The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

"I love my popcorn. Movies. Popcorn." Truly, words to live by.

When Tom Cruise dropped this waxy, philosophical quote in the run-up to the release of the eighth Mission: Impossible film, Dead Reckoning: Part One, he was really onto something. An off-the-cuff line to placate the social media demon that lives inside all of us? Maybe. Yes. But it also captures cinema as a vibe. An experience - sensorial in a way other mediums are not, as well as an avenue to stuff your body full of a sweet, sugary (but nutriously fibrous) snack that you never manage to get quite right at home despite the microwave packet providing clear instructions on timings and pop frequency. (Butterkist, why hast thou forsaken me?)

From these experiences - good or bad, perfect popcorn or burnt to a crisp by an uncooperative kitchen appliance - we form our own relationships with cinema. Genre, era, auteur - the length and breadth of the medium comes to us in different ways at different times and from there forges a unique path for us to navigate. There are established canons, critical consensuses and historiographical narratives that provide a linear-ish trajectory, but within that line are errant curves and diversions - rich estuaries carved out by experience and taste that distinguish each individual's relationship with the art form and which can either complement the canon or veer decidedly off trajectory away from it.

Is all of this an overly elaborate and somewhat self-indulgent way of saying that film criticism is subjective? Yes. Kind of. But it feels worth prefixing to a list devoted to singling out one film from each year that's the best of that year for the past 100 years, which is what I'm (foolishly) here to do today.

For the past few weeks, I've spent what WhatCulture editors are calling "simply too much time" going year by year, from 1925 to 2025, to pick and choose the best and most essential movies of all time. As with all the best laid schemes it started with the best intentions and then turned into something totally unwieldy and maybe a bit ugly. BUT it has real inner beauty, folks. Get clicking!

Honourable Mentions: The Big Parade, The Gold Rush, The Phantom of the Opera

A founding figure of Soviet cinema and a director whose influence looms large over our greatest contemporary filmmakers, Sergei Eisenstein's pioneering powers led to some of the greatest films of the 1920s and 1930s, the most potent of which remains his 1925 masterwork, Battleship Potemkin. It's a fierce retelling of the famous mutiny that took place during the Russo-Japanese War against the backdrop of the 1905 Russian Revolution, breathtaking in both its drama and imagery, and perhaps the definitive entry in the canon of silent cinema.