Wow, those Sight and Sound lists are boring.  Sure, all the films are good, but the majority of them just don't jump out at me as indisputably great, with Sunrise, Vertigo, 2001, and Tokyo Story being the obvious exceptions.  I really don't know what 8 1/2, Singin' in the Rain, and The Godfather movies are doing on that list; and I have a pretty big problem with the inclusion of Potemkin as well.  

Also, what happened to The Passion of Joan of Arc?  I guess I can forgive its exclusion, since (1) Sunrise was included this time around, and (2) it's not Dreyer's best.  Still, can anyone seriously dispute that it's a greater film than, say, 8 1/2? 

I thought there might also be a chance that a Bresson would show up on this list, with the recent international retrospective of his work and all the recent hype (at least among cineastes) surrounding it.  I suppose the problem might be that he has no single established masterpiece, and therefore his votes get distributed among several films.   

I don't really know where all this grousing is going, but it seems this list could have been a lot more interesting than it is.  I suppose this is why one ought to focus instead on the lists of individual critics or filmmakers whose taste you consider particularly good.  

That said, and my taste being particularly good (at least as far as I'm concerned), here's my alternate top ten (in boring alphabetical order):

Distant Voices/Still Lives
The Life of Oharu
M
The Magnificent Ambersons
The Man with the Movie Camera
Los Olvidados
Ordet
Stalker
Tokyo Story
Les Vampires

Note that I've implicitly limited myself to one film per director.  And if you really pressed me to for a preferential ordering:

1.  Ordet 
2.  M
3.  Tokyo Story
4.  Distant Voices/Still Lives
5.  The Magnificent Ambersons
6.  Les Vampires
7.  The Life of Oharu
8.  Los Olvidados
9.  Stalker
10.  The Man with the Movie Camera


And, finally, some painful omissions (in alphabetical order):  A Day in the Country, Greed, Kuhle Wampe, The Night of the Hunter, Scarface (1932), and Umberto D.  

  
      
