Hey everyone, great to be back again. Some of you might remember a similar title from a list I made back in April, where I made a list of the top 250 movies with 13 sources, or a preview of this list I made last month.
I want to emphasize that this is NOT an official ranking nor my personal ranking; it is just a statistical and, personally, interesting look at 500 amazing movies. These rankings reflect the opinions of thousands of critics and millions of people around the world. And I am glad that this list is able to cover a wide range of genres, decades, and countries. So before I get bombarded with "Why isn't X on here?" or "How is X above Y?" comments, I wanted to clear that up.
I sourced my data from Sight & Sound (both critic and director lists), TSPDT, iCheckMovies, 11 domestic websites (Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, IMDb, Letterboxd, TMDb, Trakt, Blu-Ray, MovieLens, RateYourMusic, Criticker, and Critics Choice), and 9 international audience sites (FilmAffinity, Douban, Naver, MUBI, Filmweb, Kinopoisk, CSFD, Moviemeter, and Senscritique). This balance of domestic/international ratings made the list more well-rounded and internationally representative (sites from Spain, China, Korea, Poland, Russia, Czech Republic, Netherlands, and France).
As for my algorithm, I weighted websites according to both their Alexa ranking and their number of votes compared to other sites. For example, since The Godfather has hundreds of thousands of votes on Letterboxd but only a couple thousand on Metacritic, Letterboxd would be weighted more heavily. After obtaining the weighted averages, I then added the movie's iCheckMovies' favs/checks ratio and TSPDT ranking, if applicable. Regarding TSPDT, I included the top 2000 movies; as an example of my calculations, Rear Window's ranking of #41 would add (2000-41)/2000=0.9795 points to its weighted average. I removed movies that had <7-8K votes on IMDb, as these mostly had low ratings and numbers of votes across different sites as well. For both Sight & Sound lists, I added between 0.5 and 1 point to a movie's score based on its ranking, which I thought was an adequate reflection of how difficult it is to be included on these lists. As examples, a #21 movie would have 0.9 points added while a #63 would have 0.69 points.
Any feedback is appreciated, especially other sites I may not have sourced. If you found this list interesting, I would really appreciate it if you can give my newish Youtube channel a subscribe. It really helps a lot. Thanks guys.
Some stats:
Decades:
1900s - 1 film
1910s - 1
1920s - 22
1930s - 22
1940s - 40
1950s - 65
1960s - 75
1970s - 58
1980s - 54
1990s - 64
2000s - 55
2010s - 43
Directors with multiple films:
12 films - Akira Kurosawa
10 - Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman
8 - Charlie Chaplin, Stanley Kubrick
7 - Andrei Tarkovsky, Billy Wilder, Hayao Miyazaki, Steven Spielberg
6 - Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel
5 - Christopher Nolan, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen
4 - David Lynch, Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, Francis Ford Coppola, John Ford, Lee Unkrich, Quentin Tarantino, Roman Polanski, Sergio Leone, Werner Herzog, William Wyler, Yasujirō Ozu
3 - Brad Bird, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Clint Eastwood, Coen Brothers, David Fincher, David Lean, François Truffaut, Frank Capra, Hirokazu Koreeda, James Cameron, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, John Huston, Masaki Kobayashi, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pete Docter, Peter Jackson, Richard Linklater, Ridley Scott, Robert Bresson, Satyajit Ray, Sidney Lumet, Vittorio De Sica, Wim Wenders
2 - Abbas Kiarostami, Alain Resnais, Andrew Stanton, Arthur Penn, Béla Tarr, Bong Joon-ho, Brian De Palma, Chris Marker, Edward Yang, Elia Kazan, Emir Kusturica, Frank Darabont, George Cukor, George Roy Hill, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Isao Takahata, Jacques Tati, Jean Cocteau, Jean Renoir, Jim Sheridan, John Cassavetes, John Lasseter, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Kenji Mizoguchi, Leo McCarey, Louis Malle, Luchino Visconti, Max Ophüls, Mike Leigh, Mike Nichols, Mikhail Kalatozov, Miloš Forman, Orson Welles, Otto Preminger, Park Chan-wook, Pedro Almodóvar, Peter Bogdanovich, Peter Weir, Raoul Walsh, Robert Zemeckis, Sam Mendes, Stanley Donen, Terrence Malick, Terry Gilliam, Thomas Vinterberg, Victor Fleming, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou
Cloned from:
https://letterboxd.com/reelstats/list/the-500-greatest-movies-of-all-time-according/
Contains all Academy Award winners in Best Picture Category to date.
The list is in order of the Academy Awards Ceremony from the 1st one to the last.
The award was named "Outstanding Picture" for the first two AA. Until 1940 it was named "Outstanding Production". For 3 years between 1941 and 1943 it was named as "Outstanding Motion Picture" and from 1944 to 1961 "Best Motion Picture". Since 1962 the award is called "Best Picture".
Top 250 films on IMDB
A list of movies which famous movie critic Roger Ebert considers to be the best movies of all-time. Ebert has written extensive reviews for each and every one of these movies.
Source: https://www.rogerebert.com/great-movies
#BEST DIRECTOR & CORRESPONDING MOVIE BY YEAR
Directors only show up next to their first movie until Trakt allows the same item multiple times on a list
The 500 movies in this list have been selected by a combination of 10,000 Empire readers, 50 critics and 150 of Hollywood's finest.
Mafia / Gangster Related Collection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_series
https://www.filmsite.org/series-boxoffice.html
All movies sorted in historical order from the beginning of time until today
IMdBs Top 250 Movies is always changing and can feel overwhelming to someone trying to tackle this list. Below is a list of films that have always been on the Top 250 list. For the past 24 years these films have never dropped out of the Top 250 and is a great place to start.
List made using data from IMDB Top 250 History - https://250.took.nl/titles/recurrence/
The National Film Registry is the United States National Film Preservation Board's selection of films for preservation in the Library of Congress. The Board was established in 1988. Each year, 25 "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films" are preserved, to increase awareness for its preservation. To be eligible for inclusion, a film must be at least ten years old but it is not required to be feature-length, nor is it required to have been theatrically released.
Source: https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/film-registry/complete-national-film-registry-listing/
1970-2024 Oscars Best Picture Winners.
Daily Updated IMDB Best 250 Movies
The 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list is actually a film reference book compiled by various critics worldwide and edited by Steven Jay Schneider. The list spans movies from as early as 1902 up to recent releases.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1001_Movies_You_Must_See_Before_You_Die
AFI - Top 100 - Best American Movies of All Time - 2019
Cosa Nostra, Bloods, Crips and Mexican Mafia Mob Movies
Source: http://www.imdb.com/list/pVQCkiZoP9c/
35 movies missing from source.
This list is drawn from the second edition of "The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made", published in 2004. It contains a selection of 1000 reviews that have been printed in The New York Times in a time period of over seven decades. The majority of movies in this book are among the "10 Best Films" chosen by New York Times critics at the end of each year.
A list of movies that have been the subject of an episode of The Rewatchables podcast from theringer.com. Does not include spinoff episodes from their The Rewatchables 1999 podcasts, they are on a separate Trakt list. NOTE: Miami Vice episode is the first two episodes of the TV show. Heat and Titanic have multiple episodes, but can only be listed in Trakt once.
This is a complete list of every movie that has ever been included in the various editions of 1001 movies. Given that I only own one edition of the physical book, this is a easier way to keep track of what has been (once) considered essential viewing.
Perfect story: ✔
Great Directing: ✔
Great acting: ✔
By many great directors:
Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick, Sergio Leon, Alfred Hitchcock, The Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, David Fincher, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Ingmar Bergman, Milos Forman, Roman Polanski, alejandro gonzález iñárritu.
1001 Must See Movies Before You Die
by jtucci