A radical feminist film directed by the Belgian Jewish filmmaker Chantal Akerman has been named “the greatest film of all time” by British critics.

It is the first time a woman has won the accolade in the 70-year survey which is held every decade by the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound magazine.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai due Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is an experimental work released in 1975.

It offers “a feminist perspective on the stifling and frustratingly recurrent aspects of everyday life,” Sight and Sound said.

“The film sparingly depicts a homemaker and part-time prostitute struggling to raise and provide for her teenage son.”

Akerman, who was the child of Holocaust survivors from Poland, died in 2015.

Another Jewish filmmaker topped the directors’ best film poll this year - Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Orson Welles’s masterpiece, Citizen Kane, was named best film in the critics’ poll on no less than five occasions, and in the last poll in 2012, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo won the accolade.