Best Picture winners ranked

A cynical expatriate American cafe owner struggles to decide whether or not to help his former lover and her fugitive husband escape the Nazis in French Morocco.

A sheltered and manipulative Southern belle and a roguish profiteer face off in a turbulent romance as the society around them crumbles with the end of slavery and is rebuilt during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods.

The story of T.E. Lawrence, the English officer who successfully united and led the diverse, often warring, Arab tribes during World War I in order to fight the Turks.

Three friends struggle to find work in Paris. Things become more complicated when two of them fall in love with the same woman.

First mate Fletcher Christian leads a revolt against his sadistic commander, Captain Bligh, in this classic seafaring adventure, based on the real-life 1789 mutiny.

A Jewish prince is betrayed and sent into slavery by a Roman friend in 1st-century Jerusalem, but it's not long before he regains his freedom and comes back for revenge.

A Manhattan insurance clerk tries to rise in his company by letting its executives use his apartment for trysts, but office politics and his own romantic hopes complicate matters.

A rogue reporter trailing a runaway heiress for a big story joins her on a bus heading from Florida to New York and they end up stuck with each other when the bus leaves them behind at one of the stops along the way.

A seemingly timid but secretly ruthless ingénue insinuates herself into the lives of an aging Broadway star and her circle of theater friends.

A group of very different individuals staying at a luxurious hotel in Berlin deal with each of their respective dramas.

Weary of the conventions of Parisian society, a rich playboy and a youthful courtesan-in-training enjoy a platonic friendship which may not stay platonic for long.

British POWs are forced to build a railway bridge across the river Kwai for their Japanese captors in occupied Burma, not knowing that the allied forces are planning a daring commando raid through the jungle to destroy it.

The son of a snobbish Wall Street banker becomes engaged to a woman from a good-natured but decidedly eccentric family not realizing that his father is trying to force her family from their home for a real estate development.

The dramatic lives of trapeze artists, a clown, and an elephant trainer are told against a background of circus spectacle.

A small-time Philadelphia boxer gets a supremely rare chance to fight the world heavyweight champion in a bout in which he strives to go the distance for his self-respect.

A self-conscious woman juggles adjusting to her new role as an aristocrat's wife and avoiding being intimidated by his first wife's spectral presence.

The ups and downs of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., famed producer of extravagant stage revues, are portrayed.

Two grifters team up to pull off the ultimate con.

A pair of sisters from the vaudeville circuit try to make it big time on Broadway, but matters of the heart complicate the attempt.

In 1910s London, snobbish phonetics professor Henry Higgins agrees to a wager that he can make a crude flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, presentable in high society.

When young Father O'Malley arrives at St. Dominic's, old Father Fitzgibbon doesn't think much of his new assistant.

Two youngsters from rival New York City gangs fall in love, but tensions between their respective friends build toward tragedy.

The aging patriarch of an organized crime dynasty transfers control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant son.

A pair of NYPD detectives in the Narcotics Bureau stumble onto a heroin smuggling ring based in Marseilles, but stopping them and capturing their leaders proves an elusive goal.