To choose only 10 films for this list was a task at once simple and impossible.
In compiling my Top 10 film list, I tried to avoid obvious choices based on general consensus.
Creating this fantasy Sight & Sound ballot felt as much like excavation as photography.
How do you distinguish a movie that’s one of the greatest of all time from one of your all-time favorites?
There are simply too many amazing films—thousands, really—that could occupy every slot on this list just as confidently as the ones that are here.
I’m totally willing to admit, at the outset, the possibility that any of my favorite 10 below may decline in estimation over time.
It’s hard not to get a little nostalgic while trying to determine one’s favorite films of all time.
Eons ago, while still in high school, I composed a list of my all-time favorite films for the first time.
The list of “obstructions” ought to be familiar to anyone with any exposure to this parlor game.
I’m a compulsive. It’s no surprise that my list is full of movies about compulsion.
It’s the warping, re-signifying logic of affect and memory that architected this list.
List-making is an exercise in futility, but as futile exercises go, it’s one of the best.
Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard is quite simply the most lavish historical epic ever captured on celluloid.
The most creative periods for the movies seem to occur about every 30 years, usually triggered by the advent of some new technology.
We’ve stormed the gates and are now officially part of the canon-forming establishment…or (fingers crossed) the canon-altering anti-establishment.
This season presents two Oscar contenders, Hugo and The Artist, that both bask in the dreaminess of cinema’s early days.