Sight & Sound Poll 2022

I am not, of course, a voter in the Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll, but that doesn’t mean I’m not prone to being swept up in a feverish celebration of the canon once every decade or so. The very nature of these lists dictates that relative safety wins out in the end, but I’m far more interested in the kinds of films that people vote for out of a sense of obligation, the ones that stand next to no chance of being a consensus winner but pop up on individual ballots simply because they mean something to someone. And so that’s how I’ve approached my own list. Each of these ten films has, for better or for worse, changed me in some way, and will no doubt continue to do so as the next ten years roll by. Or perhaps they won’t, and I’ll look back at these choices a decade from now and wonder what I saw in them. As for now, I hope, more than anything, that these films give you a sense of who I was in the summer of 2022.

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In chronological order:

Stromboli | Roberto Rossellini, 1950
Limelight | Charlie Chaplin, 1952
The Crucified Lovers | Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954
The Long Gray Line | John Ford, 1955
Bitter Victory | Nicholas Ray, 1957
Mr Klein | Joseph Losey, 1976
Blow Out | Brian De Palma, 1981
Day of the Dead | George A. Romero, 1985
Crash | David Cronenberg, 1996
Pulse | Kiysohi Kurosawa, 2001

Ten apocalypses, I suppose. It’s only in the act of making this list that I realised quite how doom-filled my tastes have become as I’ve careened towards my early thirties. A lot of gaps, of course, but there would have to be, and a lot of indecision. In any case, these are just about the films that I think about most often, and the ones that, when I think about what cinema means to me, stand out most clearly.