Sight & Sound Poll 2012

[MatViola]

Below is the Top 100 list, taken from the magazine's print version. Once Upon a Time in the West makes the cut.

The complete top 100 (critics’ poll):
1. Vertigo
Alfred Hitchcock, 1958 (191 votes)
2. Citizen Kane
Orson Welles, 1941 (157 votes)
3. Tokyo Story
Ozu Yasujiro, 1953 (107 votes)
4. La Règle du jeu
Jean Renoir, 1939 (100 votes)
5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
FW Murnau, 1927 (93 votes)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick, 1968 (90 votes)
7. The Searchers
John Ford, 1956 (78 votes)
8. Man with a Movie Camera
Dziga Vertov, 1929 (68 votes)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc
Carl Dreyer, 1927 (65 votes)
10. 8½
Federico Fellini, 1963 (64 votes)
11. Battleship Potemkin
Sergei Eisenstein, 1925 (63 votes)
12. L’Atalante
Jean Vigo, 1934 (58 votes)
13. Breathless
Jean-Luc Godard, 1960 (57 votes)
14. Apocalypse Now
Francis Ford Coppola, 1979 (53 votes)
15. Late Spring
Ozu Yasujiro, 1949 (50 votes)
16. Au hasard Balthazar
Robert Bresson, 1966 (49 votes)
17= Seven Samurai
Kurosawa Akira, 1954 (48 votes)
17= Persona
Ingmar Bergman, 1966 (48 votes)
19. Mirror
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974 (47 votes)
20. Singin’ in the Rain
Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1951 (46 votes)
21= L’avventura
Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960 (43 votes)
21= Le Mépris
Jean-Luc Godard, 1963 (43 votes)
21= The Godfather
Francis Ford Coppola, 1972 (43 votes)
24= Ordet
Carl Dreyer, 1955 (42 votes)
24= In the Mood for Love
Wong Kar-Wai, 2000 (42 votes)
26= Rashomon
Kurosawa Akira, 1950 (41 votes)
26= Andrei Rublev
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966 (41 votes)
28. Mulholland Dr.
David Lynch, 2001 (40 votes)
29= Stalker
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979 (39 votes)
29= Shoah
Claude Lanzmann, 1985 (39 votes)
31= The Godfather Part II
Francis Ford Coppola, 1974 (38 votes)
31= Taxi Driver
Martin Scorsese, 1976 (38 votes)
33. Bicycle Thieves
Vittoria De Sica, 1948 (37 votes)
34. The General
Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1926 (35 votes)
35= Metropolis
Fritz Lang, 1927 (34 votes)
35= Psycho
Alfred Hitchcock, 1960 (34 votes)
35= Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles
Chantal Akerman, 1975 (34 votes)
35= Sátántangó
Béla Tarr, 1994 (34 votes)
39= The 400 Blows
François Truffaut, 1959 (33 votes)
39= La dolce vita
Federico Fellini, 1960 (33 votes)
41. Journey to Italy
Roberto Rossellini, 1954 (32 votes)
42= Pather Panchali
Satyajit Ray, 1955 (31 votes)
42= Some Like It Hot
Billy Wilder, 1959 (31 votes)
42= Gertrud
Carl Dreyer, 1964 (31 votes)
42= Pierrot le fou
Jean-Luc Godard, 1965 (31 votes)
42= Play Time
Jacques Tati, 1967 (31 votes)
42= Close-Up
Abbas Kiarostami, 1990 (31 votes)
48= The Battle of Algiers
Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966 (30 votes)
48= Histoire(s) du cinéma
Jean-Luc Godard, 1998 (30 votes)
50= City Lights
Charlie Chaplin, 1931 (29 votes)
50= Ugetsu monogatari
Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953 (29 votes)
50= La Jetée
Chris Marker, 1962 (29 votes)
53 – Rear Window, North By Northwest, Raging Bull – 28 votes
56 – M, Touch of Evil, The Leopard – 26 votes
59 – Sherlock Jr, Sansho Dayu, La Maman et la Putain, Barry Lyndon 25 votes
63 – Modern Times, Sunset Blvd, The Night of the Hunter, Wild Strawberries, Rio Bravo, Pickpocket – 24 votes
69 – A Man Escaped, Blade Runner, Sans Soleil, Blue Velvet – 23 votes
73 – La Grande Illusion, Les Enfants du Paradis, The Third Man, L’eclisse, Nashville – 22 votes
78 – Once Upon a Time in the West, Chinatown, Beau Travail – 21 votes
81 – Magnificent Ambersons, Lawrence of Arabia, Spirit of the Beehive – 20 votes
84 – Greed, Casablanca, Colour of Pomegrantes, The Wild Bunch, Fanny & Alexander, A Brighter Summer Day – 19 votes
90 – Partie de campagne, A Matter of Life and Death, Aguirre, Wrath of God – 18 votes
93 – Intolerance, Un chien andalou, Colonel Blimp, Madame de…, Seventh Seal, Imitation of Life, Touki-Bouki, A One and a Two. – 17 votes

[Groggy]

What a cruddy list.

[drinkanddestroy]

Considering their criteria, it's kind of hard to argue with anything on the list. Each critic votes for his/her top ten movies without any ranking, and then list is made based on how many times a movie appears on each critic's list. So the list is really a ranking of how many voters believe the particular movie is a top ten movie. There are many movies that I believe are certainly among the 100 greatest of all-time. But as long as it is reasonable for one voter not to believe that a movie is one of the ten best of all-time, then it's reasonable for every voter to have felt the same way, and therefore it's reasonable for that movie to not appear on this list.

Take GBU, for example. I believe it's one of the 2 or 3 greatest movies ever. But can you say that a critic is crazy if he/she believes it's, say, the 11th best movie ever? It's hard to say, about any particular movie, that a critic is crazy for believing it is the 11th best movie ever.  Therefore, even if the great majority of critics would have said that GBU is one of the 100 greatest movies ever (or even one of 15 greatest movies ever), the fact is that it won't make the list as long as very few of them believe it's not in the top 10.

You can argue over whether or not this is a good format for ranking the "100 greatest movies of all-time." But once they did use that format, IMO it's very hard to really argue against any movie being excluded from the list.

So lists are just that -- meaningless shit, which we'll still read and get pissed off about 

[MatViola]

Yep. To look at it another way: Vertigo received 191 votes out of the 846 critics polled. This means that 77.5% of those polled didn't even put in their Top Ten, let alone at the number 1 position. Vertigo received more votes than any other film, yes, but 655 of the participants did not vote for it.

Mat

[drinkanddestroy]

So say, they had used a format that actually gave a different number of points for each ranking. Eg. let's say that had asked each critic to rank their 100 favorite films in order, and gave points based on it's position on each list, so a movie would get 100 points each time it's ranked #1, 99 points for a #2 ranking, and 1 point for a #100 ranking. That would have actually accounted for each critic's opinion of a movie's ranking.  I think it definitely would have looked very different.

Eg. take Casablanca: few critics believe it's a top 10 film, but I am sure that almost every one believes it is far better than where it placed, in the 80's. And, a movie that 50% of critics would rank as being somewhere in the 11- 20 range is much worse off than a movie that 10% of critics would put in their top 10 list, but which a large percentage of voters wouldn't even put in the top 50. (I am not certain if there is a movie that fits this sort of description; but there certainly are many movies that are like the example I gave of Casablanca.

On the other hand, the format the use is definitely easier on the voters: as hard as it may be for a voter to come up with a top 10 list, it's even harder to come up with a 1-100 ranking. I mean, can you say that you are certain that Movie X is your 27th best film and Movie Y is your 28th? I'd find that impossible. So using the rules they did, of just naming an unranked top 10 list, definitely makes the critics' job easier.

Again, I'm not necessarily saying I agree or disagree with their format; I'm just saying it has to be understood at for what it is and that's all And I believe that based on the format they used, this list can certainly NOT be called "the 100 greatest movies of all-time." Sure, that name sounds much sexier than "The 100 films that get the most votes as a top-10 movie," but the latter would be much more accurate.

[stanton]

Whatever you call it, it is what film critics and film directors think what the best films ever are.

And for that this list is more interesting than any other of these types of lists. And of course it not an objective list, but as any other list a subjective list. But it is less arbitrary than all the other of those lists. Unless only idiots had voted.

I have fun with it.

[Novecento]

My wife just rented Vertigo so we can give it a good reappraisal 

Well I feel the same way as a did last time I watched it - it's a decent flick.

[Groggy]

I'd say mediocre.

[drinkanddestroy]

Maybe you can't appreciate it's full beauty till you shot-by-shot analysis 

[Groggy]

I think the Jenkins line is that I need to memorize the score.

[drinkanddestroy]

I think the Jenkins line is that I need to memorize the score.

I was giving you the Ebert line http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2012/08/a_few_calm_words_about_the_lis.html

[Novecento]

Well it still doesn't do it for me, but here's Scorsese's foreword to a book dedicated to why it is apparently so good:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/1999/mar/05/martinscorsese

[moviesceleton]

Once Upon a Time in America is on the tied 154th place (with a load of other films). http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/film/4ce2b6e31e32e

[moviesceleton]

And The Good, the Bad and the Ugly lands 283rd: http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/film/4ce2b6a6b65d6

[drinkanddestroy]

This guy made a list of the greatest movies that got zero (or very few) votes http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2012/08/the_great_movies_nobody_voted.html

The articles responding to the Sight & Sound poll will of course be endless, so that's the last I'll bother with it. After having a long time to think about it, I've decided that I very strongly disagree with Sight & Sound's method, and that while it may be the most respected/prestigious/discussed greatest movies poll, IMO it's the most meaningless of all. I think their method is terrible, but it is what it is and that's that. We'll go through all this again in 2022