The 10 greatest American movies of all time, according to AFI

AFI's greatest American movies list came out of a ballot, not one critic's judgment. In 1998, the American Film Institute surveyed a jury of 1,500 people drawn from the American film industry — directors, screenwriters, actors, cinematographers, critics and historians — and published AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies. The institute polled that jury again for a 10th anniversary edition released in 2007, which reordered the top of the ranking and lifted films the first ballot had placed far lower. The 2007 edition is the one quoted most often, and it is the version used here.

What sets the ranking apart from the best-of lists published every year is both the electorate and the criteria. Voters were asked to weigh critical recognition, awards history, popularity that held up across decades, historical significance and cultural impact. Eligible titles had to be American feature films. The design favors studio filmmaking and the director-driven work that grew out of it, which was the stated intent — this was a survey of American cinema, not world cinema.

The gap between the two editions says nearly as much as the order itself. Raging Bull and Vertigo both climbed into the top 10 in 2007 from well outside it, pushing aside films that had held those places in 1998. Consensus about greatness shifts even within a single generation of voters.

The top 10 reads as a compressed history of how movies were made in the U.S. It runs from the Technicolor spectacle and studio craftsmanship of 1939 through wartime romance, the musical at its 1950s peak, Hitchcock's psychological thrillers, the widescreen epic shot on location and the New Hollywood work of the 1970s and beyond. Several of these films introduced techniques — deep focus, the dolly zoom, fragmented chronology — that became standard tools. Here are the 10 titles at the top, in order, and what put each one there.

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Citizen Kane, released in 1941, holds the top spot on AFI's ranking of the greatest American movies, the same position it held in the 1998 edition. Orson Welles was 25 when he directed, co-wrote, produced and starred in it, working under an RKO Pictures contract that handed a first-time filmmaker rare creative control.

The story follows newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane through the memories of the people who knew him, gathered by a reporter chasing the meaning of Kane's last word, "Rosebud." The chronology splinters across conflicting accounts instead of advancing in a straight line. Later filmmakers borrowed that structure repeatedly.

Cinematographer Gregg Toland supplies the other half of the film's technical reputation. His deep-focus work held foreground and background sharp inside a single frame, so Welles could stage action across the full depth of a shot rather than cut between close-ups. Low angles that exposed ceilings — rarely built on studio sets at the time — emphasized the scale of Kane's estate and the small figures moving through it.

The character's similarity to publisher William Randolph Hearst caused trouble before the film reached theaters. Hearst saw the parallel, kept advertising for the picture out of his newspapers and leaned on theater chains to avoid booking it. The film collected nine Academy Award nominations and won once, for original screenplay, credited to Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz.

It did not earn back its costs during its first run. Its standing was built afterward, through revival screenings, television airings and critical reassessment across the 1950s and 1960s that carried it to the front of the American canon. Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese have both named it as a formative influence on their own filmmaking.

By the time AFI surveyed its jury in 1998, Citizen Kane was the standard answer to the question of the greatest American film. The 2007 survey left that verdict in place.

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The Godfather ranks second on AFI's 2007 list, one place behind Citizen Kane. Francis Ford $F Coppola directed the 1972 adaptation of Mario Puzo's novel, with Marlon Brando as aging crime boss Vito Corleone and Al Pacino as Michael, the youngest Corleone son who had planned a life outside the family business.

Paramount $PARA Pictures opposed both pieces of casting. Brando's recent films had lost money, and studio executives saw him as a financial risk. Pacino was a stage actor with little screen experience who did not fit the leading-man mold Paramount had in mind. Coppola held out for both, and those two performances now carry the film's reputation.

Michael's transformation gives the story its structure. He turns up at his sister's wedding in a Marine dress uniform and assures his girlfriend that his father's business is not his own. By the final scene he is running it. The shift arrives in stages — a restaurant killing, a stretch in hiding in Sicily, his father's decline — rather than in a single moment.

Gordon Willis photographed the film with far less light than studio practice of the period allowed. He kept Vito's office in near darkness and let faces drop into shadow during central conversations. Colleagues nicknamed him the prince of darkness, and the look he built became a template for later gangster films. Nino Rota's main theme, written as a waltz, set organized crime to the music of family ritual.

The film won three Academy Awards: best picture, best adapted screenplay for Puzo and Coppola, and best actor for Brando. Brando refused the acting prize and sent Sacheen Littlefeather to the ceremony to decline it and to object to Hollywood's depiction of Native Americans. Coppola's 1974 sequel, The Godfather Part II, appears on the same AFI 100-film list and won best picture as well, placing both Corleone films in the ranking.

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Casablanca sits third on AFI's 2007 ranking. The 1942 film, directed by Michael Curtiz, unfolds in a Moroccan port city administered by Vichy France, where Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine runs a nightclub and claims to stick his neck out for nobody until Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa Lund reappears.

The location drives the structure. Refugees escaping Nazi-occupied Europe stop in the city while they hunt for exit visas, turning Rick's Café Américain into a meeting point for black-market traders, police informers and people with nothing left to trade. Two stolen letters of transit set the plot in motion, and the question of who uses them carries the film to its final scene.

The screenplay was adapted from an unproduced stage play, Everybody Comes to Rick's, and writers kept revising pages while the cameras rolled. The ending had not been settled when shooting began. The dialogue that emerged — "Here's looking at you, kid" and "We'll always have Paris" among it — has outlived most of the plot in public memory.

The film won three Academy Awards: best picture, best director for Curtiz and best adapted screenplay. Its premiere in November 1942 came weeks after Allied forces landed in North Africa, and the wide release followed in January 1943. A studio romance arrived attached to the day's headlines.

Claude Rains plays Captain Louis Renault, a police prefect whose loyalties track whoever appears to be winning. Dooley Wilson plays Sam, the pianist whose rendition of "As Time Goes By" ties the present-day story to Rick and Ilsa's Paris. Conrad Veidt, a German actor who had left the Nazi regime, plays Major Strasser.

The airfield ending, in which Rick gives up the reunion and sends Ilsa away, became one of Hollywood's reference points for private feeling set against public duty. AFI's voters placed Casablanca second in 1998 and third in 2007, keeping it inside the top three across both surveys.

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Martin Scorsese's 1980 biopic of middleweight champion Jake LaMotta sits at No. 4. Robert De Niro plays LaMotta across two decades, from his rise through the rankings to his later years performing in a Miami nightclub.

De Niro won the Academy Award for best actor. He trained with the real LaMotta before filming the boxing sequences, then gained more than 60 pounds for the scenes set in middle age. The weight change draws most of the attention. The performance is built around how little the film asks viewers to sympathize with LaMotta, whose jealousy and violence reach past the ring. They shape his marriage and his bond with his brother Joey, played by Joe Pesci.

Thelma Schoonmaker won the Oscar for editing. The fight sequences place the camera inside the ropes, shift speed within a single round and strip the soundtrack bare at points. That was a departure from the wide ringside coverage boxing had usually received on screen.

The script by Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin draws on LaMotta's memoir, which De Niro read and pushed Scorsese to adapt. Michael Chapman shot the film, which received eight Oscar nominations and won two. The closing scene has LaMotta reciting Marlon Brando's taxi-cab speech from On the Waterfront into a dressing-room mirror.

Scorsese shot in black and white, tying the look to both period and tone. Much of the story unfolds in the 1940s, and monochrome film recalls the newspaper sports photography of that era. It also renders the blood in the fights as abstract rather than explicit.

The film took in modest box office and reviews were divided. Its standing grew over the following two decades. AFI's 1998 ballot placed it 24th. The 2007 revision moved it to fourth, one of the sharpest climbs between the two versions of the list.

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Singin' in the Rain, the 1952 MGM musical directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, sits fifth on AFI's ranking. Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O'Connor star in a comedy about Hollywood's rushed conversion from silent pictures to sound in the late 1920s.

The plot hinges on a silent-era star whose speaking voice is unusable on a soundtrack, so her studio secretly dubs her with a young singer. That farce draws on real industry history. Synchronized sound ended careers across Hollywood, rewrote production schedules and left crews hiding microphones inside props and sealing cameras into soundproof booths. The film stages those problems as slapstick.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green built the screenplay around a catalog of existing songs, with lyrics by Arthur Freed and music by Nacio Herb Brown, most of them written for earlier MGM pictures. Freed produced the film himself. The score therefore works as a tour through the studio's own back catalog rather than a fresh songbook.

Kelly's performance of the title number — splashing down a flooded street and swinging from a lamppost — has been excerpted and parodied for decades. Kelly reportedly shot it while running a 103-degree fever. O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh," which has him running up walls and hurling himself through furniture, was punishing enough that he reportedly needed days of bed rest afterward.

Reynolds was 19 and had no serious dance training when she was cast. The production put her through months of rehearsal alongside Kelly and O'Connor, both of whom had years of stage and screen work behind them.

The film was not an awards contender in its own year. It drew two Academy Award nominations — one for Jean Hagen's supporting performance as the silent star Lina Lamont, one for Lennie Hayton's musical scoring — and won neither. Its standing built slowly, through revival screenings and later critical reassessment. AFI placed it first on its 2006 list of the greatest American movie musicals.

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Gone with the Wind, Victor Fleming's 1939 Civil War epic, sits sixth on AFI's 2007 ranking. Adapted from Margaret Mitchell's novel, it stars Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, and it runs just under four hours.

Producer David O. Selznick turned the casting of Scarlett into a public search that ran for close to two years. Leigh, a British stage actress little known to American moviegoers, was signed in January 1939, after the production had already shot the burning of Atlanta. That sequence was staged on the studio backlot, with old sets set alight, among them structures left standing from King Kong.

Direction changed hands twice. George Cukor began the picture and departed a few weeks in. Fleming replaced him, and Sam Wood covered sequences during Fleming's absence from the set. Neither Cukor nor Wood appears in the screen credits.

The film took eight competitive Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best actress. Sidney Howard won for the screenplay months after he was killed by a tractor on his Massachusetts farm, the first posthumous Oscar the Academy awarded. Hattie McDaniel won best supporting actress as Mammy, becoming the first Black performer to win an Academy Award. The 1940 ceremony took place at a Los Angeles hotel that barred Black guests, and she sat at a small table apart from the cast.

Its commercial record is hard to match. Adjusted for inflation, Gone with the Wind is the top-grossing release in domestic box office history, a total assembled from its 1939 run and repeated theatrical rereleases over the following four decades.

The film's place on best-of lists draws more argument now than it once did. It renders the antebellum South as a lost paradise and smooths over the brutality of slavery, and in 2020 HBO Max removed it before restoring it with a recorded introduction setting the film in historical context. AFI's voting criteria weigh historical significance and cultural impact alongside critical standing and craft, and the film held its place in the top 10 when the organization revised the list in 2007.

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David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, released in 1962, places seventh on AFI's 2007 ranking, two spots below the fifth place it held in 1998. Peter O'Toole stars as T.E. Lawrence, the British officer attached to the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule during World War I.

The picture runs close to four hours. Lean shot it on location in Jordan, Morocco and Spain, hauling 70mm camera equipment into desert country that had rarely been photographed at that scale. Freddie Young handled the cinematography in Super Panavision 70 and won one of the film's seven Academy Awards for it. The best-known shot holds on an empty horizon as a dark speck resolves into a rider on camelback — Omar Sharif's entrance, played almost without dialogue in a single long take.

No woman has a speaking role, unusual for a best picture winner. Alec Guinness appears as Prince Faisal and Anthony Quinn as Auda abu Tayi. Sharif, cast as Sherif Ali, reached audiences outside Egypt for the first time. Maurice Jarre won the Oscar for best original score, and long stretches of the film carry no dialogue at all, leaving the music and the landscape to do the work.

The seven wins came out of 10 nominations and included best picture and best director for Lean, plus editing for Anne V. Coates. Her cut from a match flame blown out in a Cairo office to sunrise over the desert is among the most frequently cited transitions in film. O'Toole was nominated for best actor and lost to Gregory Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird.

What keeps the film in AFI's upper tier is its refusal to settle Lawrence as a figure. The script presents him as vain, gifted, brutal and self-deceiving by turns, rather than resolving him into a hero. Steven Spielberg has said the film pushed him toward directing. A 1989 restoration supervised by Robert A. Harris, with Lean consulting, returned footage trimmed from earlier reissues.

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Schindler's List, directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1993, is the eighth film on AFI's 2007 ranking and the most recent title anywhere in the top 10. It follows Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist and Nazi Party member whose factories kept more than 1,000 Jewish workers alive during the Holocaust.

Steven Zaillian wrote the screenplay from Thomas Keneally's 1982 book, published as Schindler's Ark in the U.K. and under the film's title in the U.S. Liam Neeson plays Schindler as a profiteer whose shift in conscience the film declines to explain. Ben Kingsley plays his accountant, Itzhak Stern. Ralph Fiennes drew an Oscar nomination as Amon Göth, commandant of the Płaszów labor camp.

Janusz Kamiński photographed the film almost entirely in black and white. Handheld camera work during the ghetto liquidation sequence borrows the unsteady framing of wartime newsreel footage. Color appears in one sustained exception — a young girl in a red coat, followed through the streets of Kraków and glimpsed again later among the dead. It is one of the few openly symbolic gestures in a film otherwise built on documentary texture.

Shooting took place largely in Poland, in and around Kraków. The production worked just outside Auschwitz-Birkenau rather than within it, building a set beyond the gates after Jewish organizations objected to filming inside the camp.

The film took seven Academy Awards from 12 nominations, including best picture, adapted screenplay, cinematography, film editing, art direction and John Williams' score. It also brought Spielberg his first Oscar for directing, arriving in the same year he released Jurassic Park.

Spielberg declined a salary for the project. He directed proceeds toward the organization now known as the USC Shoah Foundation, which has recorded video testimony from more than 50,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses. AFI's voters weighed cultural impact alongside craft, and the film's place in the top 10 reflects how widely a mass audience encountered this history through it.

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Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 thriller Vertigo sits at No. 9 on AFI's 2007 ranking, up from 61st in the 1998 edition. James Stewart plays Scottie Ferguson, a San Francisco detective sidelined by acrophobia, who takes a job following a friend's wife, played by Kim Novak.

The screenplay came from the French novel D'entre les morts, written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Hitchcock reshaped it into a study of obsession. Scottie's attempt to remake one woman in the image of another turns colder than the mystery that set the plot moving.

The dolly zoom is the film's most copied technical contribution. It was devised for a shot of Scottie looking down a stairwell. The camera pulls back while the lens zooms in, holding the subject at a constant size while the space behind it appears to stretch. Later directors borrowed the effect repeatedly, including Steven Spielberg for the beach shot in Jaws and Martin Scorsese for the diner conversation in Goodfellas.

Bernard Herrmann's score loops through a rising figure that never resolves, echoing the spiral shapes in Saul Bass's opening titles. Edith Head designed Novak's costumes, among them the gray suit that Scottie later insists Judy wear again. The clothing carries much of the film's argument about control without a line of dialogue.

Hitchcock shot on location around the Bay Area. The Palace of the Legion of Honor, Fort Point beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and Mission San Juan Bautista all appear on screen. The mission no longer had its bell tower, so the production added one as a visual effect.

Reviews in 1958 split, and box office returns were modest. The film went out of circulation in the 1970s, among a group of Hitchcock titles kept off screens for years, before a restoration returned it to theaters in 1996. The British Film Institute's Sight and Sound critics' poll named Vertigo the greatest film ever made in 2012, ending a 50-year run at the top for Citizen Kane.