It's here: The once-per-decade Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time has released its latest iteration, with surprises aplenty throughout the list. Though the Rough Cut team were — shockingly! — not among the critics asked to contribute their opinions to the poll, that didn't stop us from putting together our 10-film ballots anyway. Below you'll find our choices, each in chronological order. While we all used different criteria to make our selections, we all recognize the challenge, futility, and even the inherent silliness in creating lists like these. That being said, what the films below share is a high level of personal importance: for each of us, these are the films that, for reasons both clear and unexplainable, define what cinema means to us.
Ben Nadeau
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975)
Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991)
The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998)
Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
Carson Cook
Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)
The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967)
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)
The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)
The Matrix (Lilly and Lana Wachowski, 1999)
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
Miami Vice (Michael Mann, 2006)
Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015)
Jonny Diaz
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)
Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
Sara Murphy
The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926)
High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)
The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977)
The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987)
A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)
Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001)
City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002)
The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, 2016)
Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019)
Zach D’Amico
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)
Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)
Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997)
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019)