Sight and Sound Poll

Given extraordinary freedom by Hollywood studio RKO for his debut film, boy wonder Orson Welles created this notoriously brilliant portrait of a media giant.

A fixture in critics' polls, Yasujirō Ozu's most enduring masterpiece is a beautifully nuanced exploration of filial duty, expectation and regret.

A new recruit provokes searing jealousy in Claire Denis' gruelling, sunbaked drama about a battalion of Foreign Legionnaires based in Djibouti.

Dazzling document of Soviet life, by Dziga Vertov, showing a living city and the people and machines that propel it.

The Czech archive version of one of cinema's last and most luminous silent masterpieces, an enduring fable of love, loss and redemption.

Agnès Varda’s award-winning study of those living on the margins of French society at the turn of the millennium.

Part One of Béla Tarr’s epic adaptation of Laszlo Karsnahorkai’s novel about the disintegration of an isolated community.

Bresson’s hugely influential study of a petty thief in late 50s Paris is one of his most widely acclaimed films.

The film that Martin Scorsese compared to ‘opening a door and walking into another dimension, where time has stopped and beauty has been unleashed’.

Two self-confessed hedonists wreak wanton havoc in Věra Chytilová's visually spectacular neo-dadaist farce.

This early masterpiece from Werner Herzog stars Klaus Kinski as a power-crazed explorer in sixteenth-century South America who leads a band of conquistadors through the Amazon in search of El Dorado.

Fassbinder’s international breakthrough, this unconventional love story combines lucid social analysis with devastating emotional power.

Victor Sjöström is magnificent as the crabby professor taking a nostalgic road trip with his daughter-in-law, in Ingmar Bergman's elegiac masterpiece.

A bureaucrat’s life finds new meaning in Kurosawa’s classic original, the source for Bill Nighy’s brilliant drama, Living.

Bong Joon Ho's Oscar®-winning box-office sensation is a darkly comic, twisty rollercoaster ride.