Every ten years, the British film magazine Sight & Sound conducts a worldwide poll of film critics to determine what, in their opinion, are the ten best films ever made. This poll has been conducted since 1952 and is a great barometer of the cinematic tastes of the international critical community. For in-depth information on the 2002 poll, visit the Sight & Sound 2002 Critic's Poll page. For a look at the other five polls, go to Jeem's Cinepad.

Here's the part where I'm a nerd. I wanted to find a way to take all of the films from all of the polls (there are 32 of them) and rank them in order of stature. To do this, I devised a scoring system that awarded points based on the film's ranking a poll: 1st place is worth ten points, 2nd place is worth 9, etc. If you add up all of the points for all of the polls a film appeared in, you get a cumulative score for that film.

I then realized that the competition in later polls is much stiffer. Since new films are being released all the time, there are more films to compete with as time goes by. (12 of the 32 films did not even exist in 1952, when the first poll was taken.) To account for this, I added a weighting factor that awarded 5% more points to a film for each sucessive poll. For example, the 1952 winner recieved 10 points, the 1962 winner recieved 10.5 points, etc. I then re-scored and re-ranked the films based on this weighting. (The weighting turned out to have very little impact on the top and bottom of the list. Its main effect was to reorder the middle and break some ties.) You'll find the complete list of ranked films (with their scores) in the table below.

The most common question regarding this endeavour is, of course, "Who cares?", but I don't pretend to be able to answer that one.