In , the Sight and Sound team had the novel idea of asking critics to name the greatest films of all time. The tradition became decennial, increasing in size and prestige as the decades passed. What has risen up the ranks? What has fallen?
Find out below. Preston Sturges works his magic in a screwball tale of a film director who goes on the road as a tramp to help write his socially significant screenplay. A vibrant humanist statement on racism and immigration that remains pertinent today. Responding to criticisms of racism for his record-breaking The Birth of a Nation, filmmaking pioneer D. Griffith made this epic drama depicting intolerance through the ages.
Classic Marx Brothers comedy of two small countries finding themselves on the brink of war. Broadway diva Bette Davis tries to fend off her rivals in this Oscar-winning drama. Turbulent passion and middle-class restraint combine in uniquely English style when a married woman falls for a doctor she meets at a railway station.
Jean Renoir's intoxicating first colour feature is a lyrical adaptation of Rumer Godden's coming-of-age tale of an adolescent girl living with her English family on the banks of West Bengal. Paul Thomas Anderson's sprawling, intense and multi-layered study of a collection of characters going through varying levels of crisis. Max Ophuls brought his trademark flowing camera style and a taste of the old Vienna to Hollywood for this tragic story of unrequited love. Michelangelo Antonioni's mid-career masterpiece stars Monica Vitti as an emotionally anguished young woman embarking on a tentative affair with a businessman Richard Harris.
Federico Fellini returned for inspiration to his own childhood in s Rimini for this colourful comedy-drama about life in a small seaside town under Fascist rule. Hou Hsiao-Hsien breached political taboos in his Golden Lion-winning tale of a Taiwanese family in the mids. Richard Gere plays a Chicagoan trying to make a new life in the country and finding that love gets in the way. Acclaimed filmmaker Cheryl Dunye takes centre stage in this ode to love, community and the past.
