Sight and Sound's Greatest Films of All Time 2022

1964 film by Carl Theodor Dreyer

When disillusioned Swedish knight Antonius Block returns home from the Crusades to find his country in the grips of the Black Death, he challenges Death to a chess match for his life. Tormented by the belief that God does not exist, Block sets off on a journey, meeting up with traveling players Jof and his wife, Mia, and becoming determined to evade Death long enough to commit one redemptive act while he still lives.

Domingos is a member of an African liberation movement, arrested by the Portuguese secret police, after bloody events in Angola. He does not betray his companions, but is beaten to death in prison, and not knowing he is dead, his wife goes from a prison station to another, trying in vain to know where he is.

1959 film by Robert Bresson

1955 film by Douglas Sirk

During its return to the earth, commercial spaceship Nostromo intercepts a distress signal from a distant planet. When a three-member team of the crew discovers a chamber containing thousands of eggs on the planet, a creature inside one of the eggs attacks an explorer. The entire crew is unaware of the impending nightmare set to descend upon them when the alien parasite planted inside its unfortunate host is birthed.

A young black lesbian filmmaker probes into the life of The Watermelon Woman, a 1930s black actress who played 'mammy' archetypes.

1937 film by Jean Renoir

A student of the occult encounters supernatural haunts and local evildoers in a village outside of Paris.

1975 film by Marguerite Duras

Private eye Jake Gittes lives off of the murky moral climate of sunbaked, pre-World War II Southern California. Hired by a beautiful socialite to investigate her husband's extra-marital affair, Gittes is swept into a maelstrom of double dealings and deadly deceits, uncovering a web of personal and political scandals that come crashing together.

Picks up 25 years after the inhabitants of a quaint northwestern town are stunned when their homecoming queen is murdered.

A selfless young woman, the daughter of a middle-class refugee family from East Pakistan, sacrifices her own happiness for her unappreciative family.

In 1916, a Chicago steel worker accidentally kills his supervisor and flees to the Texas panhandle with his girlfriend and little sister to work harvesting wheat in the fields of a stoic farmer.

1965 French film by Agnès Varda

It’s winter in France, the light is dull, the camera pans over a snowy wasteland and enters a massive construction of steel and glass that is open at the sides, stopping in front of the reproduction of a wooden ship. The structure that juts out over the upper deck is inscribed with the words ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’. Med Hondo uses this tracking shot to establish the setting of his feature film West Indies ou les nègres marrons de la liberté (1979), while opening up a much larger space to the imagination at the same time. The ship turns out to be a most versatile stage for a grotesque narrative of colonialism, slavery and the struggle for independence in the French West Indies. Med Hondo explores his many themes in this limited space, whether it be the Middle Passage, marronage, abolition or the history of labour migration to France. The film marries an aesthetics of thrift with the flamboyance of a musical; different time periods glide into one other as elegantly as the geographical points of reference; and only occasionally do the actors’ visible exhalations, an alienation effect created by the cold, remind us that West Indies was not shot on Martinique.

1989 film by Hou Hsiao-Hsien

1964 film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

1999 film by Pedro Almodóvar

Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.