Truly great movies are the ones that show up over and over in the cultural conversation, not just with different audiences, but across generations. They’re the ones you see in fan rankings, critic lists, film school syllabi, and “best of” debates long after they’re released.
This doesn’t mean they’re beyond criticism or that everyone likes them. (The best movies spark more debate, not less.) But they do have a kind of staying power that goes beyond nostalgia or personal attachment.
Each of these 10 movies consistently appears at the very top of critic lists, no matter who’s doing the ranking. Let’s take a look at why they stand out and why we’re still talking about them today.
The Top 10 at a Glance
Sources: Plex, IMDb Top 250, Metacritic, and RottenTomatoes
#1: The Shawshank Redemption (1994): Why the Highest-Rated Movie Almost Disappeared
How a Box Office Failure Became the #1 Rated Movie on IMDb
The Shawshank Redemption grossed $73.3 million worldwide against a $25 million budget, according to Box Office Mojo. That total includes a re-release bump after its Oscar nominations in early 1995. During its original theatrical run, it grossed roughly $16 million domestically, making it the 51st-highest-grossing film of 1994, according to industry data. The same year saw the release of Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, and The Lion King. Shawshank was buried.
Its second life started on cable television and home video. Ted Turner’s TNT acquired the broadcast rights cheaply because of the film’s low box office and began airing it regularly in 1997. It became the top-rented film of 1995 on video, according to reporting by Tom’s Guide. The repeated cable broadcasts turned it into something studios can rarely engineer: slow-building, word-of-mouth devotion from an audience that discovered it on their own terms.
By the late 1990s, it was climbing IMDb’s user-voted Top 250. It passed The Godfather for the #1 position in 2008, according to Looper’s reporting on IMDb’s historical ranking data, and has held that spot since with a 9.3 rating from over 3 million votes.
What Makes The Shawshank Redemption Resound Across Generations
The film works because of specifics, not because of broad emotional appeals. Tim Robbins plays Andy Dufresne with a restraint that lets every little act of resistance register as a real event. Morgan Freeman’s Red narrates the story using a voice that sounds like someone who has thought about every sentence for years before saying it.
The relationship between the two relies on subtle interaction, and Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption maintains that tone in the film.
Roger Deakins’ cinematography spotlights the atmosphere in the prison, and Thomas Newman’s score supports the mood of each scene without being intrusive. The film received seven Oscar nominations but won none, losing Best Picture to Forrest Gump. That fact has become part of the film’s history: a prison drama that required time to find its audience.
The film’s main subject is time: how it’s spent, how it affects people, and what happens when it doesn’t define a person. This topic is accessible to most viewers, regardless of personal experience.
#2: The Godfather (1972): The Film That Reinvented American Cinema
Francis Ford Coppola’s Transformation of the Gangster Genre
Paramount expected a cheap genre picture. Mario Puzo’s novel was a bestseller, but the studio saw it as a pulpy crime story that might turn a profit on a modest budget. They reluctantly hired Coppola, fought his casting of Marlon Brando (who was considered box-office poison at the time), resisted his choice of Al Pacino for the role of Michael, and pushed back on nearly every creative decision that later defined the film.
Gordon Willis, the cinematographer Coppola brought on, shot the film in deliberately low light. Many interiors are so dark that studio executives reportedly asked if something was wrong with the prints. The low lighting is key to the film’s visual style. Nino Rota’s score, with its trumpet theme, gave the family a tone that previous gangster films had not attempted.
The Godfather won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Brando, who famously refused the award. It holds a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a perfect 100 on Metacritic, the highest score on that platform for any film with enough reviews.
Why The Godfather Remains the Standard for Ensemble Filmmaking
Coppola managed an ensemble where all characters are defined by a clear trait. Brando’s Vito is warm, deliberate, and intimidating. Pacino’s Michael starts as an outsider and becomes more distant over time. James Caan’s Sonny acts on impulse. Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagen is calculating. Diane Keaton’s Kay observes the family’s changes.
The AFI placed The Godfather at #2 on its 100 Years…100 Movies list (revised in 2007). The BFI Sight & Sound poll consistently ranks it among the top 10 in both its critics’ and directors’ surveys. Empire’s reader polls have placed it at or near #1 multiple times.
Some viewers find the film’s pacing slow. Every conversation in the film carries meaning, and the deliberate pacing builds tension that culminates in more impactful moments.
#3: The Dark Knight (2008): When a Superhero Film Became a Crime Thriller
Heath Ledger’s Joker and the Performance That Changed the Genre’s Ceiling
Heath Ledger won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor posthumously for his performance as the Joker. It was only the second posthumous acting Oscar in the Academy’s history, following Peter Finch’s win for Network in 1977.
What Ledger did with the role went beyond a memorable villain performance. He created a character that operated by a different set of rules than the film around him. This forced every other character to respond in ways they hadn’t planned for.
This unpredictability added tension to The Dark Knight, separating it from most superhero films, which follow established patterns. Ledger’s Joker disrupted those patterns.
Christopher Nolan grounded the film within real-world architecture. Gotham City was shot on location in Chicago, with physical effects and real stunts replacing the computer-generated fabrication used in other franchise films. The result was a film in which a man in a bat suit operated in a world that looked and seemed like a real city, raising the dramatic stakes far above what audiences expected from a comic book property.
The Dark Knight’s Box Office and Critical Impact on Blockbuster Filmmaking
The Dark Knight earned $1.006 billion worldwide, per Box Office Mojo, making it the fourth film in history to cross the billion-dollar mark at the time of its release. It’s 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and 9.0 on IMDb, placing it alongside decades-old prestige dramas on every major ranking list.
Its commercial and critical success created a template that studio filmmaking has spent nearly two decades trying to reproduce: a natural tone, a complex villain with a coherent philosophy, and moral problems that don’t resolve cleanly.
Some critics have argued that its IMDb ranking is skewed by recency bias because IMDb’s user base skews younger and responds more intensely to films they saw in theaters during their formative years.
That argument has some validity. However, the film’s technical craft, Wally Pfister’s IMAX cinematography, and the complexity of its screenplay remain effective even after multiple viewings, unlike many blockbusters from the same era.
#4: The Godfather Part II (1974): The Rare Sequel That Equals Its Original
How Dual Timelines Created the First Sequel to Win Best Picture
Coppola’s approach in Part II contributes to its effectiveness and also divides opinion. The film intercuts two timelines: Michael Corleone’s consolidation of power in the late 1950s, in which he becomes more ruthless than his father, and young Vito Corleone’s origin story in early-1900s New York, showing the development of the family business.
Robert De Niro won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor playing young Vito. He performed the role largely in Sicilian dialect, a choice that grounds the character within a world that feels lived-in rather than performed.
Pacino’s Michael, by contrast, speaks less as the film progresses, and each line he delivers reflects a major decision. The alternating timelines provide an emotional structure not found in most sequels.
The Godfather Part II won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It was the first Oscar-winning sequel in Oscar history, a distinction that remained almost unique for decades. Its Rotten Tomatoes score is 96%, and its Metacritic rating is 90.
Where The Godfather Part II Ranks Across Critics and Audiences
Part II sometimes ranks above the original film in critics’ polls. The BFI Sight & Sound survey has historically placed it higher among directors, who tend to prize its structural innovation. Audiences on IMDb rank it slightly below the first film, consistent with a general preference for The Godfather’s more accessible emotional arc.
Both positions are reasonable. Critics respond to Part II’s form. Audiences respond to what The Godfather does with feeling. The fact that both films hold top-5 positions on IMDb, separated by only 0.2 points, says more about their quality than any individual ranking.
#5: 12 Angry Men (1957): One Room, Zero Special Effects, Total Mastery
Why a Film Set Entirely in a Jury Room Still Ranks Among the Greatest
The premise is simple: twelve jurors deliberate a murder case; 11 vote guilty; one dissents. Everything that follows takes place in a single room. There are no chase sequences, no musical score for most of the runtime, no location changes, and no visual presentation of any kind. As per industry reports of the era, the film cost approximately $350,000 to make and earned around $2 million at the box office.
And yet it holds a 9.0 on IMDb, a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 97 on Metacritic.
What makes it work is precision at every level. Reginald Rose’s script escalates tension through dialogue alone, layering each juror’s biases, assumptions, and reasoning into a structure in which every new revelation recontextualizes what came before.
Sidney Lumet’s directorial choices are studied in film schools because they demonstrate how camera placement can create psychological pressure without any viewer consciously noticing. He begins the film with wide shots and gradually shifts to close-ups as the room’s temperature rises, the walls seem to close in, and the arguments become personal. Henry Fonda’s lead performance is a study in how much force calm conviction can carry against collective momentum.
The film received three Oscar nominations and won none, losing Best Picture to The Bridge on the River Kwai. Its core tension, the collision between groupthink and independent reasoning, prejudice and evidence, has not dated. If anything, those subjects are more prevalent in public conversation now than in 1957.
12 Angry Men’s Influence on Courtroom and Dialogue-Driven Cinema
The film demonstrated that tension can be created without large-scale settings. Many later courtroom dramas use Rose’s script structure, and single-location thrillers often adopt Lumet’s approach of focusing the camera more closely as conflict increases.
It ranks on the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies list and has never left the IMDb Top 10 despite having no action sequences, no female speaking roles, and no visual effects. Its presence on any all-time list is a sign that enduring quality has nothing to do with scope.
#6: Schindler’s List (1993): Spielberg’s Most Difficult and Important Film
How Schindler’s List Served Both as a Film and a Historical Record
Steven Spielberg made deliberate choices that set this film apart from conventional historical dramas. He shot in black and white. He used handheld cameras. He adopted a documentary-adjacent visual style that blurs the boundary between narrative filmmaking and archival testimony. Janusz Kamiński’s cinematography gives the film a texture that feels found rather than composed, which is exactly the effect Spielberg intended.
Liam Neeson’s Oskar Schindler is played as a man who arrives at moral seriousness slowly and reluctantly, which makes his eventual actions believable rather than saintly. Ralph Fiennes’ Amon Göth is terrifying because Fiennes plays him as someone who understands his own cruelty and is unaffected by it. The contrast between the two performances gives the film its dramatic spine.
Spielberg established the Shoah Foundation with the film’s profits, an organization dedicated to recording and preserving survivors’ testimonies. That decision extended the film’s purpose beyond the screen and into a permanent role as a tool of cultural conservation.
Schindler’s List won seven Academy Awards from 12 nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. It holds a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 95 on Metacritic. The AFI placed it at #8 on its 2007 revised list.
The Critical and Cultural Weight of Schindler’s List in All-Time Rankings
A reasonable question comes up when this film appears on a list alongside entertainment-oriented titles: Does a film about the Holocaust belong in the same conversation as crime dramas and fantasy epics?
The answer from every major ranking system is yes, because the highest achievement in filmmaking includes the capacity to apply artistic rigor to the most difficult human subjects. Its consistent placement across IMDb, AFI, BFI, and Metacritic shows a consensus that craft and gravity are not separate categories.
#7: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003): The Trilogy’s Record-Breaking Finale
11 Oscar Wins from 11 Nominations: The Most Dominant Awards Night in History
The Return of the King won every Oscar category it entered, going 11-for-11. That record is shared with Ben-Hur (1959) and Titanic (1997), but neither film won in every category. The Academy’s decision was interpreted at the time as recognition of the entire trilogy, not only the third film.
Peter Jackson, who began his career directing low-budget cult horror films in New Zealand, oversaw a production of historic ambition. All three Lord of the Rings films were shot simultaneously over 438 consecutive days on location in New Zealand.
The trilogy’s worldwide gross exceeded $2.9 billion, per Box Office Mojo. Jackson proved that fantasy cinema could earn both massive commercial returns and serious critical respect simultaneously, which was not a foregone conclusion in 2001 when the first film was released.
What Separates Return of the King from Other Fantasy Blockbusters
Among the three films, Fellowship is generally seen as the most structurally refined, and The Two Towers the most viscerally propulsive. The Return of the King holds its position because it delivers the emotional resolution that the preceding six hours have built toward.
The final 45 minutes, sometimes criticized for containing too many endings, serve a narrative function that addresses the consequences for the characters. This approach delivers resolution in a way that a single, triumphant ending would not.
It has 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, 94 on Metacritic, and 9.0 on IMDb, placing it comfortably among the top-rated movies across all platforms.
#8: Pulp Fiction (1994): How Quentin Tarantino Broke Narrative Convention
Non-Linear Narrative and Why Pulp Fiction’s Structure Still Feels Fresh
Pulp Fiction tells its stories out of chronological order, but the ordering isn’t random. Each segment recontextualizes what the audience has already seen, making revelations retroactive surprises.
A character you watched die in one section appears alive and unbothered in the next, and the effect isn’t confusion but a stronger engagement with the material. Tarantino’s screenplay, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, treats chronology as a tool rather than a constraint.
The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, received seven Oscar nominations, and grossed $213 million worldwide on a $8 million budget, per Box Office Mojo. That return on investment remains one of the highest in cinema history.
It revived John Travolta’s career, gave Samuel L. Jackson a role that defined the next three decades of his public persona, and launched independent filmmaking into mainstream commercial viability.
Pulp Fiction’s Lasting Mark on Film Dialogue and Independent Cinema
The mid-to-late 1990s produced a flood of Tarantino imitators: crime films with nonlinear timelines, pop-culture-heavy dialogue, and sudden violence played for dark comedy. Most of them failed because they copied the surface without grasping the structural intelligence underneath it.
Tarantino’s dialogue works because it builds character, establishes stakes, and creates tension. The long conversations in Pulp Fiction are not filler between action scenes. They are the scenes.
The film consistently ranks in the top 10 on IMDb, appears on both the AFI and Empire lists, and its influence on the American independent film industry of the 1990s is well established.
#9: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001): The Beginning of Cinema’s Most Ambitious Trilogy
How Peter Jackson Adapted a Novel That Hollywood Called Unfilmable
Multiple attempts to adapt Tolkien’s work failed before Jackson’s production. The Beatles wanted to star in a version in the 1960s. Several major studios passed on the project over the following decades. The common objection was that the books were too long, too detailed, and too reliant on internal monologue to work as cinema.
Jackson’s answer was an unprecedented gamble: shoot all three films at once, on location in New Zealand, utilizing a mix of practical effects, elaborate miniatures, and early computer-generated effects that had never been combined at that scale.
The specific adaptation decisions that made Fellowship succeed included condensing or removing subplots (Tom Bombadil was the most notable cut), expanding Arwen’s role to give the story a romantic throughline that the novel handles differently, and using practical creature effects wherever possible.
Fellowship earned $897 million worldwide and won four Academy Awards from 13 nominations, per the Academy’s database and Box Office Mojo.
Fellowship vs. Return of the King: Why Both Rank in the Top 10
It’s unusual for two films from the same trilogy to occupy the top 10 on IMDb simultaneously. What keeps both there is that they do fundamentally different work.
Fellowship excels at world-building, at generating a sense of mystery and discovery as the audience enters Middle-earth for the first time, and at establishing emotional bonds between characters who have not yet been tested. Return of the King excels at payoff, at spectacle, and at the burden of consequence.
Their joint presence in the top 10 isn’t a flaw in the ranking system. It’s evidence that the trilogy maintains a level of quality across its full runtime that very few multi-film projects have matched. Fellowship holds an 8.9 on IMDb, a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 92 on Metacritic.
#10: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966): The Western That Established “Epic”
Sergio Leone, Ennio Morricone, and the Birth of the Spaghetti Western’s Greatest Achievement
For readers unfamiliar with the term, spaghetti westerns were Italian-produced westerns, usually shot in the deserts of Spain with international casts, that reimagined American frontier mythology through a European lens. They tended to be darker, more morally ambiguous, and more stylistically extreme than anything Hollywood was producing in the genre at the time.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly marks the peak of that movement. Sergio Leone directs with visual restraint that few filmmakers attempt. He uses extreme close-ups held longer than expected, along with wide shots of the empty desert, to establish scale before any dialogue begins. The climactic three-way standoff in a cemetery is a standard reference in film schools for how editing, framing, and music build tension without dialogue.
Ennio Morricone’s score for this film is among the most recognizable pieces of music ever composed for cinema. The main theme, with its wailing vocals and twanging guitar, has been referenced, sampled, and parodied so widely that many people who have never seen the film know the melody. Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name became one of cinema’s most imitated characters, a figure defined entirely by economy of motion and speech.
How a 1966 Italian Western Holds Its Place Against Modern Blockbusters
The film is nearly 60 years old and still sits in the IMDb Top 10. Its Rotten Tomatoes score is 97%. The BFI and Empire polls both rank it among the best films in any genre. Its influence runs through the work of Quentin Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and every filmmaker who has borrowed Leone’s technique of stretching time to amplify tension.
The answer to why it endures is that Leone’s visual language, his pacing, and his willingness to let moral complexity sit unresolved have aged better than most films from any decade. Very few movies from 1966 are still generating first-time viewers in 2026. This one is.
How Movie Ratings Work: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic Explained
What the IMDb Top 250 Actually Measures (and What It Misses)
IMDb’s Top 250 doesn’t rank films by a simple average of user ratings. The platform uses a weighted Bayesian formula, which IMDb has publicly described on its website. The formula factors in the total number of votes a film has received and gives greater weight to votes from regular users, which reduces the impact of ballot-stuffing and single-vote accounts.
The system has known demographic skews. IMDb’s user base is disproportionately younger, male, and English-speaking, according to published demographic analyses. This means certain genres perform better than their critical reputations would predict.
Crime thrillers, superhero films, and science fiction trend higher than, say, foreign-language dramas or documentaries. None of that invalidates the IMDb ranking. It means you should interpret it as a measure of audience enthusiasm, weighted by vote volume, rather than as an objective quality index.
A minimum number of votes is required for a film to qualify for the Top 250. That threshold, combined with the weighting formula, is why a film can’t game its way onto the list with only a few perfect scores.
Rotten Tomatoes vs. Metacritic: Critics’ Score vs. Weighted Average
The two most-cited critics’ rating systems measure different things, and conflating them leads to bad conclusions.
Rotten Tomatoes calculates its Tomatometer by counting the percentage of approved critics who rated a film positively. The assessment is binary: positive or negative. A film where every critic gave it a 7 out of 10 would score 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, because every review was positive. The platform also publishes an Audience Score that aggregates viewer ratings separately and sometimes diverges widely from the Tomatometer.
Metacritic takes a different approach. It assigns each critic a weight based on the publication’s perceived authority, then averages the numerical scores on a 0-to-100 scale. A film with all 70/100 reviews would score 70 on Metacritic, even though it would score 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Metacritic method distinguishes between a film that everyone thinks is good and one that everyone thinks is extraordinary. Rotten Tomatoes does not.
This distinction matters when you look at the summary table above. The Shawshank Redemption, for example, holds a 9.3 on IMDb and a 98% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes, but its Tomatometer score is 89%, and its Metacritic score is 82%. The audience loves it more than critics do, which is unusual for a consensus top-10 film and worth noting.
Why No Single Rating System Tells the Whole Story
The most reliable signal that a film belongs in the all-time conversation is convergence across multiple systems. When IMDb users, Rotten Tomatoes critics, Metacritic’s weighted average, and institutional polls like the AFI and BFI all place a film in their top tier, that agreement holds greater significance than any single rating.
All 10 films on this list exhibit that kind of convergence. Some scores are higher on one platform than on another, and the reasons for those differences are worth understanding (as the sections above explain). But none of them are absent from any major ranking system, which is why the list holds up regardless of which metric you personally trust.
How to Watch the Top 10 Movies of All Time on Plex
Finding Where Each Film Streams Without Checking 5 Different Apps
A practical problem follows any greatest-films list: the movies on it are scattered across multiple streaming services, rental platforms, and physical media libraries. Finding where all 10 are currently available means opening and searching several apps, since licensing agreements regularly move titles between platforms.
Plex solves this with a feature called Discover. It works as a universal search across all of a user’s connected streaming services, showing where any title is available. You search for The Godfather, and Plex tells you which of your existing subscriptions carries it, whether it’s available to rent, or whether it’s currently free in Plex’s ad-supported library.
The Universal Watchlist lets you add all 10 films listed here to a single queue. Plex tracks availability changes and notifies you when a title moves to a new platform or becomes free.
The platform’s ad-supported library includes over 50,000 titles licensed from studios such as Lionsgate, AMC, and Crackle, so some of these films may already be available for free. For others, Plex Rentals offers on-demand access to catalog titles and new releases.
Watching Your Own Collection of Classic Films Through Plex Media Server
For anyone who owns physical copies or downloaded files of these movies, Plex Media Server is free software that automatically organizes a personal library. It scans your files, matches them to metadata databases, and adds poster art, cast information, critic ratings, and plot summaries without any manual entry. Once the library is set up, you can stream your collection to any connected device: smart TVs, mobile phones, gaming consoles, streaming sticks, and web browsers.
The practical benefit of a collection of classic films is that the library travels with you. If you own a Blu-ray rip of 12 Angry Men and a downloaded copy of Pulp Fiction, both appear in the same organized interface alongside whatever is available through your streaming subscriptions.
Social Features for Sharing Your Movie Opinions with Friends
After watching these films, Plex lets you rate and review them, see what friends are watching, and share Watchlist items with other users. You can follow other people’s activity for recommendations and discover what to watch next based on community ratings. For a list like this one, the social features give you a way to compare your rankings with people you know and to track which of the 10 you’ve finished.
10 Honorable Mentions That Nearly Made the Top 10
Films That Rank in the Top 20 Across Multiple Rating Systems
The 10 films above occupy the top tier, but the next group down is stacked with titles that would headline any other list. All of the following appear consistently in the top 20 across IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, AFI, and BFI polls.
- Fight Club (1999): Fincher’s anti-consumerist thriller split critics on release and has since climbed into the IMDb top 15. Its audience devotion is enormous; its critical reputation is still catching up.
- Forrest Gump (1994): The film that beat Shawshank and Pulp Fiction for Best Picture. Its six Oscar wins and massive box office ($678 million worldwide) keep it in the conversation, though some critics insist its politics have not aged well.
- Inception (2010): Nolan’s second entry in the top-20 conversation. It consistently ranks between 13 and 15 across major systems. Its intellectual ambition is widely admired; its emotional core divides audiences more than any top-10 entry.
- The Matrix (1999): Redefined action filmmaking with its bullet-time effects and cyberpunk premise. It sits in the IMDb top 20 and remains a cultural reference point, though its sequels have complicated its legacy.
- Goodfellas (1990): Scorsese’s mob epic is often cited alongside The Godfather as the genre’s peak. Its Metacritic score (90) and Rotten Tomatoes rating (96%) are in the top 10; its IMDb position typically falls between 15 and 20.
- Se7en (1995): Fincher’s serial-killer procedural has an 82 on Metacritic and sits in the IMDb top 25. Its final act remains one of the most discussed endings in American cinema.
- City of God (2002): The Brazilian crime drama holds a 91 on Metacritic and a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s one of the highest-rated non-English-language films on any major platform.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002): The middle chapter of Jackson’s trilogy, with an 8.8 on IMDb. It sits right outside the top 10 in most rankings, held back only by the stronger bookends of Fellowship and Return of the King.
- Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980): The consensus pick for the best Star Wars film. It holds an 8.7 on IMDb and a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the AFI placed it at #12 on its 2007 list.
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975): One of only three films to win all five major Oscar categories (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay). Its IMDb rating of 8.7 and Rotten Tomatoes score of 93% place it firmly in the top 20.
Build Your Greatest Movies Watchlist with Plex
Turn This List into a Personal Watchlist in Under 2 Minutes
You can open Plex right now, for free, without a credit card. Search for any film on this list, tap to add it to your Universal Watchlist, and Plex will show you where it’s currently available: on your existing streaming services, in Plex’s free library, or as a rental. The app is available at plex.tv and on every major app store, and it works on smart TVs, phones, tablets, gaming consoles, and browsers.
The distance between reading about a great film and actually watching it should be as short as possible. Plex makes that distance one search and one tap.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Highest-Rated Movies of All Time
What’s the #1 Movie of All Time?
It depends on which system you use. The Shawshank Redemption holds the #1 position on IMDb’s Top 250 with a 9.3 rating. In the BFI Sight & Sound 2022 critics’ poll, the top position went to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The 2012 poll placed Vertigo at #1. If you prioritize audience ratings, the answer is Shawshank. If you value critical consensus, the answer varies by poll year.
What’s the Highest-Grossing Movie of All Time?
Avatar (2009) holds the all-time worldwide box-office record, with approximately $2.9 billion in earnings. Of course, highest-grossing and highest-rated are separate metrics that measure different things: commercial reach in one case, audience and critical approval in the other.
How Does IMDb Calculate Its Top 250 Rankings?
IMDb uses a weighted Bayesian average formula. A film must receive a minimum number of votes to qualify. The formula weights votes from regular users more heavily than those from infrequent voters, and it adjusts for statistical outliers and manipulation. The full methodology is published on IMDb’s website. The result isn’t a simple arithmetic mean of all ratings but a weighted score designed to resist gaming.
What’s the Difference Between IMDb Ratings and Rotten Tomatoes Scores?
IMDb aggregates audience votes into a weighted numerical average on a 10-point scale. Rotten Tomatoes counts the percentage of professional critics who rated a film positively, producing a binary yes-or-no percentage. A film can score 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.5 on IMDb because the systems measure different things. Rotten Tomatoes tells you how many critics liked it. IMDb tells you, on average, how much the audience liked it.
Are Black-and-White Movies Worth Watching Today?
Two films on this list are in black and white: 12 Angry Men (1957) and Schindler’s List (1993). Schindler’s List was shot in black and white by choice, not by technical limitation. In both cases, the absence of color is an artistic choice that draws attention to performance, composition, and contrast.
The data support the case plainly. 12 Angry Men holds a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Schindler’s List holds a 98%. Anyone who skips classic black-and-white films is removing some of the highest-rated cinema ever produced from their viewing options.
What Movie Has Won the Most Academy Awards?
Three films share the record at 11 Oscar wins: Ben-Hur (1959), Titanic (1997), and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). Of those three, Return of the King is the only one to win every category it was nominated in, going 11-for-11.
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