25 best films of all time, according to critics

- Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
- Metascore: 98
- Runtime: 110 minutes

Carl Theodor Dreyer tells the story of Joan of Arc's 1431 trial almost entirely in close-ups, drawing much of the dialogue from the historical trial records. Renée Jeanne Falconetti's performance as Joan, in what would be her final film role, is regularly ranked among the greatest ever captured on film. The original negative was destroyed in a fire, and for decades only incomplete versions survived. Then, in 1981, a complete print turned up in a closet at a psychiatric hospital in Oslo, Norway.

- Director: Guillermo del Toro
- Metascore: 98
- Runtime: 118 minutes

This Mexican/Spanish film finds director Guillermo del Toro in top form. The film represents a formidable blend of fantasy, history, and drama. Set in 1944 Francoist Spain, the movie centers on a bookish young girl named Ofelia who's forced to move in with her sadistic stepfather, an army captain. Still mourning the loss of her real father, Ofelia escapes into a fantastical labyrinth, where she's told by a magical faun that she's of royal descent. However, before Ofelia can fulfill her destiny, she must complete three gruesome tasks. Awash with inventive creatures and stunning set pieces, the film won three Academy Awards, including Best Makeup and Best Art Direction.

- Director: D.W. Griffith
- Metascore: 99
- Runtime: 197 minutes

The silent classic starring Lillian Gish visits four historical eras: ancient Babylon, Judea, 16th-century France, and early 20th-century America, where characters suffered under stifling social and political beliefs and systems. D.W. Griffith made the movie a year after his epic "The Birth of a Nation" was met with criticism over its racism and its sympathetic attitudes toward the institutions of slavery, white supremacy, and the Ku Klux Klan.

- Director: Charles Chaplin
- Metascore: 99
- Runtime: 87 minutes

Director and star Charlie Chaplin thought about making the silent "City Lights" a talkie but opted not to do so. It has music and sound effects but no speaking. It features some of the comic artist's best scenes as the Little Tramp in a boxing match, dodging a parade of elephants, and, after swallowing a whistle, being followed by a pack of dogs. It was one of Chaplin's most successful films, financially and with critics, and is said to have been his favorite.

- Directors: Ben Sharpsteen, Bill Roberts, Hamilton Luske, Jack Kinney, Norman Ferguson, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson
- Metascore: 99
- Runtime: 88 minutes

The childhood favorite tells the tale of the little wooden puppet created by the woodworker Geppetto. It won two Oscars: Best Original Song (for "When You Wish Upon a Star") and Best Original Score. The expected budget for the film was $500,000, but it cost five times that amount to complete, and it was one of the most costly films of its time.

- Directors: Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen
- Metascore: 99
- Runtime: 103 minutes

Hollywood legend Gene Kelly co-directed, choreographed, and starred in this wildly popular musical, which is widely considered the greatest of its kind. Set during the rise of talkies, the film finds the members of a production company struggling to keep pace with the industry changes. Featured in the film is an iconic song-and-dance number, during which Gene Kelly literally sings in the rain. Both critics and audiences love it.

- Director: Jacques Tati
- Metascore: 99
- Runtime: 155 minutes

Jacques Tati brings back his bumbling alter ego, Monsieur Hulot, for this nearly dialogue-free comedy about a group of American tourists wandering through a glass-and-steel version of Paris. To make it, Tati built an enormous modernist set on the outskirts of the city (nicknamed "Tativille"), complete with its own buildings and roads. The film was a commercial disaster that pushed him into bankruptcy. Critics now regard it as one of the most visually inventive comedies ever made.

- Director: Jean Renoir
- Metascore: 99
- Runtime: 110 minutes

Jean Renoir's satire of the French upper class unfolds over a weekend at a country estate, where aristocrats and their servants pursue love affairs that end in tragedy. Renoir also plays the good-natured Octave. Audiences jeered the film at its 1939 premiere, and the French government soon banned it as demoralizing. The original negative was destroyed during World War II bombing, and it wasn't until 1959 that a near-complete version was reconstructed.

- Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
- Metascore: 99
- Runtime: 145 minutes

Jean-Pierre Melville drew on his own experience in the French Resistance for this grim, unsentimental portrait of a cell of underground fighters in Nazi-occupied France. Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret star. The film was coolly received in France in 1969 (partly over its admiring nods to Charles de Gaulle at a politically charged moment), and it didn't get a proper U.S. release until 2006. When it finally arrived, it landed on many critics' best-of-the-year lists.

- Director: Orson Welles
- Metascore: 99
- Runtime: 95 minutes

Orson Welles' best film (according to the critics) not called "Citizen Kane" is 1958's "Touch of Evil," about murder and corruption in a small Mexican border town. Thanks to its dark and somewhat nightmarish atmosphere, the film deftly retains a sinister vibe from open to close. A domestic box office disappointment upon its initial release, "Touch of Evil" now ranks among the greatest films ever made. It stars Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Marlene Dietrich, and Welles himself.

- Director: Barry Jenkins
- Metascore: 99
- Runtime: 111 minutes

The debut feature film from writer/director Barry Jenkins, 2016's "Moonlight" takes place in Miami and chronicles three separate time periods in the life of an African American gay man named Chiron. Growing up in a broken home, Chiron falls under the wing of a local drug dealer (Mahershala Ali). Later in life, Chiron becomes a drug dealer himself, all while still coming to terms with his sexuality. The film won many awards, including Best Picture at the 2017 Oscars.

- Director: Ingmar Bergman
- Metascore: 100
- Runtime: 188 minutes

Ingmar Bergman intended this family saga as his farewell to theatrical filmmaking. Set in early 20th-century Sweden, it follows two young siblings whose warm, theatrical household gives way to a cold and cruel one after their widowed mother remarries a stern bishop. Bergman also made a five-hour version for television. The theatrical cut won four Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film.

- Director: David Lean
- Metascore: 100
- Runtime: 216 minutes

David Lean's epic about British officer T.E. Lawrence (Peter O'Toole, in his first starring role) and the Arab Revolt of World War I won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. It's also home to one of the most famous edits in film history: Lawrence blows out a match, and the picture cuts directly to a blazing desert sunrise. Steven Spielberg has credited it as the film that made him want to become a filmmaker.

- Director: Krzysztof Kieślowski
- Metascore: 100
- Runtime: 99 minutes

The final installment in Krzysztof Kieślowski's "Three Colors" trilogy is also the Polish director's final film. Blending elements of drama, romance, mystery, philosophy, and comedy, the movie takes place in Geneva, Switzerland. The film stars actress Irène Jacob as a model named Valentine. After discovering that her neighbor has a keen habit of eavesdropping on other people's conversations, Valentine grapples with the moral implications and confronts secrets from her own past.

- Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
- Metascore: 100
- Runtime: 107 minutes

Bernardo Bertolucci was still in his 20s when he made this stylish adaptation of Alberto Moravia's novel, about a repressed bureaucrat (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who joins Mussolini's secret police and is ordered to assassinate his former professor in Paris. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's bold compositions and colors became a template for a generation of American filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola, who later hired Storaro to shoot "Apocalypse Now."

- Director: Luchino Visconti
- Metascore: 100
- Runtime: 187 minutes

Luchino Visconti's sweeping adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel follows a Sicilian prince (Burt Lancaster) as he watches his aristocratic world fade during Italy's unification in the 1860s. Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon co-star. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1963, and its climactic ballroom sequence runs roughly 45 minutes. American audiences first saw a dubbed, heavily trimmed version (the restored Italian cut is what cemented its reputation).

- Director: Krzysztof Kieślowski
- Metascore: 100
- Runtime: 572 minutes

Technically, Krzysztof Kieślowski's "Dekalog" is 10 films, each roughly an hour long, made for Polish television and set in and around the same Warsaw apartment complex. Each installment takes loose inspiration from one of the Ten Commandments, though the moral puzzles Kieślowski poses rarely come with tidy answers. Two episodes were expanded into features of their own: "A Short Film About Killing" and "A Short Film About Love." Stanley Kubrick admired the series so much that he wrote the foreword to its published screenplays. It's Kieślowski's second appearance on this list, after "Three Colors: Red."

- Director: Francis Ford Coppola
- Metascore: 100
- Runtime: 175 minutes

Between its tremendous IMDb rating and flawless Metacritic score, 1972's "The Godfather" endures as the perfect film among seasoned critics and casual moviegoers alike. It's no wonder that famous critic Pauline Kael described it as coming "out of a merger of commerce and art." Based on the bestselling novel by Mario Puzo, the movie chronicles the ongoing exploits of the Corleone crime family, one of America's most powerful underworld organizations. As the family's esteemed patriarch (Marlon Brando) looks to transfer control, the youngest scion (Al Pacino) steps up to fill the void.

- Director: Alfred Hitchcock
- Metascore: 100
- Runtime: 101 minutes

Alfred Hitchcock makes the list with this noirish thriller starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. In the film, Bergman plays Alicia Huberman, the daughter of a convicted German spy who's sent undercover to spy on the Nazis. But how far will she go to earn their trust? Noted French critic and filmmaker (and major Hitchcock fan) François Truffaut called "Notorious" a personal favorite, referring to it as the "very quintessence of Hitchcock."

- Director: Alfred Hitchcock
- Metascore: 100
- Runtime: 112 minutes

A pure exercise in suspense, Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" stars James Stewart as photographer L.B. "Jeff" Jefferies, who gets confined to a wheelchair after breaking his leg in an accident. Armed with a camera and his own insatiable curiosity, Jefferies starts to spy on his neighbors through his apartment window. At first, his habit seems harmless enough, until he thinks he witnessed one of his neighbors (Raymond Burr) committing murder. Grace Kelly co-stars.

- Director: Michael Curtiz
- Metascore: 100
- Runtime: 102 minutes

According to legions of critics, this 1942 classic features one of the best screenplays ever written, and that's just one among its many charms. Giving all that catchy dialogue its due is a cast full of talented actors and actresses, including Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. In the film, Bogart plays Rick Blaine, a club owner in Casablanca, who helps refugees obtain passage to America as they flee from the Nazis. As if Blaine's life wasn't complicated enough, his former lover, Ilsa Lund (Bergman), shows up seeking help for her husband. What ensues is the stuff that cinematic legacies are made of.

- Director: Yasujirō Ozu
- Metascore: 100
- Runtime: 136 minutes

Yasujirō Ozu's quiet masterpiece follows an elderly couple who travel from their seaside town to visit their grown children in Tokyo, only to find them too busy to make much time for their parents. Only their widowed daughter-in-law (Setsuko Hara) treats them with real warmth. The film went largely unseen in the U.S. until 1972, nearly two decades after its Japanese release. In 2012, it was voted the greatest film of all time in Sight and Sound's poll of directors.

- Director: Orson Welles
- Metascore: 100
- Runtime: 119 minutes

Marking Orson Welles' auspicious feature debut, "Citizen Kane" tells the story of its title character (played by Welles), a newspaper magnate whose rise to power comes at the cost of his own humanity. In the opinion of Roger Ebert, it's the greatest movie ever made, though he's far from the only critic to feel that way. Accordingly, the film hosts a dizzying array of groundbreaking elements, from the creative camerawork to the unconventional narrative to everything in between. More than a mere masterpiece, "Citizen Kane" is a historic work of art, which will continue to impress critics for decades, if not centuries, to come.

- Director: Alfred Hitchcock
- Metascore: 100
- Runtime: 128 minutes

Overlooked upon its initial release, Hitchcock's "Vertigo" has since been reappraised and is now considered one of the greatest films ever made. It stars James Stewart as John "Scottie" Ferguson, a retired police detective who suffers from an irrational fear of heights. After being hired to follow a man's wife (Kim Novak) around San Francisco, Ferguson becomes ensnared in a murderous plot. As the mystery unravels, he's forced to confront his innermost desires and fears.

- Director: Richard Linklater
- Metascore: 100
- Runtime: 165 minutes

While audiences really liked this Richard Linklater film, the critics absolutely adored it. Shot over the course of 12 years, the movie depicts the exploits of its protagonist, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), as he goes from a young boy to a young college student. Like a number of Linklater's films, this one gets its message across through a series of naturalistic scenes, which don't build up as much as they flow together. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke co-star.