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 2 of our own sample of your favourite filmmakers’ favourite films…
Terence Davies (The Deep Blue Sea, Of Time and the City)
Singin’ in the Rain (Donen and Kelly)
The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles)
The Night of the Hunter (Laughton)
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophuls)
The Searchers (Ford)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (Hamer)
Victim (Dearden)
Great Expectations (Lean)
Young at Heart (Douglas)
The Happiest Days of Your Life (Launder)
Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy)
Frankenstein (Whale)
Freaks (Browning)
Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock)
Greed (von Stroheim)
Modern Times (Chaplin)
La Belle et la Bete (Cocteau)
Goodfellas (Scorsese)
Los olvidados (Bunuel)
Nosferatu (Murnau)
8 1/2 (Fellini)
Andrew Dominik (Chopper, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford)
Raging Bull (Scorsese)
Barry Lyndon (Kubrick)
Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
Sunset Blvd. (Wilder)
The Night of the Hunter (Laughton)
Marnie (Hitchcock)
The Tenant (Polanski)
Mulholland Dr. (Lynch)
Badlands (Malick)
Blue Velvet (Lynch)
Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, United 93)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo)
Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
Z (Costa-Gavras)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
Breathless (Godard)
The War Game (Watkins)
The Gospel According to St Matthew (Pasolini)
Kes (Loach)
Bicycle Thieves (De Sica)
Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)
A lot of love for Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter there. Rightfully so.
See more in Part 3…
Originally published August 4, 2012. Updated November 29, 2022.
