Your Watchlists started with one question: which movies do critics, audiences and filmmakers agree are the greatest ever made? Instead of adding one more opinion to the pile, we combined seven of the most respected rankings, including the AFI Top 100, the BFI Sight & Sound Poll, IMDb, Metacritic, Variety, Rotten Tomatoes and Letterboxd, into a single composite score. You can read exactly how it works in our ranking methodology.
That gave us the Top 100, then The Next 250, plus every Oscar Best Picture winner. This blog is where we dig into those lists and the movies on them.
What's coming
First up is a decade-by-decade series: the best movies of each decade, according to the same top critical sources behind our rankings. Each post walks through the films that define a decade and why they still matter.
We'll also write guides for working through the lists, and the stories behind some of the movies on them.
Where to start
If you've never watched the Top 100, the top of the list is a good place to begin. Here's the film our seven sources rank highest overall:
The Godfather
1972 · Francis Ford Coppola
Spanning the years 1945 to 1955, a chronicle of the fictional Italian-American Corleone crime family. When organized crime family patriarch, Vito Corleone barely survives an attempt on his life, his youngest son, Michael steps in to take care of the would-be killers, launching a campaign of bloody revenge.
Ranked on 7 of 7 lists
- AFI Top 100#2
- IMDb Top 250#2
- Metacritic Top Films#9
- Variety Greatest Films#3
- BFI Sight & Sound#12
- Rotten Tomatoes#1
- Letterboxd#15
And the highest-ranked film not in English:
Seven Samurai
1954 · Akira Kurosawa
A veteran samurai, who has fallen on hard times, answers a village's request for protection from bandits. He gathers 6 other samurai to help him, and they teach the townspeople how to defend themselves, and they supply the samurai with three small meals a day. The film culminates in a giant battle when 40 bandits attack the village.
Ranked on 6 of 7 lists
- IMDb Top 250#23
- Metacritic Top Films#24
- Variety Greatest Films#6
- BFI Sight & Sound#20
- Rotten Tomatoes#2
- Letterboxd#5
Can't decide? Spin the Reel will pick a movie for you. And if you sign in, you can mark what you've seen and build your own watchlist as you go.