Best Picture Movies Bucket List

Two British runners at the 1924 Olympics, and the beach to Vangelis.

A Black Philadelphia detective and a Mississippi sheriff solve a murder they cannot stand to share.

Karen Blixen's coffee farm and her affair with Denys Finch Hatton, in the Ngong Hills.

Ben Kingsley as the Mahatma across three hours and 300,000 extras at the funeral.

Two murderesses and one lawyer in Jazz Age Chicago; "Cell Block Tango".

Dickens as a musical: workhouse, pickpockets and "Consider Yourself".

A bawdy Georgian romp with the most famous eating scene in cinema.

A silent, black-and-white French film about the end of silent film; and it won.

Audrey Hepburn's flower girl and Rex Harrison's phonetician; the rain in Spain.

A Bronx butcher and a shy teacher meet at a dance; the shortest Best Picture ever.

Soldiers in Hawaii in the weeks before Pearl Harbor, and the kiss in the surf.

Thirty years of a mother and daughter, from comedy to a hospital corridor.

A Philadelphia club fighter gets one shot at the champ; the steps, the run, the raw eggs.

Peter O'Toole crosses the Nefud in 70mm; the desert epic every other desert epic quotes.

The novelist takes on the Dreyfus affair; the first biopic to win.

Bette Davis's ageing star and the fan who takes everything; "fasten your seatbelts".

The first Best Picture: a silent Great War dogfight epic with real biplanes and Clara Bow.

Clark Gable leads the mutiny against Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh.

Thirty years of a London family, from the Boer War to the Jazz Age, from Noel Coward's play.

The Oklahoma land rush and forty years of a frontier newspaper; the first western to win.

Three hours of Broadway spectacle around the impresario who invented the revue.

Gene Kelly dances a seventeen-minute Gershwin ballet through painted Paris.

Rick, Ilsa, the letters of transit and the most quoted script ever written.

Three veterans come home to the same small town and cannot fit back in.

Bing Crosby as a young priest who sings his way through a struggling parish.

Four days of an alcoholic writer, the first Hollywood film to take addiction seriously.

A Welsh mining family remembered; the film that beat Citizen Kane.

A populist governor's rise and rot, drawn from Huey Long.

German schoolboys march to the trenches in the film that defined the anti-war picture.

A runaway heiress and a reporter on a bus; the romantic comedy blueprint, and the first clean sweep of the big five.