Seven “greatest films” lists from critics, screenwriters and film institutions, merged into one canon of 1,222 films. The English subtitles of nearly a thousand of them were read for the language of moral choice, so you can pick a film by what it’s about underneath.
Seven critics’ and filmmakers’ lists, merged. A film named on more of them has wider agreement behind it, so the six on all seven are the closest thing to a consensus “best of the best.” Raise the bar below to narrow the canon.
Pick the moral themes you want a film to dwell on. Each film is scored by how often its dialogue uses words from the Moral Foundations Dictionary, compared with the other films in the canon. Blue chips favor the virtue side of a foundation and red chips the vice side.
Whenever I remembered to log it, I noted the films I’ve seen since 2015, in the order I saw them. Films from the canon carry their consensus marks; the bars below show how far through each tier of the canon I’ve gotten.
| # | Film | Year | Director | IMDb | Canon | Logged |
|---|
In 2016 I merged six “greatest films” lists into one spreadsheet: the American Film Institute’s 100 Years…100 Movies (1998 and the 2007 update), the Writers Guild of America’s 101 Greatest Screenplays (2005), the 2012 Sight & Sound critics’ poll, The Guardian’s 2010 list, and the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. In 2026 I added the 2022 Sight & Sound poll, which brought in 11 films none of the other lists had named, among them Touki Bouki, Daughters of the Dust, Parasite and Get Out. A film’s consensus is simply how many of the seven lists it appears on. Six films are on all seven. 911 are on just one.
Metadata and posters came from the OMDb API, keyed by IMDb ID.
Robert Lewis, Ph.D., who studies media and morality, shared English subtitle files for tens of thousands of films. Each subtitle file in the canon was run through LIWC2015 with the Moral Foundations Dictionary (Graham, Haidt & Nosek), which sorts about 300 word stems into five foundations, each with a virtue and a vice side: care and harm, fairness and cheating, loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, sanctity and degradation. A film’s score in a category is the share of its dialogue that uses those words.
The Moral Compass ranks films by how far above the canon average they sit, in standard deviations. Films with fewer than 1,500 words of dialogue are left out of the rankings, because a handful of words swings their scores. The scores describe what the characters talk about. They don’t judge whether a film is moral.
The merged list, the moral and language scores, and the posters are on GitHub and data.world. The original write-up is on the blog, and the first version of this tool is still on Tableau Public.