Calling anything more perfect than The Godfather feels almost unreasonable. Some call it a sin in the film world. And Francis Ford Coppola’s film, one that hails from the technological limitations in 1972, has the kind of control that makes viewers forget they are watching control at all. The opening wedding, the family rooms, the business meetings, the hospital visit, the restaurant killing, the baptism, Michael (Al Pacino)’s closing door on Kay (Diane Keaton), every part of it feels placed with absolute purpose.
That is why this list has to be ruthless. A movie cannot sit above The Godfather in a linear sense. We have to approach filmmaking from a completely different angle that The Godfather perhaps wasn’t going for and was released during that same time perhaps. And still, the choices have to feel complete in story, performance, direction, emotion, structure, and aftertaste. Only these three can seriously make that argument.
3
‘Seven Samurai’ (1954)
A man looking intently ahead in Seven-SamuraiImage via Toho
Akira Kurosawa did something here that still makes most ensemble films look underbuilt. Seven Samurai spends real time showing why each man joins the defense of the village, what kind of person he is, how he fits into the group, and what the farmers actually risk by asking warriors for help. The story could have been simple: villagers hire samurai to fight bandits. Kurosawa turns that premise into a full study of class, fear, hunger, pride, gratitude, usefulness, and sacrifice. The film’s greatness is in how much life it gives every corner of the conflict.
Kambei (Takashi Shimura)’s calm leadership, Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune)’s rage and insecurity, Kyuzo (Seiji Miyaguchi)’s discipline, Katsushiro (Isao Kimura)’s youth, the farmers’ distrust, the village’s desperation, and the physical work of preparing defenses all become essential. The battles are exciting, but the preparation is just as gripping because the film teaches the viewer how survival is being built. Kikuchiyo gives the film enormous comic force, then reveals the wound underneath without softening into a neat hero. Kambei feels wise, tired, and fully aware that victory may still leave sorrow behind. Seven Samurai earns its place above The Godfather because it feels impossibly generous: action, character, humor, tragedy, community, and moral complexity all held together for more than three hours without waste.
2
‘Casablanca’ (1942)
Ilsa and Rick about to kiss in CasablancaImage via Warner Bros. Pictures
Casablanca is so famous that people sometimes forget how sharp the actual writing is. This is not just a romantic classic with quotable lines. It is a film where almost every conversation carries two meanings: what the characters say to survive the room, and what they cannot afford to say out loud. Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) runs his café with controlled bitterness, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) reopens the one part of his life he thought he had buried, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) brings political courage into the same space, and Captain Renault (Claude Rains) keeps proving that cynicism can still recognize decency when it sees it.
The miracle is how little the film wastes. Every supporting character adds pressure or texture: Sam (Dooley Wilson), Ugarte (Peter Lorre), Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet), Strasser (Conrad Veidt), Yvonne (Madeleine LeBeau), the Bulgarian couple, the desperate refugees waiting for papers. The café feels alive before the romance takes over, which is why the emotional choices land with such force. Rick gives wounded control instead of self-pity. Ilsa’s pain stays readable without making her choices easy. Laszlo has enough dignity that the love triangle never becomes cheap. The “La Marseillaise” scene still overwhelms because the movie has already shown what fear, occupation, and escape mean to the people in that room. The Godfather may be richer and darker, but Casablanca is cleaner. It has romance, politics, sacrifice, humor, danger, and one of the most emotionally satisfying moral choices in American cinema.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
1
‘Citizen Kane’ (1941)
Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane smiling widely in Citizen KaneImage via Warner Bros. Entertainment
The reason Citizen Kane lands on top has nothing to do with treating it like mandatory canon. The film still feels alive because it understands something most biopics and rise-and-fall stories keep missing: a person can be examined from every angle and remain unknowable. Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) is a newspaper tycoon, a public figure, a husband, a collector, a performer, a child taken from home, and a man surrounded by people who can explain pieces of him without ever fully reaching him. That structure is still astonishing. The film starts with Kane’s death, then lets reporters, friends, employees, lovers, newsreels, memories, rooms, objects, and contradictions build a portrait that keeps changing.
Kane is played from youth to old age with a terrifying sense of emotional appetite. He wants love, applause, loyalty, control, and innocence restored to him, but he keeps turning each desire into pressure on other people. Gregg Toland’s photography, the deep-focus staging, the political rally, the breakfast montage, Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore)’s career, the empty rooms of Xanadu, all of it serves character and theme at once. That is why it edges past The Godfather. Coppola’s film is close to perfect in how it charts family, power, and moral surrender. Citizen Kane is even more daring in how it lets the viewer search for a definitive answer and then denies the comfort of one. Its final revelation is emotionally clear, but it does not solve Kane. It makes his life sadder, smaller, and more human.
