Sight & Sound's The Greatest Films of All Time

A lonely, ritual-obsessed widowed housewife does her daily chores, takes care of her apartment where she lives with her teenage son, and turns the occasional trick to make ends meet. When one of her clients causes her to have her first-ever orgasm, her life slowly falls apart.

An ex-police officer is asked to follow an old friends wife who thinks she is being followed by ghosts. A classic Hitchcock about a man who’s afraid of heights and a woman he must unfortunately follow to great heights.

Orson Wells was 26 when he made his first feature film Citizen Kane. The film became known as one of the greatest of all time and earned him international celebrity. The story is about the publishing business and how one thrill-seeker’s struggle for power negatively affected everybody he came in contact with and eventually lead to a merciless war.

The highly respected and often cited milestone in Science Fiction cinema. Director Stanley Kubrick takes us into the future, into outer space and aboard a spacecraft that’s controlled by a seemingly trustworthy computer named HAL.

An old couple visit their children and grandchildren in the city, but receive little attention.

In 1960s Hong Kong, two neighbors form an intimate bond after making a discovery about their spouses in this visually stunning tale of unrequited love.

The classic star-studded film from the brilliant direction of Francis Ford Coppola tells the saga of New York mafia family’s everyday life. The film from 1972 became the new ultimate gangster film in the new Hollywood movement.

Foreign Legion officer Galoup recalls his once glorious life, training troops in the Gulf of Djibouti. His existence there was happy, strict and regimented, until the arrival of a promising young recruit, Sentain, plants the seeds of jealousy in Galoup's mind.

After a car wreck on the winding Mulholland Drive renders a woman amnesic, she and a perky Hollywood-hopeful search for clues and answers across Los Angeles in a twisting venture beyond dreams and reality.

A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.

The first film from director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau to be finished in the States. The film has the tangible elements of German expressionism. Murnau received a big budget from Fox and the ability to make all the filmmaking decisions. The film has been called the greatest silent film of all time.

This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.

Hollywood's attempts to move from the 'silent' era to the 'Talkies' are not going as planned.

Persona is a psychoanalytical film from Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and reputed as his greatest masterpiece. The film deals with a silent actress and her relationship with her nurse who narrates her story.

Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game is a comedic drama about a Parisian aristocrat. The film was released shortly before the start of World War II.

During the Vietnam War, the assigned mission of Captain Willard take him through some strange and seemingly impossible scenarios in the jungle of Vietnam. Little by little Willard forgets his mission’s purpose as he becomes more and more hallucinatory and starts to lose sense of reality.

Seven Samurai is the masterpiece from Akira Kurosawa from 1954 in which a town hires an old samurai to protect their village. A mix of action, comedy, and social drama. This epic film is an intimate look into the powerful emotions of the characters and named the greatest film in Japanese cinema history.

With 8 ½ Frederico Fellini leaves a self-portrait where dreams and reality are a mix. With help from a most excellent cast and unique scenery this self reflecting film is one of his master works.

Agnès Vardas’ first feature film is an hour an a half from the life of singer Cléo in which she walks through Paris while waiting the results of a cancer test. The film showed the Nouvelle Vague the first woman to become famous from the film school.

A dying man in his forties recalls his childhood, his mother, the war and personal moments that tell of and juxtapose pivotal moments in Soviet history with daily life.

Robert De Niro stars as Travis Bickle in this oppressive psychodrama about a Vietnam veteran who rebels against the decadence and immorality of big city life in New York while working the nightshift as a taxi driver.

As a Civil War veteran spends years searching for a young niece captured by Indians, his motivation becomes increasingly questionable.

A woman returning home falls asleep and has vivid dreams that may or may not be happening in reality. Through repetitive images and complete mismatching of the objective view of time and space, her dark inner desires play out on-screen.

The Passion of Joan of Arc is the masterpiece from Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer that depicts the story of French martyr Joan from Orleans seven years after her canonization from the catholic church.

Do The Right Thing takes place on a hot summer day in Brooklyn and depicts the racial conflict between an Italian American pizza restaurant owner and his African American customers and how things erupt into a violent outbreak. This Spike Lee Joint touches on themes of segregation and apartheid in the USA.

The story of a donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly.

Jacques Tati’s gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in the age of technology reached their creative apex with Playtime, a lasting testament to a modern age tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.

A bout de Souffle is Godard’s debut film and a French classic. With this film Godard begins a new style of filming that revolutionized the film industry.

Noriko is perfectly happy living at home with her widowed father, Shukichi, and has no plans to marry -- that is, until her aunt Masa convinces Shukichi that unless he marries off his 27-year-old daughter soon, she will likely remain alone for the rest of her life. When Noriko resists Masa's matchmaking, Shukichi is forced to deceive his daughte...

Impoverished priest Harihar Ray, dreaming of a better life for himself and his family, leaves his rural Bengal village in search of work. Alone, his wife, Sarbojaya, looks after her rebellious daughter, Durga, and her young son, Apu, as well as Harihar's elderly aunt Indir. The children enjoy the small pleasures of their difficult life, while th...

A religious fanatic marries a gullible widow whose young children are reluctant to tell him where their real daddy hid $10,000 he'd stolen in a robbery.

Near a gray and unnamed city is the Zone, an alien place guarded by barbed wire and soldiers. Over his wife's numerous objections, a man rises in the dead of night: he's a stalker, one of a handful who have the mental gifts (and who risk imprisonment) to lead people into the Zone to the Room, a place where one's secret hopes come true.

An Irish rogue uses his cunning and wit to work his way up the social classes of 18th century England, transforming himself from the humble Redmond Barry into the noble Barry Lyndon.

A man and his son search for a stolen bicycle vital for his job.

In ancient Japan a crime take place as told from three different travelers who have experienced the crime: a man being killed and his wife being raped. Which if any of the stories is true? A Akira Kurosawa film about morals, truth, and communication.

Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories – survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators – Lanzmann presents testimonies from survivors of the Chelmno concentration c...

The French Colonel...who was forced even to torture! One of the many women...who stopped at nothing to win! The Algerian Street Boy...who became a rebel hero!

Psycho is one of the most famous masterpieces from Hitchcock and for it’s time was unparalleled in it’s horror effect. A chilling score sets the pace for an introverted killer and a mystery thriller case of multiple dimensions. The credits for the film directed by Saul Bass were revolutionary for their time.

Newly married couple Juliette and ship captain Jean struggle through marriage as they travel on the L'Atalante along with the captain's first mate and a cabin boy.

City Lights is the first silent film that Charlie Chaplin directed after he established himself with sound accompanied films. The film is about a penniless man who falls in love with a flower girl. The film was a great success and today is deemed a cult classic.

The three sons of devout Danish farmer Morten have widely disparate religious beliefs. Youngest son Anders shares his father's religion, but eldest son Mikkel has lost his faith, while middle child Johannes has become delusional and proclaims that he is Jesus Christ himself. When Mikkel's wife, Inger goes into a difficult childbirth, everyone's ...

Two teenage girls, both named Marie, decide that since the world is spoiled they will be spoiled as well; accordingly they embark on a series of destructive pranks in which they consume and destroy the world about them. This freewheeling, madcap feminist farce was immediately banned by the government.

On an isolated island in Brittany at the end of the eighteenth century, a female painter is obliged to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman.

The 400 Blows is Francois Truffaut’s first feature film about a boy who is misunderstood by his parents causing him to leave them and enter into a life of crime. A powerful film set in Paris that gives a glimpse into Paris life of the 1950’s along with a Jazz soundtrack.

PLEASE DELETE, EXISTS ALREADY!

Goodfellas is a mafia drama from Martin Scorsese about a gang of Irish-Americans who become fearless Mafia leaders.

After four years of production the film by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky would be banned soon after it’s release leading it to be shown only at foreign film festivals. The film is about a Russian icon painter Andrej Rubljow and the relationship of artists and their unique power.

M is German director Fritz Lang’s masterpiece that illustrates the portrait of a child murderer that has caused an entire city to begin rioting. The film is based on actual events.

An episodic romantic film, built up with many stories instead of one main plot, that ponders the voids and decadence of high society. A classic film and upon it’s first night out a scandal. The 1960 film by Federico Fellini is named the film that split up his earlier neo-realist films from the art films he did later in his career.

Jefferies has had his leg in a cast for weeks and has nothing to do but watch his neighbors from his window. His voyeurism leads him to think that he’s witnessed a murder. Together with his girlfriend Lisa and his nurse Stella they try to solve the mystery and possibly a murder.