‘Vertigo’ is now a better movie than ‘Citizen Kane’

”Citizen Kane”: no longer No. 1. (RKO Radio Pictures) Don’t feel badly if you still haven’t gotten around to watching “Citizen Kane.” It’s not the best movie ever made anymore. That honor now belongs to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.”

So says the newly revised list of the 50 greatest films of all time, as determined by the British Institute’s “Sight & Sound” magazine via its much-heralded, once-a-decade survey. As our friend Liz Kelly at Pop2It noted, “Citizen Kane” has held the top spot on this esteemed list for the past 50 years. But during this round of movie ranking by film professionals, scholars and critics, “Vertigo” outperformed the Orson Welles epic by 34 votes.

How does the rest of the top 10 list look? Like this:

1. “Vertigo”

2. “Citizen Kane”

3. “Tokyo Story”

4. “La Règle de jeu”

5. “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans”

6. “2001: A Space Odyssey”

7. “The Searchers”

8. “Man With a Movie Camera”

9. “The Passion of Joan of Arc”

10. “8 1/2”

Fun fact: only six films out of the top 50 were released post-1979. (Translation: “Total Recall” is totally not on it.) Also, while revered directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Billy Wilder, Akira Kurosawa and David Lynch all got at least one of their films on the list, others — like Steven Spielberg and Terrence Malick, to name a couple — were omitted.

Peruse the list and figure out how many of these movies you’ve actually seen. Feel free to share that number — and to weigh in on whether or not “Vertigo” is actually a better movie than “Citizen Kane” — by posting a comment.