Despite being considered one of the best sequels ever made by just about anyone you could ask, the 1,600-odd critics asked by Sight & Sound in their latest greatest films ever poll could find no room for The Godfather Part II.
The poll, which takes place every ten years, is a renowned bellwether of the movies considered to hold the most cultural and historical significance — with filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard frequently coming high in the rankings. The British Film Institute, the organisation that manages Sight & Sound magazine and thus the poll itself, elected to broaden its voting body for its eighth iteration, inviting 1,639 critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics to have their say with a top ten ballot, up from 846 respondents in 2012.
There were a handful of shock omissions — and not just of Francis Ford Coppola's crime epic. Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull fell off the list having ranked at 53rd in the 2012 poll, as did the likes of Chinatown, Nashville, Lawrence of Arabia and The Wild Bunch. There was, however, newfound room for movies that you might be surprised to find didn't rank in the previous iteration: Scorsese's Goodfellas has made its way onto the list at joint 63rd, along with Billy Wilder's 1960 rom-com classic The Apartment, and Jane Campion's groundbreaking 1993 period drama The Piano, the first Best Director nominee at the Oscars by a female filmmaker.
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The 2022 poll is especially noteworthy for some of its more diverse additions, no doubt a product of the broadened votership. For the first time in its history, the poll has been topped by a female filmmaker, with Chantal Akerman's three-and-a-half hour 1975 domestic drama Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles taking the number one spot. “At last: a shake-up, a crack in the wall, a challenge to the canon, a change to the same old list-making business of reshuffling the same old names in a slightly different order at the top,” wrote film critic Peter Bradshaw in his review of the list for The Guardian.
Elsewhere, room has been found for such innovative recent hits as Moonlight, Barry Jenkins' achingly bittersweet triptych about a Black, gay man growing up in Florida, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a period lesbian romance set in 1800s France. Bong Joon-ho's Oscar-winning Parasite creeps in at joint 90th, too, as does Jordan Peele's racial horror-satire Get Out at joint 95th. It just goes to show that, in a moviescape shifting towards the stories of the marginalised, it's not just about the oldies. But maaaybe The Godfather Part II should've had a spot.
