Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Chantal Akerman made Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles at twenty-five, with a budget of approximately $120,000 and a primarily female crew. The film opened at the 1975 Cannes Directors' Fortnight and was largely dismissed by male critics on first encounter. Forty-seven years later, in the 2022 Sight & Sound critics' poll, Jeanne Dielman was voted the greatest film ever made, the first film by a woman ever to top the once-a-decade ballot.

Across three days and 201 minutes, the film observes the meticulous domestic routines of a Brussels widow (Delphine Seyrig, in a performance of such concentrated stillness that it transformed her career), peeling potatoes, tucking her teenage son into bed, polishing shoes, receiving the single male client per day whose money pays the bills. Each task is shown in real time, frame-fixed, in long static shots from waist height. By the third day, the smallest disturbances (an overcooked dinner, a fallen brush) telegraph a rupture that the film's patient form has earned the right to complete.

Akerman's project was, in her own framing, to take seriously the rhythms of women's domestic labour, the kinds of activities cinema had spent eighty years cropping out. The 2022 result was less a discovery than a critical-mass recognition: of Akerman's wider body of work, of feminist film theory's long campaign to have its canon taken seriously, and of duration as a legitimate cinematic tool.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The film whose 2022 Sight & Sound elevation rewrote what cinema's official canon could include. Demanding, foundational, and overdue, but also genuinely a great film, not merely an important one.