David Denby is an American journalist, best known as a film critic for The New Yorker magazine. Below are his picks for Sight & Sounds critics poll for the Greatest Films of All Time 2012. His choices include some of the most influential films ever made.
| L’Avventura | 1960 | Michelangelo Antonioni |
Citizen Kane |
1941 | Orson Welles |
The Godfather Part II |
1974 | Francis Ford Coppola |
Journey to Italy |
1954 | Roberto Rossellini |
The Life Of Oharu |
1952 | Mizoguchi Kenji |
| Règle du jeu, La | 1939 | Jean Renoir |
| Seven Samurai | 1954 | Akira Kurosawa |
| Sunrise | 1927 | F. W. Murnau |
| Tree of Life, The | 2010 | Terrence Malick |
| Vertigo | 1958 | Alfred Hitchcock |
Film 70/71
Film 71/72
Film 72-73 an Anthology by the National Society of Film Critics
Film, 73-74
Awake in the Dark: An Anthology of American Film Criticism, 1915 to the Present
Kubrick: The Definitive Edition (Paperback)
In 2010, the Toronto International Film Festival released its “Essential 100” list of films, which merged one list of the 100 greatest films of all time as determined by an expert panel of TIFF curators with another list determined by TIFF stakeholders. The list reads like a definitive guide to the best of world cinema.
Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness (Hardcover)
Thanks to the phenomenal success of German director Murnau’s The Last Laugh, he was invited to Hollywood by William Fox to make an expressionist film and given complete control on Sunrise. While the film is invariably described as silent cinema it was one of the first to be released and widely seen with a Fox Movietone sound-on-film music and effects track. Based on the Hermann Sudermann novel A Trip to Tilsit, it takes place in a colourful farming community, where people from the city regularly take their weekend holidays. Local farmer George O’Brien, happily married to Janet Gaynor, falls under the seductive spell of Margaret Livingston, a femme fatale from The City. He callously ignores his wife and child and strips his farm of its wealth on behalf of Livingston, but even this fails to satisfy her. Shot in Murnau’s accustomed manner, with elaborate stylised sets, complicated location shooting and experimental visual effects, the film’s costs far exceeded its earnings, but the poetic tale of sin and redemption overwhelmed critics with its beautiful visual aesthetics and continues to be regarded as one of the greatest films ever made.
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In 2008 Le Figaro polled 76 participants: critics, screenwriters and directors to come up with a list of the one hundred most beautiful films in the world. Citizen Kane predictably came top while Charles Laughton’s only film, The Night of the Hunter was second along with the highest ranked French Film from Jean Renoir, The Rule of the game. Charlie Chaplin is the only one to have five films listed. The most recent titles are Talk to Her by Pedro Almodovar (2002) and Mulholland Drive (2001).
‘The most important and misappreciated American films since the beginning of the cinema’, is a book of 150 pages published by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium (now known as Cinematek) in 1978 and compiled by Jacques Ledoux. The list in the book came from a survey which polled 203 participants (116 Americans and 87 non-Americans) around the world. Each participant compiled two lists, a list of the most important films (limited to 30 titles) and a list of misappreciated films (not limited in number). The final list is sorted by number of votes (including both important and misappreciated votes). The book lists all 2327 films that received at least 1 vote. This list below includes the films that received at least 5 votes. “Misappreciated” was taken by those with a knowledge of the English language as meaning underrated.
In July 2015 BBC Culture polled 62 film critics from around the world to determine the 100 greatest American movies ever made. There are some surprising results with Gone With the Wind which placed 6th on 
A list compiled by filmsite.org editor and film critic Tim Dirks of what he considers to be cinema’s 100 most critically acclaimed English language films. Dirks points out that such a list is extremely subjective although suggests that the films earn their places thanks to their repeated appearances on all-time greatest film lists. The films are listed in alphabetical order.
In 2002 The National Society of Film Critics brought out the book “The A List: The National Society of Film Critics’ 100 Essential Films”, edited by Jay Carr. It features 100 essays on the 100 Films. The essays look at the origins of the films, why the critics love them and their significance within the context of film history. The list is in alphabetical order. Buy – The A List: The National Society Of Film Critics’ 100 Essential Films