Sight & Sound Top 50
The 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll, the once-a-decade vote that film people take very personally, in exact rank order. Tied films share a number, as the poll does, which is why the top 50 holds 51 films.
51 titles
- Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Chantal Akerman
Delphine Seyrig plays a Brussels widow who cooks, cleans, and sees a client each afternoon, shown largely in real time over three days, until small things start going wrong. Akerman was in her mid-twenties. In 2022 it became the first film by a woman to top the Sight and Sound poll, displacing… - Vertigo (1958), Alfred Hitchcock
A retired San Francisco detective with a fear of heights (James Stewart) is hired to follow a friend's wife (Kim Novak), and she becomes his obsession. It opened to mixed reviews in 1958. In 2012 it ended Citizen Kane's fifty-year run at No. 1 in this poll, then slipped to second in 2022. Bernard… - Citizen Kane (1941), Orson Welles
A newsreel reporter tries to decode the last word of dying newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane by interviewing the people he used up. Welles directed, co-wrote, and starred in his mid-twenties, with Gregg Toland's deep-focus photography. William Randolph Hearst tried to bury it. It topped every… - Tokyo Story (1953), Yasujirō Ozu
An elderly couple travel from the provinces to Tokyo to visit their grown children, who are too busy for them. Only their widowed daughter-in-law (Setsuko Hara) makes time. Ozu keeps his camera low and still and lets the heartbreak sit. The 2012 directors' poll named it the greatest film ever… - In the Mood for Love (2001), Wong Kar-Wai
In 1962 Hong Kong, two neighbors (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung) discover their spouses are having an affair with each other, and slowly, carefully refuse to do the same. Leung won Best Actor at Cannes. It is the highest-ranked film from 2000 onward in the 2022 poll. Nat King Cole sings in Spanish… - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Stanley Kubrick
From apes discovering tools to astronauts discovering that their computer, HAL 9000, has opinions, Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke tell humanity's story with very little dialogue. It won the Oscar for Visual Effects, Kubrick's only personal Oscar. The 2022 directors' poll ranked it No. 1. Open the… - Beau Travail (1999), Claire Denis
A former French Foreign Legion sergeant (Denis Lavant) recalls his jealous obsession with a new recruit at a base in Djibouti, loosely drawn from Melville's Billy Budd. Mostly men training in the sun, shot by Agnès Godard. Its climb into the top ten was the 2022 poll's big story. Stay for Lavant… - Mulholland Drive (2001), David Lynch
An aspiring actress (Naomi Watts) arrives in Los Angeles and finds an amnesiac woman (Laura Harring) in her aunt's apartment, and the mystery folds in on itself. It began as a rejected ABC pilot that Lynch turned into a feature. He shared Best Director at Cannes. The Club Silencio scene explains… - Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Dziga Vertov
A day in the life of Soviet cities, from waking to working to playing, filmed by Vertov's brother Mikhail Kaufman and edited by his wife, Elizaveta Svilova, with the camera itself as a character. No intertitles, no actors, no story. Sight and Sound's 2014 documentary poll ranked it No. 1. It… - Singin' in the Rain (1952), Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly
Hollywood's switch to sound threatens a silent star whose voice could strip paint, so Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, and Debbie Reynolds scheme to dub her. Jean Hagen got an Oscar nomination as Lina Lamont. It is the highest-ranked musical in the poll. O'Connor's 'Make 'Em Laugh' is the most… - Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), F. W. Murnau
A farmer seduced by a woman from the city plots to drown his wife, then spends the rest of the day falling back in love with her. Murnau's first Hollywood film won Unique and Artistic Production at the first Academy Awards, and Janet Gaynor won Best Actress. Silent, and louder than most movies… - The Godfather (1972), Francis Ford Coppola
Vito Corleone's youngest son, Michael, goes from war hero outsider to head of the family business in postwar New York. Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, from Mario Puzo's novel. It won Best Picture, Best Actor for Brando, and Adapted Screenplay, and was briefly the highest-grossing film ever made… - The Rules of the Game (1939), Jean Renoir
Aristocrats and their servants gather at a country château for a weekend hunt, where affairs pile up upstairs and downstairs until someone gets shot. It was booed on release and banned by the French government in 1939, then reconstructed in 1959. Renoir plays the hapless Octave. Every… - Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Agnès Varda
A Paris pop singer waits for the results of a medical test and wanders the city, shown nearly in real time. Varda's second feature, part of the French New Wave, with Jean- Luc Godard in a silent short inside the film. Corinne Marchand starts out vain, gets scared, and becomes something else. Paris… - The Searchers (1956), John Ford
Civil War veteran Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) spends years hunting for his niece, taken in a Comanche raid, and it slowly becomes clear he may mean to kill her. Shot in Monument Valley. It received zero Oscar nominations, then became a touchstone for Scorsese, Spielberg, and Lucas. The final shot… - Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Maya Deren and Alexander Hackenschmied
A woman comes home, falls asleep, and dreams the same afternoon over and over: a key, a knife, a hooded figure with a mirror for a face. Deren and her husband made it in their Los Angeles house on almost no money. Around 14 minutes long, the shortest film on this list. American avant-garde film… - Close-Up (1990), Abbas Kiarostami
A Tehran man, Hossain Sabzian, is arrested for impersonating the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to a well-off family. Kiarostami restages the story with the real people playing themselves and films the actual trial. It ends with the real Makhmalbaf giving Sabzian a ride on his motorbike. Documentary… - Persona (1966), Ingmar Bergman
A famous actress (Liv Ullmann) stops speaking, and her nurse (Bibi Andersson) takes her to a seaside cottage to recover, where the nurse talks and talks and their identities start to merge. It opens with a projector sputtering to life, and midway the film appears to burn. Bergman wrote it while… - Apocalypse Now (1979), Francis Ford Coppola
Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) travels upriver through Vietnam into Cambodia to kill Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a Green Beret who has gone rogue. Loosely based on Heart of Darkness. The Philippines shoot ran wildly over, Sheen had a heart attack, and a typhoon wrecked sets. It shared the Palme… - Seven Samurai (1954), Akira Kurosawa
A farming village hires seven out-of-work samurai to defend it from bandits, led by a calm veteran (Takashi Shimura), with Toshiro Mifune as a wild would-be samurai. More than three hours, ending in a battle fought in mud and rain. Remade as The Magnificent Seven, and the template for every… - The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Carl Theodor Dreyer
The trial and execution of Joan of Arc, compressed into a single day and shot almost entirely in close-up. Renée Falconetti's face is the film. The original negative burned, and a complete print turned up in 1981 in a closet at an Oslo psychiatric hospital. Tied for 21st. Nobody forgets her eyes. - Late Spring (1949), Yasujirô Ozu
A widowed professor (Chishū Ryū) and his devoted daughter (Setsuko Hara) live contentedly together until everyone decides she should marry. The first of Ozu's Noriko films, tied with Joan of Arc at 21. A shot of a vase late in the film lasts a few seconds, and critics have argued about it for… - Playtime (1967), Jacques Tati
Monsieur Hulot wanders a Paris of glass and steel over one day, crossing paths with a group of American tourists. Tati built a whole set city, nicknamed Tativille, shot on 70mm, and the cost ruined him financially. Almost no close-ups, so jokes happen everywhere in the frame at once. Watch it on… - Do the Right Thing (1989), Spike Lee
On the hottest day of the summer in Bed-Stuy, tensions around Sal's Famous Pizzeria build into a riot. Spike Lee wrote, directed, and plays Mookie, with Danny Aiello as Sal and Rosie Perez dancing to Public Enemy's 'Fight the Power.' Some critics warned it would incite violence. It did not. Oscar… - Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Robert Bresson
The life of a donkey, Balthazar, passed from owner to owner in rural France, from beloved pet to beast of burden, alongside a young woman (Anne Wiazemsky) who is also mistreated. Bresson used nonprofessional performers he called models. Godard said it was the world in an hour and a half. You will… - The Night of the Hunter (1955), Charles Laughton
A preacher with LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles (Robert Mitchum) marries a widow to find the money her executed husband hid, and her two kids run for it down the Ohio River. It flopped, and Laughton never directed again. Lillian Gish arrives with a shotgun. A fairy tale drawn in… - Shoah (1985), Claude Lanzmann
A nine-and-a-half-hour documentary about the Holocaust that uses no archival footage, only interviews with survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators, and long shots of the places where the camps stood. Lanzmann spent about eleven years on it, sometimes filming former Nazis with a hidden camera. It… - Daisies (1966), Vera Chytilová
Two young women, both named Marie, decide that since the world is spoiled, they will be spoiled too, and they eat, prank, and wreck their way through Prague. Chytilová throws color filters, collage, and jump cuts at everything. Czechoslovak authorities banned it, partly over the food it wasted… - Taxi Driver (1976), Martin Scorsese
Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), an insomniac Vietnam veteran, drives a cab at night through 1970s New York and decides to clean it up himself. Paul Schrader wrote it, Jodie Foster plays a 12-year-old runaway, and Bernard Herrmann finished the score just before he died. It won the Palme d'Or. You… - Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2020), Céline Sciamma
In 18th-century Brittany, a painter (Noémie Merlant) is hired to secretly paint a reluctant bride (Adèle Haenel) for her wedding portrait, and they fall in love. It won Best Screenplay and the Queer Palm at Cannes. The newest film in the 2022 top 50, by decades in some cases. Page 28. - Mirror (1975), Andrei Tarkovsky
A dying poet remembers his childhood, his mother, the war, and his failed marriage in a loose, non-chronological flow, with Margarita Terekhova playing both his mother and his wife. Tarkovsky's most personal film, with poems by his father, Arseny, read on the soundtrack. Soviet officials gave it a… - Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock
A Phoenix secretary (Janet Leigh) steals $40,000, drives off, and checks into the Bates Motel, run by a polite young man (Anthony Perkins) and his mother. Hitchcock bought up copies of the novel to protect the twist and barred latecomers from theaters. Killing the star at the midpoint was the… - 8½ (1963), Federico Fellini
A famous director (Marcello Mastroianni) with nothing left to say hides at a spa, pursued by producers, his wife, his mistress, and his memories, while an enormous rocket set sits unused. Fellini made a film about his own creative block. It won the Oscar for Foreign Language Film and inspired the… - L'Atalante (1934), Jean Vigo
Newlyweds begin married life on a river barge, with an eccentric first mate (Michel Simon) and his many cats. She wants Paris; he wants her back. Vigo was ill with tuberculosis during the shoot and died at 29, shortly after release, while the distributor recut his film. The underwater scene is… - Pather Panchali (1955), Satyajit Ray
A poor Brahmin family in a Bengal village, seen through young Apu and his older sister Durga. Ray's debut, the first of the Apu Trilogy, was shot over years as money came in, with a score by Ravi Shankar. Cannes gave it a prize for Best Human Document. Durga dancing in the monsoon rain will stay… - City Lights (1931), Charlie Chaplin
The Tramp falls for a blind flower seller who takes him for a millionaire, and he goes to absurd lengths, including a boxing match, to pay for her eye operation. Chaplin made it silent, with his own score, years into the talkie era. Albert Einstein attended the premiere. The final close-up is the… - M (1931), Fritz Lang
A child murderer (Peter Lorre) terrifies Berlin, and both the police and the criminal underworld hunt him, because the police crackdown is bad for business. Lang's first sound film, where a whistled Grieg tune gives the killer away. The underworld's kangaroo court at the end is the scene. Lorre… - Some Like It Hot (1959), Billy Wilder
Two Chicago musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) witness the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and hide in drag in an all-women band headed to Florida, where Marilyn Monroe plays ukulele. Released without a Production Code seal. The American Film Institute named it the funniest American film ever… - Breathless (1960), Jean-Luc Godard
A small-time Paris car thief who models himself on Bogart (Jean-Paul Belmondo) shoots a cop and hides out with an American student selling the Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées (Jean Seberg). Godard's debut, from a story by Truffaut, is cut with jump cuts that became a whole language. The… - Rear Window (1954), Alfred Hitchcock
A photographer laid up with a broken leg (James Stewart) spies on his Greenwich Village neighbors across the courtyard and becomes convinced one of them has murdered his wife. Grace Kelly visits in a series of Edith Head outfits. Hitchcock built the entire apartment complex on a Paramount… - Bicycle Thieves (1948), Vittorio De Sica
In postwar Rome, a poor man finally lands a job putting up posters, which requires a bicycle, which is stolen on his first day. He and his young son search the city. Nonprofessional actors, real streets. It received an honorary Oscar and topped the first Sight and Sound poll in 1952. Neorealism's… - Rashomon (1950), Akira Kurosawa
A samurai is killed in a forest and his wife assaulted, and four witnesses, including the dead man speaking through a medium, give four incompatible accounts. Toshiro Mifune plays the bandit. It won the Golden Lion at Venice and an honorary Oscar, opening Japanese cinema to the West. The Rashomon… - Killer of Sheep (1978), Charles Burnett
Stan, a slaughterhouse worker in Watts, drifts through his week, too tired to sleep, while kids play in rubble around him. Burnett made it as his UCLA thesis on about $10,000. Music rights kept it out of general release for decades, until a 2007 restoration. It was among the first 50 films in the… - Stalker (1979), Andrei Tarkovsky
A guide leads a writer and a professor into the Zone, a forbidden area where a room is said to grant your deepest wish. Loosely adapted from the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic. Tarkovsky had to reshoot much of it after the first footage was ruined in processing. Long takes, dripping water… - The Battle of Algiers (1966), Gillo Pontecorvo
The Algerian war of independence, centered on the FLN's bombing campaign and the French paratroopers' torture to break it, restaged in the Casbah with mostly nonprofessional actors. It won the Golden Lion and was banned in France for years. The Pentagon screened it in 2003 to study insurgency. It… - North by Northwest (1959), Alfred Hitchcock
A Madison Avenue ad man (Cary Grant) is mistaken for a spy and chased across the country, from the United Nations to a crop duster in an empty field to the faces of Mount Rushmore. Eva Marie Saint on the train, James Mason as the villain. The rough template for Bond. Grant does all of it in one… - Barry Lyndon (1975), Stanley Kubrick
An Irish opportunist (Ryan O'Neal) climbs into 18th-century English aristocracy through war, gambling, and a strategic marriage, then falls. Kubrick shot interiors by candlelight with lenses originally made for NASA. It won four Oscars, including Cinematography. Scenes look like Gainsborough… - Wanda (1970), Barbara Loden
A drifting woman in Pennsylvania coal country (Barbara Loden) walks away from her husband and kids and falls in with a small-time bank robber. Loden wrote, directed, and starred in what would be her only feature. It won a prize at Venice and then nearly vanished. The most honest portrait of a… - Ordet (1955), Carl Theodor Dreyer
On a Danish farm, a patriarch has three sons: one without faith, one who believes he is Jesus Christ, and one in love with the daughter of a rival sect. Dreyer adapted Kaj Munk's play in long, patient takes. It won the Golden Lion. The ending is either a miracle or the best effect ever achieved… - The 400 Blows (1959), François Truffaut
Antoine Doinel, a 12-year-old Paris kid ignored at home and punished at school, skips class, steals, and lands in a reform center. Jean-Pierre Léaud played him at 14 and kept playing Antoine for twenty years. Truffaut won Best Director at Cannes. The final freeze-frame on the beach is the French… - The Piano (1993), Jane Campion
A mute Scottish woman (Holly Hunter) arrives in colonial New Zealand with her daughter (Anna Paquin) and her piano, which her new husband leaves on the beach and a neighbor (Harvey Keitel) buys. Campion became the first woman to win the Palme d'Or, shared that year. Oscars went to Hunter, Paquin…
