The 350 “best” English language movies: A weighted Borda count aggregation

Many lists exist of the best movies of all time. In general, these lists fall into six categories:

• 1.         Lists from individual critics or small groups of critics
• 2.         Lists that aggregate rankings across many critics
• 3.         Lists from individuals
• 4.         Lists that aggregate rankings across many individuals
• 5.         Lists of movies with the greatest box office receipts, either unadjusted or adjusted for inflation
• 6.         Lists of movies winning the most Oscars or other awards

We provide here a list that aggregates categories 2, 4, 5, and 6 above. We see no additional value in considering categories 1 and 3, as those categories are subsumed by categories 2 and 4, respectively.

There are many different methods of aggregating rankings across different categories into a single category. We opted for one of the simplest: a weighted Borda count aggregation that ranks the top 200 movies within each category, assigning 200 points for the highest ranking movie and 1 point for the 200th ranking movie. That decision prompted two additional issues. First, we needed to decide the weights for each category. Second, we needed to determine the sources that we would use for the rankings within each category.

With respect to the weights, each of these categories has strengths and weaknesses. Critics are generally professional movie reviewers and are explicitly attempting to determine the “best” movies. However, critics’ preferences often do not align with the general public’s and, in particular, critics often overvalue novelty. On the other hand, the general public likely undervalues novelty, as evidenced by the popularity of movie remakes and sequels. Still, most movies are designed more for the general public than for movie critics, so individuals’ opinions matter. Box office receipts do not even attempt to determine the best movies. However, they are an important goal of filmmakers, perhaps the main goal, so they deserve consideration. Awards, in general, and the Oscars, in particular, are coveted by those in the industry. However, their value is limited by being determined entirely at one point in time by a narrow group of people. Of these four categories, we considered awards to be least important by far and the other three categories to be of similar importance. Therefore, we decided to award 30% of the weight each to aggregate critic rankings, aggregate individual rankings, and box office receipts and the remaining 10% of the weight to awards.

The most important sources for aggregate critic rankings are likely Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. Some of the most important sources for aggregate individual rankings are Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, and Flickchart. Box Office Mojo reports both unadjusted and inflation-adjusted box office receipts. Many online sources provide lists of winners of Oscars and other awards.

Metacritic provides a moderated list of the best movies of all time, using its determination of metascores of critic rankings. The determination of those metascores requires judgment, both in selecting critics and in assigning a score to each critic’s review. The site applies additional judgment to break ties among movies with the same metascores and to determine the minimum number of reviews to be included in the ranking. We assigned the Metacritic ranking 20% of the overall weight, or two-thirds of the critics’ ranking weight.

As noted above, Rotten Tomatoes aggregates rankings for both critics and individuals. Although it provides separate data for those groups for each movie, its best movies of all time list combines data from both groups. Again, judgment is used in selecting critics and in deciding whether each critic’s review should be considered positive or negative. The site applies additional judgment in combining the aggregate critic rankings and aggregate individual rankings into a single list. We also assigned the Rotten Tomatoes ranking 20% of the overall weight, representing the remaining one-third of the critics’ ranking weight and one-third of the individuals’ ranking weight.

The IMDb list of the top movies explains that the movies are “ranked by a formula which includes the number of ratings each movie received from users, and value of ratings received from regular users.” So, judgment is used to determine the formula, but then the formula is neutrally applied to the user data. We assigned the IMDb ranking 10% of the overall weight, representing another one-third of the individuals’ ranking weight.

Flickchart allows each user to use pairwise preferences to ultimately compile an overall ranking list for as many movies as the user cares to rank. The methodology to prepare its overall ranking list is less clear, as Flickchart explains only that each user’s rankings are assigned a point value that increases with the number of movies ranked by that user. We also assigned the Flickchart list 10% of the overall weight, representing the remaining one-third of the individuals’ ranking weight.

As noted above, Box Office Mojo provides both unadjusted and inflation-adjusted lists of movies. We decided to use only the inflation-adjusted list, as there did not seem to be any reason to also consider the unadjusted list, which would be biased in favor of recent movies. We assigned this list the full 30% ranking weight for box office receipts.

For awards, we decided to use only Academy Awards. We considered also using Golden Globe Awards, however those awards extend back only to 1944, while the Oscars extend back to 1929, and there is little question that Oscars are more valued by people in the industry. We still needed to decide which Academy Awards to consider and how many points to give for each award. The “Big Five” Oscars are considered to be Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay (either original or adapted). However, other Oscars also reward aspects of movies that are important to audience enjoyment, such as supporting acting performances, cinematography, design, sound, score, editing, and special effects. Best Picture seemed more important than the other Big Five categories, so we decided to award 5 points to that category, 3 points each to the other Big Five categories, and 1 point each to the remaining categories. This system might seem to favor more recent movies, as more categories have been added over time. At the first Academy Awards, a movie could win awards in only 8 different categories, while at the 2025 Academy Awards, a movie could win awards in 16 different categories. However, the number of movies released each year has increased at a far faster rate than the number of categories. Only about 19 movies were released in the United States in 1928, while about 569 were released in 2024, so it is much more difficult for recent movies to win Academy Awards.

For our list, we decided to consider only English language movies, including silent movies with English title cards. Most of the sources we considered are heavily biased toward English language movies and, in particular, toward U.S.-made English language movies. Foreign language movies would not receive fair consideration, so it seemed better to explicitly omit them.

Following is our list of the 350 best English language movies of all time. A total of 707 movies were represented on our list, ranking in the top 200 movies on at least one of the sources described above. However, the top 350 seemed a good place to make the cut, as there was a noticeable difference in the composition of the rankings above and below that ranking. None of the top 350 movies received all its points from just the Oscars category, while 11 of the movies ranked 351 to 400 did. After weighting each category as described above, we divided the aggregate total for each movie by two, so the maximum score would be 100 points for a movie that ranked first in every category.

It is not surprising that The Godfather ranks first. It is surprising, however, that it is the only movie ranked in the top 100 in each of our six categories. Three other movies ranked in the top 100 of five of the six categories: Casablanca, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and Schindler’s List. And two other movies ranked in the top 200 in all six categories: The Best Years of Our Lives and Saving Private Ryan.

The oldest movie on our list is Intolerance, from 1916. Two movies from 2025 (Sinners and One Battle After Another) are on our list. By decade, our list includes 1 movie from the 1910s, 4 from the 1920s, 14 from the 1930s, 30 from the 1940s, 29 from the 1950s, 31 from the 1960s, 42 from the 1970s, 24 from the 1980s, 39 from the 1990s, 44 from the 2000s, 72 from the 2010s, and 20 from the 2020s. Therefore, the 2010s are overrepresented and the 1980s are perhaps underrepresented, but there is fairly even representation of other decades since 1940.