If I had a vote in the 2022 Sight and Sound Poll...
While the Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time does not pose a more specific prompt, each individual voter must ask what their own criteria should be. Are these the most important films? The most influential? Personal favorites? Within that criteria, do you also add a quota of diversity (geographic, language, decade of release, genre, gender or race of director and/or cast, one film each from a list of favorite directors, etc.)?
So here is the criteria that I've chosen for this list of the 10 greatest films of all time: "Which works best utilize the artform of filmmaking and its techniques to convey both their story and overall themes/message to audiences?" While this does help to focus the goal, there are still hundreds of films that I cloud easily argue belong on this list using that criteria. So I've decided to narrow this down films to those whose primary theme relates to the ultimate internal struggle of all humankind: choosing whether or not to do the right thing. While this makes one of my picks plainly obvious, it states the answer to the question most explicitly. Life continually presents each and every one of us with choices: left or right, forwards or backwards, right or wrong, good or evil, love or hate, hope or despair. How we process these questions and choose our decisions reflects what it means to be a human. Animals do not choose to "do the right thing," they just do the thing. Ultimately this chosen focus for the theme of this list is indicative of the movies that most impact me emotionally, that I keep returning to, that I continue to ponder long after the credits have rolled.
The films below are listed in order of attempting to tie them together into one cohesive and overall running theme.
So here is the criteria that I've chosen for this list of the 10 greatest films of all time: "Which works best utilize the artform of filmmaking and its techniques to convey both their story and overall themes/message to audiences?" While this does help to focus the goal, there are still hundreds of films that I cloud easily argue belong on this list using that criteria. So I've decided to narrow this down films to those whose primary theme relates to the ultimate internal struggle of all humankind: choosing whether or not to do the right thing. While this makes one of my picks plainly obvious, it states the answer to the question most explicitly. Life continually presents each and every one of us with choices: left or right, forwards or backwards, right or wrong, good or evil, love or hate, hope or despair. How we process these questions and choose our decisions reflects what it means to be a human. Animals do not choose to "do the right thing," they just do the thing. Ultimately this chosen focus for the theme of this list is indicative of the movies that most impact me emotionally, that I keep returning to, that I continue to ponder long after the credits have rolled.
The films below are listed in order of attempting to tie them together into one cohesive and overall running theme.
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