Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo was on Thursday revealed as the best film of all time, toppling Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, which has won the once-a-decade poll by BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine since 1962.

The results of the once-in-a decade poll, which this time had 846 film expert participants, revealed that Vertigo, a psychological suspense drama starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, had beaten Citizen Kane to the top spot by 34 votes. Vertigo, which was released in 1958, had trailed Citizen Kane, a 1941 film, by five votes in the last poll 10 years ago.
“This result reflects changes in the culture of film criticism, which is now more about works that have personal meaning to the critic. Vertigo is the ultimate critics’ film because it is a dreamlike film about people who are not sure who they are but who are busy reconstructing themselves and each other to fit a kind of cinema ideal of the ideal soul mate. In that sense it’s a makeover film full of spellbinding moments of awful poignancy that show how foolish, tender and cruel we can be when we’re in love,” Nick James, editor, Sight and Sound magazine explained. Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu’s 1953 film Tokyo Story was placed third in the poll and French director-producer Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game), filmed in 1939, got the fourth spot on the list.
Three silent films — Russian director Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera at No. 8, German director F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (1927) and The Passion of Joan of Arc, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer in 1927 — are in the Top 10 list. This year, perennial favourite Battleship Potemkin, which made the Top 10 film for all of the polls in the last 60 years, was pushed out of the list.
The other three films on the list are Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) at sixth spot — it is also the most recent film in the Top 10, followed by John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) made the last spot on the Top 10 list.
The top 10 lists of 846 most influential film critics, academics, distributors, writers and programmers, who voted for 2,045 films overall, were incorporated into one list.
In a separate poll, 358 film directors from all over the world, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Francis Ford Coppola (who has three films in the Top 50), Woody Allen and Mike Leigh, voted Ozu’s Tokyo Story the greatest film of all time, again knocking Citizen Kane off the top spot to share the No.2 position with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In this list, Vertigo made the 7th place.
Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (1976) was placed fifth, followed by Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) shared the seventh place with Vertigo.
Mirror (1974) by Tarkovsky and Bicycle Thieves (1948) by De Sica made the last two films on directors’ choice of Top 10 films.
Most recent film included in the list of greatest films of all time is Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, made in 2000 and a new entry at No.24. David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001) comes in at No 28. The top film made by a woman was Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (35th) — the only other female director’s film in the Top 100 is Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (78th).