Results of the 2012 Sight & Sound magazine "Greatest Films" poll are out today. Apparently this is a really big deal among cinephiles, as the list comes out only once a decade and surveys hundreds of the top film critics and filmmakers worldwide. "Citizen Kane" - a shocking story which dares to postulate that money can't buy you happiness, set in a strange alternate universe where events happen wildly out of sequence and pterodactyls roam the Florida sky - is no longer in the top spot, which it has claimed since 1962.Unbelieveably, "Vertigo", Hitchcock's flawed "masterpiece" - which features a too-old Jimmy Stewart chasing a too-"can't act" Kim Novak around a sanitized San Francisco (everyone seems to be wearing clothes) in a story with attrocious dialogue and plot holes you could drive a cable car through set to an overbearing Wagneresque soundtrack - is now ranked #1.
Here is the entire list:
1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
3. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
4. La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939)
5. Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
7. The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1927)
10. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)
11. Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
12. L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
13. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
14. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
15. Late Spring (Ozu Yasujiro, 1949)
16. Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
17. Seven Samurai (Kurosawa Akira, 1954)
17. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
19. Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974)
19. Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1951)
21. L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
21. Le Mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
21. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
24. Ordet (Carl Dreyer, 1955)
24. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)
26. Rashomon (Kurosawa Akira, 1950)
26. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
28. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
29. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
29. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
31. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
31. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
33. Bicycle Thieves (Vittoria De Sica, 1948)
34. The General (Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1926)
35. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
35. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
35. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
35. Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, 1994)
39. The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
39. La dolce vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
41. Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)
42. Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
42. Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)
42. Gertrud (Carl Dreyer, 1964)
42. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
42. Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967)
42. Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
48. The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
48. Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998)
50. City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)
50. Ugetsu monogatari (Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953)
50. La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
Edits: 08/01/12 08/01/12 08/01/12 08/02/12
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Topic - Citizen Kane dethroned in Sight & Sound poll. - Dalton 15:56:47 08/01/12 (10)
- RE: Citizen Kane dethroned in Sight & Sound poll. - byegolly 15:59:23 08/06/12 (0)
- Way too much Euro-trash in that list - Doug Flynn 15:54:31 08/02/12 (2)
- I agree with you. These lists... - eppis1 02:31:37 08/04/12 (1)
- i just got the Blu Ray of Grand Illusion in the mail today, can't wait to watch it - Doug Flynn 07:35:22 08/04/12 (0)
- Vertigo isn't even one of AH's better films - Mike K 15:39:34 08/02/12 (0)
- Maybe they can get the NCAA to help them out with that ranking stuff. - Enophile 07:55:56 08/02/12 (0)
- I'll bet Hitch would have had a great big guffaw at that... - musetap 21:14:13 08/01/12 (0)
- That's like the... - mkuller 20:55:03 08/01/12 (0)
- Re-Fracking-Diculous - mbnx01 16:24:37 08/01/12 (1)
- Exactly. And "Berlin Alexanderplatz" and "Satantango" are the two best films of the past 20 years. - tinear 00:06:02 08/02/12 (0)