# What is the best German movie of all time?

> From Weimar-era expressionism to New German Cinema's reckoning with history and contemporary international award winners, Germany has produced a strikingly diverse body of filmmaking. Cast your vote!

*By YPB Team · Published June 3, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-german-movie-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Metropolis** — score 1000/1000
   Fritz Lang's 1927 visionary silent sci-fi epic depicting a dystopian city split between a luxurious upper world and an underground worker society, one of the most influential films in history.
2. **The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari** — score 812/1000
   Robert Wiene's 1920 Expressionist horror landmark — told by a mental patient about a sinister somnambulist — the defining text of German Expressionism and a founding nightmare of cinema.
3. **Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul** — score 494/1000
   Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1974 melodrama about an elderly German cleaning woman who falls in love with a young Moroccan immigrant, a fierce critique of racial prejudice and social conformism.
4. **Das Boot** — score 494/1000
   Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 claustrophobic submarine epic following a German U-boat crew through the brutal Atlantic campaign, the most expensive German film ever made at the time.
5. **Downfall** — score 384/1000
   Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2004 devastating account of Hitler's final days in the Berlin bunker as the Third Reich collapsed, Bruno Ganz delivering one of cinema's most controversial performances.
6. **Fitzcarraldo** — score 384/1000
   Werner Herzog's 1982 mad epic following a visionary lunatic who drags a full-sized steamship over a jungle mountain to fund an opera house in the Amazon, partly the story of its own insane production.
7. **M** — score 231/1000
   Fritz Lang's 1931 groundbreaking sound thriller about a child murderer hunted by both police and the criminal underworld, with Peter Lorre's riveting, tragic performance.
8. **Aguirre, the Wrath of God** — score 231/1000
   Werner Herzog's 1972 descent into madness with Klaus Kinski as a conquistador who commandeers a raft on the Amazon and declares himself emperor, shot in the actual Peruvian jungle.
9. **The Lives of Others** — score 231/1000
   Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's 2006 Oscar-winning drama about a Stasi officer surveilling a playwright in East Berlin who begins to question his own allegiance.
10. **Nosferatu** — score 231/1000
   F.W. Murnau's 1922 unauthorized Dracula adaptation, the founding document of vampire cinema, with Max Schreck's Count Orlok as cinema's most terrifying screen monster.
11. **The Tin Drum** — score 1/1000
   Volker Schlöndorff's 1979 adaptation of Günter Grass's Nobel Prize-winning novel about a boy who decides to stop growing at age three, a surreal allegory of the Nazi rise in Danzig.
12. **Wings of Desire** — score 1/1000
   Wim Wenders's 1987 poetic fantasy about angels invisibly watching over the divided city of Berlin who yearn to become human, a shimmering meditation on mortality, love, and history.
13. **Run Lola Run** — score 1/1000
   Tom Tykwer's 1998 breathless thriller sending its flame-haired heroine through three parallel realities in 20 minutes each to save her boyfriend's life, a kinetic showcase of pure cinema.
14. **The Marriage of Maria Braun** — score 1/1000
   Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1979 allegory of West Germany's postwar Wirtschaftswunder through the story of a woman who builds a life of ruthless pragmatism while waiting for her imprisoned husband.
15. **Good Bye, Lenin!** — score 1/1000
   Wolfgang Becker's 2003 bittersweet comedy about a son who preserves the illusion of East Germany for his bedridden mother after reunification, a tender portrait of a vanished world.

Tags: movies, germany, classics, all-time