Cahiers du Cinéma's Annual Top 10, Ranked
The magazine that invented auteur criticism — Truffaut, Godard and the future New Wave wrote here first — has published a ten-best list for most of its run since 1951. Here is every film from Cahiers du Cinéma's annual top 10s in our library, re-ranked by our composite score across 20+ lists, awards and polls.
609 films from this list are in our library; the top 30 by composite score are shown — the ranking is ours, not the list's own order.
- 1Parasite2019 · Bong Joon-ho9.70
Palme d'Or winner 2019 · Oscar Best Picture winner 2019 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2020 #1
- 28.30
Oscar Best Picture winner 1950 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1951 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1951 #1
- 36.63
Oscar Best Picture winner 2025 · BAFTA Best Film winner 2026 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2025 #1
- 46.55
Oscar Best Picture winner 1987 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1989 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1988 #1
- 5Unforgiven1992 · Clint Eastwood6.51
Oscar Best Picture winner 1992 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1992 #1 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1993 #1
- 66.38
Palme d'Or winner 2023 · Cesar Best Film winner 2024 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2023
- 712 Angry Men1957 · Sidney Lumet6.37
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1957 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1959 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1957
- 8Goodfellas1990 · Martin Scorsese6.01
BAFTA Best Film winner 1991 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1990 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #28
- 95.95
Oscar Best Picture winner 2009 · BAFTA Best Film winner 2010 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2010 #5
- 10Spirited Away2001 · Hayao Miyazaki5.21
Berlin Golden Bear winner 2002 · Japan Academy Best Film winner 2002 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 2001 #3
- 115.09
Palme d'Or winner 2011 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2011 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2011 #2
- 125.02
Oscar Best Picture winner 2007 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2008 #1 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2008 #4
- 134.92
Palme d'Or winner 1997 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #93 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #243
- 144.85
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1958 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1962 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72
- 15Ordet1955 · Carl Theodor Dreyer4.84
Venice Golden Lion winner 1955 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1955 #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #30
- 16Paris, Texas1984 · Wim Wenders4.79
Palme d'Or winner 1984 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #185 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1985 #6
- 17Vertigo1958 · Alfred Hitchcock4.49
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #6 · AFI 100 (2007) #9
- 18The Eel1997 · Shohei Imamura4.43
Palme d'Or winner 1997 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 1997 #1 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1997 #4
- 194.39
Palme d'Or winner 2010 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2010 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #196
- 20Raging Bull1980 · Martin Scorsese4.37
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1980 · AFI 100 (2007) #4 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #22
- 21Sunset Boulevard1950 · Billy Wilder4.35
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1950 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1951 #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #62
- 22Titanic1997 · James Cameron4.26
Oscar Best Picture winner 1997 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1998 #4 · AFI 100 (2007) #83
- 23Viridiana1961 · Luis Buñuel4.25
Palme d'Or winner 1961 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #52 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1962 #4
- 24Joker2019 · Todd Phillips4.20
Venice Golden Lion winner 2019 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2019 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2019
- 25Hana-bi1997 · Takeshi Kitano4.18
Venice Golden Lion winner 1997 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1997 #1 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 1998 #1
- 264.05
Palme d'Or winner 1951 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1951 #3 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1952 #5
- 274.00
Palme d'Or winner 1987 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1987 #1
- 284.00
Palme d'Or winner 2018 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2019 #1
- 293.99
Japan Academy Best Film winner 2022 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 2021 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2021
- 30Barton Fink1991 · Joel Coen, Ethan Coen3.89
Palme d'Or winner 1991 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1991 #3 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1992 #5
The list kept by the magazine that invented the auteur
No publication has a better claim to having changed what film criticism is for. Founded in April 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, Cahiers du Cinéma hired a bench of young critics — Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette — who first argued the politique des auteurs into existence (Truffaut's 1954 assault on France's "Tradition of Quality" was its manifesto) and then, by the end of the decade, put down their pens and became the French New Wave. The year-end top 10 has run alongside all of it since 1951, with telling silences: no lists from 1952 to 1953, none from 1969 to 1980 — a hiatus that reads, from here, as the era when ranking movies felt beside the point — and none in 2003. Our library holds 609 films from the lists' whole run, 1951 to 2025.
A canon that argues with everyone, including itself
Read across seventy years, the lists are a sustained polemic. This is the magazine that put Clint Eastwood at #1 two years running — Unforgiven (1992), then A Perfect World (1993) — that crowned Do the Right Thing (1989) and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), and that gave the top spot to Straub–Huillet's austere The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) in the same era mainstream critics were elsewhere. House loyalty is real: Godard tops the list in 1962, 1965 and again in 1985, long after he had traded the masthead for the camera. And the famous perversity is real too — this is a canon with room for Titanic (1997) alongside Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan (1987). Whether that eclecticism is rigor or contrarianism is the argument the list exists to start; to my eye it is the most consistent auteurism on record, applied without regard for respectability in either direction.
How to read our ranking
The order above is ours, not theirs: every film that has ever appeared on a Cahiers annual top 10 and is in our library, re-ranked by composite score across 20+ lists, awards and polls. That lens shows which Cahiers verdicts the wider canon has ratified — Parasite (2019) leads at 9.70, with Unforgiven, 12 Angry Men (1957) and All About Eve (1950) close behind — and which remain house positions: Under the Sun of Satan, a Cahiers #1, sits at #108 in our library. That gap between their list and everyone else's is not an error to correct. It is the magazine's entire point.