Pantheon: The Greatest Films of All Time

PANTHEON is a new monthly series running throughout 2023, a selection of the “greatest movies of all time”, inspired by the mother of all film lists, the critics’ poll that has run once a decade in the UK’s Sight & Sound magazine since 1952. (The results of the 2022 poll were announced in December.)

Of course there can be no definitive ten (or 12, or 100) Best list. But the poll does serve as a ready-made canon, and at the very least it’s a starting point for anyone curious about exploring the art of cinema (and arguing about it afterwards).

It’s also a snapshot of changing fashions and fixations in film criticism and academic circles. In 1952, Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves topped the list. Then, for forty years, from 1962-2002, Citizen Kane was crowned the Greatest. In 2012, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a film that was largely dismissed when it was released in 1957, usurped the top spot. And in 2022, Sight & Sound’s infinitely wider and more diverse constituency of 1600+ voters anointed a film directed by a woman: Chantal Akerman’s 1975 masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film that can truly be said to have revolutionized the art form but which is unknown to most of the general public.

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PANTHEON screenings will take place on the third Sunday of each month at 11am, and will comprise an introductory lecture from a roster of respected film educators, reading notes, and a discussion after the show. (There will also be a repeat screening on Tuesday evenings, without the talk.) Complimentary tea and coffee will be provided.

The focus of our series will naturally fall on the merits and qualities of the films under review, but also on wider cultural considerations on the subjectivities of taste, changing notions of excellence, diversity, representation, and what curatorship looks like at this moment in time.

Individual tickets $18