LONDON (Kyodo) -- The 1953 film "Tokyo Story" by Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu has been voted "the greatest film ever made" by movie directors in a poll conducted once a decade by a British magazine, the BBC said Thursday.

Ozu's work ranked top in the poll held by the British Film Institute's monthly publication "Sight and Sound," which included 358 film directors including Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Mike Leigh and Quentin Tarantino.

The Japanese classic also came third in another poll by the magazine that asked 846 movie distributors, critics and academics to name one film "the greatest of all time." In the previous survey in 2002, "Tokyo Story" was fifth, while it also placed third in the 1992 poll.

The magazine said Ozu's skills as a movie director reached perfection in the production of "Tokyo Story," which tells a common story about family, time and loss.

The movie featuring actors Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara tells the story of an aging couple who travel from Onomichi in Hiroshima Prefecture to Tokyo to visit their children but are treated coldly by them. Only their daughter-in-law warmly welcomes the couple.

In the poll of distributors, critics and academics, Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film "Vertigo" replaced Orson Welles's 1941 work "Citizen Kane" as the greatest film of all time, dethroning the top choice for the last 50 years.