As a cinematic genre, “drama” has taken many forms over the decades.
The list we compiled here from the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes includes the most critically acclaimed films featuring a “drama” tag. This resulted in a list that spans classic drama films, contemporary dramas, and dramadies of all sorts.
The list ranks movies by an adjusted critical score that Rotten Tomatoes derived from a weighted formula to account for the variation in number of reviews for each film.
It includes classic dramas like “Citizen Kane” and “Taxi Driver” along with recent titles like the best-picture winners “Spotlight” and “Moonlight.” At the top, there’s a conspicuous lack of movies made in the 1980s and 1990s, with the highest-rated titles being either old films or contemporary ones.
Here are the 100 best drama films of all time, according to critics on Rotten Tomatoes:
100.”Love & Friendship” (2016)
Critic score: 97%
Audience score: 60%
What critics said: “Following many staid and treacly Austen adaptations, this sublime period romp adds a thrilling splash of bemused, acidic humor.” – Minneapolis Star-Tribune
99. “The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu)” (1939)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 90%
What critics said: “The word ‘Mozartean’ … gets thrown around a little too eagerly by critics, but one movie, as almost everyone agrees, deserves this supreme benediction — Jean Renoir’s ‘The Rules of the Game.'” – The New Yorker
98. “City Lights” (1931)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 96%
What critics said: “Excruciatingly funny and terribly, terribly sad.” – New York Daily News
97. “Mr. Turner” (2014)
Critic score: 97%
Audience score: 56%
What critics said: “Mike Leigh’s biopic is so richly detailed that it feels like a documentary. Spall goes for broke in the outsize title role.” – Newsday
96. “The French Connection” (1971)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 87%
What critics said: “William Friedkin’s symphony of long, sharp shocks is memorable for any number of sequences.” – Time Out New York
95. “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 95%
What critics said: “Leone (1921-1989) is here at the peak of his epic powers.” – New York Observer
94. “The African Queen” (1951)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 86%
What critics said: “Top flight entertainment, delightful, different, always interesting.” – The Hollywood Reporter
93. “Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back” (1980)
Critic score: 95%
Audience score: 97%
What critics said: “It is a visual extravaganza from beginning to end, one of the most visionary and inventive of all films.” – Chicago Sun-Times
92. “Miracle on 34th Street” (1947)
Critic score: 96%
Audience score: 87%
What critics said: “It is light, it is charming, it is delightfully funny and completely captivating. It is all that, and something more.” – New York Daily News
91. “Let the Right One In” (2008)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 90%
What critics said: “A remarkably moving horror tale, about a pale, bullied twelve-year-old boy (Kåre Hedebrant) and his first love (Lina Leandersson), who happens to be a vampire.” – The New Yorker
90. “The Big Sleep” (1946)
Critic score: 96%
Audience score: 91%
What critics said: “Arguably the high-water mark of Hollywood’s love affair with the infinitely slippery possibilities of the English language.” – Time Out
89. “Schindler’s List” (1993)
Critic score: 97%
Audience score: 97%
What critics said: “It’s a stunning achievement, a film that re-creates the Holocaust not as something abstract, but as felt knowledge.” – Boston Globe
88. “Gone with the Wind” (1939)
Critic score: 92%
Audience score: 93%
What critics said: “Undoubtedly still the best and most durable piece of popular entertainment to have come off the Hollywood assembly lines.” – The Atlantic
87. “To Be or Not to Be” (1942)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 94%
What critics said: “Lubitsch’s guidance provides a tense dramatic pace with events developed deftly and logically throughout.” – Variety
86. “Double Indemnity” (1944)
Critic score: 96%
Audience score: 95%
What critics said: “This shrewd, smoothly tawdry thriller, directed by Billy Wilder, is one of the high points of nineteen-forties films.” – The New Yorker
85. “Nightcrawler” (2014)
Critic score: 95%
Audience score: 85%
What critics said: “A gritty urban comedy noir, a scathing, ‘Network’-worthy disembowelment of television newsgatherers that will leave you craving a shower.” – San Diego Reader
84. “Short Term 12” (2013)
Critic score: 99%
Audience score: 93%
What critics said: “A sly wonder of a film. It brings you into its unique world and then slowly reveals its characters, letting them unfold gradually, organically.” – Detroit News
83. “Things to Come (L’avenir)” (2016)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 70%
What critics said: “French screen legend Isabelle Huppert scores another bullseye with this delicate tale of philosophy professor starting over.” – Rolling Stone
82. “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 92%
What critics said: “A lean, mean amorality tale that still goes down like a cookie laced with arsenic.” – Dallas Morning News
81. “Hidden Figures” (2017)
Critic score: 93%
Audience score: 93%
What critics said: “An assertion of humanity and civil rights that is pure cinematic nourishment for soul.” – Tribune News Service
80. “Star Trek” (2009)
Critic score: 94%
Audience score: 91%
What critics said: “A movie that, against all odds, has miraculously resurrected a wheezing but beloved franchise.” – The Washington Post
79. “The Red Shoes” (1948)
Critic score: 96%
Audience score: 92%
What critics said: “Blending impressionist art and expressionist film, blurring the barriers between theatre and cinema, body and camera, reality and dream, drawing equally on the avant-garde and the classical.” – Time Out
78. “Room” (2015)
Critic score: 94%
Audience score: 93%
What critics said: “Astonishing: It transmutes a lurid, true-crime situation into a fairy tale in which fairy tales are a source of survival.” – Vulture
77. “The Social Network” (2010)
Critic score: 96%
Audience score: 86%
What critics said: “Terrific entertainment – an unlikely thriller that makes business ethics, class distinctions and intellectual-property arguments sexy.” – NPR
76. “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946)
Critic score: 94%
Audience score: 95%
What critics said: “The most well-loved of all Christmas movies.” – Chicago Tribune
75. “Before Midnight” (2013)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 82%
What critics said: “Offers a remarkably intimate and provocative study of a marriage.” – Philadelphia Inquirer
74. “La Dolce Vita” (1960)
Critic score: 97%
Audience score: 90%
What critics said: “It is an awesome picture, licentious in content but moral and vastly sophisticated in its attitude and what it says.” – The New York Times
73. “Birdman” (2014)
Critic score: 92%
Audience score: 77%
What critics said: “It’s a quasi-religious fable about a man haunted by the past and facing a profound moral and existential crisis in the present, and it’s a dazzling display of virtuoso cinematic technique and showboat performances.” – Salon
72. “The Searchers” (1956)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 88%
What critics said: “Contains scenes of magnificence, and one of John Wayne’s best performances.” – Chicago Sun-Times
71. “Paterson” (2016)
Critic score: 96%
Audience score: 71%
What critics said: “A filmmaker telling his story in pictures and the limitlessness of control he brings to his art. What more can one ask of cinema?” – San Diego Reader
70. “Whiplash” (2014)
Critic score: 94%
Audience score: 94%
What critics said: “Revealing both the dangers and payoffs of artistic ambition, ‘Whiplash’ is sure to establish Chazelle as a directorial force to be reckoned with.” – IndieWire
69. “The Leopard” (1963)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 89%
What critics said: “A magnificent film, munificently outfitted and splendidly acted by a large cast dominated by Burt Lancaster’s standout stint in the title role.” – Variety
68. “Battleship Potemkin” (1925)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 85%
What critics said: “A work of straightforward emotion and pulse-quickening tension.” – Salon
67. “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 90%
What critics said: “It is the best courtroom melodrama this old judge has ever seen.” – The New York Times
66. “Cool Hand Luke” (1967)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 95%
What critics said: “A caustically witty look at the American South and its still-surviving chain gangs, with Newman in fine sardonic form as the boss-baiter who refuses to submit and becomes a hero to his fellow-prisoners.” – Time Out
65. “Chinatown” (1974)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 93%
What critics said: “Roman Polanski’s American made film, first since ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ shows him again in total command of talent and physical filmmaking elements.” – Variety
64. “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope” (1977)
Critic score: 93%
Audience score: 96%
What critics said: “Not a film to be written about, it’s an experience. It’s that rare experience for both adults and kids that shortchanges neither. Go — and enjoy.” – Boston Globe
63. “The Godfather, Part II” (1974)
Critic score: 97%
Audience score: 97%
What critics said: “An admirable, responsible production, less emotionally disturbing than its predecessor, but a grand historical epic studying the nature of power in the United States’ heritage.” – The Hollywood Reporter
62. “Creed” (2015)
Critic score: 95%
Audience score: 89%
What critics said: “It’s an invigorating piece of nostalgia that fuels a bigger adrenaline rush with its climax than any big-budget blockbuster could provide.” – The Atlantic
61. “The Hurt Locker” (2009)
Critic score: 97%
Audience score: 84%
What critics said: “Like every war before it, the U.S. invasion of Iraq has generated its share of movies. But ‘The Hurt Locker’ is the first of them that can properly be called a masterpiece.” – Miami Herald
60. “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2” (2011)
Critic score: 96%
Audience score: 89%
What critics said: “When the movie was over, a young boy sitting behind me said, “That was great!” He was satisfied, and rightly so.” – The New Yorker
59. “The Last Picture Show” (1971)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 90%
What critics said: “Director Peter Bogdanovich has seen Anarene, Texas, in the cinematic terms of 1951 — the langorous dissolves, the strong chiaroscuro, the dialogue that starts with bickering and ends at confessional.” – Time
58. “Roman Holiday” (1953)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 94%
What critics said: “For lovers of romantic comedies through the ages, ‘Roman Holiday’ remains a favorite.” – ReelViews
57. “Carol” (2015)
Critic score: 95%
Audience score: 73%
What critics said: “‘Carol’ possesses the same quiet, catlike powers of its magnetic title character: It swirls around to ambush you … and make you swoon.” – The Washington Post
56. “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 88%
What critics said: “‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is just about as good as any picture has a right to be; if it were any better, we just wouldn’t believe our eyes.” – The New York Times
55. “On the Waterfront” (1954)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 95%
What critics said: “It’s hard to deny that Marlon Brando’s performance as a dock worker and ex-fighter who finally decides to rat on his gangster brother (Rod Steiger) is pretty terrific.” – Chicago Reader
54. “Tokyo Story (Tôkyô monogatari)” (1953)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 93%
What critics said: “The way Ozu builds up emotional empathy for a sense of disappointment in its various characters is where his mastery lies.” – Time Out
53. “Jaws” (1975)
Critic score: 97%
Audience score: 90%
What critics said: “A grisly film, often ugly as sin, which achieves precisely what it set out to accomplish-scare the hell out of you.” – Newsweek
52. “Open City” (1946)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 92%
What critics said: “A world cinema landmark, but that dusty, respectful word does not do justice to a film that has not lost its power to surprise and even shock.” – Los Angeles Times
51. “The Wages of Fear” (1953)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 95%
What critics said: “The film’s extended suspense sequences deserve a place among the great stretches of cinema.” – Chicago Sun-Times
50. “L.A. Confidential” (1997)
Critic score: 99%
Audience score: 94%
What critics said: “A movie bull’s-eye: noir with an attitude, a thriller packing punches. It gives up its evil secrets with a smile.” – Chicago Tribune
49. “The Wrestler” (2008)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 88%
What critics said: “This sad, strong beast of a film keeps us pinned to the mat with the strength of its compassion and the overpowering force of its central performance.” – Houston Chronicle
48. “Vertigo” (1958)
Critic score: 96%
Audience score: 93%
What critics said: “It’s as much a wonder of suspense as it is a catalogue of the director’s themes and an allegory for his own art of enticement-and for the erotic pitfalls of his métier.” – The New Yorker
47. “Rashômon” (1951)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 93%
What critics said: “Its virtues are still plentiful: Kurosawa’s visual style at its most muscular, rhythmically nuanced editing, and excellent performances.” – Time Out
46. “Spider-Man: Homecoming” (2017)
Critic score: 92%
Audience score: 88%
What critics said: “Marvel has finally started to figure out what the future of superhero movies might look like.” – IndieWire
45. “The Dark Knight” (2008)
Critic score: 94%
Audience score: 94%
What critics said: “An exceptionally smart, brooding picture with some terrific performances.” – CNN
44. “War for the Planet of the Apes” (2017)
Critic score: 93%
Audience score: 84%
What critics said: “The best summer blockbuster in years, a smart, thoughtful, confrontational and challenging allegory for a world run amok.” – Detroit News
43. “Rebecca” (1940)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 92%
What critics said: “It is the finest job of direction accomplished by a master director and may justly be called Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece.” – New York Daily News
42. “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 93%
What critics said:remains one of the most intelligent, handsome, and influential of all war epics.” – Chicago Reader
41. “The Babadook” (2014)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 72%
What critics said: “A deftly inventive and psychologically charged horror story that trades on the ways in which the prospect of maternal failure can be just as fearsome a boogeyman as any monster under the bed.” – Buzzfeed
40. “Brooklyn” (2015)
Critic score: 97%
Audience score: 87%
What critics said: “Although not without moments of sadness and tragedy, ‘Brooklyn’ is sublimely uplifting and life affirming.” – ReelViews
39. “Army of Shadows (L’Armée des ombres)” (1969)
Critic score: 97%
Audience score: 84%
What critics said: “From the first sight of German soldiers goose-stepping past the Arc de Triomphe to a postscript that spells out the fate of characters whose moral confusion is all too real, ‘Army of Shadows’ is a movie of its time – and ours.” – Rolling Stone
38. “The Conformist” (1970)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 91%
What critics said: “Juggling past and present with the same bravura flourish as Welles in ‘Citizen Kane,’ Bertolucci conjures a dazzling historical and personal perspective.” – Time Out
37. “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 90%
What critics said: “Brando’s performance as Stanley is one of those rare screen legends that are all they’re cracked up to be.” – The Washington Post
36. “Hell or High Water” (2016)
Critic score: 97%
Audience score: 88%
What critics said: “A film with the sort of sweeping grandeur that today’s filmmakers rarely aspire to, let alone fulfill.” – Wall Street Journal
35. “Manchester by the Sea” (2016)
Critic score: 95%
Audience score: 77%
What critics said: “The sadness of ‘Manchester by the Sea’ is the kind of sadness that makes you feel more alive, rather than less, to the preciousness of things.” – Boston Globe
34. “The Night of the Hunter” (1955)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 90%
What critics said: “A garish, unbelievable but fairly exciting nightmare.” – Time
33. “The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cents coups)” (1959)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 94%
What critics said: “One of the first glistening droplets of the French New Wave.” – Time Out
32. “Touch of Evil” (1958)
Critic score: 96%
Audience score: 92%
What critics said: “It was Orson Welles’s last Hollywood film, and in it he makes transcendent use of the American technology his genius throve on; never again would his resources be so rich or his imagination so fiendishly baroque.” – Chicago Reader
31. “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 93%
What critics said: “Greed, a despicable passion out of which other base ferments may spawn, is seldom treated in the movies with the frank and ironic contempt that is vividly manifested toward it in ‘Treasure of Sierra Madre.'” – The New York Times
30. “12 Angry Men (Twelve Angry Men)” (1957)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 97%
What critics said: “This is a film where tension comes from personality conflict, dialogue and body language, not action.” – Chicago Sun-Times
29. “M” (1931)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 95%
What critics said: “Lang’s movie is that rare thing, a nail-biting soul-searcher. While ‘M’ steers clear of analyzing deviance, it is startling in its musings on which punishment fits an inhuman crime.” – Philadelphia Inquirer
28. “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 89%
What critics said: “From such grisly materials the popular cinema is rarely drawn. The film is monumental in the courage that risked its manufacture.” – Time
27. “Taxi Driver” (1976)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 93%
What critics said: “Like Werner Herzog’s ‘Aguirre’ or Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘Taxi Driver’ is auteurist psychodrama.” – Village Voice
26. “Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai)” (1956)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 97%
What critics said: “The greatest movie ever made about warriors and battle.” – Chicago Reader
25. “Selma” (2015)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 86%
What critics said: “‘Selma’ focuses on the one thing we don’t expect in a movie about Martin Luther King Jr. – his doubts – and Oyelowo comes through with a deeply felt and quite brilliant performance.” – Boston Globe
24. “Alien” (1979)
Critic score: 97%
Audience score: 94%
What critics said: “A screamingly spooky sci-fi tale with more than a few echoes of ‘The Thing’ but echoes which enhance rather than detract.” – New York Daily News
23. “Baby Driver” (2017)
Critic score: 93%
Audience score: 86%
What critics said: “Put in your metaphorical earbuds, turn the key in the ignition, and enjoy the cinematic highlight of the summer so far.” – The Atlantic
22. “Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette)” (1949)
Critic score: 93%
Audience score: 86%
What critics said: “So well-entrenched as an official masterpiece that it is a little startling to visit it again after many years and realize that it is still alive and has strength and freshness.” – Chicago Sun-Times
21. “La La Land” (2016)
Critic score: 92%
Audience score: 81%
What critics said: “I’m hoping that ‘La La Land’ will be a hit for the ages, for all ages. It’s a film that re-enacts, with rare originality, a classic role for the movie medium — escapist entertainment in troubled times.” – The Wall Street Journal
20. “Rear Window” (1954)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 95%
What critics said: “It’s one of Alfred Hitchcock’s inspired audience-participation films: watching it, you feel titillated, horrified, and, ultimately, purged.” – The New Yorker
19. “Arrival” (2016)
Critic score: 94%
Audience score: 82%
What critics said: “Amy Adams is a miracle worker-she makes us believe in this mesmerizing mindbender about alien communication, directed with searching mind and heart by Denis Villeneuve.” – Rolling Stone
18. “Sunset Boulevard” (1950)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 95%
What critics said: “One of Wilder’s finest, and certainly the blackest of all Hollywood’s scab-scratching accounts of itself.” – Time Out
17. “Argo” (2012)
Critic score: 96%
Audience score: 90%
What critics said: “Let’s just say that the movie’s final section is so nail-bitingly tense, thanks to a skillful combination of acting, writing and crosscutting, that it puts Affleck in the big leagues as a director.” – The Wrap
16. “Repulsion” (1965)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 86%
What critics said: “Roman Polanski’s first English-language film is still a creepy little horror masterpiece.” – Entertainment Weekly
15. “Logan” (2017)
Critic score: 93%
Audience score: 90%
What critics said: “Roman Polanski’s first English-language film is still a creepy little horror masterpiece.” – Entertainment Weekly
14. “Gravity” (2013)
Critic score: 96%
Audience score: 80%
What critics said: “Unfolding as a series of terrifying object lessons in Newtonian physics, the movie lends new meaning to the phrase ‘spatial geometry.'” – The Atlantic
13. “Boyhood” (2014)
Critic score: 97%
Audience score: 80%
What critics said: “The closest thing to a lived life that fictional cinema has yet produced.” – St. Louis Post-Dispatch
12. “The Maltese Falcon” (1941)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 91%
What critics said: “Frighteningly good evidence that the British (Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed, et al.) have no monopoly on the technique of making mystery films.” – Time
11. “The Battle of Algiers (La Battaglia di Algeri)” (1967)
Critic score: 99%
Audience score: 95%
What critics said: “It uses realism as an effect, documentary as a style. You feel that you’re really there, and you can’t help but be moved.” – Village Voice
10. “12 Years a Slave” (2013)
Critic score: 96%
Audience score: 90%
What critics said: “Every scene of ’12 Years a Slave,’ and almost every shot, conveys some penetrating truth about America’s original sin.” – Dallas Morning News
9. “La Grande illusion (Grand Illusion)” (1938)
Critic score: 97%
Audience score: 92%
What critics said: “This elegy for the death of the old European aristocracy is one of the true masterpieces of the screen.” – The New Yorker
8. “Wonder Woman” (2017)
Critic score: 92%
Audience score: 88%
What critics said: “The moviegoing world deserves the best that Hollywood can deliver, and this time we’ve pretty much got it.” – The Wall Street Journal
7. “The Godfather” (1972)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 98%
What critics said: “Francis Ford Coppola has made one of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment.” – The New York Times
6. “Casablanca” (1942)
Critic score: 97%
Audience score: 95%
What critics said: “Across seven decades, the Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman starrer has emerged as Americans’ default favorite movie.” – The Hollywood Reporter
5. “Spotlight” (2015)
Critic score: 97%
Audience score: 93%
What critics said: “It’s not a stretch to suggest that ‘Spotlight’ is the finest newspaper movie of its era, joining ‘Citizen Kane’ and ‘All the President’s Men’ in the pantheon of classics of the genre.” – The Washington Post
4. “Metropolis” (1927)
Critic score: 99%
Audience score: 92%
What critics said: “A fully realized work of art whose influence on science fiction, set design and symbolism can scarcely be put into words.” – St. Louis Post-Dispatch
3. “Moonlight” (2016)
Critic score: 98%
Audience score: 79%
What critics said: “A disarmingly, at times almost unbearably personal film and an urgent social document, a hard look at American reality and a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces.” – The New York Times
2. “All About Eve” (1950)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 94%
What critics said: “Joseph Mankiewicz was Hollywood’s midcentury master of comic drama, and All About Eve, from 1950, was one of his signal achievements.” – The New Yorker
1. “Citizen Kane” (1941)
Critic score: 100%
Audience score: 90%
What critics said: “More than a great movie; it is a gathering of all the lessons of the emerging era of sound.” – Chicago Sun-Times
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