The 20 Best Movies of the Last 50 Years, Ranked

It might've been alarming to go through the whole preceding ranking while not seeing a mention of Star Wars (1977), but that’s because its sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, was even better, and worth putting in the #1 spot. Maybe Star Wars should’ve been here, too, but consider it an honorable mention. Also, The Empire Strikes Back improves just about everything, and in doing so, improves countless things that were already great.

You could go a step further and possibly argue The Empire Strikes Back is the best movie ever, if you wanted, because it’s at least a contender. Like, it takes the whole series in more complex and interesting directions while still being incredibly entertaining and technically masterful. It’s the whole package, and maybe it was all downhill afterward, for Star Wars, but also, you can’t improve upon perfection, and the hill going down wasn’t always too steep, so it’s okay.

Rules are broken throughout Pulp Fiction, as far as how you're “supposed” to write and edit a film, but then that’s also what makes it special, and what makes it more interesting. If it had been an anthology movie, or a trilogy of short films, it would still be excellent, but the non-chronological storytelling elevates the entire thing from great to masterful.

Actually, there are other things that make Pulp Fiction a classic, or maybe more accurately, there is everything in Pulp Fiction that makes it a classic. Faults, schmaults, because Quentin Tarantino delivered and seemingly went for broke with just his second feature film, but then stylistically, Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds might be even more daring. And they're almost just as great, but there’s something about Pulp Fiction that makes it special, or… you know, again, there’s everything about it that makes it special.

There aren’t too many sci-fi movies better than Blade Runner, in all honesty, though there are some titles from 1982 that honestly come close (like The Thing and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial). Like a bunch of other already mentioned classics, the premise here is simple, because there’s a guy and he’s told to kill a bunch of replicants who've gone rogue, but then… yeah, you know, there’s also a lot more to it beyond the story.

Blade Runner is overflowing with ideas and things it gives you to think about, just like most great science fiction. It’s also entertaining and a real delight as a pure visual/aural experience, since you can get lost in how the film looks and sounds without even thinking much about the story or what’s happening thematically. On any level, it’s great, and calling it a classic at this stage would be making the most under of statements.

It’s worth highlighting another Steven Spielberg film here, especially because he’s so versatile, and Schindler’s List is… well, it hopefully goes without saying that it’s nothing like Jaws, though the director’s the same and John Williams composed an incredible score for each. It’s perhaps Spielberg’s most emotionally intense film, though Munich is probably more despairing, with Schindler’s List finding a small glimmer of hope and heroism during an unspeakably violent time in history.

The film’s set during World War II, but focuses on the Holocaust, and the way Oskar Schindler managed to save more than 1000 people from likely perishing in a concentration camp. Spielberg does celebrate what Schindler did, but doesn’t sugarcoat the brutality of the central event here, with some (including Stanley Kubrick… allegedly) criticizing the film for doing both things at once, but a balance here is achieved. Kubrick might've been wrong, though he was right about many other things, concerning his own films and the making of them.

If you're pressed for time and want to understand what the hype around Martin Scorsese is all about, but you really can’t watch more than one movie (your loss), then make it Goodfellas. It’s the quintessential gangster movie of the last 50 years, and if you want to go back more than 50 years, then it also rivals The Godfather, albeit it has a pretty different style and approach to exploring mob life.

Goodfellas is ground-level stuff, and everything’s pretty raw and believable. But it’s not just about capturing reality, since the style here is also undeniably slick and bombastic, with the most Scorsese fingerprints all over it, of any of his movies (wait, sorry, “pictures”), but not in a bad way. If you can’t afford film school, or think it’s a bit overrated, just watch – and read about – Goodfellas over and over again (maybe in ultra-slow-motion one or more of those times), and you could honestly probably learn quite a lot.

Do you want to be great at something? Or, like, perfect? Are you sure? Whiplash wants to know if you're sure about that. It’s brutally honest about the cost of pursuing greatness, specifically within the jazz world, but the story here can be applied to various other creative and/or professional fields, with Whiplash being potentially uncomfortably relatable, and a strange blend of cathartic and horrifying, and also really exciting but also so unpleasant.

It's emotionally messy stuff, but that’s the point; that’s what Damien Chazelle likes exploring, and though some of his subsequent films were bigger in scale and more ambitious technically, Whiplash is still his best and most impactful movie. Whiplash is also pretty much perfectly crafted, and the two lead performances – by Miles Teller and (especially) J.K. Simmons – are remarkable, and career-best stuff for both actors.

The late 2010s was a good time to be a fan of superhero movies, since they were generally pretty good (or even great), and burn-out hadn’t really set in yet, the way it might've for some by the early 2020s. Even in the midst of all that, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse stood out as something particularly special, doing an unconventional sort of origin story for Miles Morales while also celebrating various other Spider-people and the history of Spider-Man, both on page and on screen.

All the while, the animation here was also beyond stunning, and maybe even a little weird at the time, but now you see quite a few other movies that seem to want to get in on that Spider-Verse sort of style/aesthetic. It’s easily one of the best movies out there based on a Marvel character (well, characters, here), and it’s worth watching even if you're not particularly crazy about superhero films.

Heavy-going, just as something with the same kind of premise as King Lear should be, Ran was perhaps the final masterpiece Akira Kurosawa ever made, though Dreams came out five years later and was also excellent. But if that’s an A-grade movie, then Ran is an A+, or higher somehow, since it’s Kurosawa kind of going for broke and just making the ultimate historical drama/war film, and doing something potentially even more impressive technically than Seven Samurai.

It's hard to compare them. They’re both two of the best movies of all time, and different beasts, even if they both offer emotion, spectacle, and beauty. Well, Ran offers a particularly high amount of beauty, plus some sequences that are horrifying, on par with any anti-war movie set during the 20th or 21st centuries. It’s a family drama and an epic war film on the grandest of scales, and even while watching it, it’s a little hard to fathom the fact that it actually exists.

With them coming out in 1972 and 1974 respectively, The Godfather and its sequel miss out if you're talking about movies released in the past half-century, but Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is similarly monumental, and that came a bit later in the decade. It takes place during the Vietnam War, and is mostly about a nightmarish journey deep into jungle territory to take out a colonel who’s gone rogue.

On the surface, at least, that’s what Apocalypse Now is about. It does work as an epic about the Vietnam War, but it’s arguably more interested in exploring war – and the psychological turmoil of warfare – more broadly, especially as things become more surreal and unconventional the further the film goes along. It was infamously hard to make, and is sometimes (appropriately) hard to watch, but it is also utterly and undeniably remarkable.

One of the best drama movies ever, maybe (not just of the last 50 years), The Shawshank Redemption is also famously beyond beloved at this point, having been at the top of the IMDb Top 250 for more than a decade and a half. It could change, but from at least the early 2010s to the mid-2020s, it’s been #1, and even if it’s not your personal favorite (hell, it’s not #1 here), you can probably see why it’s so enduring and well-liked.

It's just difficult to dislike much about The Shawshank Redemption. Everything here feels universal and moving, it touches on a bunch of difficult emotions while offering catharsis and a message of hope, and it’s also such a cleanly told story, largely thanks to Stephen King writing the original story with an unusual succinctness. The Shawshank Redemption might well also be the ultimate prison movie, and it just gets everything right, you know? Again, hard to dislike much here or find too many faults.

That previously alluded to movie that’s just over 50 years old, since it was famously a summer release in 1975, it would feel wrong to snub Jaws just because of that slight discrepancy. It’s the quintessential shark movie, with nothing else really coming close, since the threat here is universally terrifying, and the story – while certainly compelling – is incredibly easy to follow.

Jaws was also the first masterpiece Steven Spielberg ever directed, and even if some of his later films are more ambitious and expansive in scope, the simplicity of this one is just too hard to resist. You'd think a movie about three guys trying to kill a shark would get boring after a while, but Jaws never does, like the movie equivalent of that same bedtime story your parents might've told you every evening when you were four or five, and it somehow never got old.

There have been plenty of iconic animated movies released in the last few decades, but if the task at hand involves highlighting the best of the best, then Spirited Away probably needs a mention. Narratively, this might not sound groundbreaking on paper, being a coming-of-age story focusing on a young girl who has to get by in a strange fantastical realm to both get out alive and save her parents, but the execution is what matters.

Namely, it’s Hayao Miyazaki handling things, and he’s probably the most recognizable name in Japanese animation, maybe ever, for good reason. Princess Mononoke is also just as good, and The Boy and the Heron was also excellent (and will likely be celebrated more as the years go on), but Spirited Away is Spirited Away; like the Citizen Kane of anime, so you gotta shout it out.

The Oscars are at least occasionally cool, since films like Parasite can sometimes win. There are broad and relevant social issues explored here, but not in a typically Oscar bait kind of way, since Parasite has a certain bite to it while also being entertaining and willing to get unpredictable. It’s a really wild ride the first time you watch it, and undeniably anxiety-inducing, too.

There’s a working-class family introduced near the film’s start, and they find one way to increase their standing in life is to work their way into the lives of a wealthier family, but then unexpected things happen, and… yeah, as mentioned before, things get a bit crazy. It’s so tightly made, though, and well-controlled, even with the range of genres and all the different emotions tapped into jerking you around, as a viewer, but Parasite does ultimately feel like the right kind of chaotic.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King concludes one of the best trilogies of all time in a pretty much ideal way. It might be the big screen gold standard for how to conclude something people have invested a good deal of time in, doing for movies what the final episodes of shows like M*A*S*H and Six Feet Under did for TV. Anyone that wants to tell you The Return of the King had too many endings… no. Cut them out of your life. They're not good for you.

There had to be a longer ending than usual here, since there’s about nine hours (or 11, if you're watching the extended editions) of story to conclude. And even before the final few scenes, The Return of the King is still a masterpiece. It could’ve face-planted on the finish line and remained a great piece of spectacle, and one of the most ambitious epics of all time, maybe like how The Stand is still an awesome book, even if that ending is a bit weird. But no, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is the full package. Great action, impressive fantasy spectacle, and a moving conclusion. The first two films are also phenomenal, but the third of the trilogy might well be the best.

Yeah, it’s a whole lot more recent than most other movies here, and who knows how people will view it in another 30 or 40 years, but for now, All of Us Strangers really is one of the most essential films released in recent memory. If you say too much about its plot, things will be ruined, but it’s part romance and also part psychological drama, with something of a supernatural spin to things, too.

Hey, even listing the genres feels like saying too much. There are only a few characters in this, there’s something surprising or unexpected tied to every one of them, and All of Us Strangers burns slowly before hitting you hard – more than once, too – in its final act. The movie takes its time, and you might not have a good time if you're hit particularly hard emotionally, but if you can find the time, All of Us Strangers is worth watching at least once (and maybe twice, because there’s a lot to be gained from a rewatch for a movie like this).

Viewed a certain way, there’s not a ton that happens in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but there is a lot that’s felt… or not felt. But not feeling, or resisting feelings, is another kind of emotion or feeling, so, there’s that. It’s hard to explain. It’s a movie about two people who have feelings for each other, but they have to keep things subdued, especially because they're two women in love at a time when that was seen as taboo.

You might think you’ve seen that kind of tear-jerking historically set romance movie before, but Portrait of a Lady on Fire does a lot visually, stylistically, and pacing-wise to set it apart from otherwise comparable films. In that sense, it is original and striking, even with elements being familiar on paper, but also, love is one of those things that’s beyond broad and universal, but finding even small ways to explore it differently than most romance films is worthy of celebration. And that’s why Portrait of a Lady on Fire is worth celebrating/highlighting here.

If Amadeus had been a more straightforward biographical film about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, it could’ve still been interesting, but it was thankfully quite a bit more than just that. Mozart’s a prominent character, but Amadeus is just as interested in shedding light on fellow composer Antonio Salieri, who was never as widely known as Mozart, and harbors intense feelings of jealousy toward him throughout the entire film.

So, these were real people, but it’s not exactly a straightforward biographical film about Salieri, either, since there’s a good deal of speculation involved and the events of the movie are seen – and recalled – from his potentially biased point of view. What Amadeus has to say about complicated emotions and the darker side of human nature is even more interesting than what it has to say about fame, celebrity, and music from this time in history, but for what it’s worth, it’s still fascinating and compelling on that front, too. It’s another classic that squeezes a lot into just one movie, and of all the Best Picture winners that are more than a few decades old, it’s one of the ones that holds up the best.

If you're tired of hearing about The Dark Knight, too bad, because it’s about as good as comic book movies get, and also, it feels like more than a comic book movie, in many ways. It’s got the feel of a crime/thriller, plus the action you'd associate with a superhero movie, though it’s a bit more grounded than what you might see in most other more fantastical or sci-fi-heavy superhero/comic book flicks.

It's not that being a bit more realistic or downbeat is automatically better, and more just that The Dark Knight does the whole darker and grittier thing extremely well. Also, it’s hard to talk about the movie without mentioning how well it’s paced, and similarly hard to overlook or not mention is Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker, which really is – and always has been – as good as everyone says it is.

If you make a milkshake and take a drink every time There Will Be Blood mentions milkshakes, then you probably won’t get through much of your milkshake, and you'll also have to wait well over two hours before the sipping really starts. So, that would be the worst drinking game of all time. Don’t do that, with There Will Be Blood, but do watch There Will Be Blood, because it’s great.

There’s a level of hype surrounding it as one of those “quintessential best movies of the 21st century so far,” and that can make the whole thing intimidating, especially if you have an idea of what the film’s going to be like before realizing it might not be that. There Will Be Blood only explodes occasionally, and is very subdued and quietly uneasy for most of its runtime, but there’s a lot to chew on here with the sprawling and intimate exploration of greed provided. Also, Daniel Plainview is an endlessly fascinating character, and Daniel Day-Lewis’ portrayal of him… yeah, it’s Day-Lewis at his best, what else is there to say? Words of praise can only go so far.

City of God is a lot of things at once, functioning as a coming-of-age film, a socially conscious drama, and a gangster movie (sort of). It’s about kids growing up in a crime-heavy area of Rio de Janeiro, contrasting how some people learn to thrive in such an environment while others set their sights on getting out any way they can once they're of a certain age.

The way City of God shows its characters at different stages in life – childhood and then on the cusp of adulthood – makes it feel almost like an epic, but it’s like an epic crime film on fast-forward. It’s relentlessly paced, cramming a lot into a little over two hours, but it also never spirals out of control or becomes exhausting in a detrimental sort of way. Some of it’s hard to watch, but the honesty and intensity of it all is also part of the reason why the film’s as great as it is.