The British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound Magazine has a decades-old tradition of polling film experts in every field; directors, critics, writers, historians, and other scholars to assemble a list of the greatest films of all time. Census-style, the poll is only conducted once every ten years, cutting out much of the horserace debate and perhaps better reflecting generational shifts in critical mood. The list has always been extremely traditional, and even this year features only two films from the 21st century. In fact, a mere 11 entries represent the last four decades of cinema, with the vast majority of films being released in the 1960s or earlier.

All of this is to say that as far as arbitrarily important, masturbatory list-making goes, this one has about as much credibility as it’s possible to attain, the trade-off being that the list is stuffy as fuck.

So with the 2012 list now assembled and announced, any big news? Absolutely, in that Vertigo has dethroned Citizen Kane after five decades of Welles’ masterpiece firmly sitting at number 1. Hitchcock’s own classic has been on the path to number 1 steadily since it was first included on the list in the 80s (two years after the ‘cock’s death), slowly creeping farther up the list with each passing decade. Now with 191 votes to Kane’s 157, Vertigo holds sway as the film declared as the greatest of all time by the 846 voters.

If you could use some context on the evolving state of Vertigo‘s critical acceptance and rise on the list, check out Eric Snider’s article from a few years ago that does a nice job of setting the stage that empowered its “victory” today.

The magazine has a full 100 list of great films, as well as a Top 10 list chosen purely by 358 film directors, and individual Top 10 film lists from notable directors like Edgar Wright and more. More lists than you could stuff up your own ass and regurgitate back out again!

You can keep up with Sight & Sound’s twitter feed for those releases, while the full Top 50 films are below, followed by the Top 10 as decided by Directors.

Stuffy as the lists may be, these are unquestionably excellent collections of films, and all bullshit ranking aside, you really ought to dust off your disc queue and fill it out with any of these classic you haven’t seen. I’ll certainly be inspired to fill some gaps over the next few weeks, so if there’s anything these feedback loops of artificial import are good for, it’s getting more eyeballs on better movies.

Critics’s Top 50

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, 1939 (68 votes)

9. The Passion of Joan of Arc

Carl Dreyer, 1927 (65 votes)

10.

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)

 

Director’s Top 10

1. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)

=2 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)

=2 Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)

4. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)

5. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1980)

6. Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)

=7 The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)

=7 Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)

9. Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1974)

10. Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)

 

Source | S&S, BBC