Glenn Kenny has a thoughtful analysis at Decider of the release of the once-a-decade Sight and Sound list of the best movies of all time, per hundreds of critics.
"Vertigo" and "Citizen Kane" were elbowed aside by -- wait for it -- Chantal Akerman's three-hour-plus tribute to drudgery, "Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" (even the extended title is a chore to get through).
"Jeanne Dielman" is one of those movies you set aside an afternoon for so that you can check it off your bucket list and say that you saw it. Just watch her peel potatoes! It is not required viewing. We finally caught up to it in 2019. We gave it a C. We preferred some of Akerman's other work.
Kenny cuts to the heart of the issue: "I can see why one would vote for it, as a statement if nothing else. Akerman’s 1975 movie is an undeniably Great Film, but it’s a film that achieves its greatness by deliberately withholding the conventional components we associate with great cinema."
Here is the top 20 (with the ones we've seen bolded):
1. “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
2. “Vertigo” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
3. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)
4. “Tokyo Story” (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
5. “In the Mood for Love” (Wong Kar-wai, 2001)
6. “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
7. “Beau Travail” (Claire Denis, 1998)
8. “Mulholland Drive” (David Lynch, 2001)
9. “Man With a Movie Camera” (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
10. “Singin’ in the Rain” (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1951)
11. “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans” (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
12. “The Godfather” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
13. “The Rules of the Game” (Jean Renoir, 1939)
14. “Cléo From 5 to 7” (Agnès Varda, 1962)
15. “The Searchers” (John Ford, 1956)
16. “Meshes of the Afternoon” (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943)
17. “Close-Up” (Abbas Kiarostami, 1989)
18. “Persona” (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
19. “Apocalypse Now” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
20. “Seven Samurai” (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
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