The Best Movie of Every Year for the Last 100 Years (According to Letterboxd)

If you find me using my phone at any random point in the day and ask “What are you looking at?” odds are pretty good the answer is Letterboxd. Part social media, part movie database, Letterboxd lets you log, rate, and review movies you watch, and follow your friends to keep tabs on what they’re logging, rating, and watching. I check it multiple times every single day.

One of the coolest parts about Letterboxd is the fact that it gives users the ability to sort its massive film database in countless ways. Want to see every movie available on a certain streaming service? No problem. Or scroll through all the films made in 1963, listed in order of length? Easy peasy!

You can also sort their database according to user ratings, either your own or the average score compiled from the millions of Letterboxd users around the globe. And you can do that for every single year since the invention of cinema — meaning it’s very simple, with just a couple of clicks, to see the top-rated movie on Letterboxd from every dating back to the earliest days of movies, when audiences supposedly ran screaming out of the theater at the sight of a train barreling towards the camera.

That’s how I assembled the list below, which contains the #1 movie of every single year going back 100 years. Note that I excluded the occasional TV miniseries or anime or concert specials that sometimes popped up; this is a list of films and films only.

Also note now many titles, especially in the early decades of the list, are available on Criterion Collection Blu-rays and 4Ks. I s that because the Criterion Collection has impeccable taste? Or because the Collection (and the Criterion Channel streaming service) are the only access many people have to works of classic cinema?

It could be a bit of both. Like the chicken and the egg we may never get to the bottom of this question. But if you start scrolling now, you will get to the bottom of this list ... eventually. (Fair warning, it’s pretty long.)

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