Here's the Best Movie from Every Year Since 1894

Debating which film is better than which and weighing the merits of Jurassic Park versus those of À Bout de Souffle are just some of the favourite pastimes of any film fan.

We as a species will never be able to completely agree on which is the greatest film of any given year, but now we are closer to a definitive answer than ever before.

One eager Redditor has collated the Imdb (Internet Movie Database) ratings of every film on the site to find the most popular movie of each of the last 120 years. He has also worked out the average ratings for each year to find which was the greatest in cinematic history.

So what are his finds? Well for one, Imdb users love Christopher Nolan: five of his eight feature length films were voted the best of their respective year from Memento in 2000, to The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. All three of Nolan's Batman films appear on the list, as do all three of the original Star Wars and Lord of the Rings films.

As for the highest rated years – 1957 stands atop with an average of 8.31/10 thanks to films like 12 Angry Men and The Bridge on the River Kwai. Behind that came 1994 (Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction) and 2001 (Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Monsters Inc).

The very first top rated movie is Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, followed by Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory in 1895 and the famous Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat in 1896, when the technology was of course still primitive.

As is noted on the Reddit page, many of the first few films are available to watch online. The first three have been linked above.

2014's current top rated film is The Lego Movie, though that is likely to change before the year is out.

The list in full can be read here.