The Pendragon Society’s 1000 Greatest Films of All-Time 2018

In October 2017 we began polling our site administrators and other contributors who were asked to name and rate their 100 best films of all time. These results were combined with those of other greatest film polls (some of which are listed here) and the results have been put into a list of the 1000 greatest films 2018. The countdown of the results began on the 15th November 2017 and can be viewed below.

• 1000-901
• 900-801
• 800-701
• 700-601
• 600-501
• 500-401
• 400-301
• 300-201
• 200-101
• 100-1

Ranking films is a completely subjective exercise and we are not, of course, going to arrogantly suggest this is the most definitive of all film lists. The purpose of the poll is to stimulate healthy debate and to get people thinking about what makes a great film! So please let us no what you think of the results.

Notable losses from our last poll include – Ben-Hur (1959), The Lady Vanishes (1938), The White Ribbon (2009), For All Mankind (1989), Henry V (1944), Hotel Rwanda (2004), Ghost World (2001), How Green was My Valley (1941).

Below is a list of all the directors with two or more films in the top 1000 –

14 – Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese

13 – Luis Bunuel

12 – Steven Spielberg

11 – Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock

10 – Yasujiro Ozu

9 – Jean-Luc Godard, Hayao Miyazaki, Woody Allen, Joel & Ethan Coen

8 – Federico Fellini, Christopher Nolan, Howard Hawks, Quentin Tarantino, Charles Chaplin

7 – Andrei Tarkovsky, Michael Powell, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang

6 – Robert Bresson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Roberto Rossellini, Orson Welles, Francois Truffaut, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Masaki Kobayashi, Wong Kar-Wai, Wes Anderson, Krzysztof Kieslowski

5 – Terrence Malick, Satyajit Ray, John Ford, Sergio Leone, Kenji Mizoguchi, David Lean, F. W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, Emeric Pressburger, Robert Altman, Luchino Visconti, David Lynch, Jean Renoir, William Wyler, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Michael Mann, Francis Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg, Darren Aronofsky, Richard Linklater

4 – Carl Theodor Dreyer, Bernardo Bertolucci, Roman Polanski, Wim Wenders, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Max Ophuls, Paul Thomas Anderson, George Stevens, Alain Resnais, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Elia Kazan, Jean-Pierre Melville, David Fincher, John Boorman, Yimou Zhang, Louis Malle, Michael Curtiz, Peter Jackson, Nicholas Ray, Nicolas Roeg, Brian De Palma, Mel Gibson, Hsiao-hsien Hou, Jim Jarmusch, Sidney Lumet, Abbas Kiarostami, Spike Jonze, Peter Weir, Eric Rohmer

3 – Terry Gilliam, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, Milos Forman, Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, Bela Tarr, Steve McQueen, Hal Ashby, Andrzej Wajda, Alfonso Cuaron, George Cukor, Clint Eastwood, Preston Sturges, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Sam Mendes, Danny Boyle, Vittorio De Sica, Michael Haneke, Ang Lee, Raoul Walsh, George Miller, Carol Reed, Robert Wise, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Oliver Stone, D. W. Griffith, John Cassavetes, Robert Zemeckis, Josef von Sternberg, Brad Bird, Gus Van Sant, Rob Reiner

2 – Victor Fleming, Jean Cocteau, Terry Jones, Erich von Stroheim, Alexander Mackendrick, Andrey Zvyagintsev, John Lasseter, Damian Chazelle, George A. Romero, Henri-Georges Clouzot, George Roy Hill, Andrew Stanton, William Friedkin, John Carpenter, Mikhail Kalatozov, Edward Yang, Mike Nichols, Emanno Olmi, Theodoros Angelopoulos, Otto Preminger, Agnes Hranitzky, Jules Dassin, Chris Marker, Douglas Sirk, Jacques Becker, Victor Erice, Robert Aldrich, Michael Cimino, Mike Leigh, Isao Takahata, Peter Bogdanovich, Thomas Vinterberg, Jean Vigo, Claude Berri, Philip Kaufman, Samuel Fuller, Bob Fosse, Jacques Demy, Sam Peckinpah, Sergei Parajanov, Shohei Imamura, Wojciech Has, James Whale, Peter Watkins, George Lucas, Frank Darabont, Yuriy Norshteyn, Pete Docter, Mario Monicelli, Marc Caro, Jonathan Demme, Alexander Payne, Alan J. Pakula, Tomas Alfredson, William A. Wellman, Lindsay Anderson, Tim Burton, Charlie Kaufman, Emir Kusterica, Sam Raimi, Kon Ichikawa, Sergio Corbucci, Ken Russell, James Ivory, Jacques Rivette, Lars Von Trier, Anthony Minghella, Glauber Rocha, Giuseppe Tornatore, Franklin J. Schaffner, Don Siegel, The Wachowskis, Joe Wright, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, David Hand, Roland Joffe, Cameron Crowe, Agnes Varda, Shekhar Kapur, Todd Haynes, Denis Villeneuve, Kathryn Bigelow, Fred Zinnemann