Paramount Pictures/"The Godfather"
- Insider ranked the best films of all time, based on Metacritic scores.
- They include recent Oscar winners "Moonlight" and "Parasite" and classics like "The Godfather" and "Citizen Kane."
- Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories.
To find out which films have been the most critically acclaimed over time, Insider turned to the reviews aggregator Metacritic for this ranking, which scores films by their composite critical reception.
The resulting list includes modern masterpieces like recent Oscar winners "Moonlight" and "Parasite" in contention with classics like "The Godfather" and "Citizen Kane."
There's also, not surprisingly, a lot of Hitchcock.
This post has been updated. John Lynch contributed to a previous version of this post.
The 50 best movies of all time, according to critics:
20th Century Fox
Critic score: 96/100
User score: 9.0/10
What critics said: "Gregg Toland captures the open spaces and big skies of rural America, while the normally conservative Ford puts forward a sympathetic but radical plea for workers' rights and freedom for the people." — Empire
Netflix
Critic score: 96/100
User score: 6.1/10
What critics said: "With exuberant naturalism from its non-professional actors, and a standout performance from Kosar Ali as Rocks's best friend, the film covers the highs and lows of female adolescence with compelling sensitivity." — Globe and Mail
Neon
Critic score: 96/100
User score: 8.9/10
What critics said: "Parasite begins in exhilaration and ends in devastation, but the triumph of the movie is that it fully lives and breathes at every moment, even when you might find yourself struggling to exhale." — Los Angeles Times
Disney / Pixar
Critic score: 96/100
User score: 8.6/10
What critics said: "The subtle colors and textures of the food alone make Ratatouille a three-star Michelin evening." — Time
Paramount
Critic score: 96/100
User score: 8.8/10
What critics said: "One of the greatest American films of the '70s, Nashville remains Altman's crowning achievement." — Entertainment Weekly
Oscilloscope
Critic score: 94/100
User score: 6.9
What critics said: "You have to be prepared to see a film like this, or able to relax and allow it to unfold. It doesn't come, as most films do, with built-in instructions about how to view it." — RogerEbert.com
Fox Searchlight
Critic score: 96/100
User score: 8.0/10
What critics said: "A work that, finally, asks a mainstream audience to confront the worst of what humanity can do to itself." — Boston Globe
Paramount Pictures
Critic score: 96/100
User score: 8.2/10
What critics said: "The brilliance of the film comes more from Polanski's direction, and from a series of genuinely inspired performances, than from the original story." — Chicago Sun-Times
Claire Fogler
Critic score: 96/100
User score: 8.2/10
What critics said: "Despite his draw to tragic subjects, Lonergan holds onto a sharp, dark, Irish sense of humor, and a feel for the absurd that comes out at the most unexpected times." — New York Daily News
IMDB
Critic score: 96/100
User score: 9.3/10
What critics said: "What really transforms the piece from a rather talky demonstration that a man is innocent until proven guilty, is the consistently taut, sweltering atmosphere, created largely by Boris Kaufman's excellent camerawork." — Time Out London
MGM
Critic score: 96/100
User score:8.6/10
What critics said: "The charm of the gimmick in Lubitsch's take (directing a script by Samuel Raphaelson, who had collaborated with the German-born filmmaker on comedies and melodramas alike) is passed over quickly in favor of studying both its effects on those involved, as well as the dynamics of the workplace at large." — Slant Magazine
Searchlight Pictures
Critic score: 96/100
User score: 7.0/10
What critics said: "The result is something akin to cinematic hypertext, and thanks to Thompson's steady hand, the brief but deep dives are richly rewarding." — Washington Post
Rialto Pictures
Critic score: 96/100
User score: 8.5/10
What critics said: "The drama itself packs a powerful — and timeless — gut punch." Washington Post
Netflix
Critic score: 96/100
User score: 7.8/10
What critics said: "Alfonso Cuarón has made yet another movie that will transport you to another time and place. You will feel like you're living it." — Uproxx
DIsney
Critic score: 96/100
User score: 7.8/10
What critics said: "It's not only one of the best classic-era Disney features, but also one of the best animated films from any studio at any time." — AV Club
Universal via YouTube
Critic score: 97/100
User score: 7.8/10
What critics said: "This superb and singular film catches not only the charm and tribal energy of the teen-age 1950s but also the listlessness and the resignation that underscored it all like an incessant bass line in one of the rock-'n'-roll songs of the period." — Time
Warner Bros.
Critic score: 96/100
User score: 7.9/10
What critics said: "This is one of the best examples of actionful and suspenseful melodramatic story telling in cinematic form." — Variety
Warner Bros.
Critic score: 97/100
User score: 8.5/10
What critics said: "Streetcar is always a wonderful screen drama and now, also, a study in film archaeology." — Austin Chronicle
Kino
Critic score: 97/100
User score: 8.5/10
What critics said: "If you are at all interested in the history of cinema, or the influence of 20th century politics on the medium, then this film is a must-see, although over an hour of Soviet propaganda is likely to test the patience of modern viewers." — BBC
Paramount Pictures
Critic score: 97/100
User score: 9.1/10
What critic said: "This is a first-rate mystery thriller, full of visual shocks and surprises which are heightened by the melodramatic realism of the production." — Hollywood Reporter
Bac Films
Critic score: 97/100
User score: 8.0/10
What critics said: "This slice of celluloid dynamite comes from Romania, and what you see will floor you." — Rolling Stone
MGM
Critic score: 97/100
User score: 8.5/10
What critics said: "The older it gets, and we with it, the more we're able to see in it. As few American films have, Gone With the Wind succeeds both as historical epic and as intimate drama." — Los Angeles Times
Digital Cube
Critic score: 97/100
User score: 8.3/10
What critics said: "Quo Vadis, Aida? re-creates history in the present tense, with a gut-clutching immediacy that Žbanić makes bearable through sheer formal restraint." — Los Angeles Times
Columbia Pictures
Critic score: 97/100
User score: 8.4/10
What critics said: "Baleful and brilliant, Dr. Strangelove; Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, will outrage a predictable percentage of the population and enthrall an even greater percentage." — Hollywood Reporter
London Film Productions
Critic score: 95/100
User score: 8.4/10
What critics said: "The thing about Carol Reed's 1949 The Third Man was that no matter how many times I saw it over the years its magic never failed. Its sophisticated, world-weary glamour never lost its allure." — Newsweek
Miramax
Critic score: 97/100
User score: 8.5/10
What critics said: "That it features a brilliant performance by Daniel Day-Lewis and a fine supporting cast lifts it from mildly sentimental to excellent." — Variety
Warner Bros.
Critic score: 97/100
User score: 8.1/10
What critics said: "The hard action, bracing wit and mournful grace of Peckinpah's cowboy classic shames every new movie around. It's a towering achievement that grows more riveting and resonant with the years." — Rolling Stone
Criterion
Critic score: 97/100
User score: 7.1/10
What critics said: "The mood of the movie reflects the exuberance of youth and the wisdom of experience. New Wave gold." — Empire
20th Century Fox
Critic score: 98/100
User score: 8.7/10
What critics said: "ALL ABOUT EVE is the consummate backstage story, a film that holds a magnifying glass up to theatrical environs and exposes all the egos, tempers, conspiracies and backstage back-biting that make up the world of make-believe on Broadway." — TV Guide
RKO
Critic score: 98/100
User score: 8.6/10
What critics said: "Every element in the film, from the dense thicket of forest branches to master cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa's deceptive framing and lighting design, is precisely calibrated to make the facts more difficult to discern." — AV Club
Fine Line
Critic score: 98/100
User score: 8.1/10
What critics said: "A film like 'Hoop Dreams' is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and make us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself." — Chicago Sun-Times
MGM
Critic score: 98/100
User score: 8.2/10
What critics said: "A sublime classic." — Guardian
United Artists
Critic score: 98/100
User score: 8.3/10
What critics said: "If Some Like It Hot isn't the funniest movie ever made, you can't blame it for not trying. The first time you see Billy Wilder's 1959 farce, you might not believe that anything can make you laugh so hard for so long." — Salon
New Line Cinema
Critic score: 98/100
User score: 8.7/10
What critics said: "Literally and figuratively marvelous, a rich, daring mix of fantasy and politics." — Village Voice
Warner Bros.
Critic score: 98/100
User score: 8.5/10
What critics said: "Mr. Huston has shaped a searching drama of the collision of civilization's vicious greeds with the instinct for self-preservation in an environment where all the barriers are down. And, by charting the moods of his prospectors after they have hit a vein of gold, he has done a superb illumination of basic characteristics in men." — New York Times
MGM
Critic score: 96/100
User score: 7.9/10
What critics said: "Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking. It has its own hallucinatory look; the characters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of lurid." — New Yorker
Universal
Critic score: 99/100
User score: 8.4/10
What critics said: "A masterclass in tension, visual panache and B-movie excess." — Time Out
Disney
Critic score: 99/100
User score: 8.1/10
What critics said: "Every element in Pinocchio shimmers with the energy of young artists reveling in their newly discovered powers of creation." — Los Angeles Times
Triangle
Critic score: 99/100
User score: 9.1/10
What critics said: "The plunging and roving camera provides visceral thrills; ecstatic special effects capture the sacred (the Crucifixion) and the profane (combat in the Great War); a metaphysical framing device (starring Lillian Gish) raises human conflict to universal import; and Griffith's trademark closeups lend a quivering lip or a trembling hand the tragic grandeur of historical cataclysm." — New Yorker
A24
Critic score: 99/100
User score: 7.1/10
What critics said: "Like Brokeback Mountain a decade ago, Moonlight is a piece of art that will transform lives long after it leaves theaters." — The Playlist
United Artists
Critic score: 99/100
User score: 9.0/10
What critics said: "There's dignity and folly to The Tramp in City Lights, and everything in between." — The Dissolve
MGM
Critic score: 99/100
User score: 8.8/10
What critics said: "Escapism raised to the level of art, Singin' In The Rain inventively satirizes the illusions of the filmmaking process while celebrating their life-affirming joy." — AV Club
RKO
Critic score: 100/100
User score: 8.0/10
What critics said: "Love is a dark, corroded obsession in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, a black-velvet biocide brimming with notes of tabloid titillation, spy-versus-spy nonsense, and romance as rotten as a half-eaten Granny Smith left out in the summer sun." — Slant
Universal
Critic score: 100/100
User score: 8.8/10
What critics said: "The greatest sexual suspense drama ever made has come to be regarded by many Hitchcock admirers as his most accomplished film. It is certainly his most forlorn, and easily his most mesmerizing." — San Francisco Chronicle
The Criterion Collection
Critic score: 100/100
User score: 8.8/10
What critics said: "It is a film of much humanity and very far from smart European pap. But the external brilliance of its making does at times subvert its inner workings, as if its manufacture and its meaning were not quite in perfect harmony." — Guardian
"Boyhood"/Universal
Critic score: 100/100
User score: 7.6/10
What critics said: "On rare occasions a movie seems to channel the flow of real life. Boyhood is one of those occasions. In its ambition, which is matched by its execution, Richard Linklater's endearing epic is not only rare but unique." — Wall Street Journal
Warner Bros.
Critic score: 100/100
User score: 8.9/10
What critics said: "The dialogue is so spare and cynical it has not grown old-fashioned. Much of the emotional effect of Casablanca is achieved by indirection; as we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do after all amount to more than a hill of beans." — Chicago Sun-Times
Paramount
Critic score: 100/100
User score: 8.8/10
What critics said: "There is never an instant, in fact, when Director Hitchcock is not in minute and masterly control of his material: script, camera, cutting, props, the handsome set constructed from his ideas, the stars he has Hitched to his vehicle." — Time
YouTube screenshot
Critic score: 100/100
User score: 9.2/10
What critics said: "The Godfather traces the arc of this doomed idealism with a beauty that is still fresh." — LA Weekly
Warner Bros screengrab
Critic score: 100/100
User score: 8.5/10
What critics said: "What's magical about Kane — the sheer transformative thrill of invention — is there in every shot, every performance, every narrative surge." — Entertainment Weekly
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