Open thread for night owls: 50 Greatest Films of All Time

And now, after a day of watching Mitt Romney dig himself into an even deeper hole, something even more fun. This is the 60th year that Sight & Sound magazine has run a poll on the best movies of all time. The poll appears in the magazine's September issue now on the newsstands in the United Kingdom as well as digitally if you're a subscriber. But, happily, the list itself (without the complete commentary that the magazine itself contains) is available to all comers.

Teaser. For the first time in half a century, Citizen Kane is not at the top of the list.  

S&S did things a little differently this year:

Sorry, this one didn't make the cut.

About a year ago, the Sight & Sound team met to consider how we could best approach the poll this time. Given the dominance of electronic media, what became immediately apparent was that we would have to abandon the somewhat elitist exclusivity with which contributors to the poll had been chosen in the past and reach out to a much wider international group of commentators than before. We were also keen to include among them many critics who had established their careers online rather than purely in print.

To that end we approached more than 1,000 critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles, and received (in time for the deadline) precisely 846 top-ten lists that between them mention a total of 2,045 different films.

As a qualification of what 'greatest' means, our invitation letter stated, 'We leave that open to your interpretation. You might choose the ten films you feel are most important to film history, or the ten that represent the aesthetic pinnacles of achievement, or indeed the ten films that have had the biggest impact on your own view of cinema.' [...]

[O]ne important rule change compared to 2002 was that The Godfather and The Godfather Part II would no longer be accepted as a single choice, since they were made as two separate films.

By the way, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II came in at #21 and #31 respectively in the survey.

There are two separate lists:

The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time (as chosen by 846 critics, programmers, academics and distributors)

The Directors' Top Ten (as chosen by 358 directors from around the world)

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