Last year marked the 80th anniversary of Orson Welles' landmark 1941 feature Citizen Kane, which topped the American Film Institute (AFI)'s inaugural list of the "Greatest American Movies" in 1998 (and, once again, in their 10th anniversary poll in 2007). The film continues to turn up in various conversations on "The Greatest Movies of All-Time." This year (2022) marks the 50th anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola's celebrated big-screen adaptation of Mario Puzo's crime novel The Godfather, which also regularly stands shoulder-to-shoulder with cinema's greatest achievements.
I've been thinking a lot lately about why it is that such films as these have endured over the years, and why it is that various critics and historians have curated or highly-regarded them. I did some research a few months back, reading everything from the AFI to the British Film Institute, Rolling Stone, Steven Schneider's "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die," and late critic Roger Ebert.
Apart from these resources, I'm an avid user of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) the most, and I sometimes like to browse through excerpts of their respective reviews, as well as trivia, for further insight. For the following, I've arranged a list of the highest-rated picks from IMDb's "Top 250" (as ranked and rated by users), focusing primarily on metascores from critics and how they rank, from scores of 100 on down. Granted, not all of these flicks are universally-known, nor are they all for general audiences. It's just another interesting way of looking at the history of cinema. With that in mind, here are the top 25 films (as of this writing), along with synopses and other facts from IMDb, as well as review excerpts from some of the aforementioned resources. (Spoiler alert: Citizen Kane isn't at the top of this particular list, while only three films from the 21st Century made the cut for now.)
25. Ran (1985, dir. Akira Kurosawa, Japan)
Metascore: 96
IMDb "Top 250": #128
IMDb Star Rating: 8.2
Review excerpts:
Kurosawa pulled out all the stops with Ran, his obsession with loyalty and his love of expressionistic film techniques allowed to roam freely.
~G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Examiner
In many respects, it's Kurosawa's most sumptuous film, a feast of color, motion and sound: Considering that its brethren include Kagemusha, The Seven Samurai and Dersu Uzala, the achievement is extraordinary.
~Shawn Levy, Portland Oregonian
The Japanese title means chaos, and that is what is let loose when a powerful king foolishly tries to release the reins of power, in the hopes of enjoying a peaceful old age.
~F.X. Feeney, Mr. Showbiz
24. Modern Times (1936, dir. Charles Chaplin, USA)
Metascore: 96
IMDb "Top 250": #40
IMDb Star Rating: 8.5
Review excerpts:
Chaplin's sentimental politics and peerless comic invention dovetailed more perfectly in this film than in any other he made.
~Ty Burr, Boston Globe
The final outing for Charlie Chaplin’s beloved Tramp character finds him enduring the pratfalls and humiliations of work in an increasingly mechanised society.
~British Film Institute (#63 in 2012 poll)
23. Parasite (2019, dir. Bong Joon Ho, South Korea)
Metascore: 96
IMDb "Top 250": #31
IMDb Star Rating: 8.6
Review excerpts:
A masterful dissection of social inequality and the psychology of money.
~John Bleasdale, CineVue
Parasite begins in exhilaration and ends in devastation, but the triumph of the movie is that it fully lives and breathes at every moment, even when you might find yourself struggling to exhale.
~Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
[A] furious and fiendishly well-crafted . . . film. ... Giddy one moment, unbearably tense the next, and always so entertaining and fine-tuned that you don’t even notice when it’s changing gears, Parasite takes all of the beats you expect to find in a Bong film and shrinks them down with clockwork precision.
~David Ehrlich, IndieWire
22. Spirited Away (2001, dir. Hayao Miyazaki, Japan)
Metascore: 96
IMDb "Top 250": #29
IMDb Star Rating: 8.5
Review excerpt:
Miyazaki's works . . . have a depth and complexity often missing in American animation. Not fond of computers, he draws thousand of frames himself, and there is a painterly richness in his work. He's famous for throwaway details at the edges of the screen (animation is so painstaking that few animators draw more than is necessary). And he permits himself silences and contemplation, providing punctuation for the exuberant action and the lovable or sometimes grotesque characters.
~Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun Times)
21. 12 Angry Men (1957, dir. Sidney Lumet, USA)
Metascore: 96
IMDb "Top 250": #5
IMDb Star Rating: 8.9
Review excerpt:
A penetrating, sensitive, and sometimes shocking dissection of the hearts and minds of men who obviously are something less than gods. It makes for taut, absorbing, and compelling drama that reaches far beyond the close confines of its jury room setting.
~The New York Times
20. Gone With the Wind (1939, dir. Victor Fleming, USA)
Metascore: 97
IMDb "Top 250": #180
IMDb Star Rating: 8.1
Review excerpts:
The movie comes from a world with values and assumptions fundamentally different from our own--and yet, of course, so does all great classic fiction, starting with Homer and Shakespeare. . . . As an example of filmmaking craft, [it's] still astonishing. . . . The real auteur was the producer, David O. Selznick, the Steven Spielberg of his day, who understood that the key to mass appeal was the linking of melodrama with state-of-the-art production values. . . . [The film] will be around for years to come, a superb example of Hollywood's art and a time capsule of weathering sentimentality for a Civilization gone with the wind, all right--gone, but not forgotten.
~Roger Ebert, Chicago-Sun Times
Well, even if it is essentially four hours about a selfish, silly cow, it's impeccably well made, and should be seen by anyone with even a passing interest in romance or movies.
~Kim Newman, Empire
Gone with the Wind is a very good movie, perhaps bordering on being great, but its subject matter and running time (which is easily 60 minutes too long) argue against its status as a masterpiece.
~James Berardinelli, ReelViews
Gone with the Wind's epic grandeur and romantic allure encapsulate an era of Hollywood filmmaking -- but that can't excuse a blinkered perspective that stands on the wrong side of history.
19. The Third Man (1949, dir. Carol Reed, UK)
Metascore: 97
IMDb "Top 250": #169
IMDb Star Rating: 8.1
Review excerpts:
Director Carol Reed outdid himself with this noirish thriller set against a Europe physically and morally devastated by war. . . . The Third Man is a consummate production, from Graham Greene’s witty, disturbing screenplay to Robert Krasker’s evocatively skewed photography and Anton Karas’ unforgettable zither score. But, despite his minimal screen time, Orson Welles’ amoral Harry Lime steals the show . . .
~British Film Institute (#73 in 2012 poll)
A gorgeously atmospheric thriller about the black market in postwar Vienna offers a never-better Orson Welles as cheeky villain Harry Lime. And, oh, that cuckoo clock.
~Peter Travers, Rolling Stone (1999)
18. Dr. Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, dir. Stanley Kubrick, UK/USA)
Metascore: 97
IMDb "Top 250": #67
IMDb Star Rating: 8.4
Review excerpts:
The genius of Dr. Strangelove is that it's possible to laugh -- and laugh hard -- while still recognizing the intelligence and insight behind the humor.
~James Berardinelli, ReelViews
The film is a model of barely controlled hysteria in which the absurdity of hypermasculine Cold War posturing becomes devastatingly funny--and at the same time nightmarishly frightening in its accuracy.
~TV Guide Magazine
17. Psycho (1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Metascore: 97
IMDb "Top 250": #38
IMDb Star Rating: 8.5
Review excerpt:
What makes Psycho immortal, when so many films are already half-forgotten as we leave the theater, is that it connects directly with our fears: Our fears that we might impulsively commit a crime, our fears of the police, our fears of becoming the victim of a madman, and of course our fears of disappointing our mothers.
~Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
16. Pan's Labyrinth (2006, dir. Guillermo del Toro, Spain/Mexico)
Metascore: 98
IMDb "Top 250": #148
IMDb Star Rating: 8.1
Review excerpts:
[A] haunting mixture of horror, history and fantasy that works simultaneously on every level.
~Liam Lacey, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
There's plenty of blood -- both literal and figurative -- coursing through the veins of Pan's Labyrinth, a richly imagined and exquisitely violent fantasy from writer-director Guillermo del Toro.
~Justin Chang, Variety
15. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, John Huston, USA)
Metascore: 98
IMDb "Top 250": #147
IMDb Star Rating: 8.2
Review excerpts:
This superb tale of how greed eats at the soul, casting heroic Humphrey Bogart as a murderous panhandler looking for gold in Mexico and Walter Huston, the director’s father, as a toothless prospector.
~Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
Mr. Huston has shaped a searching drama of the collision of civilization's vicious greeds with the instinct for self-preservation in an environment where all the barriers are down. And, by charting the moods of his prospectors after they have hit a vein of gold, he has done a superb illumination of basic characteristics in men. One might almost reckon that he has filmed an intentional comment here upon the irony of avarice in individuals and in nations today...But don't let this note of intelligence distract your attention from the fact that Mr. Huston is putting it over in a most vivid and exciting action display.
~Bosley Crowther, The New York Times
14. Some Like It Hot (1959, dir. Billy Wilder, USA)
Metascore: 98
IMDb "Top 250": #136
IMDb Star Rating: 8.2
Review excerpt:
Billy Wilder’s zany cross-dressing comedy begins with a massacre – resembling the gangland St Valentine’s Day killings of 1929 – and ends with one of the most celebrated last lines in cinema history. Written in cahoots with the director’s new collaborator I.A.L. Diamond, Some Like It Hot ascends to inspired heights of silliness in-between, with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon both on career-best form as dragged-up musicians hiding out with Sugar Kane’s girl band.
Both the gangster story and the screwball antics hark back to Hollywood films of the 1930s, but Wilder’s outrageous and subversive play with gender was truly boundary pushing and helped lead to a loosening of censorship after United Artists released the film without certification.
~British Film Institute (#42 in 2012 poll)
13. All About Eve (1950, dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, USA)
Metascore: 98
IMDb "Top 250": #134
IMDb Star Rating: 8.2
Review excerpts:
“Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,” says diva supreme Bette Davis in this immortal take on the freaks of the theater, including Anne Baxter as Davis’ cutthroat protégée, George Sanders as an acerbic critic and the young Marilyn Monroe as a budding talent who trained, claims the critic, “at the Copacabana School of Dramatic Arts.”
~Peter Travers, Rolling Stone (1999)
Set in the Broadway jungle rather than among the ‘sun-burnt eager beavers’ of Hollywood, Joseph L Mankiewicz’s film dissects the narcissism and hypocrisy of the spotlight as sharply as Wilder’s, but pays equal attention to the challenges of enacting womanhood.
~Time Out
All About Eve is the consummate backstage story, a film that holds a magnifying glass up to theatrical environs and exposes all the egos, tempers, conspiracies and backstage back-biting that make up the world of make-believe on Broadway.
12. Rashomon (1950, dir. Akira Kurosawa, Japan)
Metascore: 98
IMDb "Top 250": #132
IMDb Star Rating: 8.2
Review excerpt:
The word ‘Rashomon’ has passed into the English language to signify a narrative told from various, unreliable viewpoints. In this case, the mystery relates to the murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife in 11th century Japan, events which are relayed in wildly differing versions by those present: the bandit, the treacherous wife, a passing woodcutter and the spirit of the dead samurai.
This radically non-linear structure, with its profound implications about the fallibility of perspective, impressed judges at the 1951 Venice Film Festival. They awarded Akira Kurosawa’s film the Golden Lion, helping to encourage a broader interest in Japanese film in the west. With its snaking bolero-like score and poetic use of dappled forest light, Rashomon is a work of enduring ambiguity.
~British Film Institute (#26 in 2012 poll)
11. Metropolis (1927, dir. Fritz Lang, Germany)
Metascore: 98
IMDb "Top 250": #110
IMDb Star Rating: 8.2
Review excerpt:
Fritz Lang claimed to have been inspired to make Metropolis by his first glimpse of the New York skyline. The result is the grandest science fiction film of the silent era (and for many years to come), a seminal prediction of a megacity where the masses work as slaves for the good of a ruling elite.
The DNA of huge swathes of sci-fi cinema is traceable in Lang’s production, from the mad-scientist creation of the robot Maria, which would feed into Hollywood’s Frankenstein (1931), to the imposing Art Deco cityscapes (ingeniously created using miniatures by Eugen Schüfftan), which became the model for later depictions of dystopian cities, from Blade Runner (1982) to Brazil (1985). The strikingly angular set design is characteristic of the German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s.
~British Film Institute (#35 in 2012 poll)
10. North By Northwest (1959, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Metascore: 98
IMDb "Top 250": #99
IMDb Star Rating: 8.3
Review excerpts:
This is Hitchcock's longest film and also his most self-referential. Little jokes abound about art and artifice, role play and reality, duty and duplicity and each viewing reveals something new to enhance the pleasure of watching the Master of Suspense at his most mischievous and assured.
~David Parkinson, Empire
North by Northwest is the Alfred Hitchcock mixture - suspense, intrigue, comedy, humor. Seldom has the concoction been served up so delectably.
9. Seven Samurai (1954, dir. Akira Kurosawa, Japan)
Synopsis: "A poor village under attack by bandits recruits seven unemployed samurai to help them defend themselves."
Metascore: 98
IMDb "Top 250": #19
IMDb Star Rating: 8.6
Review excerpts:
Strongly influenced by the poetic westerns of John Ford, Kurosawa’s story of farmers recruiting a motley troupe of samurai to help them fend off bandits in turn had a huge impact on subsequent westerns and action films . . . The early section’s gathering together of the diversely talented fighters is a trope in action movies to this day, while the restrained use of slow-motion in the frenzied final faceoff has since been abused to far less subtle ends. Kurosawa expertly sustains the suspense over a lengthy duration, instilling the story with an almost Shakespearian grandeur.
~British Film Institute (#17 in 2012 poll)
Rich in detail, vivid in characterization, leisurely in exposition, this 207-minute epic is bravura filmmaking -- a brilliant yet facile synthesis of Hollywood pictorialism, Soviet montage, and Japanese theatricality that could be a B western transposed to Mars.
~J. Hoberman, Village Voice
8. Singin' in the Rain (1952, dir. Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, USA)
Metascore: 99
IMDb "Top 250": #98
IMDb Star Rating: 8.3
Review excerpts:
To follow the acclaim for An American in Paris, which won him the 1951 Oscar for best picture, songwriter-turned-producer Arthur Freed charged screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green with writing a musical based around some of his own most popular early songs. The result was a nostalgic tribute to the Hollywood of a bygone era starring Gene Kelly as Don Lockwood, the swashbuckling silent star at a film studio grappling with the coming of sound.
From the iconic scene in which Lockwood, smitten with young actress Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), dances home during a downpour singing the title song, to the extended ballet sequence featuring Cyd Charisse in a parody of the gangster film, Singin’ in the Rain represents the musical genre at its most energetic and ambitious.
~British Film Institute (#20 in 2012 poll)
There is no movie musical more fun than Singin' in the Rain, and few that remain as fresh over the years. Its originality is all the more startling if you reflect that only one of its songs was written new for the film, that the producers plundered MGM's storage vaults for sets and props, and that the movie was originally ranked below An American in Paris, which won a best picture Oscar. The verdict of the years knows better than Oscar: Singin' in the Rain is a transcendent experience, and no one who loves movies can afford to miss it.
~Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
7. City Lights (1931, dir. Charlie Chaplin, USA)
Metascore: 99
IMDb "Top 250": #46
IMDb Star Rating: 8.5
Review excerpts:
City Lights comes the closest to representing all the different notes of Chaplin’s genius. It contains the slapstick, the pathos, the pantomime, the effortless physical coordination, the melodrama, the bawdiness, the grace.
~Roger Ebert, "The Great Movies" (2002)
By 1931 talkies were the industry norm, but Chaplin was autonomous enough to be able to make City Lights silent, preferring the purity of mute pantomime for the antics of his iconic Tramp character. Despite this anachronism, the result was a huge success with audiences, who responded to the film’s exquisitely poised balancing act between humour and pathos.
Earnestly sentimental in its story of the downtrodden Tramp being mistaken for a wealthy benefactor by a blind and impoverished flower girl, the film nonetheless yields some of Chaplin’s most ingenious comic set-pieces, including a classic sequence in which the Tramp becomes an unwilling contestant in the boxing ring. The closing shot, after it dawns on the girl who her sponsor really was, counts among the cinema’s most moving.
~British Film Institute (#50 in 2012 poll)
6. Lawrence of Arabia (1962, dir. David Lean, UK)
Metascore: 100
IMDb "Top 250": #103
IMDb Star Rating: 8.2
Review excerpts:
It was a miracle that picture... And maybe the greatest screenplay ever written for the motion-picture medium.
“I’m different,” declares Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence. Director David Lean had worked on something approaching this scale on The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), but his masterstroke with Lawrence of Arabia was to centre this colossal epic about the WWI Arab revolt on a strange and fascinating performance from O’Toole, then enough of an unknown to merit the credit “And Introducing...”.
One stunning set piece follows another: the entrance of Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) through a mirage, the capture of the town of Aqaba and the attack on a Turkish train. But for all this epic splendour Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson’s script asks searching questions about identity and loyalty, and the ultimately grim view of British intervention in Arab affairs remains all too relevant.
~British Film Institute (#81 in 2012 poll)
5. Citizen Kane (1941, dir. Orson Welles, USA)
Metascore: 100
IMDb "Top 250": #96
IMDb Star Rating: 8.3
Review excerpts:
The 26-year-old Welles, already renowned for his work in radio and theatre, used the unprecedented artistic license offered to him by RKO to create a fictionalised portrait of one of America’s most powerful men – press baron William Randolph Hearst. Charting the rise of Charles Foster Kane (played by Welles himself) – who decides to start a newspaper with his inherited fortune – Welles’ film is a classic story of the corrupting effects of power.
The use of deep-focus photography (keeping both foreground and background in focus) and abstracted camera angles, the non-chronological narrative structure and overlapping dialogue, were just some of the myriad formal innovations that Welles brought together for his groundbreaking debut. Such novelty and controversy proved a curse for Welles, whose career never enjoyed such indulgence again.
Any film to go after the dark heart of the American dream, from The Godfather (1972) to There Will Be Blood (2007), owes Citizen Kane a debt.
~British Film Institute (#2 in 2012 poll)
Pauline Kael claims that Welles’ debut film – the wonder boy was just twenty-five – is “more fun than any other great movie.” You can still sense Welles’ enthusiasm for film as “the biggest toy-train set any boy ever had.” The techniques he used to tell the story of a tycoon destroyed by ambition and childhood neglect revolutionized movies in ways that are still being felt.
~Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
4. Vertigo (1958, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Metascore: 100
IMDb "Top 250": #93
IMDb Star Rating: 8.3
Review excerpt:
This classic from the master of suspense was so poorly received upon release that Alfred Hitchcock later withdrew it from distribution for several years. Its reputation has since grown and it is now widely regarded as Hitchcock’s finest film, a haunting examination of male desire memorably filmed in real San Francisco locations.
The story of acrophobic Scottie Ferguson (brilliantly played by James Stewart), who compulsively remodels Judy Barton (Kim Novak) in the image of his dead love Madeleine Elster (also Novak), is unflinchingly dark and tragic. Though Hitchcock was originally deemed to have erred in giving away the film’s plot twist halfway through, Vertigo succeeds as a hallucinatory fable about the traps of desire. A thriller of dreamlike allure, it’s whipped to dizzying heights by Bernard Herrmann’s Wagner-influenced score.
~British Film Institute (#1 in 2012 poll)
3. Rear Window (1954, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Metascore: 100
IMDb "Top 250": #51
IMDb Star Rating: 8.4
Review excerpts:
A superb example of suspense filmmaking, especially when one considers the technical limitations of its single set.
Hitchcock confines all of the action to this single setting and draws the nerves to the snapping point in developing the thriller phases of the plot. He is just as skilled in making use of lighter touches in either dialog or situation to relieve the tension when it nears the unbearable. Interest never wavers during the 112 minutes of footage.
What's extraordinary, for a film that works on . . . different levels, is that it also manages to be a riveting thriller.
Simply put, Rear Window is a great film, perhaps one of the finest ever committed to celluloid. All of the elements are perfect (or nearly so), including the acting, script, camerawork, music (by Franz Waxman), and, of course, direction. The brilliance of the movie is that, in addition to keeping viewers on the edges of their seats, it involves us in the lives of all of the characters, from Jefferies and Lisa to Miss Torso. There isn't a moment of waste in 113 minutes of screen time.
~James Berardinelli, ReelViews
2. Casablanca (1942, dir. Michael Curtiz, USA)
Metascore: 100
IMDb "Top 250": #49
IMDb Star Rating: 8.4
Review excerpts:
Casablanca is as much about movies as about romantic adventure. It taps our love of movies, our involvement with them, our dreamy bondage by them.
~Jay Carr, "The A List: The National Society of Film Critics’ 100 Essential Films" (2002)
Set in Vichy-controlled Morocco during WWII, Casablanca revolves around a nightclub run by cynical American expat Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), where resistance fighters, immigrants and Nazis converge to police or partake in an illicit economy. In this colourfully exotic setting, created entirely on the Warner Bros studio lot, an affair is rekindled between Rick and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), the latter now the wife of a resistance leader.
Directed by Hungarian refugee Michael Curtiz, Casablanca exemplifies the consummately crafted Hollywood drama, in which all the elements seem to have fallen alchemically into place. The screenplay sparkles with memorable lines, the supporting cast overflows with indelible performances, and the whole is given an urgent, topical edge by being made on the cusp of America’s involvement in the war.
~British Film Institute (#84 in 2012 poll)
1. The Godfather (1972, dir. Francis Ford Coppola, USA)
Metascore: 100
IMDb "Top 250": #2
IMDb Star Rating: 9.2
Review excerpts:
One of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment.
~Vincent Canby, The New York Times
The wedding sequence... is a virtuoso stretch of filmmaking: Coppola brings his large cast onstage so artfully that we are drawn at once into the Godfather's world.
~Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Overflowing with life, rich with all the grand emotions and vital juices of existence, up to and including blood. And its deaths, like that of Hotspur in Henry IV, Part I, continue to shock no matter how often we've watched them coming.
~Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
Adapting a bestseller by Mario Puzo, young Italian-American director Francis Ford Coppola – then known primarily for low-budget countercultural films such as The Rain People – fashioned one of New Hollywood’s signature works, for a few years the most commercially successful film ever made.
Starring Marlon Brando as Don Corleone, an ageing Mafia ‘Godfather’, and Al Pacino as Michael, the youngest son who takes up the mantle despite his better intentions, The Godfather is a vast fresco of family life that is also a compelling account of the ruthless machinations of a criminal empire.
Revisiting the 1930s Hollywood trend for gangster movies, Coppola moved the genre in a grandiose, near-operatic new direction, assisted by Nino Rota’s lilting score and cinematography by Gordon Willis that’s full of inky darknesses.
~British Film Institute (#21 in 2012 poll)
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