Gene Siskel's Annual Top 10 Lists, Ranked
The other half of the balcony: Gene Siskel's year-end ten-best lists ran from 1969 to 1998, first in the Chicago Tribune and later on the TV specials he shared with Roger Ebert. Here is every film from Siskel's lists in our library, re-ranked by our composite score across 20+ lists, awards and polls.
297 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.
- 1The Godfather1972 · Francis Ford Coppola · United States / Italy · crime, drama, thriller9.75
Empire 500 (2008) #1 · Oscar Best Picture winner 1972 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #3
- 2Goodfellas1990 · Martin Scorsese · United States · biography, crime, thriller6.33
BAFTA Best Film winner 1991 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #28 · Empire 500 (2008) #6
- 3Taxi Driver1976 · Martin Scorsese · United States · film-noir, drama, crime6.25
Palme d'Or winner 1976 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1976 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #12
- 4Schindler's List1993 · Steven Spielberg · United States · war, biography, drama6.12
Oscar Best Picture winner 1993 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1994 · AFI 100 (2007) #8
- 5Pulp Fiction1994 · Quentin Tarantino · United States · crime, drama, thriller5.76
Palme d'Or winner 1994 · Empire 500 (2008) #9 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1994
- 6Raging Bull1980 · Martin Scorsese · United States · biography, drama, action5.71
AFI 100 (2007) #4 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #22 · Siskel's annual top 10 1980 #1
- 7Annie Hall1977 · Woody Allen · United States · comedy, romance, drama5.55
Oscar Best Picture winner 1977 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1978 · Siskel's annual top 10 1977 #1
- 8The Piano1993 · Jane Campion · France / Australia / New Zealand · drama, romance4.99
Palme d'Or winner 1993 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1994 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #50
- 9Midnight Cowboy1969 · John Schlesinger · United States · drama4.62
Oscar Best Picture winner 1969 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1970 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1969 #2
- 10Secrets & Lies1996 · Mike Leigh · United Kingdom · drama4.58
Palme d'Or winner 1996 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1997 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1996
- 11Do the Right Thing1989 · Spike Lee · United States · comedy, drama4.39
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1989 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #24 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #29
- 12Amadeus1984 · Miloš Forman · United States · biography, musical, drama4.33
Oscar Best Picture winner 1984 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1985 #1 · Ebert's annual top 10 1984 #1
- 13MASH1970 · Robert Altman · United States · comedy, drama, war4.25
Palme d'Or winner 1970 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1970 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1970 #5
- 14E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial1982 · Steven Spielberg · United States · sci-fi, drama4.17
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1982 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1982 · AFI 100 (2007) #24
- 15The Deer Hunter1978 · Michael Cimino · United States · war, drama4.15
Oscar Best Picture winner 1978 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1979 #3 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #211
- 16Barry Lyndon1975 · Stanley Kubrick · United States / United Kingdom · drama, war, adventure3.95
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #12 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #45 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1975
- 17The Last Emperor1987 · Bernardo Bertolucci · China / France / United Kingdom · drama, biography3.94
Oscar Best Picture winner 1987 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1989 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1988 #1
- 18The Conversation1974 · Francis Ford Coppola · United States · thriller, drama, mystery3.76
Palme d'Or winner 1974 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1974
- 19Dances with Wolves1990 · Kevin Costner · United States · drama, war, western3.59
Oscar Best Picture winner 1990 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1991 #1 · Ebert's annual top 10 1990 #3
- 20Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope1977 · George Lucas · United States · sci-fi, action, adventure3.58
AFI 100 (2007) #13 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1977 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #225
- 21The Shawshank Redemption1994 · Frank Darabont · United States · drama, crime3.55
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1995 #1 · Empire 500 (2008) #4 · Letterboxd Top 250 #7
- 22Raiders of the Lost Ark1981 · Steven Spielberg · United States · action3.47
Empire 500 (2008) #2 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1981 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #211
- 23The Thin Red Line1998 · Terrence Malick · United States · war, drama3.46
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1999 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1999 #2 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1998
- 24Forrest Gump1994 · Robert Zemeckis · United States · comedy, drama, romance3.45
Oscar Best Picture winner 1994 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1995 #4 · AFI 100 (2007) #76
- 25Nashville1975 · Robert Altman · United States · comedy, drama, musical3.41
Ebert's annual top 10 1975 #1 · Siskel's annual top 10 1975 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1975
- 26Network1976 · Sidney Lumet · United States · comedy, drama, romance3.39
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1977 #2 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1976 · AFI 100 (2007) #64
- 27Farewell My Concubine1993 · Chen Kaige · China · drama, romance3.39
Palme d'Or winner 1993 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1994 #2 · TIME All-TIME 100
- 28The English Patient1996 · Anthony Minghella · United Kingdom / United States · romance, war, drama3.38
Oscar Best Picture winner 1996 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1997 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1997 #5
- 29The Last Picture Show1971 · Peter Bogdanovich · United States · drama3.35
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1972 #1 · Ebert's annual top 10 1971 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1971
- 30Fanny and Alexander1982 · Ingmar Bergman · France / Germany / Sweden · drama3.30
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #52 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1985 #3 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #129
The other chair on the balcony
Gene Siskel (1946–1999) reviewed movies for the Chicago Tribune from 1969 until his death, and every December across those three decades he published a ten-best list. That is the source this page is built from: not his television verdicts, but the year-end tallies that ran in print, roughly 1969 through 1998. He is remembered now mostly as one half of a double act — the sparring partner Roger Ebert traded thumbs with on Sneak Previews, At the Movies and finally the show that carried both their names from 1986 on — but the critic underneath the pop-culture duo prized clean storytelling above almost everything: coherent plots, motives you could believe, an argument the film actually finished. His annual lists are the residue of that temperament, one year at a time.
What this list is, and is not
It is not Siskel's own ordering. Reproducing his rankings would only relay someone else's editorial work, so every film here has been detached from the year it belonged to and re-scored on our own terms. Membership is the only thing Siskel decides: a title appears because it landed on one of his year-end tens (our siskel-top10-by-year mapping), and nothing else about the ranking is his. The sequence above is our composite score — the same weighting of 20-plus lists, awards and polls applied to every page on the site — so a film Siskel ranked first in some December can sit well below one he ranked tenth in another, if the wider record disagrees. What survives is the overlap between one critic's thirty years of taste and the accumulated verdict of everyone else.
How to read our ranking
Our composite puts The Godfather (1972) at the top of Siskel's cohort — score 9.75, and the highest-ranked film in the whole library — followed by Goodfellas (1990) and Taxi Driver (1976). The clustering rewards the durable consensus picks: Schindler's List (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Annie Hall (1977) all sit inside the top twenty, evidence that Siskel's narrative-first instinct pointed at films the canon later ratified. His taste also ran early. Midnight Cowboy (1969), a film from the very first year he was listing, still holds a respectable #29; Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) climbs all the way to #21, a pick the wider record has only confirmed since. The divergences sit lower down, and they are the interesting part. Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) rests at #35 — still a shade beneath the standing it now carries in most serious accounts of the decade. Read that gap not as an error but as evidence: it measures the distance between one critic's live conviction, filed in a single December, and the slow tribunal of everyone counting since. For the mirror-image case, see Roger Ebert's own annual lists, scored the same way.