This month’s Sight and Sound dropped through my letterbox Saturday 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 the final Part 5 of our own sample of your favourite filmmakers’ favourite films…
Paul Schrader (American Gigolo)
Tokyo Story (Ozu)
Pickpocket (Bresson)
Le Regle du jeu (Renoir)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
The Conformist (Bertolucci)
Vertigo (Hitchcock)
The Lady Eve (Sturges)
Wild Bunch (Peckinpah)
Orphee (Cocteau)
In the Mood for Love (Wong)
Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull)
8 1/2 (Fellini)
2001: A Space Odyssey
Ashes and Diamonds (Wajda)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
The Leopard (Visconti)
Paisa (Rossellini)
The Red Shoes (Powell and Pressburger)
The River (Renoir)
Salvatore Giuliano (Rosi)
The Searchers (Ford)
Ugetsu monogatari (Mizoguchi)
Vertigo (Hitchcock)
Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Leone)
Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
The Bad News Bears (Ritchie)
Carrie (De Palma)
Dazed and Confused (Linklater)
The Great Escape (Sturges)
His Girl Friday (Hawks)
Jaws (Spielberg)
Pretty Maids All in a Row (Vadim)
Rolling Thunder (Flynn)
Sorcerer (Friedkin)
Taxi Driver (Scorsese)
Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
An American Werewolf in London (Landis)
Carrie (De Palma)
Dames (Enright and Berkeley)
Don’t Look Now (Roeg)
Duck Soup (McCarey)
Psycho (Hitchcock)
Raising Arizona (Coens)
Taxi Driver (Scorsese)
The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah)
Both Scorsese and Tarantino were allowed 12 choices. Knowing how much they love cinema, Sight and Sound probably had to edit those 12 down from a gazillion.
And that concludes our pick of Sight and Sound’s once-a-decade Director’s Poll. In truth, it was all a build up to our Flickering Myth’s Top 10 Greatest Film’s of all Time that will be unveiled tomorrow; our own poll of all writers and contributors to the site. Will Vertigo top ours? Or will it be Jim Carrey’s The Mask?
Tune in Saturday to find out…
Originally published August 7, 2012. Updated April 10, 2018.
