Sight & Sound: 1972 Critics Poll

Top films as voted by international critics. The Sight & Sound poll is probably the most renowned film poll. Critic Roger Ebert described it as "...by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies – the only one most serious movie people take seriously."

# Film Year Country Director
1 Citizen Kane 1941 USA Orson Welles
2 The Rules of the Game 1939 France Jean Renoir
3 Battleship Potemkin 1925 Soviet Union Sergei Eisenstein
4 1963 France, Italy Federico Fellini
5 L'Avventura 1960 France, Italy Michelangelo Antonioni
6 Persona 1966 Sweden Ingmar Bergman
7 The Passion of Joan of Arc 1928 France Carl Theodor Dreyer
8 The General 1926 USA, UK Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman
9 The Magnificent Ambersons 1942 USA Orson Welles
10 Ugetsu 1953 Japan Kenji Mizoguchi
11 Wild Strawberries 1957 Sweden Ingmar Bergman
12 The Gold Rush 1925 USA Charlie Chaplin
13 Hiroshima Mon Amour 1959 France, Japan Alain Resnais
14 Ikiru 1952 Japan Akira Kurosawa
15 Ivan the Terrible, Part I 1944 Soviet Union Sergei Eisenstein
16 Pierrot le Fou 1965 France, Italy Jean-Luc Godard
17 Vertigo 1958 USA Alfred Hitchcock
18 Grand Illusion 1937 France, France Jean Renoir
19 Mouchette 1967 France Robert Bresson
20 The Searchers 1956 USA John Ford
21 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans 1927 USA F. W. Murnau
22 2001: A Space Odyssey 1968 USA, UK Stanley Kubrick
23 Viridiana 1962 Spain, Mexico Luis Buñuel