My favourite films per year, starting from 1911. A companion to this list.
The five films for each year are sorted alphabetically. I used dates from IMDb.
Top 20 per Year
1968 | 1969 | | | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | | | 1975 | 1976 | 1977 | | | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | | | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025
Recurring Directors
16 films - Kenji Mizoguchi
13 films - Akira Kurosawa
11 films - Alfred Hitchcock, Yasujiro Ozu
10 films - Ingmar Bergman, Martin Scorsese
9 films - Stanley Kubrick
8 films - D.W. Griffith
7 films - Andrei Tarkovsky, Michael Powell, Satyajit Ray, Buster Keaton
6 films - Emeric Pressburger, Victor Sjöström, F. W. Murnau, Charlie Chaplin, Paul Thomas Anderson, Park Chan-wook
5 films - Terrence Malick, Wong Kar-wai, Yevgeni Bauer, Fritz Lang, Christopher Nolan, Orson Welles, David Fincher
4 films - Edward Yang, Hayao Miyazaki, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Carl Theodor Dreyer, John Ford, Patricio Guzmán, Federico Fellini, Howards Hawks, Billy Wilder, David Lean, Hong Sang-soo, Sergio Leone, David Cronenberg
3 films - Krzysztof Kieślowski, George A. Romero, Isao Takahata, Béla Tarr, Lee Chang-dong, David Lynch, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, Michael Curtiz, James Whale, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Francis Ford Coppola, Jean-Pierre Melville, Mike Leigh, Ben Sharpsteen, Wilfred Jackson, David Hand, Bong Joon-ho, Lav Diaz, Luis Buñuel
2 films - Andrea Arnold, Guillermo del Toro, Paul Greengrass, Terry Jones, Kim Ki-duk, Ridley Scott, Andrew Stanton, Shinya Tsukamoto, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Quentin Tarantino, Nicolas Roeg, John Woo, King Hu, Steven Spielberg, Edgar Wright, Toshio Matsumoto, Terry Gilliam, Mikhail Kalatozov, Carol Reed, Victor Fleming, Leo McCarey, Jean Renoir, Frank Lloyd, Fred Zinnemann, Erich von Stroheim, Lois Weber, Giuseppe de Liguoro, Francesco Bertolini & Adolfo Padovan, Spike Lee, Sidney Lumet, Roberto Rossellini, Robert Wiene, Wallace Worsley, Jean-Luc Godard, Lars von Trier, Cecil B. DeMille, Jonathan Demme, Joshua Oppenheimer, Masaki Kobayashi, Alain Resnais, Alfonso Cuarón, Pedro Costa, Wim Wenders, Frank Capra, Abel Gance, John Cassavetes, Juraj Herz, Jonathan Glazer, John Huston, Ernst Lubitsch, Chantal Akerman, George Miller, William A. Wellman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Bill Roberts, James Algar, Paul Satterfield, Samuel Armstrong, Dario Argento, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean Cocteau, Roman Polanski, Aleksei German, Josef von Sternberg, Edmund Goulding, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Michael Haneke, Jacques Tourneur