Glenn Kenny (former Premiere mag critic):

I was quite honored, this spring, to receive an invitation to participate in the British Film Institute/Sight & Sound "Greatest Films Of All Time" poll. Now that the results of that poll are being unveiled online, I figure it would not be improper for me to put up my own ballot, along with the note I attached to it.

1) Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
2) Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)
3) Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959)
4) Céline et Julie vent en bateau (Rivette, 1974)
5) Stalker (Tarkovsky, 1979)
6) Belle de jour (Buñuel, 1967)
7) Boudu sauvé des eaux (Renoir, 1932)
8) Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Lang, 1922)
9) Singin' in the Rain (Donen & Kelly, 1952)
10)The Searchers (Ford, 1956)

Thanks so much for the invitation to participate in the poll. It's true; the task is not an easy one at all. I arrived at this particular list, one out of perhaps dozens of other entirely different ones, by splitting he difference between honoring convention and saying to hell with it. As it happens, the four films on the list which might conceivably be seen as "consensus" picks—Kane, Psycho, Singin' in the Rain, Searchers—are also ones close to "my heart" or at least the formation of my sensibility. The other six films came to me after a lot of debate with myself over whether I was being different for the sake of being different, or whether these were not in fact truly GREAT films that, when the time came for surveys along the lines of this one, did not get the proper recognition for being the imaginatively prodigious, paradigm-shifting, galvanic works that I believe they in fact are. OF COURSE I regret that my list cannot be longer, because surely Sansho Dayu, The General (not to mention Sherlock Jr.), The Last Temptation of Christ, and a lot more ought to have a place, and the more I think about the films and filmmakers I am leaving off (Yang! Naruse!...and, yep, Godard; what am I thinking?) the more I can twist a long knife inside both my guts and brain. And for all that this is a list that in its way satisfies me. If anybody asks me "What IS cinema," yeah, I can show them any one of these pictures and say "This is."

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2012/08/my-sight-sound-50-greatest-films-of-all-time-ballot.html





Steven Shaviro (lit and film prof):

This year, quite to my excitement, I was asked to participate in Sight and Sound magazine’s once-per-decade poll of film critics to determine “The Ten Greatest Films of All Time.” (Previous decades’ results can be found here).

Making lists of this sort is always somewhat arbitrary. I added to the arbitrariness by saying only one film per director. In any case, six months from now the list I would make might well be quite different. Also, when I make a list like this, I inevitably forget and leave something out; there are always omissions that I later regret. Nonetheless, here is the list that I sent in this week:

Vertigo (Hitchcock)
Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi)
The Nutty Professor (Jerry Lewis)
Rules of the Game (Renoir)
Two or Three Things I Know About Her (Godard)
Ordet (Dreyer)
Red Desert (Antonioni)
Golden Eighties (Akerman)
Imitation of Life (Sirk)
Mouchette (Bresson)

Notes: Fassbinder is my all-time favorite director, but I couldn’t decide on a particular single film. Probably I should have included Berlin Alexanderplatz, but since it is a long TV miniseries, I am not sure that it would count. — I also hesitated over which Bresson film to include; I could see voting instead for A Man Escaped or Au Hazard Balthasar or The Devil Probably or L’argent.– I also regret the non-inclusion of a few runner-ups (runners-up?): Andrei Rublev (or maybe Stalker), Playtime, Celine and Julie Go Boating, India Song, The Devil is a Woman, Shock Corridor, Beau Travail, Daisies, WR:Mysteries of the Organism, Three Crowns of the Sailor, Teorema.

http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1046