Once every decade, “Sight and Sound” magazine has polled film critics from around the world and issued a list of the 100 greatest films of all time. Ever since the first poll in 1952, the “Sight and Sound” list has played a central role in film culture, sending movie lovers on obsessive viewing quests to watch them all, as well as catalyzing debates around the assumptions and biases that shape the canon. With over 1,600 critics contributing ballots, 2022’s edition is the most expansive yet, resulting in a list that includes old favorites like TOKYO STORY, THE RULES OF THE GAME, and SEVEN SAMURAI and new entries such as WANDA and CHUNGKING EXPRESS—as well as a new champion in the number-one spot, now occupied by Chantal Akerman’s singular masterpiece JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES. Drawing from Janus Films’s library of essential art-house classics, we’re pleased to be able to present so many of the poll’s selections—you won’t find as many of the consensus greats on any other streaming service.
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky • 1979 • Russian Federation
Andrei Tarkovsky’s final Soviet feature is a metaphysical journey through an enigmatic postapocalyptic landscape, and a rarefied cinematic experience like no other. A hired guide—the Stalker—leads a writer and a professor into the heart...
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo • 1966 • Algeria, Italy
Starring Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Saadi Yacef
One of the most influential political films in history, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, by Gillo Pontecorvo, vividly re-creates a key year in the tumultuous Algerian struggle for independence from the o...
Directed by Carl Th. Dreyer • 1955 • Denmark
Starring Henrik Malberg, Emil Hass Christensen, Cay Kristiansen
A farmer’s family is torn apart by faith, sanctity, and love—one child believes he’s Jesus Christ, a second proclaims himself agnostic, and the third falls in love with a fundamentalist’s...
Directed by Barbara Loden • 1970 • United States
Starring Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins
With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of characte...
Directed by François Truffaut • 1959 • France
Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy
François Truffaut’s first feature is also his most personal. Told through the eyes of Truffaut’s cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), THE 400 BLOWS sensitively re-creates t...
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1974 • West Germany
Starring Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin
The wildly prolific German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder paid homage to his cinematic hero Douglas Sirk with this update of that filmmaker’s 1955 ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. A ...
Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1976 • United States
Letters from Chantal Akerman's mother are read over a series of elegantly composed shots of 1976 New York, where our (unseen) filmmaker and protagonist has relocated. Akerman's unforgettable time capsule of the city is also a gorgeous meditati...
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard • 1963 • France
Starring Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance
Jean-Luc Godard’s subversive foray into commercial filmmaking is a star-studded Cinemascope epic. CONTEMPT stars Michel Piccoli as a screenwriter torn between the demands of a proud European direct...
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein • 1925 • Soviet Union
This incredibly influential Soviet silent film depicts a crew mutiny on the Russian Battleship Potemkin.
Directed by Chris Marker • 1983 • France
Chris Marker, filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and now videographer and digital multimedia artist, has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement ...
Directed by Carol Reed • 1949 • United Kingdom
Starring Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Alida Valli
Pulp novelist Holly Martins travels to shadowy, postwar Vienna, only to find himself investigating the mysterious death of an old friend, black-market opportunist Harry Lime—and thus begins this l...
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty • 1973 • Senegal
With a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a vivid, fractured portrait of Senegal in the early 1970s. In this French New Wave-influenced fantasy-drama, two young lovers long to leave Dakar for the glamour...
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky • 1966 • Soviet Union
Starring Anatoly Solonitsyn, Ivan Lapikov, Nikolai Grinko
Tracing the life of a renowned icon painter, the second feature by Andrei Tarkovsky vividly conjures the murky world of medieval Russia. This dreamlike and remarkably tactile film follow...
Directed by Chris Marker • 1963 • France
Chris Marker, filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and now videographer and digital multimedia artist, has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement ...
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger • 1948 • United Kingdom
Starring Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring
THE RED SHOES, the singular fantasia from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is cinema’s quintessential backstage drama, as well as one of the most glorious Tech...
Directed by Agnès Varda • 2000 • France
Starring Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda’s extraordinary late-career renaissance began with this wonderfully idiosyncratic, self-reflexive documentary in which the French cinema icon explores the world of modern-day gleaners: those living on the margins who surviv...
Directed by Fritz Lang • 1927 • Germany
Starring Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Brigitte Helm
Among the most visually dazzling and influential of all silent films, Fritz Lang's towering science-fiction landmark unfolds in a stunningly imagined future in which the populace is divided between worke...
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1960 • France, Italy
Starring Gabriele Ferzetti, Monica Vitti
Michelangelo Antonioni invented a new film grammar with this masterwork. An iconic piece of challenging 1960s cinema and a gripping narrative on its own terms, L’AVVENTURA concerns the enigmatic di...
Directed by Roberto Rossellini • 1954 • Italy
Starring Ingrid Bergman, George Sanders
Among the most influential films of the postwar era, Roberto Rossellini’s JOURNEY TO ITALY (VIAGGIO IN ITALIA) charts the declining marriage of a couple from England (Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders) on a tri...
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi • 1954 • Japan
When an idealistic governor disobeys the reigning feudal lord, he is cast into exile, his wife and children left to fend for themselves and eventually wrenched apart by vicious slave traders. Under Kenji Mizoguchi's dazzling direction, this classic Japa...
Directed by Edward Yang • 1991 • Taiwan
Among the most praised and sought-after titles in all contemporary film, this singular masterpiece of Taiwanese cinema, directed by Edward Yang, finally comes to home video in the United States. Set in the early sixties in Taiwan, A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY is ...
Directed by Charles Chaplin • 1936 • United States
Starring Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman
MODERN TIMES, Charlie Chaplin’s last outing as the Little Tramp, puts the iconic character to work as a giddily inept factory employee who becomes smitten with a gorgeous gamine (Paulette...
Directed by Jacques Rivette • 1974 • France
Starring Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier
Whiling away a summer in Paris, director Jacques Rivette, working in close collaboration with his stars and coconspirators Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier, set out to rewrite the rules of cin...
Directed by Víctor Erice • 1973 • Spain
Starring Ana Torrent, Isabel Tellería, Fernando Fernán Gómez
Criterion is proud to present Víctor Erice’s spellbinding THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (EL ESPÍRITU DE LA COLMENA), widely regarded as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s. In a small Castilian vi...
