There's a new Sight & Sound "Best Movies Of All Time" poll to piss all your film nerd friends off
A new decade, a new critical poll of the 100 greatest films of all time

For 70 years running, the British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound magazine has brought numerous voices in the film world together, once every 10 years, in a noble effort: To make every single movie nerd on the planet very angry by issuing a poll—tabulated from nearly a thousand critics and directors—supposedly listing the 100 greatest films of all time. Originating back in 1952, and arriving on every year ending in 2 since, the Sight & Sound Poll, while certainly not as definitive as its name might suggest, is an ever-fascinating document of where the critical consensus currently rests on the state of movie-making as a whole. And the 2022 poll, released today, is no exception.
Let’s start with the big upset: Chantal Akerman’s 1975 Belgian slice-of-life drama, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—which made big moves up to No. 35 on the 2012 list, after spending the preceding two decades sitting in the mid-70s—has just scored the top spot as Sight & Sound’s official current best film of all time. Praised as a landmark work in feminist moviemaking, Akerman’s film (which focuses on three days in the life of the titular single mother, played by Delphine Seyrig) beat out both Vertigo and Citizen Kane, which have been duking it out for the top slot on the list for 60 years now. Those two films instead arrived at No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, fronting a Top 10 that went on to include, in order, 1953's Tokyo Story, 2000's In The Mood For Love, 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1998's Beau Travail, 2001's Mulholland Dr., 1929's Man With A Movie Camera, and 1951's Singin’ In The Rain. (That’s a big jump for Mulholland, too, which didn’t place at all in 2002, and which came in at No. 28 in 2012.)