TIME's All-TIME 100 Movies, Ranked
For TIME's 2005 anniversary, critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel picked from every film since the magazine's founding in 1923 — an unranked, alphabetical hundred. Here is TIME's All-TIME 100 given an order: ranked by our composite score across 20+ lists, awards and polls.
98 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
- 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
- 4Goodfellas1990 · Martin Scorsese · United States · biography, crime, thriller6.33
BAFTA Best Film winner 1991 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #28 · Empire 500 (2008) #6
- 5Taxi 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
- 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
- 7Pulp Fiction1994 · Quentin Tarantino · United States · crime, drama, thriller5.76
Palme d'Or winner 1994 · Empire 500 (2008) #9 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1994
- 8Raging 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
- 9Casablanca1942 · Michael Curtiz · United States · romance, war, drama5.29
Oscar Best Picture winner 1943 · AFI 100 (2007) #3 · AFI 100 (1998) #2
- 10Unforgiven1992 · 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
- 11Tokyo 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
- 12Dr. 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
- 138½1963 · 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
- 14Chinatown1974 · Roman Polanski · United States · film-noir, mystery, thriller4.33
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1974 · AFI 100 (2007) #21
- 15On the Waterfront1954 · Elia Kazan · United States · drama, crime, thriller4.31
Oscar Best Picture winner 1954 · AFI 100 (1998) #8 · AFI 100 (2007) #19
- 16Singin' 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
- 17Persona1966 · Ingmar Bergman · Sweden · drama4.29
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1967 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #9 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #18
- 18E.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
- 19The 400 Blows1959 · François Truffaut · France · drama, crime4.04
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #33 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #50 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1959 #5
- 20Psycho1960 · Alfred Hitchcock · United States · thriller, horror, mystery4.01
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #31 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #46 · AFI 100 (2007) #14
- 21Barry 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
- 22Bonnie and Clyde1967 · Arthur Penn · United States · drama, crime, biography3.82
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1968 #1 · Ebert's annual top 10 1967 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1967
- 23Ikiru1952 · Akira Kurosawa · Japan · drama3.78
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 1952 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #157
- 24Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans1927 · F. W. Murnau · United States · drama, silent, romance3.77
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1928 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #11 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #33
- 25The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King2003 · Peter Jackson · New Zealand / United States · fantasy, adventure3.69
Oscar Best Picture winner 2003 · BAFTA Best Film winner 2004 · Letterboxd Top 250 #11
- 26Star 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
- 27It's a Wonderful Life1946 · Frank Capra · United States · comedy, romance, fantasy3.52
AFI 100 (2007) #20 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1946 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #133
- 28Some Like It Hot1959 · Billy Wilder · United States · comedy, romance, crime3.47
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #38 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #62 · AFI 100 (2007) #22
- 29City Lights1931 · Charlie Chaplin · United States · comedy, romance, drama3.40
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #36 · AFI 100 (2007) #11 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #52
- 30Farewell My Concubine1993 · Chen Kaige · China · drama, romance3.39
Palme d'Or winner 1993 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1994 #2 · TIME All-TIME 100
The hundred TIME chose
In 2005, marking the years of film released since the magazine's first issue in March 1923, TIME turned two of its critics loose on eight decades of cinema. Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel each drew up a private roster of some hundred and fifteen candidates. They then argued the overlaps and omissions for roughly four months, until a shared hundred emerged. They chased breadth on purpose — across directors, players, countries and genres — and the seams show: only one title, Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, carries a woman's name as director, while Martin Scorsese lands three films and Robert De Niro turns up in five performances. TIME printed the result unranked and alphabetical, a deliberate refusal to say which of the hundred was best. The feature drew 7.8 million page views in its opening week.
What our order reveals
An alphabetical list hides every judgment except inclusion. Our page restores the missing one: it takes the films from that hundred which our library carries and sorts them by composite score across twenty-plus lists, awards and polls — so the ordering here is ours, not TIME's. What surfaces first is Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), the highest-scoring survivor, trailed by David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) — a top three that reads less like a critics' truce than like the accumulated weight of a half-century of other canons agreeing.
Scorsese's three inclusions cluster near the top by our count as well: Goodfellas (1990), Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) all sit inside the leading dozen, which tells you the composite and the critics converged on the same body of work from opposite directions. Steven Spielberg enters high with Schindler's List (1993); Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) proves a blockbuster can outscore an arthouse pillar when enough ballots reward it.
The tail of our rendered list is where reputation and measurement part company. F. W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) — routinely called one of the medium's supreme achievements — anchors the bottom of the top thirty, outscored by Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946). That is not a verdict on the film so much as a reading of how canons are built: a silent masterpiece accrues votes slowly, while a myth that half the planet has watched compounds fast. The lesson of imposing an order on TIME's un-ordered hundred is precisely that the order was never neutral to begin with.