Citizen Kane in the context of "Citizen Kane trailer"

The following films have been voted the best in national and international surveys of critics and the public.

Some surveys focus on all films, while others focus on a particular genre or country. Voting systems differ, and some surveys suffer from biases such as self-selection or skewed demographics, while others may be susceptible to forms of interference such as vote stacking.

The cinema of Japan (日本映画, Nihon eiga), also known domestically as hōga (邦画; "Japanese cinema"), began in the late 1890s. Japan has one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world; as of 2022, it was the fourth largest by number of feature films produced (634) and the third largest in terms of box office revenue ($1.5 billion).

During the 1950s, a period dubbed the "Golden Age of Japanese cinema", the jidaigeki films of Akira Kurosawa and the sci-fi films of Ishirō Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya gained Japanese cinema international praise and made these directors universally renowned and highly influential. Some Japanese films of this period are now considered some of the greatest of all time: in 2012, Yasujirō Ozu's film Tokyo Story (1953) was placed at No. 3 on Sight & Sound's 100 greatest films of all time and dethroned Citizen Kane (1941) atop the Sight & Sound directors' poll of the top 50 greatest films of all time, while Kurosawa's film Seven Samurai (1954) topped the BBC's 2018 survey of the 100 Greatest Foreign-Language Films. Japan has also won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film five times, more than any other Asian country.

Bernard Herrmann (born Maximillian Herman; June 29, 1911 – December 24, 1975) was an American composer and conductor best known for his work in film scoring. As a conductor, he championed the music of lesser-known composers. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest film composers. Alex Ross writes that "Over four decades, he revolutionized movie scoring by abandoning the illustrative musical techniques that dominated Hollywood in the 1930s and imposing his own peculiar harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary."

An Academy Award-winner for The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), Herrmann worked in radio drama, composing for Orson Welles's The Mercury Theater on the Air, and his first film score was for Welles's film debut, Citizen Kane (1941). He is known for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, notably The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) (where he makes a cameo as the conductor at Royal Albert Hall), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963) (as "sound consultant") and Marnie (1964) . His other credits include Jane Eyre (1943), Anna and the King of Siam (1946), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Cape Fear (1962), Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Twisted Nerve (1968). Herrmann scored films that were inspired by Hitchcock, like François Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (1968) and Brian De Palma's Sisters (1972) and Obsession (1976). He composed the scores for several fantasy films by Ray Harryhausen, and composed for television, including Have Gun – Will Travel and Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. His last score, recorded shortly before his death, was for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976).

RKO Pictures, commonly known as simply RKO, is an American film, television and stage production company owned by Concord. In its original incarnation, as RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., it was one of the "Big Five" film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain and Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Offices of America studio were brought together under the control of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in October 1928. RCA executive David Sarnoff engineered the merger to create a market for the company's sound-on-film technology, RCA Photophone, and in early 1929 production began under the RKO name (an initialism of Radio-Keith-Orpheum). Two years later, another Kennedy concern, the Pathé studio, was folded into the operation. By the mid-1940s, RKO was controlled by investor Floyd Odlum.

RKO has long been renowned for its cycle of musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the mid- to late 1930s. Actors Katharine Hepburn and, later, Robert Mitchum had their first major successes at the studio. Cary Grant was a mainstay for years, with credits including touchstones of the screwball comedy genre with which RKO was identified. The work of producer Val Lewton's low-budget horror unit and RKO's many ventures into the field now known as film noir have been acclaimed, largely after the fact, by film critics and historians. The studio produced two of the most famous films in motion picture history: King Kong and producer/director/star Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. RKO was also responsible for notable coproductions such as It's a Wonderful Life and Notorious, and it distributed many celebrated films by animation pioneer Walt Disney and leading independent producer Samuel Goldwyn. Though it often could not compete financially for top star and director contracts, RKO's below-the-line personnel were among the finest, including composer Max Steiner, cinematographers Nicholas Musuraca and Gregg Toland, and designer Van Nest Polglase.