Critics' and directors' lists of greatest films per British Film Institute's opinion poll
The Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time 2012 was a worldwide
opinion poll conducted by Sight & Sound and published in the magazine's September 2012 issue. Sight & Sound, published by the
British Film Institute, has conducted a poll of the
greatest films every 10 years since 1952.[1]
Criteria
For this poll, Sight & Sound listened to decades of criticism about the lack of diversity of its poll participants and made a huge effort to invite a much wider variety of critics and filmmakers from around the world to participate, taking into account gender, ethnicity, race, geographical region, socioeconomic status, and other kinds of underrepresentation.[2]
They published the critics' list of "
greatest films" based on 846 critics, programmers, academics, and distributors,[3] as well as a directors' list based on 358 directors and filmmakers.[4] The two lists were headed by 1958's Vertigo and 1953's Tokyo Story respectively.
Dziga Vertov's 1929 silent documentary Man with a Movie Camera was the only film in the top 10 that had not appeared in the critics' top 10 lists published previously.
2,045 different films received at least one mention from one of the 846 critics.
In the 2012 directors' poll, Tokyo Story ranked first,[4][13] also replacing Citizen Kane, which held the top spot in both of the previous decennial directors' polls.[14]