The Vatican's Great Films List, Ranked
In 1995, for cinema's centenary, the Vatican named 45 great films in three categories — religion, values and art. Here is the list's cinema, re-ranked by our composite score across 20+ lists, awards and polls.
44 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.
- 1Citizen Kane1941 · Orson Welles · United States · drama, biography, mystery9.21
AFI 100 (2007) #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #2 · AFI 100 (1998) #1
- 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
- 3Schindler's List1993 · Steven Spielberg · United States · war, biography, drama6.12
Oscar Best Picture winner 1993 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1994 · AFI 100 (2007) #8
- 4Bicycle 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
- 58½1963 · 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
- 6On the Waterfront1954 · Elia Kazan · United States · drama, crime, thriller4.31
Oscar Best Picture winner 1954 · AFI 100 (1998) #8 · AFI 100 (2007) #19
- 7Wild Strawberries1957 · Ingmar Bergman · Sweden · drama4.30
Berlin Golden Bear winner 1958 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1962 #1 · Sarris's annual top 10 1959 #1
- 8Ordet1955 · Carl Theodor Dreyer · Denmark · drama4.06
Venice Golden Lion winner 1955 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1955 #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #30
- 9Ben-Hur1959 · William Wyler · United States · drama, action3.61
Oscar Best Picture winner 1959 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1960 · AFI 100 (2007) #100
- 10The Seventh Seal1957 · Ingmar Bergman · Sweden · fantasy, drama3.58
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1958 #2 · Sarris's annual top 10 1958 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72
- 11Chariots of Fire1981 · Hugh Hudson · United Kingdom / Australia · biography, drama3.55
Oscar Best Picture winner 1981 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1982 · TIFF People's Choice winner 1981
- 12It'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
- 13A Man for All Seasons1966 · Fred Zinnemann · United Kingdom · biography, drama3.51
Oscar Best Picture winner 1966 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1968 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1967 #4
- 14Gandhi1982 · Richard Attenborough · United Kingdom / India · biography, drama3.37
Oscar Best Picture winner 1982 · BAFTA Best Film winner 1983 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1983 #3
- 15The Wizard of Oz1939 · Victor Fleming, King Vidor · United States · fantasy, musical, adventure3.17
AFI 100 (2007) #10 · AFI 100 (1998) #6 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1939
- 16The Tree of Wooden Clogs1978 · Ermanno Olmi · Italy · drama3.14
Palme d'Or winner 1978 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1979 #2 · Empire 500 (2008) #108
- 17Modern Times1936 · Charlie Chaplin · United States · comedy, romance, drama2.97
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #78 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1938 #4
- 18The Leopard1963 · Luchino Visconti · France / Italy · drama2.94
Palme d'Or winner 1963 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #90 · Vatican film list
- 19Rome, Open City1945 · Roberto Rossellini · Kingdom of Italy · drama2.82
Palme d'Or winner 1946 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1950 #4 · Scorsese's 39 essential foreign films
- 20La Strada1954 · Federico Fellini · Italy · drama2.74
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1957 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #38 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1955 #7
- 21The Passion of Joan of Arc1928 · Carl Theodor Dreyer · France · drama, silent2.62
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #21 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #30 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1929 #7
- 22La Grande Illusion1937 · Jean Renoir · France · drama2.53
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1949 #2 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1938 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #146
- 23Au revoir les enfants1987 · Louis Malle · France / Italy / Germany · drama, war2.43
Venice Golden Lion winner 1987 · César Best Film winner 1988 · Vatican film list
- 24Andrei Rublev1966 · Andrei Tarkovsky · Soviet Union · biography2.30
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #26 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #67 · Empire 500 (2008) #36
- 25The Sacrifice1986 · Andrei Tarkovsky · Sweden / France / United Kingdom · drama2.26
Cannes Grand Prix winner 1986 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1986 #2 · Kehr's annual top 10 1986 #2
- 26Stagecoach1939 · John Ford · United States · western, drama, action2.24
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1940 #2 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1939 · AFI 100 (1998) #63
- 27Metropolis1927 · Fritz Lang · Weimar Republic · silent, drama, sci-fi2.18
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #67 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1929 #4 · TIME All-TIME 100
- 28The Mission1986 · Roland Joffé · United Kingdom / France · drama2.17
Palme d'Or winner 1986 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1986 · Vatican film list
- 29Thérèse1986 · Alain Cavalier · France · drama, biography1.92
César Best Film winner 1987 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1986 #7 · Sarris's annual top 10 1986 #3
- 30The Gospel According to St. Matthew1964 · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Italy / France · drama1.49
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1966 #4 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #157 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1965 #9
Most institutional canons read like press releases; the Vatican's reads like an argument. When the Church sat down to name great films, it did not simply bless the pious — it reached for Buñuel, whose anticlericalism was a career-long provocation, and for a Jesuit tragedy that turns on the Church betraying its own missionaries. That tension is what makes this the most interesting curated list on the site, and what our composite score quietly rearranges.
The centenary list (1995)
The list was published in 1995 by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, under the title Alcuni film importanti — "some important films" — to mark the hundredth year since the Lumière brothers first projected cinema to a paying audience. It gathers 45 titles sorted into three thematic categories of fifteen each: Religion, Values and Art. The selection was not one prelate's whim: a team led by council president John Patrick Foley and film-library head Enrique Planas worked with twelve experts, librarians and academics, and Pope John Paul II endorsed the result for public viewing.
What the list was really arguing
Read closely, the categories are less about doctrine than about a defence of the medium. Foley framed the exercise as proof that "great films could be made without pandering to violent or pornographic elements" — a claim about craft, not catechism. The Religion group, tellingly, makes room for work that interrogates the institution rather than flattering it, and the Values and Art groups reach well outside anything a viewer would call devotional. The through-line is seriousness of intent. It is a churchman's list that trusts art over advertisement, which is rarer than it should be and is the reason it still gets cited thirty years on.
How to read our list
Our composite score flattens those three thematic columns into a single axis, and the reshuffle is the point. Citizen Kane (1941) tops the page at #2 in our full library, score 9.21 — an Art pick with not a hymn in it — trailed by Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) at #3 and Schindler's List (1993) at #8. The spiritual heart of the Vatican's Religion category sits further down by accumulated weight: Dreyer's Ordet (1955) lands at #55, his own The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) only at #220, and Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) at #632. Membership is fixed by the Vatican's own selection — our list carries 44 of the 45, mapped by source ID — but the order below is ours alone, drawn from more than twenty lists, awards and polls, never from the Church's sequence.