Sight & Sound was first published in the spring of 1932, two years before the British Film Institute took over its management — making it one of the oldest continuously published film magazines on earth and, by the consensus of critics from Roger Ebert to the editors of every serious film journal in existence, the most important. Its decennial Greatest Films of All Time poll, first conducted in 1952, is not just a list but a seismic event in film culture: the only poll that most serious movie people take seriously, as Ebert put it.
The magazine reviews every film released each month in Britain, including those with only a limited art-house release — a commitment to comprehensive coverage that distinguishes it from virtually every other film publication. The writing has always been intellectually rigorous without being inaccessible, shaped by a succession of editors who read like a history of British film criticism itself: Gavin Lambert, who brought with him future directors Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz; Penelope Houston, who held the editorship for an extraordinary thirty-four years; and Nick James, who ran it from 1997 to 2019. The current editor is Mike Williams.
The 2022 poll was the largest in the magazine's history. More than 1,600 critics, programmers, curators, academics, and archivists voted for 3,800 different films. Nearly 600 directors participated in a separate ballot. The result — Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman at number one, the first time in seventy years the poll was topped by a film directed by a woman — trended globally for days and sent cinemas, distributors, and publishers scrambling to respond. It was proof that the poll is not merely a reflection of film culture but a force that actively shapes it. Only La Règle du Jeu has appeared in all eight of the magazine's decennial polls. The complete archive, stretching back to 1932, is available digitally — ninety-three years of the most sustained critical attention any art form has ever received from a single publication.
Explore Sight & Sound at <a href="https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound" target="\_blank">bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound