Fritz Lang's futurist city spectacle stuns critics a century on, a German silent science-fiction landmark imagining skylines, machines and class conflict.
Classic films to start with
If you want a first pass through film history, these are our Top 21 classics arranged by decade instead of by score. Several are not in English — Japanese, Italian, Bengali and silent German cinema sit alongside Hollywood.
1920s–1930s
3 picks; highest score here: Modern Times (92).
Chaplin's factory gags and hard-times tenderness charm critics, who treat this late silent film as industrial-age comedy gold, timed to perfection.
Technicolor road fantasy still enchants critics and families as a foundational American classic whose songs and set pieces endure across generations.
1940s
4 picks; highest score here: Citizen Kane (93).
Newsroom ambition and deep-focus invention still anchor film-language lessons, and critics continue to rank Welles's debut among cinema's truly foundational masterworks.
Wartime romance and moral choice still define Hollywood myth, and critics keep ranking Bogart and Bergman's chemistry near the classic peak.
This neorealist father-and-son hunt through Rome still devastates critics, who call it essential humanist cinema born amid ruined postwar Italian streets.
Vienna noir, a zither score and sewer chases still hypnotize critics, who rank this British classic among the century's shadowy thrillers.
1950s
10 picks; highest score here: Seven Samurai (95).
Broadway ambition and poison wit still cut as critics crown this backstage classic among the sharpest American studio dramas ever filmed.
Gothic decay and bitter wit still fascinate critics, who rank this noir among the sharpest studio-era takedowns of fame ever made.
Contradictory testimonies about a forest crime still shape how critics across cultures discuss truth on screen, and syllabi keep teaching it.
This joyful Hollywood meta-musical still dances past its peers, and critics simply call it the gold standard for studio-era song craft.
Quiet family distance in postwar Japan still devastates critics who rank Ozu among the gentlest most precise masters of everyday cinema.
Kurosawa's village-defense epic still sets the action template critics cite whenever they rank the all-time greats, and few films equal it.
This courtyard voyeur thriller keeps earning near-perfect notices for suspense craft that critics still teach as Hitchcock at his most playful.
Dockside conscience and Brando's intensity still earn near-perfect scores, as critics revisit this American labor classic for its uncompromising moral heat.
Ray's village childhood drama opened global eyes to Indian neorealism and still earns critic scores for its tender rural poverty detail.
Jury-room tension and moral pressure stay timeless, and critics keep awarding perfect scores to this lean American civic drama about justice.
1960s–1990s
4 picks; highest score here: The Godfather (95).
This documentary-style uprising drama still shocks with street-level realism that critics call essential political cinema, shot inside the Algiers casbah itself.
Family power and operatic crime craft keep this American epic atop critics' all-time lists, the film other gangster stories endlessly chase.
This Los Angeles corruption noir feels poisonously modern, and critics keep ranking Polanski and Towne's craft among America's great mystery dramas.
Spielberg's Holocaust rescue drama still earns towering critic scores for humanist urgency that stays anchored in faces rather than historical spectacle.
How these scores work
Every line is exactly 21 words, an original paraphrase of public consensus. Scores (1–100) are mapped from named public aggregates, last checked 2026-11-02:
- Classic films: blend of public critic and audience aggregates (Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, IMDb, Letterboxd where available)
Links go to each subject’s official site. Disclaimer.