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The 15 Best Movies of All Time, According to Letterboxd

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Ignacio Weil

Entertainment - September 18th 2026, 17:00 GMT+2

Ikiru 1952 — 15. Ikiru (1952)

A terminal diagnosis finally forces Kanji Watanabe to notice how little living he has done during three decades of shuffling paperwork. Akira Kurosawa avoids easy sentimentality, even shifting the story to Watanabe’s wake and letting his colleagues argue over what truly motivated him. Takashi Shimura’s quiet performance makes a neighborhood playground feel more heroic than any battlefield victory. | © Toho

Cropped Parasite — 14. Parasite (2019)

Bong Joon Ho begins with a struggling family folding pizza boxes and somehow ends up dissecting an entire economic system without pausing for a lecture. Every staircase, window and hidden room reveals where someone belongs in the social order. The tonal turns would derail a lesser movie, yet *Parasite* moves from comedy to thriller to tragedy with frightening confidence. | © CJ Entertainment

Cropped Yi Yi — 13. Yi Yi (2000)

Edward Yang observes three generations of a Taipei family as weddings, first loves, business troubles and old regrets quietly collide. Its nearly three-hour runtime never feels indulgent because every detour adds another angle to the same question: how well can anyone really know another person? Young Yang-Yang photographing the backs of people’s heads may be cinema’s most charming attempt to solve that problem. | © Atom Films

Cropped schindlers list 1993 — 12. Schindler’s List (1993)

Steven Spielberg strips away the comforting distance that historical dramas can create, placing viewers inside the machinery of the Holocaust while keeping individual lives in focus. Liam Neeson’s Oskar Schindler begins as a calculating opportunist and gradually recognizes what his access and money can accomplish. The black-and-white photography is not decorative prestige filmmaking; it gives the horror the immediacy of recovered evidence. | © Universal Pictures

Cropped The Lord of the Rings The Return of the King — 11. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

Three enormous films, several armies and one dangerously addictive piece of jewelry all converge without collapsing under their own mythology. Peter Jackson delivers spectacle on a scale Hollywood has spent years trying to reproduce, but the emotional core remains two exhausted hobbits crawling toward Mount Doom. Its record-tying 11 Academy Awards—and clean sweep of every category in which it was nominated—now seem entirely reasonable. | © New Line Cinema

Cropped city of god — 10. City of God (2002)

Rocket wants to become a photographer; everyone around him appears determined to become either a gangster or a casualty. Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund turn Paulo Lins’ novel into a breathless account of organized crime taking root in a Rio de Janeiro favela. The editing moves like a bullet, yet the film never loses sight of the children being pulled into violence before they can understand its consequences. | © O2 Filmes

The Human Condition Part II 1959 cropped processed by imagy — 9. The Human Condition I: No Greater Love (1959)

Kaji believes accepting a job at a labor camp in Japanese-occupied Manchuria will protect both his ideals and his marriage. The arrangement instead places him inside a system built on exploitation, where every attempted reform exposes another layer of cruelty. Masaki Kobayashi gives his protagonist no morally clean escape route, beginning this monumental trilogy with over three hours of devastating compromise. | © Ninjin Club

Cropped The Godfather Part II — 8. The Godfather Part II (1974)

Rather than simply giving audiences more Corleone business, Francis Ford Coppola constructs two tragedies that move in opposite directions. Young Vito builds a family and an empire while Michael inherits both, then methodically destroys the former to protect the latter. Robert De Niro and Al Pacino never share the screen, but their performances speak to each other across decades in one of cinema’s greatest dramatic contrasts. | © Paramount Pictures

Cropped The Shawshank Redemption — 7. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Its theatrical run was modest, its awards campaign went unrewarded, and then television audiences decided *The Shawshank Redemption* belonged to them. Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novella turns prison routine into a patient study of institutionalization, friendship and stubborn hope. Tim Robbins provides the mystery, Morgan Freeman supplies the soul, and one carefully concealed rock hammer earns perhaps the finest payoff in prison-movie history. | © Castle Rock Entertainment

Seven Samurai 1954 cropped processed by imagy — 6. Seven Samurai (1954)

A desperate farming village hires seven warriors with little to offer beyond rice, shelter and the likelihood of death. Akira Kurosawa transforms that simple premise into a vast human drama, giving even minor characters fears and loyalties worth remembering. Modern action films still borrow its team-building structure and battle grammar, although most forget the melancholy truth underneath: victory does not mean everyone gets to share it. | © Toho

High and Low 1963 cropped processed by imagy — 5. High and Low (1963)

A kidnapping threatens wealthy executive Kingo Gondo’s family—until he learns the criminal mistakenly abducted his chauffeur’s son. Paying the ransom would ruin him; refusing would reveal exactly what his principles are worth. Akira Kurosawa begins with a suffocating moral debate inside a hillside mansion, then descends into Yokohama for a meticulous police procedural where geography itself becomes an expression of class. | © Toho

Come and see msn — 4. Come and See (1985)

Elem Klimov follows teenage Flyora into Nazi-occupied Belarus and steadily dismantles every romantic idea cinema has attached to war. Aleksei Kravchenko’s face seems to age decades as violence, starvation and mass murder replace the adventure he imagined. Distorted sound, staring close-ups and nightmarish imagery trap viewers inside his damaged perception, making *Come and See* less a conventional war film than an ordeal preserved on celluloid. | © Belarusfilm / Mosfilm

Cropped 12 Angry Men — 3. 12 Angry Men (1957)

Sidney Lumet confines nearly the entire drama to one sweltering jury room, then makes every shifting vote feel like a major plot twist. Henry Fonda’s Juror 8 does not claim the accused is innocent; he merely insists that sending someone to his death deserves a conversation longer than a few minutes. Prejudice, ego and impatience become the real evidence under examination, and none of them withstands scrutiny particularly well. | © Orion-Nova Productions

The Human Condition Part III — 2. The Human Condition III: A Soldier’s Prayer (1961)

Kaji has survived military brutality and Japan’s defeat, but the final chapter offers no triumphant road home. Wandering through Manchuria, he leads soldiers and civilians through hunger, Soviet captivity and the collapse of every institution that once demanded their obedience. Tatsuya Nakadai carries the accumulated weight of the trilogy in his increasingly haunted body, bringing Masaki Kobayashi’s nine-hour anti-war epic to a merciless conclusion. | © Ninjin Club / Shochiku

Harakiri 1962 cropped processed by imagy — 1. Harakiri (1962)

Hanshiro Tsugumo enters the Iyi clan’s courtyard requesting permission to commit ritual suicide, and the officials believe they have heard this performance before. They have not. Masaki Kobayashi slowly turns one ronin’s story into a furious attack on institutions that use honor as camouflage for cruelty. Tatsuya Nakadai remains terrifyingly controlled until the film’s formal elegance finally erupts, exposing bushido’s polished mythology as an elaborate fraud. | © Shochiku

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Letterboxd’s highest-rated movies rarely stay in the same order for long, especially when millions of film lovers are constantly logging, reviewing, and reconsidering the classics. The latest update has reshuffled the platform’s top 15, mixing universally adored masterpieces with international favorites that casual viewers may have missed. Naturally, everyone will have at least one complaint. Here is how Letterboxd users currently rank the best movies ever made.

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Letterboxd’s highest-rated movies rarely stay in the same order for long, especially when millions of film lovers are constantly logging, reviewing, and reconsidering the classics. The latest update has reshuffled the platform’s top 15, mixing universally adored masterpieces with international favorites that casual viewers may have missed. Naturally, everyone will have at least one complaint. Here is how Letterboxd users currently rank the best movies ever made.