Every ten years since 1952, the distinguished British film magazine Sight & Sound has polled critics and scholars to nominate their “ten best” films. Over the decades, the pool of voters has gone from a few dozen to more than 1600, and the greatest film ever made has switched from Bicycle Thieves to Citizen Kane (across multiple polls), to Vertigo, and most recently to Jeanne Dielman, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
Now in its third year, our Pantheon series draws from this list. Every third Sunday morning of the month we present one of the greats, preceded by a 20-minute introductory lecture by a local film scholar, and followed by an audience talkback.
Each film gets a repeat screening the following Tuesday evening.
Tickets include free tea or coffee.
Presented by
Guest Speakers
Films
Bicycle Thieves
De Sica's film about a labourer desperate to track down the bike that has been stolen from him is a landmark in film history, the movie that cemented the impact of Italian neo-realism on world cinema.
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
RW Fassbinder's lop-sided love story (60 year old German widow and a Moroccan twenty years her junior) shines an unflattering light on social hypocrisies.
The Cloud-Capped Star
Ritwik Ghatak is the unsung genius of Bengali cinema. His best known film is a a brilliantly structured melodrama about the terrible demands of poverty and family on the prospects of a young woman.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Céline Sciamma's queer costume drama -- about a painter covertly studying a young noblewoman who refuses to sit for her portrait -- was voted 30th Greatest Film Ever Made in a 2022 poll, the highest ranking film of the past decade.
Woman in the Dunes (35mm)
Teshigahara's collaboration with novelist Kōbō Abe's is vividly strange, erotic and unsettling allegory about an amateur entymologist who is himself ensnared in a trap he only dimly understands.
The Colour of Pomegranates + The House Is Black
This month's Pantheon screening is a double-bill, Sergei Parajanov's extraordinary evocation of the life and work of C18th Armenian poet Sayat Nova, and, The House is Black (22 min), the only film directed by the great Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
In December 2022, Chantal Akerman's 1975 masterpiece was voted the Greatest Film of All Time by 1600+ critics, academics and curators in Sight & Sound's prestigious once-a-decade poll. It's a rigorous feminist work and a stunning temporal experience.
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Vertigo
Runner up in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll of the Greatest Films of All Time (and #1 in 2012) this is Hitchcock's most personal and revealing film, a movie about male neurosis, fetishism and power, with James Stewart and Kim Novak.
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Beau Travail
Inspired by Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Claire Denis' transfixing Beau Travail is set in East Africa. Sgt Galoup (Denis Lavant) reflects on his time in the French Foreign Legion, and the impact of the handsome Sentain (Gregoire Colin).
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Singin' in the Rain
The greatest movie musical ever made, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's sublime Hollywood on Hollywood satire is dynamic, romantic, and very funny, with some of the most memorable dance numbers ever shot - including, of course, the legendary title number.
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Man with a Movie Camera
Bottomless invention and frenetic, dizzying montage make this city symphony one of cinema’s sharpest, most exciting experiences nearly a century after its release.
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Tokyo Story
Ozu's most celebrated film follows an aging couple as they come to the city and make the rounds of their now grown children. Busy with their own lives, the children have little time for their parents, who are quickly packed off to hot springs in Osaka.
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2001: A Space Odyssey
Based on Arthur C Clarke's short story The Sentinel, 2001 redefined the sci-fi genre. With its radical structure, scant dialogue and oblique narrative this was the first film to emulate the philosophical seriousness of writers like Clarke and Dick.
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Mulholland Dr.
Brunette Rita (Laura Elena Harring) wanders Mulholland Drive, dazed and confused after an auto accident. She finds refuge with Betty (Naomi Watts), an aspiring blonde actress who has arrived from Deep River, Ontario, with her innocence intact.
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In the Mood for Love
Wong Kar-wai's most popular film is a love story about two neighbours (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung) who are drawn together by the long absences of their respective spouses.
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Citizen Kane
Orson Welles's debut was the most sophisticated movie to come out of the Hollywood studio system to that time, and opened up the creative possibilities of the narrative feature film for generations. For nearly 50 years it was "the best ever made".
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Ran
Tackling King Lear in his seventies with the same gusto he brought to Macbeth 25 years earlier, Akira Kurosawa has a great warlord (Tatsuya Nakadai) blindly plunging the country into civil war when he divides his kingdom between his three sons.
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Persona
Liv Ullmann plays a famous actress, Elisabeth. Withdrawing from the world by refusing to speak, Elisabeth is placed under the care of a chatty nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson) in a remote seaside cottage. Ingmar Bergman's modernist masterpiece.
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Cléo from 5 to 7
Agnes Varda's second feature, Cléo from 5 to 7, is a marvelously charming real-time portrait of a young singer, Cléo Victoire (Corinne Marchand) one evening in Paris as she nervously awaits the results from a biopsy.
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A Matter of Life and Death
In this splendid WWII fantasy, RAF pilot Peter (David Niven) cheats death when his plane is downed over the Channel. Washing up on an English beach, he must plead his case for a life extension in the highest court of them all...
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Daisies + Meshes of the Afternoon
This program highlights two landmarks in feminist film: Maya Deren's surrealist short Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), and Vera Chytilova's subversive new wave farce, Daisies (1966), perhaps the most radical, confrontational film of the era.
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Sunrise
The consummate director of the silent era, Murnau was schooled in German Expressionism and embraced the fluidity and dynamism of the moving camera. Invited to Hollywood he prefigured film noir with this tale of a married villager seduced by a city vamp.
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Pather Panchali
Satyajit Ray's first film opened eyes in the West. It's a naturalistic portrait of the childhood of a Brahman child, Apu, growing up in a village far from twentieth century technology in West Bengal.
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The Night of the Hunter
One of the strangest and most beguiling movies you'll ever see, from a poetic, nightmarish novel by Davis Grubb, a fable about two children fleeing from a psychotic evangelical preacher (Robert Mitchum). Charles Laughton's only film as director.
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The Battle of Algiers
French Colonel Mathieu hunts for Algerian resistance leader Ali la Pointe in Pontecorvo's classic, which draws the battle lines between colonialists and Arab insurrectionists in a pulsating, "fly-on-the-wall" documentary style.
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Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise)
The crowning glory of classical French cinema, this sumptuous melodrama brings to life the early 19th century Boulevard du Crime in Paris, where popular audiences for mime shows and carnival rub shoulders with wealthy patrons of classical theatre.
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The Wild Bunch (Director's Cut)
The Mexico/Texas borderlands, 1913: Pike (William Holden) leads his gang of aging outlaws on a foray south for one last hurrah. Peckinpah's masterpiece, a savage lament for men who believe in nothing but find respect by dying in vain.
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The Ascent
During the darkest winter of WWII, two Soviet partisans venture through the backwoods of Belarus in search of food, always at risk of falling into enemy hands. In her masterpiece Larisa Shepitko zeroes in on profound spiritual and philosophical themes.
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