The Best Films of Every Decade, Ranked (1950s to Today)

The Best Films of Every Decade, Ranked (1960s to Today)

This isn't a list of each decade's most decorated film. It's the one that plays like something's happening at midnight, not something to cite in an argument. A few picks will annoy fans of the safer title; Fargo over Goodfellas, further down, is not an accident.

🎥 1960s: Rebellion and Realism

The studio system was cracking open, the Production Code losing its grip; drama, war, and western got meaner and stranger. Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Sergio Leone, and François Truffaut worked from different countries, as studio noir faded.

Psycho (1960) kills its lead actress a third in, after an hour rooting for her to escape with the stolen money, something nobody did in 1960. Hitchcock shot it in black and white on his TV crew's budget; Bernard Herrmann's shrieking strings do the work the knife never shows.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) runs close to four hours and earns every minute, largely on one cut: a blown-out match flame jumping to a blazing desert sunrise, a trick film students still steal. Peter O'Toole's Lawrence gets smaller against the dunes, not bigger. Best on a real transfer: Amazon carries it.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) closes the Dollars trilogy with a three-way graveyard standoff Ennio Morricone's score stretches past bearing. Eastwood barely speaks through Leone's near-three-hour extended cut; the U.S. release runs about two and a half. Both on Amazon: Psycho and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

More in the genre pages if this era's your thing.

🌎 1970s: Grit and Auteur Power

Directors got final cut and the budget to match; crime, thriller, drama, and early sci-fi benefited. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas proved a studio picture didn't have to look or sound like one.

The Godfather (1972) turned Brando's whisper into movies' most quoted line: "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse." When Brando won Best Actor, he sent Sacheen Littlefeather to decline it and read a statement on Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans. Amazon has a copy.

Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle got a mohawk and a mirror monologue he reportedly improvised, "You talkin' to me?" in Taxi Driver (1976). Bernard Herrmann finished scoring it and died that night, so its dread is literally his last work; it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes that year.

Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) exists because George Lucas needed effects nobody could deliver, so he started Industrial Light & Magic to build them. The crawl, the models, the handmade look still feel tactile, unlike its sequels. Both on Amazon: Taxi Driver and Star Wars: A New Hope.

More of this era on Directors and Genres.

🕶️ 1980s: Blockbusters and Bravado

Action, sci-fi, and horror went mainstream and stayed there, largely because Steven Spielberg, John Hughes, and James Cameron made popcorn movies with real craft underneath.

Mars turned Spielberg down over M&M's in E.T. (1982), so Hershey said yes to Reese's Pieces, and sales of the mid-tier candy spiked. The film held the highest-grossing record for over a decade, on the strength of one silhouette: a bicycle crossing the face of the moon.

The Terminator (1984) takes a B-movie premise, a relentless killing machine hunting one woman, and launches James Cameron into the career that made Titanic and Avatar. Schwarzenegger tells a desk sergeant "I'll be back," then makes good on it, driving a car through the wall.

The Breakfast Club (1985) locks five high school stereotypes in Saturday detention, spending ninety minutes on each. Hughes ends it with a fist raised against a freeze frame and Simple Minds on the soundtrack, still shorthand for teenage defiance. All three on Amazon: E.T., The Terminator, and The Breakfast Club.

More from this decade in the Movie Directory, especially Action and Sci-Fi.

🎬 1990s: Innovation and Independent Voices

Goodfellas usually wins the 90s crime argument; it's not on this list. Fargo is, and it's not close. Drama, crime, romance, and thriller all got stranger once directors like Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen), and Kathryn Bigelow ran the show outside the studio system.

John Travolta's career came back almost single-handedly because of Pulp Fiction (1994), which scrambles its own timeline and won the Palme d'Or the same decade Taxi Driver's shadow still hung over American crime cinema.

The Matrix (1999) is the reason "bullet time" entered the vocabulary, the slowed-down, camera-orbiting shot every action movie spent years trying to copy. The red pill and blue pill did the same: most who use the phrase have never seen the film. Amazon has it here.

Fargo (1996) opens with a title card claiming a true story. It isn't, the Coens admit, and the lie's the joke: a kidnapping for ransom ends at a wood chipper, with a pregnant, unbothered police chief, Marge Gunderson, smarter than every man in the movie. Both on Amazon: Pulp Fiction and Fargo.

More from this run in Directors.

🌐 2000s: Global Voices and Groundbreaking Visuals

Fantasy, thriller, adventure, drama, and mystery all had a strong decade, and the biggest swings weren't only from Hollywood. Peter Jackson and Christopher Nolan redefined the blockbuster, while Bong Joon-ho led Korea's New Wave.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) won all eleven Oscars it was nominated for, tying the record for most wins by a single film, and closed a trilogy shot as one continuous production, years before that was normal.

The Dark Knight (2008) is remembered for Heath Ledger's Joker: he died before the film came out, and his posthumous Oscar remains one of Oscar history's more unsettling wins. Nolan shot key IMAX sequences before that was normal for comic book movies. Find it on Amazon.

A hallway fight in one unbroken take anchors Oldboy (2003), with a hammer, a live octopus, and a twist still argued over. Director Park Chan-wook took the Grand Prix at Cannes for it, the film that broke Korean cinema in America. Both on Amazon: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Oldboy.

More on Nolan's director page; the rest of the decade is in Genres.

📽️ 2010s: Diverse Stories, Bold Risks

Drama, horror, comedy, action, adventure, and sci-fi got room to be personal, and a handful of directors used it well: Jordan Peele, Greta Gerwig, and Denis Villeneuve, who became the decade's go-to for serious science fiction.

Get Out (2017) was Jordan Peele's directorial debut, after years in sketch comedy, turning "the sunken place" into shorthand for a kind of horror that has nothing to do with monsters. It won him the Oscar for Original Screenplay. Amazon has it.

Greta Gerwig's solo directorial debut, Lady Bird (2017), is a coming-of-age film that refuses to flatter its lead. Saoirse Ronan's Christine, "Lady Bird," McPherson gets to be self-absorbed and unfair to her mother. Sacramento has never looked more worth escaping and missing.

Cars and bodies fly through the desert in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), almost entirely practical stunt work; Charlize Theron's Furiosa says more with her face than most scripts manage. It won six Oscars, all technical, without touching Best Picture or Director. Both on Amazon: Lady Bird and Mad Max: Fury Road.

More of Gerwig's filmography, or branch out through Genres.

🔮 2020s: New Frontiers

Sci-fi, mystery, and animation carry the decade so far, with Chloé Zhao, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (billed together as Daniels), and Emerald Fennell proving small, sharp films can cut through a franchise-heavy market.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) sends Michelle Yeoh's laundromat owner jumping between infinite versions of her life to save her daughter from nihilism, landing on sincerity, not exhaustion. It swept seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and Yeoh became the first Asian actress to win Best Actress.

Nomadland (2020) puts Frances McDormand's fictional Fern alongside real nomads playing versions of themselves, blurring documentary and drama. Chloé Zhao won Best Director for it, the first woman of color to do so, and the film took Best Picture too. Amazon link here.

Robert Pattinson's Bruce Wayne works an actual murder investigation in The Batman (2022), a detective story across 176 minutes. Director Matt Reeves leans on Nirvana's "Something in the Way" as a recurring cue. Another reboot in a franchise rebooted every decade since Tim Burton's 1989 original. Both on Amazon: Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Batman.

Keep going through Directors or Genres to see where the decade goes.

📚 Wrap-Up:

The pattern's clear: the decade's most decorated film and its best rewatch aren't always the same movie. Fargo over Goodfellas is the cleanest version of it. Some picks won every award; others got beaten by something safer and outlasted it. Keep arguing: start with the Movie Directory, get lost in the Genre List, or pick a director and watch their whole run, including the westerns nobody mentions until they actually watch one.