At the end of this year, Swampflix will be celebrating its 10th anniversary as a movie review website.  To celebrate, we’ve attempted to create something the world has never seen before: a definitive list of the 100 greatest movies of all time.  Kidding, of course.  This is well-trodden territory for any film criticism publication, most notably including the BFI’s Sight & Sound list dating back to the 1950s.  The difference is that Sight & Sound polls over 1,000 professional film critics and filmmakers to compile their Top 100 list, whereas we only have six active contributors.  Hopefully, this means our list reflects our personal tastes & passions among the more standard consensus picks for The Greatest Films of All Time, since less than 20% of our titles overlapped with Sight & Sound‘s most recent poll in 2022. 

We created this list in two quick rounds of voting & ranking among our six active contributors in March of 2024, followed by a brief period of ensuring that every film listed had been covered on the site via either podcast or written review.  You can find blurbs for every film listed on the new official landing page of The Swampflix Top 100, or you can find more fleshed-out reviews of each film by clicking the links below.  We love movies, we love working on this website, and we hope that love shines through to anyone who follows along. 

1. House (1977) – “The best thing about haunted house movies is the third-act release of tension where there are no rules and every feature of the house goes haywire all at once, not just the ghosts. The reason this is the height of the genre is that it doesn’t wait to get to the good stuff; it doesn’t even wait to get to the house. It’s all haywire all the time, totally unrestrained.”

2. The Night of the Hunter (1955) – “A classic tale of good versus evil, love versus hate. The black and white cinematography drives home the point with its sharp dynamic lighting. It’s chilling, uncanny and even ruthless at times, but it also has so many makings of a good fairy tale: lost children, evil stepparents, and even a fairy godmother in the end.”

3. The Wizard of Oz (1939) – “Blatant in its artificiality at every turn, yet through some kind of dark movie magic fools you into seeing beyond its closed sets into an endless, beautifully hellish realm. I’m sure there were plenty musicals released in 1939 that have been forgotten by time, but it’s no mystery why this is the one that has endured as an esteemed classic. Even when staring directly at the seams where the 3D set design meets the painted backdrop of an endless landscape, I see another world, not a mural on the wall. It’s the closest thing I can recall to lucid dreaming, an experience that can be accessed by the push of the play button.”

4. Videodrome (1983) – “‘The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena: The Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television.’

I lie awake at night wondering what Brian O’Blivion would make of TikTok.”

5. Tampopo (1985) – “Hailed as the first ‘ramen western’ (a play on the term ‘spaghetti Western’), Tampopo takes that designation to its most extremely literal end, focusing on the title character’s ramen shop as the location of metaphorical quick-draws and high noon showdowns, as well incorporating a variety of loosely connected comedy sketches about food.”

6. 3 Women (1977) – “This feels like a huge departure from what I’ve come to expect from a Robert Altman picture. I’m much more used to seeing him in his big cast/overlapping dialogue mode this is a much more insular, cerebral experience than that. I wish he had tackled this kind of eerie, dreamlike, horror-adjacent material more often (see also: Images, That Cold Day in the Park); he’s damn good at it.”

7. Moonstruck (1987) – “On a short list of classics that I can rewatch at any time no questions asked, especially if I’m feeling low. Come to think of it, Mermaids & The Witches of Eastwick are also on that list, so maybe I just seek comfort in Cher’s curls.”

8. The Red Shoes (1948) – “The centerpiece nightmare ballet is maybe the most gorgeous cinema has ever been. If nothing else, it’s unquestionably the most gorgeous that the color red has ever looked onscreen, which is appropriate since it’s right there in the title.”

9. Peeping Tom (1960) – “It’s near impossible to gauge just how shocking or morally incongruous this must’ve been in 1960, especially in the opening scenes where old men are shown purchasing pornography in the same corner stores where young girls buy themselves candy for comedic effect, and the protagonist/killer is introduced secretly filming a sex worker under his trench coat before moving in for his first kill. Premiering the same year as Hitchcock’s Psycho and predating the birth of giallo & the slasher in 1962’s Blood & Black Lace, this was undeniably ahead of its time. A prescient ancestor to the countless slashers to follow, Powell’s classic is a sleek, beautifully crafted work that should’ve been met with accolades & rapturous applause instead of the prudish dismissal it sadly received.”

10. Sunset Boulevard (1950) – “Not sure why Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is universally cited as the kickstart to the psychobiddy genre while this is fabulously campy/draggy in almost the exact same way (love them both). Anyways, it’s a masterpiece, but you already knew that.”

11. Grey Gardens (1975)
12. Vertigo (1958)
13. Akira (1988)
14. Polyester (1981)
15. Alien (1979)
16. Persona (1966)
17. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
18. Spirited Away (2001)
19. Heathers (1988)
20. Suspiria (1977)
21. Daisies (1966)
22. The Thing (1982)
23. Blue Velvet (1986)
24. All That Heaven Allows (1955)
25. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

26. Possession (1981) – “With a title like Possession and the heavy synths in the opening theme, it’d be reasonable to expect a straight-forward 80s zombie or vampire flick, but the film refuses to be pinned down so easily. If Possession were to be understood as a creature feature, the monster in question would be the coldness of romantic separation. When a character supposes early in the film, ‘Maybe all couples go through this’ it seems like a reasonable claim. The bitterness of divorce, loneliness, and adulterous desire then devolve into a supernatural ugliness. The main couple frantically move about Berlin as if drunk or suffering seizures, downright possessed by their romantic misery. Their own motion & inner turmoil is more of a violent threat than the film’s most menacing blood-soaked monsters or electric carving knives.”

27. Heavenly Creatures (1994)
28. The Virgin Suicides (1999)
29. Princess Mononoke (1997)
30. Crimes of Passion (1984)
31. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)
32. Psycho (1960)
33. Robocop (1987)
34. Citizen Kane (1941)
35. My Winnipeg (2007)
36. Santa Sangre (1989)
37. Blow Out (1981)
38. The Cook the Thief His Wife and Her Lover (1989)
39. Cruising (1980)
40. Female Trouble (1974)
41. The VVitch (2015)
42. Hard Boiled (1992)
43. The Shining (1980)
44. Paprika (2006)
45. Fargo (1996)
46. Poor Things (2023)
47. The Seventh Seal (1957)
48. Serial Mom (1994)
49. Jackie Brown (1997)
50. Eyes Without a Face (1960)

51. Don’t Look Now (1973) – “A delectable head-scratcher. For a movie with such clear themes & purposeful imagery, it’s difficult to parse out exactly what it was getting at with its conclusion, which is definitely part of the charm. Reminded me of many great works of its era, but most of all Fulci’s The Psychic. Would gladly watch it a few more times to continue to puzzle at it, which I suppose is the highest praise you can lay on any film.”

52. Paris is Burning (1990)
53. Mulholland Drive (2001)
54. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
55. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
56. Midsommar (2019)
57. Basic Instinct (1992)
58. Parasite (2019)
59. Beauty and the Beast (1946)
60. Metropolis (1927)
61. Starship Troopers (1997)
62. True Stories (1986)
63. Some Like It Hot (1959)
64. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
65. Birth (2004)
66. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
67. Wild at Heart (1990)
68. Body Double (1984)
69. Amelie (2001)
70. Muriel’s Wedding (1994)
71. Brief Encounter (1945)
72. All About My Mother (1999)
73. Diabolique (1955)
74. M (1931)
75. Knife+Heart (2018)

76. Boogie Nights (1997) – “Even more so than Goodfellas, this has cinema’s clearest distinction between its story’s Fuck Around era (the 1970s) and his Find Out era (the 1980s), down to the minute.”

77. Rear Window (1954)
78. Adaptation (2002)
79. Jurassic Park (1993)
80. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
81. Clueless (1995)
82. Opera (1987)
83. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
84. Labyrinth (1986)
85. In the Mood for Love (2000)
86. Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
87. Dogtooth (2009)
88. All About Eve (1950)
89. Theorem (1968)
90. mother! (2017)
91. After Hours (1985)
92. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
93. The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)
94. What Happened Was … (1994)
95. Altered States (1980)
96. Gaslight (1944)
97. Raw (2016)
98. Halloween (1978)
99. The Exterminating Angel (1962)
100. The Doom Generation (1995)

Scroll through the full list here.

-The Swampflix Crew