It is out! (UPDATED 8/3/12)

The 2012 Sight and Sound Greatest Films Poll was released yesterday.  Here are the Top 50.  And, we have a new Number One.  Citizen Kane, after winning five straight polls, has finally been topped.  By Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.  Citizen Kane is now considered by the Critics to be the second greatest film of all-time now.  I have not really gotten in to the nitty gritty yet, or looked at the Directors' poll.  When I have more time to completely devour both polls, I will write a very lengthy, chewy fauxluxe post re these developments.

Hitch is Number One.

Here, though, are some first very quick impressions.  I still think Citizen Kane is the greatest film ever made.  And, there are at least a half-dozen Hitch films I like more than Vertigo, to wit:  The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Rebecca, Notorious, Shadow of a Doubt, Rear Window, North by Northwest, etc, ... That is seven right there, and I could keep going, still.

It is so wonderful to see Sunrise climb the charts.  It is up to number five now.  And, my recommendation for folks out there to give this stunning, magical, FW Murnau silent film a chance, still stands.

And, it is very good to see that La Regle de Jeu is still holding strong in the top five.

The Godfather films dropped out of the Top Ten, which is fine by me.  They changed the rules which serious Coppola devotees will surely grumble about.  Unlike my poll, and all the recent Sight and Sound polls of the past, this time you could not vote for the first two Godfather films as one entry.  Thus, those two films split the vote, obviously, and knocked it out of Top Ten contention.

The most recent film made to garner a vote was Lynch's Mullholland (Ick! I hate that movie.) from 2001.  So, no 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days or The Lives of Others or, basically anything from the most recent decade.  And, that is fine by me, too.

And, just between you and me, I will take Fosse's All That Jazz over Fellini's 8 1/2 (No. ten in this poll) in a heartbeat.

Here were the final results for my poll

And, here is my number one selection, and a roundup of my personal Top Ten.

Much much much more about all this in the coming days.  I love you all,














Ardent




UPDATE (8/3/12):  It will be a while before I can really dig in to the polls.  BFI, Sight and Sound are not releasing how every critic and every director voted, and the entire lists for both polls, every film that received a vote, etc, ... until Aug 15 for the Critics and the twenty-second for the Directors.

And, the other big story, other than Vertigo topping the Critics poll, is Tokyo Story, which won the Directors Poll and finished third w/ the Critics.  There will be a lot of people renting or streaming Tokyo Story now, I am sure.







AH