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Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time 2022

Hello Humber!

We've got the movie-watching part of your break covered here at Humber Libraries! As you might know, the British Film Institute’s monthly film magazine  Sight & Sound  just this month released the latest results of their decennial  Greatest Films of All Time poll! If you’re unfamiliar with the poll,  Sight & Sound  reaches out to critics, programmers, curators, archivists, and academics around the world to submit a ballot of ten films they nominate as the greatest films of all time. This year was the largest turnout yet with 1,639 individuals voting! 

And here at Humber you’re in luck as you have access to most of the top 100 through  Audio Cine,  Criterion , and  Kanopy.  Browse the  entire top 100 list  and chances are you already have access to the films in it! Also check out  the  director’s top 100, which had a record turnout of 480 filmmakers around the world. Below is a small selection from the larger list for your consideration! 

Happy Viewing, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year! 

Movies!

 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

 1975 Belgium, France

 Directed by Chantal Akerman

“A singular work in film history, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick. In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or as one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, Jeanne Dielman is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades.” (Criterion)

 In the Mood for Love

 2000 Hong Kong, France

 Directed by Wong Kar Wai

“Hong Kong, 1962: Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung Man Yuk) move into neighboring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite—until a discovery about their spouses creates an intimate bond between them. At once delicately mannered and visually extravagant, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love is a masterful evocation of romantic longing and fleeting moments. With its aching soundtrack and exquisitely abstract cinematography by Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping Bing, this film has been a major stylistic influence on the past two decades of cinema, and is a milestone in Wong’s redoubtable career.” (Criterion)

 Singin' in the Rain

 1952 USA

 Directed by Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen

“Hollywood’s troubled transition from silent to talking pictures at the end of the 1920s provided the inspiration for perhaps the greatest of movie musicals.” (British Film Institute)

 Close-up

 1989 Iran

 Directed by Abbas Kiarostami

“Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and Close-up is his most radical, brilliant work. This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves. With its universal themes and fascinating narrative knots, Close-up has resonated with viewers around the world.” (Criterion)

 Seven Samurai

 1954 Japan

 Directed by Akira Kurosawa

“One of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai) tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits. This three-hour ride from Akira Kurosawa—featuring legendary actors Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura—seamlessly weaves philosophy and entertainment, delicate human emotions and relentless action, into a rich, evocative, and unforgettable tale of courage and hope.” (Criterion)

 Portrait of a Lady on Fire

 2019 France

 Directed by Céline Sciamma

“Passion brews quietly between an artist and her subject, until together they create a space in which it can briefly flourish, in this sumptuous eighteenth-century romance from Céline Sciamma, one of contemporary French cinema’s most acclaimed auteurs. Summoned to an isolated seaside estate on a secret assignment, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) must find a way to paint a wedding portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who is resisting chattel marriage, by furtively observing her. What unfolds in exquisite tension is an exchange of sustained gazes in which the two women come to know each other’s gestures, expressions, and bodies with rapturous intimacy, ultimately forging a subversive creative collaboration as well as a delirious romance. Charged with a yearning that almost transcends time and space, Portrait of a Lady on Fire mines the emotional and artistic possibilities that emerge when women can freely live together and see one another in a world without men.” (Criterion)

 Pather Panchali

 1955 India

 Directed by Satyajit Ray

“With the release in 1955 of Satyajit Ray’s debut, Pather Panchali, an eloquent and important new cinematic voice made itself heard all over the world. A depiction of rural Bengali life in a style inspired by Italian neorealism, this naturalistic but poetic evocation of a number of years in the life of a family introduces us to both little Apu and, just as essentially, the women who will help shape him: his independent older sister, Durga; his harried mother, Sarbajaya, who, with her husband away, must hold the family together; and his kindly and mischievous elderly “auntie,” Indir—vivid, multifaceted characters all. With resplendent photography informed by its young protagonist’s perpetual sense of discovery, Pather Panchali, which won an award for Best Human Document at Cannes, is an immersive cinematic experience and a film of elemental power.” (Criterion)

 Rear Window

 1954 USA

 Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

“The Master of Suspense ratchets up the tension while dishing out insights into obsession, urban living and the dangers of the gaze.” (British Film Institute)

 Parasite

 2019 Republic of Korea

 Directed by Bong Joon-Ho

“A zeitgeist-defining sensation that distilled a global reckoning over class inequality into a tour de force of pop-cinema subversion, Bong Joon Ho’s genre-scrambling black-comic thriller confirms his status as one of the world’s foremost filmmakers. Two families in Seoul—one barely scraping by in a dank semibasement in a low-lying neighborhood, the other living in luxury in a modern architectural marvel overlooking the city—become entwined in a dangerous relationship that will lay bare the dark contradictions of capitalism with shocking ferocity. A bravura showcase for its director’s meticulously constructed set pieces, bolstered by a brilliant ensemble cast and stunning production design, Parasite cemented the New Korean Cinema as an undeniable international force when it swept almost every major prize from Cannes to the Academy Awards, where it made history as the first non-English-language film to win best picture.” (Criterion)

 Get Out

 2017 USA, Japan

 Directed by Jordan Peele

“A poster film for Black Lives Matter, Jordan Peele’s horror-satire of white vampirism gleefully needles America’s racial malaise.” (British Film Institute)