from our September 2012 issue 
 
 Credit: Kobal Collection 
 
 Introduction 
 
 Ian Christie rings in the changes in our biggest-ever poll. 
 
 And the loser is – Citizen Kane. After 50 years at the top of the Sight & Sound poll, Orson Welles’s debut film has been convincingly ousted by Alfred Hitchcock’s 45th feature Vertigo – and by a whopping 34 votes, compared with the mere five that separated them a decade ago. So what does it mean? Given that Kane actually clocked over three times as many votes this year as it did last time, it hasn’t exactly been snubbed by the vastly larger number of voters taking part in this new poll, which has spread its net far wider than any of its six predecessors. 
 
 But it does mean that Hitchcock, who only entered the top ten in 1982 (two years after his death), has risen steadily in esteem over the course of 30 years, with Vertigo climbing from seventh place, to fourth in 1992, second in 2002 and now first, to make him the Old Master. Welles, uniquely, had two films (The Magnificent Ambersons as well as Kane) in the list in 1972 and 1982, but now Ambersons has slipped to 81st place in the top 100. 
 
 So does 2012 – the first poll to be conducted since the internet became almost certainly the main channel of communication about films – mark a revolution in taste, such as happened in 1962? Back then a brand-new film, Antonioni’s L’avventura, vaulted into second place. If there was going to be an equivalent today, it might have been Malick’s The Tree of Life, which only polled one vote less than the last title in the top 100. In fact the highest film from the new century is Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, just 12 years old, now sharing joint 24th slot with Dreyer’s venerable Ordet… 
 
 Ian Christie’s full essay on changing fashions on our new poll is published in the September 2012 issue of Sight & Sound. Texts below are quotations from our poll entries and magazine coverage of the top ten. Links are to the BFI’s Explore Film section. See Nick James’s poll coverage introduction for details of our methodology, and the ‘further reading’ links at the end of this page. 
 
 The top 50 
 
 Alfred Hitchcock, 1958 (191 votes) 
 
 Hitchcock’s supreme and most mysterious piece (as cinema and as an emblem of the art). Paranoia and obsession have never looked better. —Marco Müller 
 
 After half a century of monopolising the top spot, Citizen Kane was beginning to look smugly inviolable. Call it Schadenfreude, but let’s rejoice that this now conventional and ritualised symbol of ‘the greatest’ has finally been taken down a peg. The accession of Vertigo is hardly in the nature of a coup d’état. Tying for 11th place in 1972, Hitchcock’s masterpiece steadily inched up the poll over the next three decades, and by 2002 was clearly the heir apparent. Still, even ardent Wellesians should feel gratified at the modest revolution – if only for the proof that film canons (and the versions of history they legitimate) are not completely fossilised. There may be no larger significance in the bare fact that a couple of films made in California 17 years apart have traded numerical rankings on a whimsically impressionistic list. Yet the human urge to interpret chance phenomena will not be denied, and Vertigo is a crafty, duplicitous machine for spinning meaning… —Peter Matthews’ opening to his new essay on Vertigo in our September 2012 issue 
 
 Orson Welles, 1941 (157 votes) 
 
 Kane and Vertigo don’t top the chart by divine right. But those two films are just still the best at doing what great cinema ought to do: extending the everyday into the visionary. —Nigel Andrews 
 
 In the last decade I’ve watched this first feature many times, and each time, it reveals new treasures. Clearly, no single film is the greatest ever made. But if there were one, for me Kane would now be the strongest contender, bar none. —Geoff Andrew 
 
 All celluloid life is present in Citizen Kane; seeing it for the first or umpteenth time remains a revelation. —Trevor Johnston 
 
 Ozu Yasujiro, 1953 (107 votes) 
 
 Ozu used to liken himself to a “tofu-maker”, in reference to the way his films – at least the post-war ones – were all variations on a small number of themes. So why is it Tokyo Story that is acclaimed by most as his masterpiece? DVD releases have made available such prewar films as I Was Born, But…, and yet the Ozu vote has not been split, and Tokyo Story has actually climbed two places since 2002. It may simply be that in Tokyo Story this most Japanese tofu-maker refined his art to the point of perfection, and crafted a truly universal film about family, time and loss. —James Bell 
 
 Jean Renoir, 1939 (100 votes) 
 
 Only Renoir has managed to express on film the most elevated notion of naturalism, examining this world from a perspective that is dark, cruel but objective, before going on to achieve the serenity of the work of his old age. With him, one has no qualms about using superlatives: La Règle du jeu is quite simply the greatest French film by the greatest of French directors. —Olivier Père 
 
 FW Murnau, 1927 (93 votes) 
 
 When F.W. Murnau left Germany for America in 1926, did cinema foresee what was coming? Did it sense that change was around the corner – that now was the time to fill up on fantasy, delirium and spectacle before talking actors wrenched the artform closer to reality? Many things make this film more than just a morality tale about temptation and lust, a fable about a young husband so crazy with desire for a city girl that he contemplates drowning his wife, an elemental but sweet story of a husband and wife rediscovering their love for each other. Sunrise was an example – perhaps never again repeated on the same scale – of unfettered imagination and the clout of the studio system working together rather than at cross purposes. —Isabel Stevens 
 
 Stanley Kubrick, 1968 (90 votes) 
 
 2001: A Space Odyssey is a stand-along monument, a great visionary leap, unsurpassed in its vision of man and the universe. It was a statement that came at a time which now looks something like the peak of humanity’s technological optimism. —Roger Ebert 
 
 John Ford, 1956 (78 votes) 
 
 Do the fluctuations in popularity of John Ford’s intimate revenge epic – no appearance in either critics’ or directors’ top tens in 2002, but fifth in the 1992 critics’ poll – reflect the shifts in popularity of the western? It could be a case of this being a western for people who don’t much care for them, but I suspect it’s more to do with John Ford’s stock having risen higher than ever this past decade and the citing of his influence in the unlikeliest of places in recent cinema. —Kieron Corless 
 
 Dziga Vertov, 1929 (68 votes) 
 
 Is Dziga Vertov’s cine-city symphony a film whose time has finally come? Ranked only no. 27 in our last critics’ poll, it now displaces Eisenstein’s erstwhile perennial Battleship Potemkin as the Constructivist Soviet silent of choice. Like Eisenstein’s warhorse, it’s an agit-experiment that sees montage as the means to a revolutionary consciousness; but rather than proceeding through fable and illusion, it’s explicitly engaged both with recording the modern urban everyday (which makes it the top documentary in our poll) and with its representation back to its participant-subjects (thus the top meta-movie). —Nick Bradshaw 
 
 Carl Dreyer, 1927 (65 votes) 
 
 Joan was and remains an unassailable giant of early cinema, a transcendental film comprising tears, fire and madness that relies on extreme close-ups of the human face. Over the years it has often been a difficult film to see, but even during its lost years Joan has remained embedded in the critical consciousness, thanks to the strength of its early reception, the striking stills that appeared in film books, its presence in Godard’s Vivre sa vie and recently a series of unforgettable live screenings. In 2010 it was designated the most influential film of all time in the Toronto International Film Festival’s ‘Essential 100’ list, where Jonathan Rosenbaum described it as “the pinnacle of silent cinema – and perhaps of the cinema itself.” —Jane Giles 
 
 
 
 
 
 Federico Fellini, 1963 (64 votes) 
 
 Arguably the film that most accurately captures the agonies of creativity and the circus that surrounds filmmaking, equal parts narcissistic, self-deprecating, bitter, nostalgic, warm, critical and funny. Dreams, nightmares, reality and memories coexist within the same time-frame; the viewer sees Guido’s world not as it is, but more ‘realistically’ as he experiences it, inserting the film in a lineage that stretches from the Surrealists to David Lynch. 
 
 —Mar Diestro-Dópido 
 
 Sergei Eisenstein, 1925 (63 votes) 
 
 Jean Vigo, 1934 (58 votes) 
 
 Jean-Luc Godard, 1960 (57 votes) 
 
 Francis Ford Coppola, 1979 (53 votes) 
 
 Ozu Yasujiro, 1949 (50 votes) 
 
 Robert Bresson, 1966 (49 votes) 
 
 Kurosawa Akira, 1954 (48 votes) 
 
 Ingmar Bergman, 1966 (48 votes) 
 
 Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974 (47 votes) 
 
 Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1951 (46 votes) 
 
 Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960 (43 votes) 
 
 Jean-Luc Godard, 1963 (43 votes) 
 
 Francis Ford Coppola, 1972 (43 votes) 
 
 Carl Dreyer, 1955 (42 votes) 
 
 Wong Kar-wai, 2000 (42 votes) 
 
 Kurosawa Akira, 1950 (41 votes) 
 
 Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966 (41 votes) 
 
 David Lynch, 2001 (40 votes) 
 
 Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979 (39 votes) 
 
 Claude Lanzmann, 1985 (39 votes) 
 
 Francis Ford Coppola, 1974 (38 votes) 
 
 Martin Scorsese, 1976 (38 votes) 
 
 Vittoria De Sica, 1948 (37 votes) 
 
 Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1926 (35 votes) 
 
 Fritz Lang, 1927 (34 votes) 
 
 Alfred Hitchcock, 1960 (34 votes) 
 
 Chantal Akerman, 1975 (34 votes) 
 
 Béla Tarr, 1994 (34 votes) 
 
 François Truffaut, 1959 (33 votes) 
 
 Federico Fellini, 1960 (33 votes) 
 
 Roberto Rossellini, 1954 (32 votes) 
 
 Satyajit Ray, 1955 (31 votes) 
 
 Billy Wilder, 1959 (31 votes) 
 
 Carl Dreyer, 1964 (31 votes) 
 
 Jean-Luc Godard, 1965 (31 votes) 
 
 Jacques Tati, 1967 (31 votes) 
 
 Abbas Kiarostami, 1990 (31 votes) 
 
 Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966 (30 votes) 
 
 Jean-Luc Godard, 1998 (30 votes) 
 
 Charlie Chaplin, 1931 (29 votes) 
 
 Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953 (29 votes) 
 
 Chris Marker, 1962 (29 votes) 
 
 → Explore the complete critics’ and directors’ polls with every individual entry on our special poll site ||||| The BFI's Sight & Sound magazine survey puts Hitchcock's psychological drama at the top of the charts in the once-a-decade international critics’ film poll, published since 1962. 
 
 LONDON – Orson Welles' Citizen Kane no longer enjoys the moniker of greatest film of all time, a plaudit it has held for 50 years. 
 
 The movie has occupied top billing in the British Film Institute-published magazine Sight & Sound's once-a-decade international critics’ film poll since 1962. 
 
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 But that crown, according to Sight & Sound's 2012 survey of 846 movie experts who participate, has now passed to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. 
 
 Made in 1958, the psychological suspense drama first entered the Sight & Sound poll in 1982 in seventh place -- two years after its director died. Largely ignored by the critics for most of his career, its rise in the poll is testament to how Hitchcock’s reputation has steadily increased over time. 
 
 Starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, Vertigo trumped Citizen Kane by 34 votes this time around; it finished second 10 years ago, five votes shy of Kane. 
 
 And 1941's Kane, second in the survey, also missed out on the top spot in a separate poll of 358 film directors from all over the world -- including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen and Mike Leigh -- whose survey chose Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) as its greatest. 
 
 The critics poll, first conducted in 1952, marks the magazine's seventh and its most ambitious to date. 
 
 The 10-yearly survey aims to rule out fluctuations in taste and asks participants to interpret "greatest" in any way they choose. 
 
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 That could mean whether the film was most important to film history, represented the aesthetic pinnacle of achievement or perhaps had a personal impact on their own view of cinema. 
 
 This year’s poll sample of 846 film critics, academics, distributors, writers and programmers from all corners of the globe was the biggest ever. They voted for 2,045 movie titles overall. 
 
 That compares with the 144 who were asked 10 years ago. The pollsters said the huge increase "reflects the impact of the Internet and proliferation and increased influence of film commentators using this new medium." 
 
 Another fallout from this year's top 10 is Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, a 1925 film that has appeared in the top 10 for all of the poll's 60 years in various slots. 
 
 Three silent films make 2012's top 10: Dziga Vertov’s documentary Man With a Movie Camera (1929) is a new addition, while 1927's Sunrise, directed by F.W. Murnau, moves up to fifth and 1927's The Passion of Joan of Arc re-enters – ousting Potemkin. 
 
 Organizers said the changes might be explained by the availability of the films on DVD and the resurgence in popularity in recent years for different kinds of live accompaniment to the films, from The Alloy Orchestra and Michael Nyman to prog rock. 
 
 Ozu’s Tokyo Story is in third spot and Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939) occupies fourth. 
 
 Vertov’s film is the first documentary to make the top 10 since 1952. 
 
 Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc is ninth , while the most recent film in the top 10 is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in sixth place. John Ford's The Searchers (1956) hits the seventh spot, while Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963) lies 10th. 
 
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 The Critics’ Top 10 Greatest Films of All Time 
 
 1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) 
 
 2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) 
 
 3. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953) 
 
 4. La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939) 
 
 5. Sunrise: A Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927) 
 
 6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) 
 
 7. The Searchers (Ford, 1956) 
 
 8. Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) 
 
 9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1927) 
 
 10. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963) 
 
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 The Directors’ Top 10 Greatest Films of All Time 
 
 1. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953) 
 
 2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) 
 
 3. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) 
 
 4. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963) 
 
 5. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1980) 
 
 6. Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979) 
 
 7. The Godfather (Coppola, 1972) 
 
 8. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) 
 
 9. Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1974) 
 
 10. Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)
– Citizen Kane has to take a rare step back: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo has claimed its long-held title as "greatest film of all time" in a well-regarded survey, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Sight & Sound, the magazine published by the British Film Institute, says the 1958 movie with Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak got the most votes among 846 international film critics. Citizen Kane had been atop the once-a-decade survey since 1962. Tokyo Story, La Règle du jeu, and Sunrise: A Song for Two Humans round out the top five. Click here for the full list.