The 100 best drama movies of all time, according to critics

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

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

Critic score: 98%

Audience score: 96%

What critics said: "Excruciatingly funny and terribly, terribly sad." — New York Daily News

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

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

Critic score: 98%

Audience score: 95%

What critics said: "Leone (1921-1989) is here at the peak of his epic powers." — New York Observer

Critic score: 98%

Audience score: 86%

What critics said: "Top flight entertainment, delightful, different, always interesting." — The Hollywood Reporter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critic score: 94%

Audience score: 95%

What critics said: "The most well-loved of all Christmas movies." — Chicago Tribune

Critic score: 98%

Audience score: 82%

What critics said: "Offers a remarkably intimate and provocative study of a marriage." — Philadelphia Inquirer

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

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

Critic score: 100%

Audience score: 88%

What critics said: "Contains scenes of magnificence, and one of John Wayne's best performances." — Chicago Sun-Times

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

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

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

Critic score: 100%

Audience score: 85%

What critics said: "A work of straightforward emotion and pulse-quickening tension." — Salon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critic score: 98%

Audience score: 94%

What critics said: "For lovers of romantic comedies through the ages, 'Roman Holiday' remains a favorite." — ReelViews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critic score: 94%

Audience score: 94%

What critics said: "An exceptionally smart, brooding picture with some terrific performances." — CNN