The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

100. 1926 - The General

The General Buster Keaton
United Artists

Honourable Mentions: The Black Pirate, Faust, What Price Glory?

Buster Keaton. That is all.

It's hard to think of any actor - Charlie Chaplin, perhaps - from the silent era of cinema who looms as large in terms of influence on the cinema of today than Buster Keaton. An ingenious performer whose daring stuntwork and penchant for physical comedy can be found in the DNA of everything from Looney Tunes to Jackie Chan, Keaton lent his talents to 88 films across his career, with undoubtedly his most famous being The General.

Everything great about Keaton - his comedic timing, charm, and his commitment to physical peril - is present in The General, a Civil War-set comedy inspired by the real-life Great Locomotive Chase. Keaton himself called it his proudest work, and while initial consensus was unkind to the film, time has vindicated his assessment and then some.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.