Star Wars special effects voted best ever

George Lucas's groundbreaking Star Wars has won an award for the Most Influential Visual Effects Film of All Time exactly 30 years after its release.

The honour was granted by the Visual Effects Society, the entertainment industry's official trade organisation for visual effects practitioners.

The Society's 1,500 global members voted on the most influential visual effects films of all time, putting Star Wars at the top just ahead of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

Third place was a tie between another golden oldie, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the more recent Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix.

Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993) came fifth, Steven Lisberger's Tron (1982) came sixth and the 1933 version of King Kong came seventh.

Older films continued to dominate the top 10, with Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) in eighth place, Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) in ninth place and James Cameron's The Abyss (1989) in tenth place.

"These films have had a significant, lasting impact on the practice and appreciation of visual effects as an integral, artistic element of cinematic expression and the storytelling process," said Visual Effects Society executive director, Eric Roth.