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.
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M is a 1931 German mystery thriller film directed by Fritz Lang and starring Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert, a serial killer who targets children, in his third screen role. Both Lang's first sound film and an early example of a procedural drama, M centres on the efforts of both a city's police force and its criminal syndicates to apprehend a serial child-murderer.
The film's screenplay was written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou. It features many cinematic innovations, including the use of long tracking shots and a musical leitmotif in the form of "In the Hall of the Mountain King", which is repeatedly whistled by Lorre's character. Lang regarded the film as his magnum opus, and it is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time and an indispensable influence on modern crime and thriller fiction.
King Kong is a 1933 American pre-Code adventure horror monster film directed and produced by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, with special effects by Willis H. O'Brien and music by Max Steiner. Produced and distributed by RKO Radio Pictures, King Kong is the first film in the self-titled franchise, combining live action sequences with stop-motion animation using rear-screen projection. The idea for the film came when Cooper decided to create a motion picture about a giant gorilla struggling against modern civilization. The film stars Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Bruce Cabot. The film follows a giant ape dubbed Kong who feels affection for a beautiful young woman offered to him as a sacrifice.
King Kong premiered in New York City on March 2, 1933, to many rave reviews, with praise for its stop-motion animation and musical score. During its initial run, the film earned a profit of $650,000, which increased to $2,847,000 by the time of its re-release in 1952. Various scenes were deleted by censors, and in 1970, they were restored. Later, in 1991, the film was deemed "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 2010, the film was ranked by Rotten Tomatoes as the greatest horror film of all time and the fifty-sixth greatest film of all time. Various new editions of the film have also been released. A sequel, entitled Son of Kong, was made the same year as the original film, and several more films have been made, including two remakes in 1976 and 2005, respectively. The characters and story have since entered the public domain; the film's copyright is set to expire in 2029 in the US. Analysis of the film has included such topics as racial stereotypes, Ann's relationship with the other characters, and the struggle between nature and civilization.
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.
Jean Renoir (French: [ʁənwaʁ]; 15 September 1894 – 12 February 1979) was a French filmmaker, actor, producer and author. His La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939) are often cited by critics as among the greatest films ever made. In 2002, he was ranked fourth on the BFI's Sight & Sound poll of the greatest directors. Among numerous honours accrued during his lifetime, he received a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1975. Renoir was the son of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the uncle of the cinematographer Claude Renoir. With Claude, he made The River (1951), the first color film shot in India. A lifelong lover of theater, Renoir turned to the stage for The Golden Coach (1952) and French Cancan (1955). He was one of the first filmmakers to be known as an auteur; the critic Penelope Gilliatt said a Renoir shot could be identified "in a thousand miles of film."
Pauline Kael wrote that "At his greatest, Jean Renoir expresses the beauty in our common humanity—the desires and hopes, the absurdities and follies, that we all, to one degree or another, share." Per The New York Times: "The style that ran through Mr. Renoir's films — a mixture of tenderness, irony and Gallic insouciance‐was caught in a famous line from his 1939 masterpiece, The Rules of the Game. It was spoken by Octave, played by the director himself: 'You see, in this world, there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons.'”
Battleship Potemkin is a 1925 Soviet silent epic film produced by Mosfilm. Directed and co-written by Sergei Eisenstein, it presents a dramatization of the mutiny that occurred in 1905 when the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin rebelled against their officers.
The film is a prime example of the Soviet montage theory of editing, such as in the "Odessa Steps" scene, which became widely influential and often recreated. In 1958, the film was voted on Brussels 12 list at the 1958 World Expo. Battleship Potemkin is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made. In the most recent Sight and Sound critics' poll in 2022, it was voted the fifty-fourth-greatest film of all time, and it had been placed in the top 10 in many previous editions.
Bicycle Thieves (Italian: Ladri di biciclette), also known as The Bicycle Thief, is a 1948 Italian neorealist drama film directed by Vittorio De Sica. It follows the story of a poor father searching in post-World War II Rome for his stolen bicycle, without which he will lose the job which was to be the salvation of his young family.
Adapted for the screen by Cesare Zavattini from the 1946 novel by Luigi Bartolini, and starring Lamberto Maggiorani as the desperate father and Enzo Staiola as his plucky young son, Bicycle Thieves received an Academy Honorary Award (most outstanding foreign language film) in 1950, and in 1952 was deemed the greatest film of all time by Sight & Sound magazine's poll of filmmakers and critics; fifty years later another poll organized by the same magazine ranked it sixth among the greatest-ever films. In the 2012 version of the list the film ranked 33rd among critics and 10th among directors.
The Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time 2012 was a worldwide opinion poll conducted by Sight & Sound and published in the magazine's September 2012 issue. Sight & Sound, published by the British Film Institute, has conducted a poll of the greatest films every 10 years since 1952.
Au hasard Balthazar (French pronunciation: [o a.zaʁ bal.ta.zaʁ]; meaning "Balthazar, at Random"), also known as Balthazar, is a 1966 tragedy film written and directed by Robert Bresson. Believed to be inspired by a passage from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1868–69 novel The Idiot, the film follows a donkey as he is given to various owners, most of whom treat him callously.
Noted for Bresson's ascetic directorial style and regarded as a work of profound emotional effect, it is frequently listed as one of the greatest films of all time.
George Miller (born 3 March 1945) is an Australian filmmaker. Over the course of four decades he has received critical and popular success, and is widely known for creating and directing every film in the Mad Max franchise starting in 1979, including two entries which are considered two of the greatest action films of all time according to Metacritic. He has earned numerous accolades including an Academy Award from six nominations in five different categories.
His directing career started in Australia with the first three Mad Max films between 1979 and 1985 with his friend and producing partner Byron Kennedy, after which he transitioned to Hollywood with The Witches of Eastwick (1987). His family drama Lorenzo's Oil (1992) earned him his first Academy Award nomination after which he produced and co-wrote Babe (1995) and directed the sequel Babe: Pig in the City (1998). He would venture into animation with Happy Feet (2006), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and the sequel Happy Feet Two (2011), before returning to Mad Max with the acclaimed Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which went on to win six Academy Awards, and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024).