The annual Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time had a few surprises this year. It took 50 years to Alfred Hitchcock's 45th feature, Vertigo, to become the Number One, but was it worth the wait! Apart from being a genuinely fine film, starring the great James Stewart and Kim Novak, Vertigo will now have to be watched as the film that ousted Orson Welles's Citizen Kane from the top spot the latter had occupied for half a century. 

      Other entries on the list vary from the more or less predictable Francis Ford Coppola, Akira Kurosava, and Jean-Luc Godard to the less expected Jean Renoir, Frank Murnau, and others. 846 critics, programmers, academics and distributors have voted in the poll. 

      Russian film makers have also received some due attention. Three feature films by Andrei Tarkovsky were included in the list - Mirror (1974, #19), Andrei Rublev (1966, #26), and Stalker (1979, #29). Sergei Eisenstein's classic, Battleship Potemkin (1925), scored just outside the Top 10, on the 11th place. 

      A surprising turn awaited the fans of the early Russian/Soviet cinema - a classical film by Dziga Vertov, A Man With a Movie Camera (1926), is thus described by Nick Bradshaw: 

      "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)". 

      Last year Vertov's film entered the list at #27. We'll have to wait and see how its position improves in a year's time - perhaps, this is the next Number One in the making?