This month’s Sight and Sound dropped through my letterbox this morning, and in it contained their once-a-decade Top 10 Films of All Time, as voted for by critics and filmmakers. If you’ve been living as a recluse in your own personal Xanadu, Orson Welles, who’s been number one for the past half century, got Citizen Kaned by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (James Stewart).
In the issue, Sight and Sound also included “100 sample entries” representing “edited highlights of the 358 voting entries we recieved for the 2012 Directors’ Poll.” The whole bunch will be available online from 22nd August, but until then, here’s Part 3 of our own sample of your favourite filmmakers’ favourite films…
Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist)
City Girl (Murnau)
City Lights (Chaplin)
To Be or Not to Be (Lubitsch)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
The Apartment (Wilder)
The Shining (Kubrick)
North by Northwest (Hitchcock)
The Third Man (Reed)
Raging Bull (Scorsese)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand)
Mike Leigh (Naked, Secrets and Lies)
American Madness (Capra)
Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky)
I Am Cuba (Kalatozov)
The Emigrants (Troell)
How a Mosquito Operates (McCay)
Jules et Jim (Truffaut)
Radio Days (Allen)
Songs from the Second Floor (Andersson)
Tokyo Story (Ozu)
The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Olmi)
Kevin Macdonald (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland)
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Powell and Pressburger)
The Thin Blue Line (Morris)
Shoah (Lanzmann)
Some Like It Hot (Wilder)
Singin’ in the Rain (Donen and Kelly)
The Ascent (Shepitko)
The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
The Leopard (Visconti)
I vitelloni (Fellini)
Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral)
Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
Avatar (Cameron)
Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick)
Biutiful (Inarritu)
Mr Darling Clementine (Ford)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
Raging Bull (Scorsese)
The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah)
Two of these Top 10s really reflect their choosers’ directorial style: Kevin Macdonald has two documentaries in (Shoah and The Thin Blue Line), the medium in which he started, and Michel Hazanavicius four silent films, showing that the passion behind The Artist was genuine.
But Michael Mann… Avatar… does he own James Cameron money?
It continues in Part 4!
Originally published August 5, 2012. Updated November 6, 2019.
