Kinema Junpo's Best Ten, Ranked
Kinema Junpo — publishing since 1919, one of the world's oldest film magazines — has run its Best Ten critics' poll since 1924: twin year-end lists of the best Japanese and foreign films. Here is every Best Ten film in our library, re-ranked by our composite score across 20+ lists, awards and polls.
1756 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
- 2Citizen Kane1941 · Orson Welles · United States · drama, biography, mystery9.21
AFI 100 (2007) #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #2 · AFI 100 (1998) #1
- 32001: A Space Odyssey1968 · Stanley Kubrick · United States / United Kingdom · adventure, mystery, sci-fi7.43
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #6 · AFI 100 (2007) #15
- 4Lawrence of Arabia1962 · David Lean · United Kingdom / United States · war, biography, drama7.40
Oscar Best Picture winner 1962 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1963 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1963 #1
- 5Apocalypse Now1979 · Francis Ford Coppola · United States · war, action, drama6.84
Palme d'Or winner 1979 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #18 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #19
- 6Goodfellas1990 · Martin Scorsese · United States · biography, crime, thriller6.33
BAFTA Best Film winner 1991 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #28 · Empire 500 (2008) #6
- 7Taxi 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
- 8Schindler's List1993 · Steven Spielberg · United States · war, biography, drama6.12
Oscar Best Picture winner 1993 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1994 · AFI 100 (2007) #8
- 9The Third Man1949 · Carol Reed · United Kingdom · film-noir, mystery, drama6.08
BFI Top 100 British films #1 · Palme d'Or winner 1949 · Cannes Grand Prix winner 1949
- 10All About Eve1950 · Joseph L. Mankiewicz · United States · drama, comedy5.87
Oscar Best Picture winner 1950 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1951 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1951 #1
- 11Pulp Fiction1994 · Quentin Tarantino · United States · crime, drama, thriller5.76
Palme d'Or winner 1994 · Empire 500 (2008) #9 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1994
- 12Parasite2019 · Bong Joon-ho · South Korea · comedy, drama, thriller5.72
Palme d'Or winner 2019 · Oscar Best Picture winner 2019 · Film Comment year-end poll 2019 #1
- 13Raging 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
- 14Annie 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
- 15The Godfather Part II1974 · Francis Ford Coppola · United States · drama, crime, thriller5.37
Oscar Best Picture winner 1974 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #26 · Letterboxd Top 250 #8
- 1612 Angry Men1957 · Sidney Lumet · United States · drama5.25
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1957 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1959 #1 · Letterboxd Top 250 #3
- 17In the Mood for Love2000 · Wong Kar-wai · Hong Kong, China / France / Thailand · romance, drama5.13
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #5 · Rolling Stone 100 Best of the 21st Century #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #9
- 18The 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
- 19Spirited Away2001 · Hayao Miyazaki · Japan · fantasy, animation, drama4.98
Berlin Golden Bear winner 2002 · Japan Academy Prize winner 2002 · Kehr's annual top 10 2002 #1
- 20Unforgiven1992 · Clint Eastwood · United States · western, drama, crime4.96
Oscar Best Picture winner 1992 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1992 #1 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1993 #1
- 21Tokyo Story1953 · Yasujirō Ozu · Japan · drama4.91
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #4 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #4 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 1953 #2
- 22Bicycle Thieves1948 · Vittorio De Sica · Italy · drama4.78
BAFTA Best Film winner 1950 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1950 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #20
- 23The Battle of Algiers1966 · Gillo Pontecorvo · Italy / Algeria · drama, war4.69
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1967 #1 · Venice Golden Lion winner 1966 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #22
- 24One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest1975 · Miloš Forman · United States · comedy, drama4.63
Oscar Best Picture winner 1975 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1977 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1976 #2
- 25Midnight Cowboy1969 · John Schlesinger · United States · drama4.62
Oscar Best Picture winner 1969 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1970 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1969 #2
- 26The Bridge on the River Kwai1957 · David Lean · United Kingdom / United States · drama, war4.61
Oscar Best Picture winner 1957 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1958 · BFI Top 100 British films #11
- 27Mulholland Drive2001 · David Lynch · United States · mystery, thriller, crime4.61
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2001 #1 · Film Comment year-end poll 2001 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #8
- 288½1963 · Federico Fellini · Italy / France · comedy, drama, fantasy4.58
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #6 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1965 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #31
- 29Secrets & Lies1996 · Mike Leigh · United Kingdom · drama4.58
Palme d'Or winner 1996 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1997 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1996
- 30Sunset Boulevard1950 · Billy Wilder · United States · drama, film-noir4.54
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1951 #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #62 · AFI 100 (2007) #16
The oldest poll in the movies
Before Sight & Sound, before the AFI, there was Kinema Junpo. Japan's oldest film magazine — begun in July 1919 by four students of the Tokyo Institute of Technology — started its Best Ten in 1924, which makes it the longest-running critics' poll our library tracks anywhere. It began with foreign films only; a parallel list for Japanese cinema arrived in 1926, and a readers' choice poll joined in 1972. The twin lists have run nearly unbroken for a century — in our library's record the foreign poll falls silent only for 1941–1945 and the Japanese poll for 1943–1945, the war years — and together they account for almost 1,700 films from 1924 to 2025.
Two lists, two histories
The foreign Best Ten is something no other institution can offer: a year-by-year record of what world cinema looked like from Tokyo. Its winners begin with A Woman of Paris (1923) and The Covered Wagon (1923) in the very first poll, and run through Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), Bicycle Thieves (1948) and La Strada (1954) to Parasite (2019), which topped the 2020 list. The delays are part of the charm: Japan met Citizen Kane (1941) only in 1966 — and ranked it second that year, behind Pather Panchali (1955). The Japanese list, meanwhile, is the spine of that national cinema's own canon, and its single most quoted verdict remains 1954: Twenty-Four Eyes (1954) at #1, Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) at #3, Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff (1954) at #9 — a year so deep that placing third in it now reads as a kind of victory.
How to read our ranking
The order above is ours: every Best Ten film in our library, both polls pooled, re-ranked by our composite score across 20+ lists, awards and polls. Because that score leans on award records and the Western canons, the top of the page is dominated by the foreign list — The Godfather (1972), Citizen Kane, Parasite. The Japanese Best Ten's own champions mostly enter lower down: Tokyo Story (1953), at #24 in our library, is the one that cracks the leaders, with Seven Samurai at #82, Shoplifters (2018) at #87, The Eel (1997) at #154 and Hana-bi (1997) at #208 behind it. To my eye that says more about the blind spots of the aggregate canon than about the films; treat the deeper half of this list as the correction, and the magazine that kept score for a hundred years as the witness.