The 50 Best Movies of All Time
Credit: Ethan Miller
sk 100 people to name their top
five movies, and you'll get 100 different answers. That’s the beauty of
cinema: it's an art form that impacts each viewer uniquely. One list
will be filled with classic Hitchcock horror; the next with modern,
independent dramas and Cannes Film Festival darlings.Combine all
those individual opinions into a single list, however, and you’ll likely
wind up with a ranking much like the one here. Regardless of whom you
ask, the same 50 films tend to emerge time and time again.
At PrettyFamous, an entertainment site from Graphiq, we set out to determine a consensus ranking of best movies. Specifically, we gathered, combined and normalized ratings from four key film authorities across the web*:
1. Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer Score and Audience Score
2. IMDb’s user rating
3. Metacritic’s Metascore
4. Gracenote’s Proprietary Rating for movies, based on critical scores
*We also included a slight adjustment for inflation-adjusted box office gross.
Using these figures, we calculated a single score out of 100 for every film in our database, normalized such that the top film received a perfect 100/100.
Pixar nabs five spots in the top 50 — fairly remarkable for a studio with fewer than 20 films to its name. Most of this is well deserved, but Pixar might also benefit from mass appeal, a characteristic typical of good children’s movies.
Meanwhile, directors Martin Scorsese, Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg each notch three films in the top 50, more than any other directors. Icons like Francis Ford Coppola and Alfred Hitchcock earn only two slots each, which might speak to the recency bias inherent in modern film websites, and to some extent, our methodology. Along the same lines, directing luminaries Orson Welles (“The Third Man,” 1949) and Stanley Kubrick (“Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” 1964) earn only one top film apiece.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, drama is the best-represented genre on the list, while fiction favorites like adventure and fantasy appear the next-most frequently. Action and comedy films are comparatively less well represented, mirroring a similar tendency in the Academy Awards.
Without further ado, the numbers say these are the 50 best films of all time.
Ben Taylor
At PrettyFamous, an entertainment site from Graphiq, we set out to determine a consensus ranking of best movies. Specifically, we gathered, combined and normalized ratings from four key film authorities across the web*:
1. Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer Score and Audience Score
2. IMDb’s user rating
3. Metacritic’s Metascore
4. Gracenote’s Proprietary Rating for movies, based on critical scores
*We also included a slight adjustment for inflation-adjusted box office gross.
Using these figures, we calculated a single score out of 100 for every film in our database, normalized such that the top film received a perfect 100/100.
Pixar nabs five spots in the top 50 — fairly remarkable for a studio with fewer than 20 films to its name. Most of this is well deserved, but Pixar might also benefit from mass appeal, a characteristic typical of good children’s movies.
Meanwhile, directors Martin Scorsese, Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg each notch three films in the top 50, more than any other directors. Icons like Francis Ford Coppola and Alfred Hitchcock earn only two slots each, which might speak to the recency bias inherent in modern film websites, and to some extent, our methodology. Along the same lines, directing luminaries Orson Welles (“The Third Man,” 1949) and Stanley Kubrick (“Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” 1964) earn only one top film apiece.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, drama is the best-represented genre on the list, while fiction favorites like adventure and fantasy appear the next-most frequently. Action and comedy films are comparatively less well represented, mirroring a similar tendency in the Academy Awards.
Without further ado, the numbers say these are the 50 best films of all time.
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