What truly defines the greatest movies of all time? It’s a subjective question with answers as diverse as the audiences themselves.

Everyone holds their own opinion, and it’s neither right nor wrong. Popular lists from platforms like IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes often highlight films that, while generally well-received, aren’t necessarily the absolute best; they are typically those with the broadest appeal and the fewest detractors.

Meanwhile, critics’ lists sometimes lean towards esoteric art films, favoring works that resonate strongly within niche circles, yet may not reach a wider audience.

In a notable example from 2022, the prestigious publication Sight and Sound named “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” a Belgian art film renowned for its deliberate pacing, as the greatest film ever made.

In 2022, Sight and Sound named famously slow Belgian art film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as the best movie ever made.

There’s no way to work it out mathematically. It just comes down to gut feeling.

Which is why the task has fallen to this journalist to compile their ultimate list – based on nothing more than watching a lot of movies and thinking very hard about it.

To avoid casting too wide a net, this list only includes English-language movies.

What to do when you’re in an inescapable and tiny space with something that wants to kill you?

It’s the most basic of a horror movie premise, but Alien manages to be both subtle and terrifying.

The film also undermined the audience’s expectations by having the sole survivor among the cast be the only one who wasn’t yet famous.

19. When Harry Met Sally (1989)

Every movie in the 1990s that didn’t star Arnold Schwarzenegger was either a courtroom drama or a rom-com.

And every rom-com was setting out to recapture the charm of When Harry Met Sally.

The concept of the movie will seem very familiar to people who have never seen it, but that’s because it set the standard.

But no rom-com did it better.

18. All The President’s Men (1976)

Film buffs love to talk about the elaborate, single-take long-shot.

But the script is so tight in All The President’s Men that you don’t realise you have been looking at nothing but Robert Redford’s face non-stop for six minutes.

Made in close consultation with the real-life subjects, the film is not only a vehement defence of the importance of journalism, but a primary source in one of the biggest political scandals in history.

The sheer audacity of making a movie with one of the most complicated conceits ever attempted – and making it for children.

The movie tells the story of two monsters who find themselves in charge of the most hazardous and terrifying thing in the world – a small child.

And despite its high concept, it is great fun the whole way through.

16. 12 Angry Men (1957)

Twelve men, one room, no air conditioning.

It’s a simple concept but a masterful execution.

A jury deciding the fate of an accused murderer is deadlocked because of one stubborn man.

But over the course of 90 minutes, he causes each of them to question everything they’ve seen in a trial the audience saw nothing of.

15. Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

A few minutes into a bank robbery, the phone rings.

“It’s for you,” the manager says, and hands the phone to one of the robbers.

Too often, Hollywood makes films about criminal masterminds.

This is a movie about two men who don’t know what they are doing, trapped in a bank, surrounded by police, with a group of hostages they are becoming increasingly attached to.

14. Inglourious Basterds (2009)

The charming Nazi psychopath tasked with finding Jews doesn’t know there’s a family secretly underneath the floorboards while he drinks a glass of milk.

Most of Quentin Tarantino’s movies could be included on this list, but Inglorious Basterds manages to be his most tense and his most funny.

And as the movie reaches what appears to be its thrilling crescendo, Brad Pitt utters the word “Buongiorno”.

13. West Side Story (1961)

Street toughs doing ballet and modern dance moves seems like the silliest idea for a movie ever.

If this movie wasn’t fantastic, it would be terrible.

It’s billed as a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, but the best parts are the scenes with neither of the stars.

There’s no tragedy in Lady Bird.

It’s the story of the last few months of a girl’s high school experience.

It’s a movie about disappointment, friendship and discovery.

But more than anything, it’s a movie about a daughter and her mother.

No film captures the experience of growing up with greater wit, charm and truth.

11. Schindler’s List (1993)

Oskar Schindler was an unlikely real-life hero – a Nazi industrialist philanderer who made his fortune off Jewish slave labour.

But over three harrowing hours, Steven Spielberg made one of the most affecting films ever – about Schindler and the thousands of lives he saved.

It’s a story about a tiny flicker of hope within the worst atrocity of all time, and it is a masterpiece.

10. Singin’ In The Rain (1952)

It’s the 1920s, and the two biggest stars in Hollywood are switching from silent movies to talkies. 

The actress has a very annoying voice, and no-one’s brave enough to tell her.

There’s lots of singing and the dancing is incredible, but nobody tells you ahead of time just how funny Singin’ In The Rain is.

9. There Will Be Blood (2007)

For the first 15 minutes of There Will Be Blood, there isn’t a word spoken.

But we see Daniel Day-Lewis as a ruthlessly determined would-be oil tycoon, the violence within him a tightly coiled spring.

When he loses control, it is terrifying and mesmerising.

Perhaps the greatest ever performance put to film.

Chris is nervous about meeting his girlfriend’s parents for the first time, in no small part because he is black and they are white.

What starts off as a surgical satire on race and manners takes a turn midway through, and it is gripping.

With dozens of mediocre and cliched horror movies made each year, Get Out is clever, funny, unsettling and thoroughly original.

It’s nearly impossible to make a perfect movie, but Steven Spielberg managed two in one year.

Jurassic Park is the perfect popcorn movie – thrilling, charming, dazzling and fun.

It was also the movie that showed that CGI made anything possible – and it still looks better than movies that came out two decades later.

6. Some Like It Hot (1959)

Two men witness a mob hit, and in order to get out of town unnoticed, they join an all-female orchestra, but in disguise.

It’s a familiar conceit, but no film pulls it off better than Some Like It Hot, which is hilarious the whole way through.

The final line is “Nobody’s perfect”.

But this movie just might be.

5. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Realising that a mental hospital is a cushier life than prison, a convict pretends to be insane in order to get himself committed.

But this chronic troublemaker clashes with the head nurse, who had every inmate in the unit wrapped around her finger.

One of three films to have won Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay at the Oscars, and it’s hard to imagine any film beating it.

Rick is a cold and broken bar owner happy to take the money of desperate refugees trying to flee the Nazis, and the Germans looking for dissidents to arrest.

And in walks the woman who broke his heart, and the fugitive Resistance fighter she is in love with.

Made at the height of World War II, much of the supporting cast consisted of refugees.

As Madeleine Lebeau sang La Marseillaise in the most powerful scene of the movie, her desperate and determined tears were real.

3. No Country For Old Men (2007)

While out hunting, small-town welder Llewelyn stumbles across a mass of bodies from a drug deal gone wrong, and a briefcase full of money.

The innocent bystander finds himself chased by a cold-blooded killer tasked with getting the briefcase back – and by an out-of-his-depth sheriff desperate to stop more bloodshed.

There’s few moments in film history as tense as Javier Bardem’s character talking to an oblivious petrol station owner – the audience knowing he has murdered every other person he has interacted with.

2. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Over the course of four hours, we see the real-life war hero T.E. Lawrence go from being too effete for the British Army, to too savage for a band of Arabian militia.

Along the way, we get a scathing view of colonialism and masculinity in a world completely removed from women.

But even without the subtext, the film is magnificent.

You could watch it without the sound on and it would still be incredible.

1. Silence of the Lambs (1991)

It makes little sense that perhaps the scariest and most unsettling scene in the history of cinema is merely two people talking.

There’s no raised voices, no threats, and they are separated by unbreakable glass.

But what makes Silence of the Lambs a masterpiece is how it can fill the audience with terror on the strength of extreme close-ups of Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster.

By every conceivable metric, the movie is perfect.