# The 43 Greatest Silent Films of All Time

> Slapstick daredevils, Expressionist nightmares and Soviet montage experiments, all made before the talkies arrived. A handful sit on every critics' list, while others deserve far more viewers than they get.

*By YPB Team · Published November 1, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-43-greatest-silent-films-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Metropolis** — score 1000/1000
   Fritz Lang's 1927 German science-fiction epic of a divided future city and its robot Maria.
2. **Steamboat Bill, Jr.** — score 684/1000
   Keaton's 1928 river comedy, home of the falling house facade that misses him by inches.
3. **I Was Born, But...** — score 636/1000
   Yasujiro Ozu's 1932 silent comedy about two boys disillusioned to discover their father bowing to his boss.
4. **Faust** — score 581/1000
   Murnau's 1926 German version of the legend, with Emil Jannings as a towering Mephisto.
5. **Dr. Mabuse the Gambler** — score 581/1000
   Fritz Lang's 1922 two-part crime saga about a master manipulator and hypnotist preying on Weimar Berlin.
6. **The Birth of a Nation** — score 581/1000
   D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic, technically groundbreaking and infamous for its racist glorification of the Ku Klux Klan.
7. **Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans** — score 515/1000
   F.W. Murnau's 1927 Hollywood fable of a farmer tempted to drown his wife, voted the greatest silent film in Sight and Sound's 2012 poll.
8. **Un Chien Andalou** — score 515/1000
   Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's 1929 surrealist short with its infamous razor-and-eye opening.
9. **The Crowd** — score 515/1000
   King Vidor's 1928 portrait of an ordinary clerk swallowed by New York City.
10. **The Phantom of the Opera** — score 515/1000
   The 1925 Universal horror classic featuring Lon Chaney's self-designed skull-faced Phantom.
11. **Nanook of the North** — score 515/1000
   Robert Flaherty's 1922 portrait of Inuit life in the Canadian Arctic, often called the first feature documentary.
12. **Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ** — score 515/1000
   MGM's lavish 1925 Roman epic with a chariot race that set the standard for decades.
13. **Sherlock Jr.** — score 515/1000
   Keaton's 1924 comedy about a projectionist who dreams himself into the movie he is screening.
14. **The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari** — score 515/1000
   Robert Wiene's 1920 German Expressionist nightmare with painted, jagged sets.
15. **The Wind** — score 435/1000
   Victor Sjostrom's 1928 frontier drama starring Lillian Gish as a woman driven to breaking by a relentless Texas wind.
16. **Man with a Movie Camera** — score 435/1000
   Dziga Vertov's 1929 Soviet city symphony, an experimental documentary with no actors or intertitles.
17. **Battleship Potemkin** — score 435/1000
   Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 Soviet mutiny drama whose Odessa Steps sequence changed film editing.
18. **Greed** — score 435/1000
   Erich von Stroheim's 1924 study of avarice, notoriously cut from about nine hours to two.
19. **Strike** — score 435/1000
   Eisenstein's 1925 debut feature about a factory uprising, ending in a brutal intercut massacre.
20. **The General** — score 435/1000
   Buster Keaton's 1926 Civil War locomotive chase, filled with real stunts and a famous bridge collapse.
21. **The Thief of Bagdad** — score 435/1000
   Douglas Fairbanks' 1924 Arabian Nights spectacle with flying carpets and enormous sets.
22. **Nosferatu** — score 339/1000
   Murnau's 1922 unauthorised Dracula adaptation starring Max Schreck as the vampire Count Orlok.
23. **The Gold Rush** — score 339/1000
   Chaplin's 1925 Klondike comedy with the dancing dinner rolls and the boiled-shoe supper.
24. **The Last Laugh** — score 339/1000
   Murnau's 1924 story of a demoted hotel doorman, told with a free-roaming camera and almost no intertitles.
25. **The Navigator** — score 339/1000
   Keaton's 1924 comedy of two spoiled heirs adrift alone on an empty ocean liner, his biggest hit.
26. **The Docks of New York** — score 339/1000
   Josef von Sternberg's 1928 waterfront romance between a stoker and a would-be suicide.
27. **Napoleon** — score 339/1000
   Abel Gance's 1927 biopic of the young Bonaparte, ending in a three-screen Polyvision finale.
28. **Pandora's Box** — score 339/1000
   G.W. Pabst's 1929 German drama that made Louise Brooks and her bob haircut an icon.
29. **A Trip to the Moon** — score 339/1000
   Georges Melies' 1902 trick-film fantasy in which a rocket lands in the eye of the Man in the Moon.
30. **The Kid** — score 339/1000
   Chaplin's 1921 first feature, in which the Tramp raises an abandoned boy played by Jackie Coogan.
31. **The Lodger** — score 339/1000
   Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 Jack the Ripper-style thriller, the first truly Hitchcockian film.
32. **Lonesome** — score 339/1000
   Paul Fejos' 1928 tale of two lonely workers who meet at Coney Island, rediscovered as a Criterion favourite.
33. **It** — score 339/1000
   The 1927 romantic comedy that made Clara Bow the original It girl.
34. **The Passion of Joan of Arc** — score 0/1000
   Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 trial drama told almost entirely in close-ups of Renee Falconetti's face.
35. **Wings** — score 0/1000
   William Wellman's 1927 First World War aviation epic and the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture.
36. **Intolerance** — score 0/1000
   D.W. Griffith's colossal 1916 epic weaving four stories across 2,500 years of history.
37. **Haxan** — score 0/1000
   Benjamin Christensen's 1922 Swedish-Danish docu-horror essay on the history of witchcraft.
38. **Earth** — score 0/1000
   Alexander Dovzhenko's 1930 lyrical Ukrainian film about collectivisation and the cycle of life.
39. **City Lights** — score 0/1000
   Charlie Chaplin's 1931 romantic comedy in which the Tramp helps a blind flower girl, made silent well into the sound era.
40. **Safety Last!** — score 0/1000
   Harold Lloyd's 1923 comedy, remembered for its hero dangling from a skyscraper clock.
41. **The Big Parade** — score 0/1000
   King Vidor's 1925 First World War drama, one of the highest-grossing films of the silent era.
42. **Broken Blossoms** — score 0/1000
   Griffith's 1919 tragedy of an abused girl in London's Limehouse, starring Lillian Gish.
43. **The Unknown** — score 0/1000
   Tod Browning's 1927 circus horror with Lon Chaney as a knife thrower pretending to have no arms.

Tags: movies, classics, silent film, 20s