The British Film Institute’s magazine Sight and Sound polls the world’s leading critics and filmmakers every 10 years to determine which films are currently considered the greatest of all time. Its editor Nick James claims the results to be ‘a touchstone for worldwide film opinion’. The results of the latest poll were published last month:

The Critics’ Choice:
1 Citizen Kane (Welles)
2 Vertigo (Hitchcock)
3 La Règle du jeu (Renoir)
4 The Godfather and The Godfather Part II (Coppola)
5 Tokyo Story (Ozu)
6 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
7 Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein)
8 Sunrise (Murnau)
9 8½ (Fellini)
10 Singin' in the Rain (Kelly, Donen)
11 Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)
12 The Searchers (Ford)
13 Rashomon (Kurosawa)
14 The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)
15 À bout de soufe (Godard)
16 L'Atalante (Vigo)
17 The General (Keaton)
18 Touch of Evil (Welles)
19 Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson)
20 Jules et Jim (Truffaut)
21 L'avventura (Antonioni)
22 Le Mépris (Godard)
23 Pather Panchali (S. Ray)
24 La dolce vita (Fellini)
25 M (Lang)
26 The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Mizoguchi)
27 Barry Lyndon (Kubrick)
28 Ivan the Terrible (Eisenstein)
29 Les Enfants du paradis (Carné)
30 Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov)
31 Metropolis (Lang)
32 Some Like It Hot (Wilder)
33 Ugetsu Monogatari (Mizoguchi)
34 Wild Strawberries (Bergman)
35 Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky)
36 The 400 Blows (Truffaut)
37 Fanny and Alexander (Bergman)
38 La Grande Illusion (Renoir)
39 The Magnificent Ambersons (Welles)
40 Modern Times (Chaplin)
41 Psycho (Hitchcock)
42 The Seventh Seal (Bergman)
43 Taxi Driver (Scorsese)
44 The Third Man (Reed)
45 Bicycle Thieves (De Sica)
46 Blade Runner (Scott)
47 City Lights (Chaplin)
48 Greed (von Stroheim)
49 Intolerance (Griffith)
50 Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)

The Directors’ Choice:
1 Citizen Kane (Welles)
2 The Godfather and The Godfather Part II (Coppola)
3 8½ (Fellini)
4 Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)
5 Dr Strangelove (Kubrick)
6 Bicycle Thieves (De Sica)
6= Raging Bull (Scorsese)
6= Vertigo (Hitchcock)
9 Rashomon (Kurosawa)
9= La Règle du jeu (Renoir)
9= Seven Samurai (Kurosawa)

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Philip French of The Observer discusses the nature of the changes in this poll’s results over the last six decades. He also lists his own top ten and his choice of the best films made in the last two decades.sll