voted the 12th-greatest film of all time. The Village Voice ranked North by Northwest at No. 49 in its "Top 250 Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics. Entertainment Weekly voted it the 44th-greatest film of all time in 1999. The film ranks at No. 98 in Empire'''s list of the 500 Greatest Films of All Time. The Writers Guild of America ranked the screenplay No. 21 on its list of 101 Greatest Screenplays ever written. It is ranked the 40th-greatest American film by the American Film Institute. The film was voted at No. 28 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by the prominent French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 2008. In the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made, North by Northwest was ranked 53rd among critics; and in the 2022 polls, the film was ranked 45th among critics. In 2010, The Guardian ranked it as the second-best action and war film of all time. North by Northwest was ranked 13th in BBC's 2015 list of the 100 greatest American films. In 2022, Time Out named North by Northwest the greatest thriller film ever made.Time called the film "smoothly troweled and thoroughly entertaining". A. H. Weiler of The New York Times made it a "Critic's Pick" and said it was the "year's most scenic, intriguing and merriest chase"; he also complimented the two leads: Film critic Charles Champlin saw the film as an "anthology of typical Hitchcockian situations" and was particularly taken by the scene and suspense in which Grant's character avoids death when attacked by a crop-dusting plane in the cornfields, which he believed was representative of Hitchcock's finest work. Sight & Sound critic Penelope Houston called it "the purest piece of entertainment filmmaking". The London edition of Time Out, reviewing the film nearly a half-century after its initial release, commented: Author and journalist Nick Clooney praised Lehman's original story and sophisticated dialogue, calling the film "certainly Alfred Hitchcock's most stylish thriller, if not his best". Awards North by Northwest was nominated for three Academy Awards—Best Film Editing (George Tomasini), Best Art Direction – Set Decoration, Color (William A. Horning, Robert F. Boyle, Merrill Pye, Henry Grace and Frank R. McKelvy), and Best Original Screenplay (Ernest Lehman)—at the 32nd Academy Awards ceremony. Two of the three awards went instead to Ben-Hur, and the