Ranking

Every decade in the CineBrawl corpus, compared

How many titles each decade contributes to the site’s tournaments, how they are rated, and the standouts of each era.

Curated selections skew recent — newer films are easier to remember and easier to stream. This shows how strongly, decade by decade, and which titles hold up best in each era.

1. The 2020s 77 titles · ★ 7.6/10 average

   Standouts: Arcane, INVINCIBLE, The Last of Us, House of the Dragon

2. The 2010s 273 titles · ★ 7.6/10 average

   Standouts: Rick and Morty, Stranger Things, Chernobyl, Attack on Titan

3. The 2000s 189 titles · ★ 7.6/10 average

   Standouts: Breaking Bad, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Dark Knight, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

4. The 1990s 105 titles · ★ 7.7/10 average

   Standouts: The Shawshank Redemption, Schindler's List, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump

5. The 1980s 69 titles · ★ 7.6/10 average

   Standouts: The Empire Strikes Back, Back to the Future, Grave of the Fireflies, Dead Poets Society

6. The 1970s 39 titles · ★ 7.7/10 average

   Standouts: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Apocalypse Now

7. The 1960s 16 titles · ★ 7.8/10 average

   Standouts: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Psycho, Once Upon a Time in the West, 2001: A Space Odyssey

8. The 1950s 17 titles · ★ 7.9/10 average

   Standouts: 12 Angry Men, Rear Window, Paths of Glory, Vertigo

9. The 1940s 7 titles · ★ 7.8/10 average

   Standouts: It's a Wonderful Life, Casablanca, Rope, Rebecca

10. The 1930s 4 titles · ★ 7.4/10 average

    Standouts: The Wizard of Oz, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps

How this ranking is built

Grouped by release year. The average is a plain mean of TMDB ratings; standouts use the weighted average so a decade is not represented by a niche title with 300 votes.

The pool is the CineBrawl corpus: every title hand-picked into one of the site’s ready-made tournaments. That is an editorial selection, not a scrape of a whole database — which is exactly why this ranking looks different from a raw “top rated” list.

Ratings and vote counts come from TMDB and were captured when the site was last built. They move over time; treat them as an order of magnitude, not as a verdict.

Rankings are a starting point, not an answer. If you want a decision rather than a list, run these titles through a bracket: build your own tournament or play a ready-made one.