About this site
An independent, data-driven map of film history — what it measures, how it works, and who is behind it.
What this site is
History of Movies is a data-driven map of film history. Instead of publishing one more editor's opinion, we cross-reference more than twenty authoritative film lists, awards and polls — Sight & Sound, the AFI lists, the Academy Awards, Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Kinema Junpo, Cahiers du Cinéma, the National Film Registry, the Criterion Collection, Letterboxd and others — into a single composite canon score, then unfold that score into rankings by decade, genre, country, director and film-history era.
Why it exists
Every "best films of all time" list disagrees with every other one, and each reflects the tastes of whoever compiled it. But underneath the disagreement there is a measurable consensus: some films keep showing up, decade after decade, across critics' polls, festival juries, national registries and audience communities alike. This site exists to measure that consensus and present it plainly, with every input citable back to its source.
How the rankings work
Each film's score is the sum of small, checkable contributions — one for every appearance it makes on a source list, in an award record or in a major poll. Heavyweight sources count for more, top placements count for more, and a nomination counts for a fraction of a win. The arithmetic, the source weights and the reasoning behind them are fully disclosed on the methodology page, so anyone can recompute any ranking here.
Independence
This is an independent project. We have no affiliation with any studio, distributor, streaming service or any of the publications and institutions whose lists we cite. Nobody pays to place a film, and no ranking on this site can be bought. The data comes from public sources; the compilation, scoring and presentation are our own.
Who runs it
History of Movies is built and maintained by a small independent team that cares about film history and about honest, verifiable data. If you spot an error, disagree with how a source is weighted, or just want to talk movies, we read everything sent to us — see the contact page.