Stream some of IMDb’s top movies of all time on Showmax

Love great movies? Then check out IMDb’s 30 Top-Rated Movies Of All Time, and watch over a third of the greatest films out there, right from the comfort of your couch.

#6: Schindler’s List

Steven Spielberg’s magnum opus, Schindler’s List, won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, as well as seven BAFTAs and three Golden Globes. As the critics consensus on Rotten Tomatoes says, “Schindler’s List blends the abject horror of the Holocaust with Steven Spielberg’s signature tender humanism to create the director’s dramatic masterpiece.” 

Liam Neeson (Gangs of New York, Michael Collins) was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor as German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved more than 1 000 Jewish refugees from the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland during WWII. Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient, The Grand Budapest Hotel) was also nominated for an Oscar and won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor, while Oscar winner Ben Kingsley (House of Sand and Fog, Gandhi) was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor. The cast also includes South Africa-raised actress Embeth Davidtz (Matilda, Old).

The screenplay picked up an Oscar for writer Steven Zaillian (The Night Of, The Irishman), while the Oscar for Best Cinematography went to Janusz Kamiński (Saving Private Ryan, War Horse, Lincoln) and the score, by 52-time Oscar nominated and five-time Oscar-winning composer John Williams (Star Wars, Superman, Harry Potter) won both an Oscar and a Grammy. The main theme is performed by violinist Itzhak Perlman, winner of 16 Grammys.

#20: Seven

The Oscar-nominated 1995 blockbuster psychological crime thriller Seven has an 8.6/10 rating on IMDb and an 82% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics consensus calls it, “A brutal, relentlessly grimy shocker with taut performances, slick gore effects, and a haunting finale.”

Seven follows retiring police Detective William Somerset (Oscar winner Morgan Freeman from The Dark Knight) and rookie David Mills (Oscar winner Brad Pitt from Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood) on the trail of a serial killer who’s theming elaborate and grizzly murders around the seven deadly sins. 

Directed by triple Oscar nominee David Fincher (Mank, The Social Network), with a BAFTA-nominated screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker (Sleepy Hollow), Seven also stars Oscar winners Gwyneth Paltrow (Shakespeare in Love) and Kevin Spacey (L.A. Confidential).

#21: The Silence of the Lambs

Dr Hannibal Lecter and FBI Agent Clarice Starling remain the most iconic roles of the Oscar-winning juggernauts – Sir Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster – who played them three decades ago in The Silence of the Lambs, which follows Starling as she is forced to seek out the help of a manipulative cannibal in order to track down a sadistic new serial killer.

The seminal psychological horror was the fourth-biggest film of 1991 and won five Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actor (Hopkins), Best Actress (Foster), Best Director for Jonathan Demme (Philadelphia), and Best Adapted Screenplay for writer Ted Tally’s (All the Pretty Horses) adaptation of Thomas Harris’ best-selling novel.

The Silence of the Lambs has an 8.6/10 score on IMDb and a 96% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Rolling Stone called it “mercilessly scary and mercifully humane at the same time,” and Boston Globe “stylish, intelligent, audacious… and stolen by a suave monster you’ll never forget.”

Also watch the brand-new follow-up series Clarice on Showmax. 

#30: Parasite

Update: No longer available.

Considered one of the best films of the century so far, the South Korean black comedy thriller Parasite won over 300 awards worldwide, including the Cannes Palme d’Or, a Golden Globe, two BAFTAs, and four 2020 Oscars: Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best International Feature Film and – a first-ever for a non-English-language film – Best Picture. 

Co-written and directed by Bong Joon Ho (Snowpiercer, The Host, Mother, Okja), Parasite weaves a tale of class discrimination and greed as a poor family schemes to infiltrate a wealthy household by posing as highly qualified, unrelated individuals. Vulture calls Parasite “a nerve-racking masterpiece,” saying, “You expect Parasite to be one thing, but it mutates into something else,” while New York Times says it’s “Bong at his best” in “an urgent story of class, told in the most sensationally entertaining way.”

With an 8.6/10 score on IMDb and a 98% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Parasite grossed over $250 million at the 2019 global box office. In IndieWire’s 2019 poll of over 300 critics, Parasite ranked #1 in the Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Foreign Film categories.