In 2002 Sight & Sound carried out a mini-poll of 50 UK critics to find out the best films of the last 25 years. The poll was done after the results of Sight & Sound’s 2002 Critics’ and Directors’ Polls to establish the top ten films of all time showed little change from the previous lists with Orson Welles’ 1941 Citizen Kane ahead of Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo to top the Critics’ Poll for the fifth time in a row. With no particular modern favourites emerging in the results Sight & Sound decided to get an idea of the best of modern cinema, films released since 1976. So below is the top 10 along with the top 10 directors from the period.
Top 10 Films
1 Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
2 Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)
3 Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman)
4 GoodFellas (Martin Scorsese)
5 Blue Velvet (David Lynch)
6 Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee)
7 Blade Runner (Ridley Scott)
8 Chungking Express (Wong Kar-Wai)
9 Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies)
10= Once upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone)
10= A One and a Two… (Edward Yang)
Top 10 Directors
1 Martin Scorsese
2 Krzysztof Kieslowski
3 Wong Kar-Wai
4 Abbas Kiarostami
5 Michael Mann
6 David Lynch
7 Pedro Almodóvar
8 Francis Ford Coppola
9= Spike Lee
9= Ingmar Bergman