The Letterboxd Top 250, Measured
The community canon: Letterboxd's official Top 250 narrative films, voted by millions of ratings. Here it is measured against our composite score — where the internet's favorites agree with the critics' canon, and where they defy it.
250 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
- 22001: 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
- 3Lawrence 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
- 4Apocalypse 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
- 5Goodfellas1990 · Martin Scorsese · United States · biography, crime, thriller6.33
BAFTA Best Film winner 1991 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #28 · Empire 500 (2008) #6
- 6Schindler's List1993 · Steven Spielberg · United States · war, biography, drama6.12
Oscar Best Picture winner 1993 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1994 · AFI 100 (2007) #8
- 7All 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
- 8Parasite2019 · 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
- 9The 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
- 10Casablanca1942 · Michael Curtiz · United States · romance, war, drama5.29
Oscar Best Picture winner 1943 · AFI 100 (2007) #3 · AFI 100 (1998) #2
- 11Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles1975 · Chantal Akerman · Belgium / France · drama5.26
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #4 · Hoberman's annual top 10 1978 #1
- 1212 Angry Men1957 · Sidney Lumet · United States · drama5.25
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1957 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1959 #1 · Letterboxd Top 250 #3
- 13In 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
- 14Spirited 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
- 15Tokyo 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
- 16Bicycle 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
- 17The 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
- 18Dr. Strangelove1964 · Stanley Kubrick · United States / United Kingdom · comedy, war4.66
BAFTA Best Film winner 1965 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #46 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1964
- 19One 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
- 20The 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
- 21Mulholland 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
- 228½1963 · 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
- 23Secrets & Lies1996 · Mike Leigh · United Kingdom · drama4.58
Palme d'Or winner 1996 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1997 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1996
- 24Sunset 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
- 25Do 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
- 26The Apartment1960 · Billy Wilder · United States · comedy, romance, drama4.38
Oscar Best Picture winner 1960 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1961 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #54
- 27Chinatown1974 · Roman Polanski · United States · film-noir, mystery, thriller4.33
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1974 · AFI 100 (2007) #21
- 28Amadeus1984 · 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
- 29The Best Years of Our Lives1946 · William Wyler · United States · war, drama4.31
Oscar Best Picture winner 1946 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1948 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1948 #2
- 30Singin' in the Rain1952 · Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen · United States · comedy, romance, musical4.30
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #10 · AFI 100 (2007) #5 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #52
Every list on this site is a claim about what lasts, and most of them are made by critics, academies or polling bodies — small rooms of expert taste. This one is made by everybody. Letterboxd's Top 250 is the only crowd on our shelves, and re-sorting it by our composite score is really a test of a single question: how far does the internet's affection track the canon the professionals have built?
A living list, voted by millions
Letterboxd launched in October 2011 out of Auckland, New Zealand, the work of Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow — a social platform where members log films and rate them on a five-star scale. The Top 250 is not curated; it is counted, an aggregate of those millions of ratings, and it moves. Six different films have held the title of highest-rated narrative feature over the years — The Godfather (1972), Parasite (2019), Come and See (1985) and Harakiri (1962) among them — with the crown changing hands as new releases surge and older favorites settle. That churn is the point. A critics' poll freezes taste once a decade; this one re-tallies every day.
Where the crowd meets the canon
Our re-ranking sorts that popular vote by a composite drawn from awards, polls and critical lists — and the surprise is how often the two agree at the very top. The Godfather leads our ordering at a score of 9.75, with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) a stretch behind at 7.43: two films the crowd adores and the critics have canonized in equal measure. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) holds third at 7.40. Consensus this broad is rare, and it carries a lesson — the films that unite a mass audience and a jury tend to be the ones that were never really in dispute.
The friction shows lower down. Crowd ratings reward the recent, the emotionally direct and the animated: Spirited Away (2001) rides high on Letterboxd's affection but settles to a composite score of 4.98 here, while Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) — a fixture of the critics' polls — lands at 5.26, its stature institutional rather than popular. That inversion is the whole value of measuring a crowd against a canon: the ranking above is ours, sorted by score, never Letterboxd's own live order. Read it as two verdicts laid over each other — where they converge you can trust the film completely, and where they split is where the argument about cinema actually lives.