LONDON – Orson Welles' Citizen Kane no longer enjoys the moniker of greatest film of all time, a plaudit it has held for 50 years. After 50 years at the top of the Sight & Sound poll, Orson Welles’s debut film has been convincingly ousted by Alfred Hitchcock’s 45th feature Vertigo – and by a whopping 34 votes, compared with the mere five that separated them a decade ago. But it does mean that Hitchcock, who only entered the top ten in 1982 (two years after his death), has risen steadily in esteem over the course of 30 years, with Vertigo climbing from seventh place, to fourth in 1992, second in 2002 and now first, to make him the Old Master. So does 2012 – the first poll to be conducted since the internet became almost certainly the main channel of communication about films – mark a revolution in taste, such as happened in 1962? The top 50 
 
 Alfred Hitchcock, 1958 (191 votes) 
 
 Hitchcock’s supreme and most mysterious piece (as cinema and as an emblem of the art). So why is it Tokyo Story that is acclaimed by most as his masterpiece? With him, one has no qualms about using superlatives: La Règle du jeu is quite simply the greatest French film by the greatest of French directors. —Olivier Père 
 
 FW Murnau, 1927 (93 votes) 
 
 When F.W. —Isabel Stevens 
 
 Stanley Kubrick, 1968 (90 votes) 
 
 2001: A Space Odyssey is a stand-along monument, a great visionary leap, unsurpassed in its vision of man and the universe. —Roger Ebert 
 
 John Ford, 1956 (78 votes) 
 
 Do the fluctuations in popularity of John Ford’s intimate revenge epic – no appearance in either critics’ or directors’ top tens in 2002, but fifth in the 1992 critics’ poll – reflect the shifts in popularity of the western? Three silent films make 2012's top 10: Dziga Vertov’s documentary Man With a Movie Camera (1929) is a new addition, while 1927's Sunrise, directed by F.W. Another fallout from this year's top 10 is Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, a 1925 film that has appeared in the top 10 for all of the poll's 60 years in various slots. Like Eisenstein’s warhorse, it’s an agit-experiment that sees montage as the means to a revolutionary consciousness; but rather than proceeding through fable and illusion, it’s explicitly engaged both with recording the modern urban everyday (which makes it the top documentary in our poll) and with its representation back to its participant-subjects (thus the top meta-movie). —Nick Bradshaw 
 
 Carl Dreyer, 1927 (65 votes) 
 
 Joan was and remains an unassailable giant of early cinema, a transcendental film comprising tears, fire and madness that relies on extreme close-ups of the human face. —Mar Diestro-Dópido 
 
 Sergei Eisenstein, 1925 (63 votes) 
 
 Jean Vigo, 1934 (58 votes) 
 
 Jean-Luc Godard, 1960 (57 votes) 
 
 Francis Ford Coppola, 1979 (53 votes) 
 
 Ozu Yasujiro, 1949 (50 votes) 
 
 Robert Bresson, 1966 (49 votes) 
 
 Kurosawa Akira, 1954 (48 votes) 
 
 Ingmar Bergman, 1966 (48 votes) 
 
 Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974 (47 votes) 
 
 Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1951 (46 votes) 
 
 Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960 (43 votes) 
 
 Jean-Luc Godard, 1963 (43 votes) 
 
 Francis Ford Coppola, 1972 (43 votes) 
 
 Carl Dreyer, 1955 (42 votes) 
 
 Wong Kar-wai, 2000 (42 votes) 
 
 Kurosawa Akira, 1950 (41 votes) 
 
 Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966 (41 votes) 
 
 David Lynch, 2001 (40 votes) 
 
 Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979 (39 votes) 
 
 Claude Lanzmann, 1985 (39 votes) 
 
 Francis Ford Coppola, 1974 (38 votes) 
 
 Martin Scorsese, 1976 (38 votes) 
 
 Vittoria De Sica, 1948 (37 votes) 
 
 Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1926 (35 votes) 
 
 Fritz Lang, 1927 (34 votes) 
 
 Alfred Hitchcock, 1960 (34 votes) 
 
 Chantal Akerman, 1975 (34 votes) 
 
 Béla Tarr, 1994 (34 votes) 
 
 François Truffaut, 1959 (33 votes) 
 
 Federico Fellini, 1960 (33 votes) 
 
 Roberto Rossellini, 1954 (32 votes) 
 
 Satyajit Ray, 1955 (31 votes) 
 
 Billy Wilder, 1959 (31 votes) 
 
 Carl Dreyer, 1964 (31 votes) 
 
 Jean-Luc Godard, 1965 (31 votes) 
 
 Jacques Tati, 1967 (31 votes) 
 
 Abbas Kiarostami, 1990 (31 votes) 
 
 Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966 (30 votes) 
 
 Jean-Luc Godard, 1998 (30 votes) 
 
 Charlie Chaplin, 1931 (29 votes) 
 
 Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953 (29 votes) 
 
 Chris Marker, 1962 (29 votes) 
 
 → Explore the complete critics’ and directors’ polls with every individual entry on our special poll site
– Citizen Kane has to take a rare step back: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo has claimed its long-held title as "greatest film of all time" in a well-regarded survey, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Sight & Sound, the magazine published by the British Film Institute, says the 1958 movie with Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak got the most votes among 846 international film critics. Citizen Kane had been atop the once-a-decade survey since 1962. Tokyo Story, La Règle du jeu, and Sunrise: A Song for Two Humans round out the top five. Click here for the full list.