The highest-ranked films by women directors in the Sight and Sound poll

The Sight and Sound poll is the closest thing film has to an official canon. The British Film Institute magazine has run it once a decade since 1952, asking critics, programmers, and academics to name the greatest films ever made. For 50 years the answer barely moved. Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane" held first place from 1962 through 2002, and Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" took over in 2012. Films directed by women rarely appeared anywhere near the top.

December 2022 broke the pattern. The critics' poll drew more than 1,600 voters, a larger and more international group than any earlier edition. Chantal Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" arrived at number one. No film by a woman had ever topped the poll before, and no title made after the 1950s had either. Claire Denis's "Beau travail" placed seventh, the only other entry by a woman in the top 10.

The result prompted a long argument over whether the canon was being corrected or rewritten. What the expanded ballot brought into view is easier to describe. Films that had circulated for decades in repertory programming, film school syllabi, and academic writing — without the distribution or studio backing that builds a mainstream reputation — climbed sharply once a younger and less homogeneous electorate voted.

This list covers the highest-ranked films by women directors in that poll and explains what each one does. The range is wide. A 1943 American avant-garde short made for a few hundred dollars sits alongside a French New Wave portrait structured in real time. Others include a Gullah family drama set on the South Carolina Sea Islands in 1902, a Palme d'Or winner shot in colonial New Zealand, and a 2019 period romance that placed within three years of its release. Akerman, Denis, Agnès Varda, Julie Dash, Jane Campion, Barbara Loden, Céline Sciamma, and Maya Deren worked across different countries, decades, and budgets. Their films together show how far back the record of major work by women directors runs.

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Chantal Akerman's 1975 film took the top position in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll, the first film by a woman director to lead the ranking in the survey's history. It also broke a run in which the number one spot had gone to work from the 1940s and 1950s.

The film follows three days in the life of a widowed Belgian housewife, played by Delphine Seyrig, inside her Brussels apartment. She peels potatoes, makes coffee, washes dishes, sets the table for her teenage son, and receives a male client each afternoon for money. Akerman shoots most of it in static long takes, the camera low and fixed, the action unfolding at close to real time.

At more than three hours, the film asks viewers to learn the rhythm of the routine until small deviations register as events. A dropped utensil, an overcooked dish, a button left undone — these carry the dramatic weight that plot usually carries elsewhere. The tension accumulates through repetition, then breaks.

Akerman was 25 when she made it, working with cinematographer Babette Mangolte, and she drew in part on her observations of her mother's domestic life. Early reception outside a narrow circle was mixed, and the film circulated for years through repertory screenings, film schools, and feminist criticism that treated housework and female interiority as legitimate cinematic material rather than background.

That position moved into the mainstream of critical opinion over the following decades. "Jeanne Dielman" had already reached the top 40 of the 2012 Sight and Sound list, so its arrival at number one a decade later confirmed a trajectory rather than starting one.

Akerman died in 2015 at age 65 and did not live to see the result. Museum retrospectives had already begun reintroducing her work, and the poll gave that renewed attention a formal marker.

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Claire Denis's 1999 film "Beau travail" finished seventh in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll, the only other woman-directed title inside the top 10 alongside the film at number one. It follows a French Foreign Legion unit posted in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa.

The script reworks Herman Melville's novella "Billy Budd." Denis Lavant plays Galoup, a career sergeant who drills his men with rigid devotion and whose resentment of a well-liked recruit, Sentain, played by Grégoire Colin, hardens into obsession. Michel Subor plays the commanding officer. Galoup's campaign against the younger man ends with Sentain left in the desert carrying a broken compass. Galoup narrates from Marseille after the fact, writing in a notebook, so the chronology arrives in fragments rather than a straight line.

Agnès Godard shot the film, and much of its standing rests on her images of the legionnaires at work: ironing uniforms, crawling under wire, swimming, and running training exercises choreographed by Bernardo Montet into something closer to dance than to military routine. Dialogue is sparse. Benjamin Britten's opera "Billy Budd" runs through the score, tying the film to its source while the soldiers' bodies carry the narrative.

Denis spent part of her childhood in French colonial Africa, where her father worked in the civil administration, and her films return often to Europeans living at the edges of territory France once governed. The Djibouti posting is a place where the Legion's rituals have outlived their purpose, with the men performing discipline in a landscape that has no use for them.

The closing sequence draws the most attention. Galoup, alone in an empty nightclub, dances to Corona's "The Rhythm of the Night," moving from stillness into a burst of physical release that recasts everything he has held down.

The film had placed in an earlier edition of the Sight and Sound survey, but its climb into the top 10 in 2022 marked a sharp rise, and it is the Denis title the poll's voters ranked highest.

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Agnès Varda's "Cléo from 5 to 7" is one of the highest-placing woman-directed titles in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll, and the earlier of her two films on it. Released in 1962, it follows a Paris pop singer across one afternoon as she waits for the results of a medical test.

Corinne Marchand plays Cléo, a performer whose livelihood depends on being looked at. Over the course of the afternoon she stops arranging herself for other people and starts watching the city around her.

The story runs close to real time, from 5 p.m. to roughly 6:30 — shorter than the two hours the title implies — and Varda divides it into chapters marked by on-screen time stamps. The opening tarot reading is in color. Everything after it is black and white.

Cléo moves through a hat shop, a taxi, her apartment, a rehearsal with her pianist and songwriter, and finally the Parc Montsouris, where she meets a soldier on leave from the Algerian War. Michel Legrand wrote the score and plays the pianist on screen. A silent comedy short screened inside the film casts Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.

Varda came to filmmaking from still photography and directed her first feature, "La Pointe Courte," in 1955, several years before the French New Wave broke commercially. She is usually grouped with the Left Bank filmmakers, alongside Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, rather than with the Cahiers du Cinéma critics who turned to directing.

Her reputation widened in the last two decades of her life. "The Gleaners and I" in 2000 and "Faces Places" in 2017, the latter co-directed with the artist JR, brought her to viewers who had never seen her early fiction work. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave her an honorary Oscar in 2017. Varda died in 2019 at 90, with "Cléo from 5 to 7" established as one of the best known of her narrative features.

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Céline Sciamma's 2019 film is the most recent title on this list, and the only one that placed in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll within three years of its theatrical release. Every other entry had decades of circulation behind it.

Set on the Brittany coast in the late 18th century, the film follows Marianne, a painter played by Noémie Merlant, hired to make a wedding portrait of a young woman who must not know she is being observed. Héloïse, played by Adèle Haenel, has already seen off one painter by refusing to sit, and she is being sent into an arranged marriage in Milan. Marianne arrives posing as a hired walking companion, studies the face during the day and paints from memory at night.

Once the deception collapses, the two begin the portrait again in the open, with Héloïse questioning the painter's choices instead of submitting to them. Sciamma builds the relationship out of looking — who watches, who allows it, who looks back — rather than out of dialogue about feelings or plot machinery.

Claire Mathon's cinematography uses daylight, candles and firelight, giving the images a palette closer to 18th-century portraiture than to standard period-drama lighting. The film has no orchestral score. The few pieces of music in it are performed by characters on screen, which makes silence the default texture and gives the bursts of sound unusual force.

Sciamma wrote the screenplay herself and won the best screenplay award at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, where the film also received the Queer Palm. Her earlier features "Water Lilies," "Tomboy" and "Girlhood" center on girls and young women whose interior lives drive the story, with men kept at the margins of the frame. She also wrote the screenplay for the stop-motion feature "My Life as a Courgette." "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" moved that method into a period setting, and its standing rests on the three years between its Cannes premiere and the poll rather than on a later revival.

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Julie Dash's 1991 feature "Daughters of the Dust" was the first film directed by an African American woman to receive general theatrical distribution in the U.S. Critics voting in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll placed it among the highest-ranked woman-directed titles.

The story unfolds over a single day in 1902 on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. The Peazant family gathers there before part of the clan leaves for the mainland North. The Peazants are Gullah, descendants of enslaved West Africans whose isolation on the islands preserved language, foodways, and ritual practice that mainland communities lost.

Dash builds the film around that inheritance rather than around conflict and resolution. The day moves through cooking, argument, prayer, and family photographs.

Much of the dialogue is spoken in Gullah, and Dash spent years researching the community's history and speech before shooting. Narration comes from the Unborn Child, a voice speaking from outside ordinary chronology. That device lets the film hold past, present, and future in the same frame.

Arthur Jafa shot the film and won the cinematography award in the dramatic competition at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. The images borrow from 19th-century portrait photography — white dresses against pale sand, figures held in drifting motion. Slow motion stretches small gestures well past ordinary speed.

Distribution was narrow, and the film slipped out of circulation for years. Its audience widened in 2016, when Beyoncé's visual album "Lemonade" drew openly on its imagery and sent younger viewers looking for the source. A 4K restoration reached theaters the same year, for the 25th anniversary. The Library of Congress had already added the film to the National Film Registry in 2004.

Dash went decades without another theatrical feature, working largely in television, including the 2002 TV film "The Rosa Parks Story" with Angela Bassett.

Jane Campion's "The Piano," released in 1993, ranks among the highest-placing woman-directed features in the Sight and Sound critics' poll, and the year it came out Campion became the first woman to win the Palme d'Or, sharing the 1993 prize at Cannes with Chen Kaige's "Farewell My Concubine."

Holly Hunter plays Ada McGrath, a Scottish woman who stopped speaking in childhood and is sent to colonial New Zealand for an arranged marriage to a settler she has never met. She lands on a beach with her daughter Flora, her luggage, and a piano. Her husband, Alisdair Stewart, refuses to haul the instrument inland. A neighbor, George Baines, offers to return it to her one key at a time in exchange for lessons that turn into a bargain of another sort. Sam Neill and Harvey Keitel play the two men.

Campion wrote the screenplay and won the Academy Award for best original screenplay. Hunter, a trained pianist, performed Ada's music on camera rather than miming to another player's hands, and the part won her the Oscar for best actress. Anna Paquin, cast as Flora at age 11, took best supporting actress, making her one of the youngest winners in Academy history. Michael Nyman's score, built from the pieces Ada plays, sold widely as an album apart from the film.

Ada's inner life reaches the audience almost entirely without speech — through the piano, through signed exchanges that Flora translates aloud, and through a short voiceover at the opening and the close. The structure puts a woman's desire and her refusals at the center of a settler-romance plot usually driven by the men trading over her.

Campion was born in Wellington and trained as a filmmaker in Australia, and she shot "The Piano" on the black-sand beaches west of Auckland. Its success abroad drew wider attention to New Zealand's film industry, and its 2022 poll placement rests on 30 years of steady critical standing rather than a late revival.

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Barbara Loden wrote, directed, and starred in "Wanda," released in 1970 and the only feature she ever directed. It ranked among the woman-directed films voted into the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll, attention the film almost entirely missed on release.

Loden plays Wanda Goronski, a woman in the eastern Pennsylvania coal country who gives up custody of her children at a divorce hearing and drifts away. She sleeps in cars and movie theaters, loses a job at a sewing factory, and falls in with a petty thief she meets as he robs a bar after closing. He bullies her, buys her clothes, and pulls her into a bank robbery she is in no way equipped to carry out.

Shot on 16mm with a small crew, the film's grainy handheld texture sits closer to documentary than to the American crime pictures of the same years. Loden skips the beats those films run on. Wanda stays passive as the plot escalates around her, and the script gives her no backstory, no redemption, and no exit.

Loden worked mostly as a stage and screen actress before this, winning a Tony Award in 1964 for her role in Arthur Miller's "After the Fall," and she was married to the director Elia Kazan. She built the script over several years from a newspaper account of a woman who thanked a judge for sentencing her. Loden died of cancer in 1980 at age 48, without finishing another feature.

"Wanda" won a prize at the 1970 Venice Film Festival, then went largely unseen in the U.S. and fell out of circulation. Restorations and festival retrospectives returned it to screens, and the French writer Nathalie Léger shaped her 2012 book "Suite for Barbara Loden" around it. Kelly Reichardt is among the directors who have cited it behind their own films about drifting, unexplained characters. The poll result came 42 years after Loden's death.

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Chantal Akerman's "News from Home" is the second of her films among the highest-placing woman-directed titles in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll. Released in 1977, it works nothing like the three-hour domestic study that carried her to the top of that ranking. It is a feature-length portrait of New York City in which nothing is dramatized.

The structure is strict. Akerman and cinematographer Babette Mangolte filmed streets, storefronts, subway platforms, and traffic in mid-1970s Manhattan, mostly in long fixed takes, sometimes from a moving car or train. Over those images, Akerman reads aloud, in French, letters her mother sent her from Belgium while she was living in New York.

The letters themselves are ordinary. Natalia Akerman passes along family news, worries about money, asks why her daughter writes so seldom, and presses her to come back. The reading is flat rather than tender, and the city's noise frequently rises over the voice, burying whole lines under a passing train.

The gap between the two tracks is the film's real subject. The images show a place indifferent to the person holding the camera, while the soundtrack carries a voice that keeps asking for her return. The closing shot is taken from the Staten Island Ferry, holding on Lower Manhattan as the skyline pulls away into haze.

Set beside her 1975 feature, the film applies the same method to different material: duration as the main instrument, with feeling accumulating through what the camera declines to cut away from.

Akerman died in 2015, and her features and installation work have been widely reprogrammed since, including at New York's Museum of Modern Art. She and Agnès Varda are the only directors with two titles among the highest-ranked woman-directed films in the 2022 poll, a sign that voters were responding to a body of work rather than one famous title.

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Agnès Varda's "Vagabond," released in France in 1985 as "Sans toit ni loi," was among the higher-placing woman-directed films in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll, and it gave Varda a second title on the list. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival that year, the highest competitive festival prize of her career.

It opens with a body. A young woman is found frozen in a ditch in the vineyards of southern France, and the authorities record the death as natural and close the file. Varda then works backward through the final weeks of the woman's life, assembling an account from the people who crossed her path — a farmhand, an agronomist studying diseased plane trees, a garage owner and a woman who gave her a ride. Several speak directly to the camera, as if answering questions in a documentary that does not exist.

Sandrine Bonnaire plays Mona, a drifter who sleeps in a tent, takes work when she wants it and walks away when she does not, and turns down nearly every offer of help that arrives with conditions attached. Bonnaire was still a teenager during the shoot and won the César for best actress, the French equivalent of an Academy Award.

Varda built the picture around a formal device: lateral tracking shots that slide along roadsides, fields and walls, catching Mona partway through the movement and leaving her behind before the shot ends. The camera watches her without claiming to understand her.

The script withholds explanation. Mona gets no backstory, no trauma offered as a cause and no arc toward rescue or ruin. The people who met her supply their own readings — freedom, squalor, menace, envy — and the film declines to rule on any of them. By the end, the witnesses have described themselves more precisely than they have described her.