The Best Movies Ever Made, According to Letterboxd

When the topic of the best movies ever made comes up, there are a few respected polls and lists that cinephiles consult. Every ten years, Sight & Sound puts out their best film poll that draws on the expertise of dozens of film critics and filmmakers. The American Film Institute released several well-respected lists of the greatest American films of all time, along with the best films in several specific genres like thrillers, horror films, or musicals.

Those lists are all informative and valuable. But they’re also fixed in place. The AFI hasn’t put out a new 100 best films list in over 15 years, and Sight & Sound only polls their experts once a decade. If you want a more fluid look at the evolving consensus picks for the greatest movies in history, you might want to try Letterboxd, the film-based social media site where you can see a ranking of every single movie in their database — over 900,000 titles! — based on hundreds of thousands of users’ votes.

There are a few different best-of lists on Letterboxd already. If you click the “Films” tab and then go “Browse By” and click “Rating” and “Highest First” you’ll get all 900,000+ titles ranked from the absolute top score all the way to the absolute worst. But that raw list also includes some TV shows, documentary miniseries, and longform anime; titles are are certainly wonderful but perhaps do not belong on a list of best movies ever made.

Likewise, Letterboxd maintains its own “official” list of the top 250 narrative features, but that list by its very nature does not include things like documentaries or concert films which perhaps do belong on a list of the best films of all time. That’s why I made the list of 25 titles below, which is sort of the best of both worlds: It’s all of Letterboxd’s highest-rated films, but only films — including docs and concert films. Take a look for yourself and see what made the cut…

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