a Yourlist ranking · the crowd decides the order
These are among the most acclaimed Academy Award winners for Best Picture. Vote for the ones you think deserve the crown as the greatest of all time.
What counts: 'Best' weighs lasting cultural impact, critical reputation, and rewatchability over box office alone. Year is the Oscar ceremony year (for the prior year's film), IMDb rating is approximate and rounded, and box office/budget figures are rough approximations in unadjusted dollars.
Coppola's mafia epic turned a pulp novel into a somber meditation on power and family, redefining what a crime film could be. Brando's whispered menace and the horse-head scene became instant cinematic scripture. It's the film most often cited as the greatest Best Picture winner
Oscar Year: 1972IMDb Rating: 9.2/10Genre: Runtime: 175 minDirector:
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A wartime romance shot on a tight schedule with a script rewritten daily somehow became the most quotable film in Hollywood history. Bogart and Bergman's doomed love affair at Rick's Café Américain distilled sacrifice and cynicism into perfect melodrama. 'Here's looking at you, k
Oscar Year: 1944IMDb Rating: 8.5/10Genre: Runtime: 102 minDirector:
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Spielberg shot in stark black-and-white to confront the Holocaust with unflinching moral clarity, anchored by Liam Neeson's transformation from opportunist to savior. The girl in the red coat remains one of cinema's most devastating single images. It proved a blockbuster director
Oscar Year: 1994IMDb Rating: 9/10Genre: Runtime: 195 minDirector:
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A rare sequel that many consider superior to its original, weaving young Vito's rise in New York with Michael's descent into isolated paranoia in Nevada. It's the only Best Picture sequel to a Best Picture winner, a feat unmatched since. De Niro's Oscar-winning performance cement
Oscar Year: 1975IMDb Rating: 9/10Genre: Runtime: 202 minDirector:
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David Lean's desert epic turned T.E. Lawrence's campaigns into pure cinematic spectacle, with Peter O'Toole's piercing blue eyes framed against endless dunes shot in 70mm. The match-cut to a rising sun remains a film-school staple. It's the gold standard for how 'epic' should loo
Oscar Year: 1963IMDb Rating: 8.3/10Genre: Runtime: 218 minDirector:
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Jack Nicholson's Randle McMurphy battles Nurse Ratched's cold institutional cruelty in a psychiatric ward, becoming a symbol of rebellion against conformity. It swept all five major Oscars, a feat only three films have achieved. The lobotomy aftermath still lands like a gut punch
Oscar Year: 1976IMDb Rating: 8.7/10Genre: Runtime: 133 minDirector:
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The highest-grossing film ever adjusted for inflation, this Civil War-era romance made Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler's 'frankly, my dear' farewell immortal. Its lavish Technicolor spectacle set a benchmark for scale that Hollywood chased for decades. Its glorification of the a
Oscar Year: 1940IMDb Rating: 8.2/10Genre: Runtime: 238 minDirector:
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Anthony Hopkins turned eleven minutes of screen time as Hannibal Lecter into one of cinema's most iconic villains, opposite Jodie Foster's steely Clarice Starling. It's the only horror-adjacent film to ever win Best Picture, blending psychological dread with a taut procedural. Th
Oscar Year: 1992IMDb Rating: 8.6/10Genre: Runtime: 118 minDirector:
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Bong Joon-ho's class-warfare thriller shocked Oscar history as the first non-English-language film to win Best Picture, sneaking laughs and horror into a scathing critique of inequality. The flooding basement sequence recontextualizes the entire film in one devastating stroke. It
Oscar Year: 2020IMDb Rating: 8.5/10Genre: Runtime: 132 minDirector:
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Steve McQueen refused to look away from the brutality of American slavery, forcing long unbroken takes that make the violence impossible to sanitize. Chiwetel Ejiofor's Solomon Northup carries a story of endurance rooted in a real memoir. It's one of the most unflinchingly honest
Oscar Year: 2014IMDb Rating: 8.1/10Genre: Runtime: 134 minDirector:
added by IJRin 2 rankings12 Years a Slave
F. Murray Abraham's jealous Salieri narrates Mozart's genius as divine cruelty, turning classical music history into operatic melodrama. Tom Hulce's cackling, childish Mozart subverted every stuffy biopic expectation. It's a rare Best Picture winner that's as fun as it is prestig
Oscar Year: 1985IMDb Rating: 8.4/10Genre: Runtime: 160 minDirector:
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The Coen Brothers adapted Cormac McCarthy's bleak thriller into a meditation on chaos and inevitability, with Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh becoming cinema's most terrifying coin-flipping killer. Its abrupt, anti-climactic ending remains one of the most debated choices in modern
Oscar Year: 2008IMDb Rating: 8.2/10Genre: Runtime: 122 minDirector:
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Barry Jenkins told a quiet, three-act coming-of-age story about a gay Black man in Miami with unmatched tenderness and visual poetry. Its win became instantly historic thanks to the chaotic envelope mix-up with La La Land onstage. Beyond the drama, it's a genuinely groundbreaking
Oscar Year: 2017IMDb Rating: 7.4/10Genre: Runtime: 111 minDirector:
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William Wyler's chariot race remains one of the most spectacular practical action sequences ever filmed, still breathtaking without a shred of CGI. It won a then-record 11 Oscars, a mark equaled only twice since. Charlton Heston's Judah Ben-Hur turned Roman-era revenge into a gen
Oscar Year: 1960IMDb Rating: 8.1/10Genre: Runtime: 212 minDirector:
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Bette Davis's Margo Channing sparred with Anne Baxter's scheming ingenue in the sharpest, wittiest screenplay of Hollywood's Golden Age. Its cynical look at theater ambition and aging fame still feels startlingly modern. It holds the record for most Oscar acting nominations for a
Oscar Year: 1951IMDb Rating: 8.2/10Genre: Runtime: 138 minDirector:
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Clint Eastwood dismantled his own gunslinger mythology as an aging killer dragged back into violence he can't escape. It's a mournful, self-aware Western that argues there's no glory in killing, only consequence. Gene Hackman's sadistic sheriff makes for one of the genre's great
Oscar Year: 1993IMDb Rating: 8.2/10Genre: Runtime: 130 minDirector:
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Scorsese finally won his overdue Best Director Oscar with this Boston-set cat-and-mouse thriller about dueling moles in the mob and police. Jack Nicholson's unhinged crime boss and a jaw-dropping final ten minutes made it feel like pulp elevated to art. It's proof the Academy can
Oscar Year: 2007IMDb Rating: 8.5/10Genre: Runtime: 151 minDirector:
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A jazzy, cynical musical about fame and murder brought the genre roaring back to Oscar glory after decades of dormancy. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellweger's razzle-dazzle numbers married satire with spectacle. Its win reopened Hollywood's door to big splashy musicals winnin
Oscar Year: 2003IMDb Rating: 7.2/10Genre: Runtime: 113 minDirector:
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Christopher Nolan turned the making of the atomic bomb into a three-hour psychological thriller, told partly in stark black-and-white, that swept the Oscars in a rare modern sweep. Cillian Murphy's haunted stare as the father of the bomb captures a man wrestling with unleashing a
Oscar Year: 2024IMDb Rating: 8.3/10Genre: Runtime: 180 minDirector:
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