The Sight & Sound Greatest Films Poll
Once a decade since 1952, Sight & Sound asks the world's critics to name the greatest films ever made — the closest thing cinema has to an official canon. Here is the 2022 critics' poll measured against our composite score, which weighs it alongside 20+ other lists, awards and community canons.
252 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.
- 1Parasite2019 · Bong Joon-ho9.70
Palme d'Or winner 2019 · Oscar Best Picture winner 2019 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2020 #1
- 2Citizen Kane1941 · Orson Welles9.16
AFI 100 (2007) #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #2 · AFI 100 (1998) #1
- 3The Godfather1972 · Francis Ford Coppola8.37
Oscar Best Picture winner 1972 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #3 · AFI 100 (2007) #2
- 4Lawrence of Arabia1962 · David Lean7.71
Oscar Best Picture winner 1962 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1963 #1 · BFI Top 100 British films #3
- 5Taxi Driver1976 · Martin Scorsese7.30
Palme d'Or winner 1976 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1976 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1976
- 6Apocalypse Now1979 · Francis Ford Coppola7.15
Palme d'Or winner 1979 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1979 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #18
- 7The Piano1993 · Jane Campion6.71
Palme d'Or winner 1993 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1994 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1993
- 82001: A Space Odyssey1968 · Stanley Kubrick6.65
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #6 · BAFTA Best Film nominee 1969
- 9All About Eve1950 · Joseph L. Mankiewicz6.30
Oscar Best Picture winner 1950 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1951 #1 · AFI 100 (2007) #28
- 10Pulp Fiction1994 · Quentin Tarantino6.25
Palme d'Or winner 1994 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1994 · BAFTA Best Film nominee 1995
- 11The Godfather Part II1974 · Francis Ford Coppola6.10
Oscar Best Picture winner 1974 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #26 · Letterboxd Top 250 #8
- 12Casablanca1942 · Michael Curtiz6.00
Oscar Best Picture winner 1943 · AFI 100 (2007) #3 · AFI 100 (1998) #2
- 13The Third Man1949 · Carol Reed5.46
BFI Top 100 British films #1 · Cannes Grand Prix winner 1949 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1952 #2
- 14Dr. Strangelove1964 · Stanley Kubrick5.25
BAFTA Best Film winner 1965 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1964 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #46
- 15La Dolce Vita1960 · Federico Fellini5.21
Palme d'Or winner 1960 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1960 #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #35
- 16The Tree of Life2011 · Terrence Malick5.09
Palme d'Or winner 2011 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2011 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2011 #2
- 17Pather Panchali1955 · Satyajit Ray4.93
BAFTA Best Film winner 1958 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1966 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #22
- 18Taste of Cherry1997 · Abbas Kiarostami4.92
Palme d'Or winner 1997 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #93 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #243
- 19Annie Hall1977 · Woody Allen4.89
Oscar Best Picture winner 1977 · AFI 100 (2007) #35 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #243
- 20Wild Strawberries1957 · Ingmar Bergman4.85
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1958 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1962 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72
- 21Ordet1955 · Carl Theodor Dreyer4.84
Venice Golden Lion winner 1955 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1955 #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #30
- 22The Battle of Algiers1966 · Gillo Pontecorvo4.80
Venice Golden Lion winner 1965 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1967 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #22
- 23Paris, Texas1984 · Wim Wenders4.79
Palme d'Or winner 1984 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #185 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1985 #6
- 24The Deer Hunter1978 · Michael Cimino4.70
Oscar Best Picture winner 1978 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1979 #3 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #211
- 25The Apartment1960 · Billy Wilder4.70
Oscar Best Picture winner 1960 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #54 · AFI 100 (2007) #80
- 26Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles1975 · Chantal Akerman4.65
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #4 · Letterboxd Top 250 #210
- 27Vertigo1958 · Alfred Hitchcock4.49
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #6 · AFI 100 (2007) #9
- 28Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives2010 · Apichatpong Weerasethakul4.39
Palme d'Or winner 2010 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2010 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #196
- 29Raging Bull1980 · Martin Scorsese4.37
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1980 · AFI 100 (2007) #4 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #22
- 30Sunset Boulevard1950 · Billy Wilder4.35
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1950 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1951 #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #62
Cinema's official census, once a decade
Since 1952, the British Film Institute's magazine Sight & Sound has polled critics once every ten years on the greatest films ever made. Because it moves so slowly and asks so many people, it has become the canon of record — the list every other list is implicitly arguing with. Its history is legible in three changes of throne: Bicycle Thieves won the first poll; Citizen Kane took over in 1962 and sat there for half a century; Vertigo dethroned it in 2012; and in 2022 — after the voter pool expanded to 1,639 critics, programmers and academics — Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman arrived at number one, the poll's most argued-about result ever. A parallel poll of working directors (480 of them in 2022) runs alongside the critics' poll and reliably disagrees with it in revealing ways: directors put 2001: A Space Odyssey first.
Our composite score treats both 2022 polls as top-tier sources — the heaviest weight in our methodology, alongside the Oscars and the Palme d'Or — but never as the whole story. The list above is the critics' poll re-measured against everything else our library tracks: 20+ lists, awards and community canons. Reading it this way shows you which S&S choices the wider record confirms, and which films the poll rates far higher than anyone else does — the gap that keeps the argument going for the next ten years.