Sight and Sound Top Ten 2002
The British film magazine Sight and Sound has been running a "Top Ten Films of All Time" poll every ten years since 1952. This decade's poll results were announced Friday, and Sight and Sound has done an exemplary job presenting the results on the web. You can browse the top ten lists (divided now into a critics poll and a directors poll), lists of every film and director receiving votes, and each individual voter's ballot, all seamlessly hyperlinked.
Four hardcore porn films from the 1970s received votes in this year's balloting: Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door, The Opening of Misty Beethoven and The Devil in Miss Jones. These votes were almost certainly provocations rather than sincere aesthetic judgments. Misty Beethoven is a legitimately great film (though L'Image is Radley Metzger's best film, in my opinion), but hardly worthy of "best films of all time" consideration. Another three non-porn films with lots of onscreen sex received votes: Ai No Corrida (aka In the Realm of the Senses or Empire of the Senses), Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom and The Pillow Book. And Daze fave Russ Meyer got two votes for Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!.
