Orson Welles' magnum opus 'Citizen Kane' has been knocked off its perch as the greatest film "of all time", bbc.co.uk reports.

Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' has replaced Kane in the British Film Institute's (BFI) Sight and Sound industry poll which is made up of some 846 distributors, critics and academics.

It is the first time in 50 years that Kane, the story of a group of reporters trying to decipher the last words of a dying millionaire newspaper tycoon, has moved from the top spot in the decennial poll.

Competition between the two films was close the last time the results were drawn, with just five votes separating the two. However, this time, the critics have sided with Hitchcock's 1958 thriller - about a retired cop with a fear of heights - coinciding perfectly with the BFI's Hitchcock season.

Nick James, the editor of Sight & Sound magazine, told guardian.co.uk that while both films are a mark of filmmaking mastery, Hitchcock's Vertigo is the film that grows on audiences, moving them infinitely deeper than Kane.

"It feels like a much more contemporary film than Citizen Kane, which is a lot of bombast and is very theatrical and slightly hammy by modern acting standards. Vertigo is about our inner life," he said.

In a separate poll quizzing just film directors, Yasujiro Ozu's 1953 'Tokyo Story' was championed as the greatest film ever made.