IMDb Top 250 Movies

1.The Shawshank Redemption

The Shawshank Redemption is Frank Darabont's 1994 prison drama, adapted from a Stephen King novella. It flopped in theaters and then became, through cable replays, one of the most beloved films ever made.

2.The Godfather

Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 adaptation of Mario Puzo's novel about a New York Italian crime family. Three Academy Awards including Best Picture; the film by which post-1970 American filmmaking is often measured.

3.The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight is Christopher Nolan's 2008 superhero crime film and the middle entry of his Batman trilogy. Heath Ledger's posthumous-Oscar performance as the Joker reshaped what a comic-book antagonist could look like on screen.

4.The Godfather Part II

Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 epic, both prequel and sequel to The Godfather (1972). Cuts between Vito Corleone's rise from Sicily to early-twentieth-century New York and Michael Corleone's slow collapse in 1958. The first sequel ever to win Best Picture.

5.12 Angry Men

Sidney Lumet's 1957 directorial debut, shot in 96 minutes on a single jury-room set in nineteen days. Twelve men deliberate the fate of a teenager accused of stabbing his father, and Henry Fonda's lone dissenter slowly turns the room.

6.The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Peter Jackson's 2003 finale to his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Eleven Academy Awards, the highest fantasy gross in cinema history at the time, and the most successful adaptation of Tolkien ever filmed.

7.Schindler's List

Steven Spielberg's 1993 black-and-white drama about Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who sheltered over a thousand Jewish workers from the Holocaust. Seven Oscars and the seed funding for the USC Shoah Foundation.

8.The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Peter Jackson's 2001 first film of the J. R. R. Tolkien trilogy — shot in New Zealand back-to-back with its two sequels, scored by Howard Shore, and the film that proved a serious adult fantasy could carry a billion-dollar studio investment.

9.Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction is Quentin Tarantino's 1994 crime film, three interlocking Los Angeles stories told out of order. It won the Palme d'Or, took home the Oscar for Original Screenplay, and rewrote the rules for American independent film.

10.The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Sergio Leone's 1966 Spaghetti Western, the third in the Dollars Trilogy. Three men chase $200,000 in stolen Confederate gold through the American Civil War. Ennio Morricone's score is one of the most recognizable in cinema.

11.The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Peter Jackson's December 2002 middle chapter — the one with Helm's Deep, Gollum, and the Ents. Two Academy Awards, $951 million worldwide, and the entry where the trilogy's split-narrative structure forced Jackson to direct three movies as one.

12.Forrest Gump

Forrest Gump is Robert Zemeckis's 1994 picaresque about a sweet-natured Alabama man drifting through three decades of American history. It won six Oscars, made nearly $700 million, and has been argued about ever since.

13.Fight Club

Fight Club is David Fincher's 1999 satire about masculinity, consumerism, and dissociation, adapted from Chuck Palahniuk's debut novel. It bombed in theaters and became one of the most-quoted, most-misread films of the next two decades.

14.Inception

Christopher Nolan's 2010 science-fiction heist film about shared dreaming. Won four Academy Awards (cinematography, sound mixing, sound editing, visual effects) and grossed over $836 million worldwide on a $160 million budget.

15.Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

Irvin Kershner's 1980 sequel to Star Wars — the film that introduced Yoda, Lando, Hoth, Dagobah, Cloud City, and the line that rewrote movie endings ('No, I am your father.').

16.The Matrix

The Wachowskis' 1999 cyberpunk action film starring Keanu Reeves as a hacker who discovers his world is a simulation. Four Academy Awards, the bullet-time visual technique, and a cultural footprint deep enough that 'the red pill' is now a metaphor used by people who have never seen the film.

17.Interstellar

Christopher Nolan's 2014 hard-SF epic about a Kip Thorne-consulted wormhole mission to save humanity, anchored by Hans Zimmer's organ score and Matthew McConaughey's father-leaving-his-daughter performance.

18.GoodFellas

Martin Scorsese's 1990 mob film — adapted from Nicholas Pileggi's nonfiction Wiseguy, built around Henry Hill's 25-year career in the Lucchese family, and a permanent reference for how modern crime films are paced, shot, and narrated.

19.One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Milos Forman's 1975 adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel pits Jack Nicholson's R. P. McMurphy against Louise Fletcher's Nurse Ratched in an Oregon psychiatric ward — the second film in history to sweep the Big Five Oscars.

20.Seven

David Fincher's 1995 serial-killer thriller about two detectives chasing a murderer who designs his killings around the seven deadly sins. Bleak, beautifully shot, and the moment Fincher became Fincher.

21.It's a Wonderful Life

Frank Capra's 1946 fantasy drama starring James Stewart was a box-office disappointment on release, then drifted into the public domain in 1974 and became a Christmas perennial through unlicensed TV broadcasts.

22.The Silence of the Lambs

Jonathan Demme's 1991 thriller about an FBI trainee who interviews a cannibal psychiatrist to catch a different serial killer — the third (and most recent) film to win the Academy Awards Big Five and the only horror film ever to win Best Picture.

23.Saving Private Ryan

Steven Spielberg's 1998 World War II film, built around one of the most viscerally accurate combat sequences ever staged on film. It reset the genre and won Spielberg his second Best Director Oscar.

24.Seven Samurai

Akira Kurosawa's 1954 jidaigeki epic about a poor farming village that hires seven masterless samurai to defend it from bandits — a 207-minute film that effectively invented the modern action ensemble.

25.The Green Mile

Frank Darabont's 1999 adaptation of Stephen King's serial novel is a three-hour Depression-era death-row drama starring Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan, made by the same writer-director team behind The Shawshank Redemption.

26.City of God

Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's 2002 Brazilian crime epic traces two decades inside Rio's Cidade de Deus favela through a cast of mostly first-time actors from the neighborhood itself. Four Oscar nominations followed.

27.Life Is Beautiful

Roberto Benigni's 1997 Italian film. A Jewish Italian father uses elaborate fiction to convince his young son that their imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp is an enormous game. Won three Oscars including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor for Benigni.

28.Terminator 2: Judgment Day

James Cameron's 1991 sequel that turned the original's modest cyborg horror movie into a $100M science-fiction epic. The CGI work changed Hollywood. The film itself is also still terrific.

29.Back to the Future

Robert Zemeckis's 1985 time-travel comedy: a teenager accidentally drives a DeLorean back to 1955 and has to keep his teenage mother from falling in love with him. The highest-grossing film of its year.

30.Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope

George Lucas's 1977 space-fantasy that fused Joseph Campbell mythmaking, Kurosawa structure, and ILM-pioneered effects into the modern blockbuster, won seven Oscars, and launched a franchise that reshaped Hollywood.

31.Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair

Quentin Tarantino’s combined cut presents the Bride’s revenge journey as one continuous, genre-spanning epic of martial arts, exploitation cinema, animation, and wounded loyalty.

32.Spirited Away

Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 animated feature about a sulky ten-year-old girl trapped in a bathhouse for the gods. The first non-English film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and one of the highest-grossing films in Japanese history.

33.Gladiator

Gladiator is Ridley Scott's 2000 epic about a Roman general turned slave-arena fighter seeking revenge on the emperor who killed his family. It revived the sword-and-sandal genre and won five Oscars including Best Picture.

34.The Pianist

Roman Polanski's 2002 adaptation of Władysław Szpilman's memoir of surviving the Warsaw Ghetto. Won the Palme d'Or, three Oscars including Best Director and Best Actor for Adrien Brody, and is the most directly autobiographical film of Polanski's career.

35.Parasite

Bong Joon Ho’s precisely engineered tragicomedy follows a struggling Seoul family whose entry into a wealthy household exposes the architecture of class inequality.

36.Grave of the Fireflies

Isao Takahata's 1988 animated drama follows two siblings in the last months of WWII Japan. Adapted from Akiyuki Nosaka's semi-autobiographical story, it remains one of the most devastating war films ever made.

37.Psycho

Hitchcock's 1960 thriller killed off its protagonist in the first hour, shocked the Production Code, and effectively invented the modern slasher film. Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, the Bates Motel, and the 78-second shower scene.

38.Harakiri

Masaki Kobayashi’s devastating samurai drama uses one ronin’s formal request for ritual suicide to expose cruelty beneath the rhetoric of honor.

39.The Lion King

Disney's 1994 animated feature is the highest-grossing traditionally animated film ever made — a Shakespearean coming-of-age story scored by Hans Zimmer, with songs by Elton John and Tim Rice, set against the African savanna.

40.The Departed

The Departed is Martin Scorsese's 2006 Boston crime film about an undercover cop in the Irish mob and an undercover mobster in the state police, both racing to expose each other. It won Scorsese his only Best Director Oscar.

41.Whiplash

Damien Chazelle's 2014 drama about a jazz drummer and his abusive conservatory instructor. Won three Academy Awards including Best Supporting Actor for J.K. Simmons; made on a $3.3 million budget and grossed $50 million.

42.The Prestige

Christopher Nolan's 2006 adaptation of Christopher Priest's 1995 novel is a non-linear mystery about two rival Victorian-era stage magicians, with Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale in the lead roles and a literal-magic third-act reveal.

43.American History X

Tony Kaye's 1998 drama about a Los Angeles neo-Nazi who tries to talk his younger brother out of the movement that put him in prison. Built on a feature-defining Edward Norton performance.

44.Léon: The Professional

Luc Besson's 1994 New York crime drama about a taciturn Italian hitman who reluctantly takes in a 12-year-old neighbor after her family is murdered — Jean Reno, Natalie Portman's debut, and Gary Oldman at his most volatile, in a film whose central relationship still divides critics.

45.Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

The 2023 animated sequel to Into the Spider-Verse. Miles Morales meets the Spider-Society and finds out the multiverse has a canon it expects him to obey. Ends on a cliffhanger.

46.Cinema Paradiso

Giuseppe Tornatore's 1988 Italian drama about a small Sicilian village's movie theatre and the boy who grows up in its projection booth won the 1990 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film — but only after a 51-minute trim saved a flop.

47.Casablanca

Michael Curtiz's 1942 wartime romance about a cynical American expat in Vichy-controlled Morocco won three Academy Awards and is one of the most quoted, most rewatched films ever made — partly because it was rewritten as it shot.

48.The Intouchables

A wealthy Parisian quadriplegic and an inexperienced caregiver from the suburbs develop a lively friendship that crosses differences of class, race, taste, and expectation.

49.The Usual Suspects

Bryan Singer's 1995 neo-noir built on an unreliable narrator, a corkboard, and a final reveal — written by Christopher McQuarrie and remembered for one of cinema's most quoted twists.

50.Django Unchained

Quentin Tarantino's 2012 spaghetti-Western revenge film about a freed slave hunting his wife's owner across the antebellum South. Won two Oscars, grossed over $425 million worldwide, and is the only Tarantino film whose central romance carries the plot.

51.Alien

Ridley Scott's 1979 deep-space horror film about the crew of a commercial towing ship and the creature that gets aboard with them. The film that proved science fiction and horror were the same genre with different production designers.

52.Rear Window

Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 thriller about a housebound photographer who suspects his neighbor of murder, shot entirely from a single Greenwich Village apartment set, is a masterclass in confined-space suspense and audience complicity in voyeurism.

53.Modern Times

Charlie Chaplin's 1936 film about an assembly-line worker trying to survive the Great Depression. The last full appearance of the Tramp character, the first time Chaplin's voice is ever heard on screen, and a working argument that silent film could still mean something in the sound era.

54.Once Upon a Time in the West

Sergio Leone's 1968 epic Western turns the genre's conventions against themselves — Henry Fonda cast against type as a killer, Ennio Morricone's score recorded before filming, and one of cinema's longest opening sequences.

55.City Lights

Charlie Chaplin's 1931 silent romantic comedy, released four years into the sound era, in which the Tramp loves a blind flower girl. Widely cited as one of the greatest films ever made.

56.WALL·E

Pixar's 2008 film directed by Andrew Stanton follows the last trash-compactor robot left running on an abandoned Earth, who meets a reconnaissance robot named EVE and follows her to a cruise ship full of humans in space. Its first 40 minutes have almost no dialogue.

57.Apocalypse Now

Francis Ford Coppola's hallucinatory 1979 Vietnam War film, a loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness whose 16-month Philippine shoot nearly destroyed the production and its director.

58.Memento

Christopher Nolan's second feature, adapted from his brother Jonathan's short story, tells the story of a man with no short-term memory hunting his wife's killer — and tells it backwards.

59.Avengers: Infinity War

The Russo brothers' 2018 crossover film bringing together every major hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe against Thanos. Closes on the Snap. Grossed $2.05 billion worldwide and is one of the largest-scale studio films ever made.

60.Dune: Part Two

Denis Villeneuve's 2024 sequel completing his adaptation of Frank Herbert's first Dune novel. A $711 million spectacle that treats its religious-prophecy plot as warning rather than triumph.

61.Raiders of the Lost Ark

Steven Spielberg's 1981 archaeology-adventure film that introduced Indiana Jones. A homage to 1930s movie serials that became the highest-grossing film of its year and one of the most-imitated adventure templates in cinema.

62.Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Miles Morales’s first animated feature transforms comic-book form into motion as multiple Spider-heroes help him discover that courage begins before anyone feels ready.

63.The Lives of Others

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's 2006 debut feature is a quiet, devastating drama about a Stasi captain who begins to doubt the system he serves while surveilling an East Berlin playwright in 1984. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

64.Sunset Boulevard

Billy Wilder's 1950 noir about a faded silent-era star and the screenwriter who washes up at her gate is narrated from the bottom of a swimming pool by a dead man. It is Hollywood's sharpest film about itself.

65.Witness for the Prosecution

Billy Wilder's 1957 courtroom thriller, adapted from Agatha Christie's stage play, anchored by Charles Laughton's gout-ridden barrister and Marlene Dietrich's most calculating performance. The film Christie herself called the best made from her work.

66.Paths of Glory

Stanley Kubrick's 1957 anti-war film — a French colonel defends three soldiers court-martialed for cowardice after a suicidal World War I attack their generals knew would fail.

67.The Shining

Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror film, a heavily reworked adaptation of Stephen King's novel that traps a writer, his wife, and their psychic son in an empty Colorado hotel for the winter.

68.The Great Dictator

Charlie Chaplin's 1940 satire was his first full sound film and a direct attack on Adolf Hitler, written, directed, produced, scored, and starred-in by Chaplin while the United States was still officially neutral toward Nazi Germany.

69.Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino's 2009 alternate-history war film about a Jewish-American sabotage unit and a French-Jewish cinema owner converging on a Nazi premiere in occupied Paris — the picture that won Christoph Waltz his first Oscar.

70.Aliens

James Cameron's 1986 sequel to Ridley Scott's Alien — the action-horror benchmark that turned a haunted-house story into a Vietnam-era war picture and earned Sigourney Weaver an unprecedented Best Actress nomination for a sci-fi role.

71.12th Fail

Vidhu Vinod Chopra turns the true story of civil-service candidate Manoj Kumar Sharma into an unusually grounded portrait of persistence, integrity, and educational inequality in India.

72.High and Low

Akira Kurosawa transforms a kidnapping mistake into a tense moral inquiry and a panoramic study of class, police work, and postwar Japanese modernity.

73.Avengers: Endgame

The Russo brothers' 2019 closer to the 22-film Infinity Saga. Three hours, a time-travel heist, the largest box office in cinema history at the time of release, and the deaths or retirements of three of the original six Avengers.

74.Good Will Hunting

A working-class mathematical prodigy in South Boston confronts the limits of intelligence when therapy, friendship, and intimacy demand a different kind of courage.

75.Coco

Pixar's 2017 fantasy turns Día de Muertos imagery, Mexican musical traditions, and a family mystery into one of the studio's most emotionally precise adventures. Its dazzling afterlife matters because every color, joke, and song serves a story about who remains alive in memory.

76.The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan's 2012 conclusion to his Batman trilogy — eight years after The Dark Knight, a broken Bruce Wayne faces Bane, a mercenary who breaks his back and seizes Gotham.

77.Toy Story

Pixar's 1995 debut made the first fully computer-animated feature feel intimate, funny, and emotionally recognizable. Beneath the technological milestone is a precise story about jealousy, identity, and an unlikely friendship.

78.Amadeus

Milos Forman's 1984 adaptation of Peter Shaffer's stage play frames Mozart's life through the eyes of his rival Antonio Salieri — a story about mediocrity confronted with genius. It won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture and is among the most influential films ever made about a classical composer.

79.Your Name.

Makoto Shinkai's animated romance connects two teenagers through body-swapping, memory, and a cosmic disaster, joining intimate longing to spectacular images of time and place.

80.Das Boot

Wolfgang Petersen's claustrophobic submarine epic follows a German U-boat crew through boredom, terror, and mechanical peril while stripping warfare of triumphal romance.