Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Many scenes use one-point perspective a la Kubrick, and checkerboard floors to emphasize depth. The scenes especially in the kitchen are suggestive of Vermeer's domestic interiors. But maybe that's just me on a bit of a stretch.

Slice of life drama? If one wants to use the term. It is a strange aesthetic to portray monotony by boring the pants off of your audience. But 'portray' is perhaps the wrong word. It is a representation or a portrayal only insofar as it's a film. There is little mediation. A scene where Madame Dielman ascends to her floor in the elevator is given in real time. Why? The 'Odyssey' does not take 10 years to read.

The film would benefit from an extreme cut from its 3 hours and 22 minutes to something like 90 minutes to satisfy the connoisseurs. I would suggest more radical fast cutting, and the use of hip hop montage, to get the film down to a manageable short of 15 minutes or thereabouts. And then it would be fixed.

It is an excruciating watch. I watched it over three legs. I was curious. But its inaction is depressing and vexing. To resolve this bout of nothing the writer/director Chantal Akerman resorts to melodrama.

I find films like this very hard to rate. It is difficult to say anything new or astute about 'Jeanne Dielman.' Unbelievable as it sounds this film was well-received, and is, it seems, objectively significant in the history of cinema. In fact, it has recently been elevated to Sight & Sound's "greatest film of all time." The emperor's new clothes, anybody? Of course.

I think it is awful. So a two. No, actually on reflection, a one.

The ultimate tragedy of the film is that everyone you see through its lens is trapped in the 1970s.

I can safely say that I have never seen cinema like this before! Set out over a three-day period, we see widowed mother, Jeanne Dielman, go through her daily routine, many tasks played out in real time, the camera stubbornly static, and often, moreso earlier in the film, at waist-height looking upwards, so that Jeanne's head and shoulders frequently disappear out of shot. At first, watching these actions performed in full seems a touch unnerving - this is something that many people have carried out hundreds of times, but we have never before been forced to pay attention to the monotony of daily chores in such detail. However, holding these shots for so long draws the viewer in even further, making them concentrate on every action, so that when even the smallest cracks appear in Jeanne's monotonous routine, it appears to be almost earth shattering, just as the effect this has on Jeanne is equally momentous.

The wonderful Delphine Seyrig here plays Jeanne with an astonishing subtlety and restraint, almost emotionless throughout the three hours and twenty minutes of running time, yet it remains one of the most affecting, powerful performances that I have seen in cinema.

To see during 3 and half hours a middle aged woman silently executing the same household works over and over again is one thing. But to realize that this tired looking single mother is virtually cut out of the rest of society and hardly has an occasion of interacting with her fellow citizen, except routinely visiting teenage son and occasional sexual partners, is completely another thing. Once we notice this obvious fact, every act of repetitive domestic task is suddenly becoming painful to contemplate, strangely too familiar for many of us to dismiss simply as monotonous and insipid. All depends on your sensibility to such an existence. Some might find it to be trivial, pretending every woman is more or less supposed to do so since the Creation. Others might spontaneously feel a deep sympathy for her, a prisoner of one's own occupation unable to cope with a deepening void left by the irreversible passage of time, with a growing sense of non-fulfillment.

Apparently, this cinematographic study of housewife's social condition was first intended to be politically engaging at its release, and rightly so, seeing the socio-cultural contexts of 70s. But categorizing it simply as a pioneer of feminist film making, one would miss more essential values this experimental work may embody. If we feel a lingering melancholy and a vague sorrow toward the secluded existence of the protagonist, her solitary acts of peeling vegetables, boiling water, or mechanically making love with men for living... it is probably not because this is a mere depiction of women's status which one hope to be improved in more egalitarian society. We find here something much more deep seated in the modern men's existence in general, namely the social condition of laborers trapped by a particular mode of occupation, gradually and ineluctably losing any clue of human communication as well as the conviction of one's own destiny, without really knowing why.

The director was only 24 years old when this film was released and that's cool but obviously she lacked the skills of making a really good film. She made it easy for herself. The camera should not move, just stand there. This does not demand a skilled cinematographer. The actors should not talk, just do stuff like cooking food and reading. This does not demand good actors. It is not demanding to write the script either.

But we don't understand the film, right? If we understood it, we would acknowledge its greatness, right? No. We fully understand that the message the director wants to convey is that many women's lives suck and that they are fed up with society, life and being housewives and that men are to blame. They become depressed and crazy because of this. We do understand this. However, that political message in itself is not enough for a great movie.

How could this be ranked as number one on the Sight & Sound poll? It is sad. She was so young when she directed this film and you can tell by watching it! It is absolutely not the greatest film in the world. It is more like a typical film one would do if you lacked the resources to do something greater.

There are some clichés in the movie as well.

I give the film a 2-rating because I acknowledge some qualities. For example, the movie became pretty creepy in the end.

I can understand how the Sight & Sound Poll might have ranked this film on the Top of their list. Given the rules, I can see how many critics would have this film in their Top Ten. After all, every list needs an outlier, a film to cleanse the palette amongst the many genre films synonymous with this list, and JD may rise to the top in that category. When the votes are counted, this film may well be included in the majority of the ballots.

It's interesting in that JD is only one of two or three film on the list not categorized as ENTERTAINMENT, in its broadest sense. It is a philosophical piece, an art piece through and through, and it is presented very well, focusing on the external life of a woman, a mother, a widow, a prostitute, through a series of vignettes and makes no attempt to capture the internal life of the main character . In the age of social media, this film is an antidote to the INSTAGRAM/TIKTOK/FACEBOOK mindset of today. After viewing JD, I felt not so bad, in comparison, about my own life, even optimistic. In fact, I felt a sort of kinship with her watching her complete the most mundane tasks of daily living without a need for heightened emotion or personal drama. JD, of course, is not the greatest film ever made, but it may certainly be the best example of why films, like people, should not be ranked as if they were always in competition. This film, and many others like it, stands alone. (if that makes any sense).