Since the release of Sight & Sound magazine’s 2022 Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time critics poll, some of us agreed, others were appalled; in particular with the absence of masterworks by Luis Buñuel, Ernst Lubitsch and Howard Hawks. But the positive is that it opens pathways for lists by other cineastes which keeps the importance of cinema on the front burner. …

I have never been able to get behind director Vittorio De Sica as much as the critical consensus tells me I should. His neorealist classics — Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief, Umberto D. — seem to me flaccid, concerned with whipping up pathos to the exclusion of all else, and not always employing the most respectable means. When he made The Roof in 1956, it became clear that neorealism had reached a dead end...