics poll asks working critics, festival programmers, curators and academics to name the greatest films ever made. Since 1952, the aggregate result has served as cinema's nearest equivalent to a canon. Box office receipts play no part. Neither do audience scores. The poll measures the considered judgment of people who watch and write about film for a living, captured at one fixed moment and then left alone for 10 years.

The 2022 edition produced the largest reordering in the poll's history. In all, 1,639 voters took part — a far bigger and more geographically varied group than the few hundred who shaped earlier results. Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles climbed from 36th place in 2012 to first. The 1975 film follows a Belgian widow's household routine, much of it shown in real time. It is the first film directed by a woman to lead the poll. Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, which won in 2012, moved to second. Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, first in every edition from 1962 through 2002, settled at third.

The 10 films below are the 2022 top 10 in order, and they cover seven decades of filmmaking. The oldest is a Soviet silent documentary from 1929; the newest arrived in 2001. Between them sit a Japanese domestic drama, a Hollywood musical and a Hong Kong romance. There is also a French film shot at a Foreign Legion outpost in Djibouti, and a science fiction epic made in Britain by an American director. Several met divided or muted responses on release and gained their current standing only through later reappraisal. That delay is part of what the poll records: not just which films critics rank highest, but how long it can take for a reputation to form. The next edition is due in 2032.

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Chantal Akerman's 1975 film tops the 2022 Sight and Sound critics poll, the first work by a woman director to lead the list. It follows three days in the life of a widowed Brussels housewife who keeps a rigid schedule and sees a male client each afternoon.

Delphine Seyrig plays Jeanne, and the part is built almost entirely from household labor. She peels potatoes. She makes coffee. She washes dishes, sets the table for her teenage son, polishes shoes, folds laundry and switches off the lights as she leaves each room. Seyrig was already known for Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Akerman films the tasks at close to their real duration instead of compressing them. The camera stays put for long stretches, framing the apartment in wide shots at a fixed height, with no reaction cutaways.

The running time is roughly three hours and 20 minutes, and that duration carries the structure. Once a viewer has absorbed Jeanne's routine across the first day, small breaks in the pattern register as events — an overcooked pot, a dropped utensil, a button left unfastened. The film withholds conventional dramatic cues, then closes on a final act that reframes everything before it.

Akerman was 25 when she directed it, working with cinematographer Babette Mangolte on a production staffed largely by women. The film screened at Cannes in 1975 and built its standing over the following decades through academic writing, feminist film criticism and repertory programming rather than commercial release.

Its place at the top in 2022 marks a steep climb. The film ranked 36th in the 2012 edition, then moved to first as the voting pool grew past 1,600 participants and drew on a wider international and generational range of critics. Akerman died in 2015, seven years before the result was announced, and did not live to see her film lead the poll.

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Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, the 1958 thriller that topped the previous Sight and Sound critics poll in 2012, finished second in 2022. James Stewart plays Scottie Ferguson, a San Francisco detective forced off the police force by acrophobia. A former college classmate hires him to follow his wife, played by Kim Novak.

The screenplay came from the French novel D'entre les morts, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Hitchcock made one structural change to the book. Rather than hold the deception at the center of the plot for a final reveal, he discloses it to the audience long before Scottie understands it. Suspense about what happened gives way to dread about what the detective will do next. The second half follows a man remaking one woman into the likeness of another he has lost.

The film's signature visual effect is the dolly zoom, achieved by tracking the camera backward while the lens zooms in. The background stretches away while the subject stays the same size. Hitchcock's crew produced the shot cheaply, building a scale model of the mission bell tower stairwell and filming it on its side. Jaws and Goodfellas later used the same effect. Robert Burks photographed the picture, and Saul Bass designed the spiraling title sequence.

Bernard Herrmann's score circles through unresolved figures that echo the film's pattern of repetition and return. It carries long stretches in which neither lead speaks, including the sequences in which Scottie tails Novak's character through San Francisco.

Vertigo was not a commercial success. Reviews in 1958 were mixed and box office returns modest. Hitchcock withdrew it from circulation in the early 1970s along with four other titles he controlled, and it stayed largely unseen until a 1983 reissue. A restoration followed in 1996. The film first entered the Sight and Sound top 10 in 1982, reached No. 2 in 2002, then led the 2012 list before slipping one place a decade later.

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Orson Welles' 1941 debut feature now sits third in the Sight and Sound critics poll, having finished first in five consecutive editions between 1962 and 2002. The fall reflects a changed electorate rather than a reassessment of the filmmaking, which remains among the most studied work in American cinema.

Welles directed the picture, produced it, co-wrote the screenplay with Herman J. Mankiewicz and played the title role, all before turning 26. RKO Pictures had handed him contract terms rarely offered to a first-time director, including control of the final cut.

The story traces the rise and collapse of newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane. It opens with his death and the word "Rosebud," then follows a reporter who interviews the people who knew him. The accounts arrive out of chronological order, and none of them squares fully with the next. The audience assembles the man from contradictory fragments, and the central mystery never resolves into a satisfying explanation of a human being. That was unusual for a Hollywood studio release of the period.

Cinematographer Gregg Toland shot much of the film in deep focus, holding figures in the immediate foreground and the far background sharp within a single frame. Welles also had sets built with ceilings. Crews dug trenches into the floor so cameras could shoot upward, which gave interiors a low, pressing quality that studio soundstages seldom showed.

Kane's resemblance to publisher William Randolph Hearst drew retaliation before the film reached the public. Hearst's newspapers refused to carry advertising for it, and his organization leaned on theater chains. The release stayed small enough that the picture lost money, and it took a single Academy Award, for original screenplay.

Its reputation was rebuilt across the 1950s and 1960s through French criticism and American revival screenings. The 2022 poll drew a far wider and more international group of voters than earlier rounds, and two films finished above it — Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and Vertigo.

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Yasujiro Ozu's 1953 drama placed fourth in the 2022 critics poll, down one position from the third-place finish it recorded in 2012. The premise is plain: an elderly couple travel from the coastal town of Onomichi to Tokyo to visit their grown children, who have little time to spare for them.

Chishu Ryu plays the father, Shukichi, and Chieko Higashiyama his wife, Tomi. Their eldest son, a doctor, and their daughter, who runs a beauty salon, pass the visitors back and forth between work commitments before sending them off to a spa resort at Atami. The one person who gives them real attention is Noriko, the widow of a son killed in the war, played by Setsuko Hara in the role most closely identified with her.

Ozu's method is as recognizable as his subject. He set the camera low, at about the height of a person kneeling on a tatami mat, and kept it still. Dissolves, pans and tracking shots are almost entirely absent. Scenes are joined by short images of rooftops, laundry lines and passing trains rather than conventional transitions.

The emotional weight comes from what is withheld. A death happens largely offscreen. Resentment surfaces as a change of subject. The screenplay, written by Ozu with his longtime collaborator Kogo Noda, leaves its sharpest observations about generational duty unspoken.

Western audiences came to the film late. Shochiku, Ozu's studio, held his work back from foreign festivals on the view that it was too Japanese to travel. Tokyo Story did not open theatrically in the U.S. until 1972, nearly two decades after it was made and nine years after Ozu died. Its reputation abroad built quickly once prints circulated.

The film's influence runs through directors who favor stillness over incident. Wim Wenders made the 1985 documentary Tokyo-Ga as a search for the Tokyo that Ozu filmed. Hou Hsiao-hsien directed Café Lumière in 2003, a commission marking the centenary of Ozu's birth. In the 2012 Sight and Sound directors' poll, a separate ballot taken alongside the critics' vote, Tokyo Story finished first.

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Wong Kar-wai's 2000 film is the highest-placed 21st-century title in the 2022 poll, and the only entry in the top 10 from Hong Kong. Set in 1962, it follows two neighbors, played by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, who work out that their absent spouses are having an affair with each other.

What follows is a near-affair that never arrives. Leung's journalist and Cheung's secretary rehearse how the betrayal might have started, write a martial arts serial together, and keep testing whether they will become what they resent. Wong films almost none of it head-on. The spouses are heard but barely seen, and several decisive conversations happen in stairwells or are left out altogether.

Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin shot the film in cramped, partially blocked frames, looking through doorways and down narrow hallways, often with a curtain or a wall edge cutting into the shot. The audience is placed in the position of a neighbor catching sight of something not meant to be seen. Cheung wears a long run of fitted cheongsams, each in a different pattern, and the changes mark a passage of time the story never states outright.

Shigeru Umebayashi's waltz "Yumeji's Theme," written for Seijun Suzuki's 1991 film Yumeji, recurs over slow-motion passages of the two characters passing each other on the stairs to a noodle stall. Wong set it against Nat King Cole's Spanish-language recordings, among them "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás," whose refrain restates the hesitation at the center of the film.

The shoot ran roughly 15 months, far beyond its intended schedule, as Wong rewrote and reshot during production — a working method he has used across his career. Leung won best actor at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival for the role. Barry Jenkins has named the film among the influences on his own work.

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Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science fiction film sits sixth in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics poll, the highest-placed entry from the genre. Co-written with novelist Arthur C. Clarke, it runs from a prehistoric encounter with a black monolith to a crewed mission toward Jupiter, where the onboard computer HAL 9000 turns on the astronauts aboard the spacecraft Discovery One.

Dialogue is sparse. The film runs more than 20 minutes before a character speaks, and long stretches carry nothing but breathing, machinery and orchestral music. Kubrick built the picture around what an audience sees rather than what anyone explains on screen.

The effects predate digital compositing. Kubrick's team, which included Douglas Trumbull, used front projection for the prehistoric African sequences and slit-scan photography for the corridor of streaking light in the Star Gate passage near the end. The work brought Kubrick an Academy Award for visual effects, the only Oscar he received in his career.

HAL's level, courteous voice, performed by Canadian actor Douglas Rain, set a template for how movies depict machine intelligence. The computer never raises its tone, including when it refuses an order or when astronaut Dave Bowman dismantles its memory banks. Rain recorded the part after Kubrick discarded an earlier version read by Martin Balsam.

Kubrick commissioned an original score from composer Alex North, then dropped it in favor of the classical recordings he had been cutting the footage against. Johann Strauss II's "The Blue Danube" plays over the docking and shuttle scenes, Richard Strauss' "Also sprach Zarathustra" opens the film, and works by György Ligeti accompany the monolith.

Reviews in 1968 divided sharply, and several prominent critics dismissed the film as slow or impenetrable. Kubrick cut about 19 minutes shortly after the New York premiere. The film became a commercial success regardless, and it has placed sixth in each of the three most recent editions of the poll.

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Beau Travail placed seventh in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics poll, one of two films in the top 10 directed by a woman. Claire Denis released it in 1999, transposing Herman Melville's novella Billy Budd to a French Foreign Legion outpost in Djibouti. The title translates as "good work."

Denis Lavant plays Galoup, a career sergeant who narrates his own ruin of a young recruit he cannot stop watching. The voiceover takes the form of journal entries recalled after Galoup's expulsion from the Legion, and it carries most of the plot.

Dialogue is otherwise sparse. The camera watches bodies at work. Soldiers iron shirts, dig trenches and move through exercises choreographed by Bernardo Montet that sit closer to modern dance than military drill. Jealousy, desire and rank register through posture and proximity rather than confrontation.

Agnès Godard shot the film in widescreen, framing salt flats, volcanic rock and sunburned skin with a tactile quality. The soundtrack draws on Benjamin Britten's operatic setting of Billy Budd, placing trained voices against the quiet of the East African landscape.

Denis knew the region long before production. She grew up in several French colonial territories in Africa, including Djibouti and Cameroon, and her films return to the residue of French colonial rule. Her 1988 debut feature, Chocolat, drew on that childhood. Earlier in her career she worked as an assistant director for Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch.

The closing scene is the film's best-known sequence. Lavant, alone in an empty nightclub, dances to Corona's 1993 Eurodance single "The Rhythm of the Night." He moves from near stillness into something violent and uncontained, then the film cuts to black. The ending settles nothing — whether the dance is release, collapse or fantasy is left open.

Beau Travail climbed sharply between the 2012 and 2022 polls, a shift that tracks with the wider reassessment of Denis' place in contemporary French cinema.

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David Lynch's 2001 film took eighth place in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics poll, and it exists as a feature only because ABC passed on it. Lynch first shot the material as a television pilot for the network, which declined to order a series. French backing from StudioCanal let him film additional scenes and recut the footage for theatrical release.

Naomi Watts plays Betty Elms, an aspiring actress who arrives in Los Angeles and moves into her aunt's apartment. Laura Harring plays a dark-haired woman with amnesia who takes the name Rita after seeing a poster for Gilda. The two set out to recover her identity. About two-thirds of the way through, the film resets. Names, relationships and circumstances rearrange, and the characters turn out to occupy positions other than the ones the first section established.

Lynch never supplied a definitive reading. He put a list of 10 clues on the DVD release instead of an explanation. One common interpretation treats the opening stretch as a dream or a fantasy and the later stretch as the situation underneath it, though nothing in the film confirms that.

Watts handles the turn. She plays Betty as open and eager, then plays Diane Selwyn as bitter and professionally finished. The gap between the two performances is what the structure rests on. An earlier audition scene, in which Betty reworks flat dialogue into something charged, demonstrates that range before the film calls on it.

Lynch shared the best director prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival with Joel Coen, who was recognized for The Man Who Wasn't There. The film's critical standing built over the two decades that followed, through repeat viewings, essays and end-of-decade lists, rather than arriving on release. Its Club Silencio sequence, in which Rebekah Del Rio performs an a cappella Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison's "Crying" and then collapses while the recording keeps playing, is among the passages most often discussed in writing about Lynch's work.

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Dziga Vertov's 1929 Soviet film is the oldest title in the 2022 top 10 and the only documentary among them. It has no actors, no plot and no intertitles. What it offers instead is a composite day in several Soviet cities, built through editing of unusual density for the silent era.

Mikhail Kaufman, Vertov's brother, shot the footage across Moscow, Kyiv and Odesa, recording factory shifts, streetcars, beaches, a marriage registry office, a birth and a funeral. Vertov never pretends these belong to one place or one morning. The city on screen is an invention of the cutting room, assembled from material gathered over an extended production.

His governing idea was the kino-eye, his term for the camera as an instrument that perceives more than the human eye can. Speed, reversal, superimposition and extreme magnification served as tools for seeing rather than ornament. The film runs through split screens, canted angles, freeze frames, slow motion and stop-motion animation, including a passage in which a tripod appears to walk on its own.

What separates it from other city films of the period is its insistence on exposing its own construction. The audience repeatedly sees the editor, Elizaveta Svilova, Vertov's wife, bent over strips of celluloid, cutting and splicing the images that surround her in the finished work. The cameraman turns up inside the frame as well, setting up shots the viewer has already watched or is about to see. Motion halts mid-gesture, then resumes, leaving the mechanism visible.

That method — treating the apparatus as part of the subject — explains why the film has stayed a fixture of documentary and avant-garde study for close to a century. It made little impression in the Soviet Union at the time. Vertov's refusal of conventional narrative drew criticism from contemporaries, and the reputation the film now carries was built later by scholars, archivists and festival programmers.