The Sight & Sound Directors' Poll
Alongside its famous critics' poll, Sight & Sound asks the world's working filmmakers to name the greatest films ever made — a canon chosen by the people who make canon. Here is the 2022 directors' poll measured against our composite score across 20+ lists, awards and polls.
104 films from this list are in our library; the top 30 by composite score are shown — the ranking is ours, not the list's own order.
- 1The Godfather1972 · Francis Ford Coppola · United States / Italy · crime, drama, thriller9.75
Empire 500 (2008) #1 · Oscar Best Picture winner 1972 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #3
- 2Citizen Kane1941 · Orson Welles · United States · drama, biography, mystery9.21
AFI 100 (2007) #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #2 · AFI 100 (1998) #1
- 32001: A Space Odyssey1968 · Stanley Kubrick · United States / United Kingdom · adventure, mystery, sci-fi7.43
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #6 · AFI 100 (2007) #15
- 4Lawrence of Arabia1962 · David Lean · United Kingdom / United States · war, biography, drama7.40
Oscar Best Picture winner 1962 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1963 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1963 #1
- 5Apocalypse Now1979 · Francis Ford Coppola · United States · war, action, drama6.84
Palme d'Or winner 1979 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #18 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #19
- 6Goodfellas1990 · Martin Scorsese · United States · biography, crime, thriller6.33
BAFTA Best Film winner 1991 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #28 · Empire 500 (2008) #6
- 7Taxi Driver1976 · Martin Scorsese · United States · film-noir, drama, crime6.25
Palme d'Or winner 1976 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1976 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #12
- 8Parasite2019 · Bong Joon-ho · South Korea · comedy, drama, thriller5.72
Palme d'Or winner 2019 · Oscar Best Picture winner 2019 · Film Comment year-end poll 2019 #1
- 9Raging Bull1980 · Martin Scorsese · United States · biography, drama, action5.71
AFI 100 (2007) #4 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #22 · Siskel's annual top 10 1980 #1
- 10The Godfather Part II1974 · Francis Ford Coppola · United States · drama, crime, thriller5.37
Oscar Best Picture winner 1974 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #26 · Letterboxd Top 250 #8
- 11Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles1975 · Chantal Akerman · Belgium / France · drama5.26
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #4 · Hoberman's annual top 10 1978 #1
- 12Vertigo1958 · Alfred Hitchcock · United States · mystery, thriller, drama5.16
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #6 · AFI 100 (2007) #9
- 13In the Mood for Love2000 · Wong Kar-wai · Hong Kong, China / France / Thailand · romance, drama5.13
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #5 · Rolling Stone 100 Best of the 21st Century #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #9
- 14The Piano1993 · Jane Campion · France / Australia / New Zealand · drama, romance4.99
Palme d'Or winner 1993 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1994 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #50
- 15Tokyo Story1953 · Yasujirō Ozu · Japan · drama4.91
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #4 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #4 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 1953 #2
- 16Bicycle Thieves1948 · Vittorio De Sica · Italy · drama4.78
BAFTA Best Film winner 1950 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1950 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #20
- 17The Battle of Algiers1966 · Gillo Pontecorvo · Italy / Algeria · drama, war4.69
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1967 #1 · Venice Golden Lion winner 1966 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #22
- 18Dr. Strangelove1964 · Stanley Kubrick · United States / United Kingdom · comedy, war4.66
BAFTA Best Film winner 1965 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #46 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1964
- 19Mulholland Drive2001 · David Lynch · United States · mystery, thriller, crime4.61
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2001 #1 · Film Comment year-end poll 2001 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #8
- 208½1963 · Federico Fellini · Italy / France · comedy, drama, fantasy4.58
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #6 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1965 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #31
- 21Sunset Boulevard1950 · Billy Wilder · United States · drama, film-noir4.54
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1951 #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #62 · AFI 100 (2007) #16
- 22Do the Right Thing1989 · Spike Lee · United States · comedy, drama4.39
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1989 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #24 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #29
- 23Chinatown1974 · Roman Polanski · United States · film-noir, mystery, thriller4.33
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1974 · AFI 100 (2007) #21
- 24Singin' in the Rain1952 · Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen · United States · comedy, romance, musical4.30
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #10 · AFI 100 (2007) #5 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #52
- 25Wild Strawberries1957 · Ingmar Bergman · Sweden · drama4.30
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1958 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1962 #1 · Sarris's annual top 10 1959 #1
- 26Persona1966 · Ingmar Bergman · Sweden · drama4.29
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1967 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #9 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #18
- 27La Dolce Vita1960 · Federico Fellini · France / Italy · comedy, drama4.24
Palme d'Or winner 1960 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1960 #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #35
- 28Moonlight2016 · Barry Jenkins · United States · drama4.15
Oscar Best Picture winner 2016 · Rolling Stone 100 Best of the 21st Century #3 · Film Comment year-end poll 2016 #2
- 29Ordet1955 · Carl Theodor Dreyer · Denmark · drama4.06
Venice Golden Lion winner 1955 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1955 #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #30
- 30The 400 Blows1959 · François Truffaut · France · drama, crime4.04
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #33 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #50 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1959 #5
Every canon is really an argument about who gets to speak, and the Sight & Sound directors' poll answers it with a provocation: hand the ballot to the people who actually make the films. Where the magazine's famous critics' poll gathers the verdict of those who watch for a living, this sibling survey asks working filmmakers the same question — what are the greatest films ever made — and gets back a noticeably different list, warmer toward craft and muscle, cooler toward the austere formal experiment that critics love to crown.
The poll that filmmakers vote
Sight & Sound has run its greatest-films survey once a decade since 1952, when the British Film Institute's magazine first polled a few dozen international critics. For its first forty years the result was a single combined ranking; only in 1992 did the magazine split the ballot in two, inviting directors to vote in a poll of their own, separate from the critics. The 2022 edition — the most recent (Wikipedia, accessed 21 July 2026) — drew ballots from filmmakers across the world, and the gap between what they chose and what the critics chose has become the survey's most-discussed feature. In 2022 the directors named Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) their number one; the critics, voting the same year, elevated Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman (1975) to the top instead — two films, two temperaments, one decade.
What directors reward
Read down the ballot and a sensibility emerges: directors vote for the films they wish they had made. The auteurs of heavy, worked cinema recur far more often than a critics' list would allow. Francis Ford Coppola alone surfaces four times in our library's slice of the poll, and Martin Scorsese three — a concentration of muscular American craft that tells you these voters prize execution and control as much as theory. It is a filmmakers' filmmaker canon, and it wears that identity proudly.
How to read our list
Films appear here because directors voted them onto the 2022 Sight & Sound poll; the ordering above is not theirs but ours, re-ranked by composite score across 20-plus lists, awards and polls, so a film's place reflects its standing everywhere, not its rank on this one ballot. The re-ranking scrambles the poll's own hierarchy in instructive ways. Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), score 9.75, tops our version of the list, with Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) and David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) close behind; Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019), at #12 library-wide (score 5.72), is a reminder that this canon is unusually open to the present. The revealing comparison is between the two number-ones: Kubrick's 2001, the directors' own choice, holds up at our #3 by composite (score 7.43), while Jeanne Dielman — the film the critics crowned — sits at #17 (score 5.26). One poll, measured against all the others, tells you whose taste the wider record backs — and this time it is the filmmakers'.