[3] Philip Dodd became the editor following the merging of Monthly Film Bulletin with Nick James taking over in 1997.

Sight and Sound has in the past been the subject of criticism, notably from Raymond Durgnat, who often accused it of elitism, puritanism and snobbery, although he did write for it in the 1950s, and again in the 1990s.

"[7] Sight and Sound first ran the poll in 1952 following publication earlier in the year of a list of the Top Ten Films, headed by Battleship Potemkin, based on a poll of mostly directors conducted by the committee of the Festival Mondial du Film et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique.

[9] 85 critics from Britain, France, the United States, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were asked but only 63 responded including Lindsay Anderson, Lotte H. Eisner, Curtis Harrington, Henri Langlois, Friedrich Luft, Claude Mauriac, Dilys Powell, Jean Queval, Terry Ramsaye, Karel Reisz, G. W. Stonier (under the name William Whitebait) and Archer Winsten.

[11] For the 2012 poll, Sight and Sound listened to decades of criticism about the lack of diversity of its poll participants and made a huge effort to invite a much wider variety of critics and filmmakers from around the world to participate, taking into account gender, ethnicity, race, geographical region, socioeconomic status, and other kinds of underrepresentation.

2001: A Space Odyssey topped the directors' poll for the first time in 2022 with Citizen Kane in second place and Tokyo Story in joint fourth together with Jeanne Dielman.

Among the directors that participated were Julie Dash, Barry Jenkins, Lynne Ramsay, Martin Scorsese and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

[10][15] Films directed by Sergei Eisenstein received the most votes with 46, followed by Charles Chaplin with 43 and Jean Renoir with 35.

[10] Closest runners-up: The Gold Rush, Hiroshima mon amour, Ikiru, Ivan the Terrible, Pierrot le Fou, and Vertigo.

Chantal Akerman became the first woman director to top the poll with her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.