Top 10 Greatest Movies of All Time

Yasujiro Ozu's 1953 film is a quietly devastating portrait of generational disconnect in postwar Japan. Its restrained style and emotional depth made it a touchstone for filmmakers worldwide — and in 2012, Sight & Sound's directors' poll named it the greatest film ever made.

Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 psychological thriller was initially a commercial and critical disappointment, grossing just $3.2 million in its first US run. By 2012 it had dethroned Citizen Kane at the top of the Sight & Sound Greatest Films poll -- a stunning reversal that confirmed it as Hitchcock's most obsessive and technically daring work, built around a double-exposure dolly-zoom technique he invented for the film.

Jean Renoir's 1939 French satire of the aristocracy was a commercial disaster upon release -- banned by French authorities and literally burned to prevent circulation -- but is now routinely voted one of the top 5 films ever made in the Sight & Sound poll. Its mobile camera work and simultaneous staging across multiple planes of action were revolutionary techniques 20 years ahead of their time.

Wong Kar-wai's 2000 Hong Kong romance was shot over 15 months on 10,000 metres of film -- roughly a 100:1 shooting ratio -- to achieve its signature slow-motion languor. Selected for Cannes Competition, it won the Best Actor award for Tony Leung Chiu-wai and is now ranked in the top 10 of virtually every major critics poll, widely cited as the most visually beautiful film of the past 25 years.

Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film introduced the concept of unreliable narration to global audiences. Its structure of contradictory testimonies fundamentally changed how stories could be told on screen.

Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 oil-boom epic earned Daniel Day-Lewis his second Academy Award in a performance widely ranked among the greatest in screen history. Shot on 65mm film across California's Ventura County oil fields, it grossed $76 million worldwide against a $25 million budget and topped dozens of decade-end critics lists as the defining American film of the 2000s.

Vittorio De Sica's 1948 Italian neorealist masterpiece follows a father and son searching for a stolen bicycle in postwar Rome. Its raw emotional power and use of non-professional actors changed cinema forever, and it received an honorary Academy Award in 1950, years before the Best Foreign Language Film category existed.