The Best Silent Films
Cinema's first three decades still rank among its greatest. The silent canon, ordered by composite score across critics' polls and registries.
Wings (1927) leads with a composite score of 3.61.
- 1Wings1927 · William A. Wellman, Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast3.61
Oscar Best Picture winner 1928 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1928 #5 · National Film Registry (inducted 1997)
- 2Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans1927 · F. W. Murnau3.10
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1928 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #11 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #33
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- 4Modern Times1936 · Charlie Chaplin2.74
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #78 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1938 #4
- 5The Passion of Joan of Arc1928 · Carl Theodor Dreyer2.39
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #21 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #30 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1929 #7
- 6The Gold Rush1925 · Charlie Chaplin2.15
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1926 #1 · AFI 100 (2007) #58 · AFI 100 (1998) #74
- 7Seventh Heaven1927 · Frank Borzage2.13
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1927 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1928 · National Film Registry (inducted 1995)
- 8Metropolis1927 · Fritz Lang1.69
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #67 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1929 #4 · Scorsese's 39 essential foreign films
- 9Man with a Movie Camera1929 · Dziga Vertov1.64
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #9 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #30 · Roger Ebert's Great Movies
- 10Meshes of the Afternoon1943 · Maya Deren, Alexandr Hackenschmied1.46
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #16 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #62 · National Film Registry (inducted 1990)
- 11A Diary of Chuji's Travels1927 · Daisuke Itō1.43
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 1927 #1 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 1927 #4
- 12The Docks of New York1928 · Josef von Sternberg1.39
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1929 #1 · National Film Registry (inducted 1999) · Criterion Collection spine #531
- 13The General1926 · Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman1.29
AFI 100 (2007) #18 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #95 · National Film Registry (inducted 1989)
- 14Intolerance1916 · D. W. Griffith1.18
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #225 · AFI 100 (2007) #49 · National Film Registry (inducted 1989)
- 15A Woman of Paris1923 · Charlie Chaplin, A. Edward Sutherland1.16
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1924 #1 · Criterion Collection spine #1253
- 16The Last Laugh1924 · F. W. Murnau1.14
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1926 #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #243 · Roger Ebert's Great Movies
- 17Battleship Potemkin1925 · Sergei Eisenstein1.11
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #54 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #93 · Roger Ebert's Great Movies
- 18Safety Last!1923 · Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor1.02
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1924 #3 · National Film Registry (inducted 1994) · Criterion Collection spine #662
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- 27Sherlock, Jr.1924 · Buster Keaton, Roscoe Arbuckle0.98
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #54 · Letterboxd Top 250 #91 · National Film Registry (inducted 1991)
- 28Nosferatu1922 · F. W. Murnau0.97
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #196 · Scorsese's 39 essential foreign films · Vatican film list
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Thirty years that invented everything
Between the Lumière brothers' first public projections in 1895 and the arrival of synchronized sound in 1927, cinema went from fairground novelty to the dominant art form of the century — and nearly every tool filmmakers still use was invented in that window. Georges Méliès, a stage magician, discovered special effects and narrative fantasy almost single-handedly; A Trip to the Moon (1902) — with its rocket in the Moon's eye, one of the most reproduced images in film history — is the medium's first blockbuster and first work of science fiction. The 1910s added feature length, continuity editing and the close-up as psychological instrument; D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), built partly in penance for the racism of his previous film, pushed crosscutting to a four-story architecture that filmmakers still study.
The 1920s were the form's high summer, and its canon is strikingly international. Germany contributed expressionism — The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), with its painted shadows and unreliable narrator, is the ancestor of every horror film and film noir. The Soviet Union contributed montage theory: Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) and its Odessa Steps sequence remain the most-quoted editing lesson in cinema. Hollywood contributed physical comedy at a level never matched — Buster Keaton's The General (1926), an action epic performed without stunt doubles on moving locomotives — and, in F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927), made by a German expressionist with a Fox budget, the silent film's most complete synthesis of camera movement, design and feeling. Denmark's Carl Theodor Dreyer closed the era with The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), a trial film told almost entirely in faces, routinely ranked among the greatest films ever made.
Why the silent canon still climbs
Chaplin ignored the sound revolution for years — City Lights (1931) is a silent film released deep into the talkie era, and its final recognition scene is perhaps the most praised single ending in cinema — proof that silence was an aesthetic choice, not just a technical limitation. The critics' polls have only strengthened the silent canon over time: as recency bias fades, the era's formal daring stands out more clearly, and preservation institutions (a large share of this page sits in the National Film Registry) treat these films as the medium's founding documents. Ranked by composite score, this page is effectively cinema's constitutional convention: the films that decided what the art form would be.