This is a list of the 120 highest-ranked films on Letterboxd in the decade of the 1950s, within certain qualifications, as of 11 February 2025.
To make a list like this meaningful, you need to set a threshold for numbers of ratings before including a film, mitigating the effect of spurious high ratings and helping ensure the rankings really do represent a significant consensus of viewers. The current threshold for the overall Letterboxd Top 250 is 15,000 ratings, but on average fewer people rate older films and with such a high bar the list would be heavily slanted towards well-known Hollywood productions with a good few interesting films excluded. So I've set a threshold of 2,000 to allow a sufficiently…
This is a list of the 120 highest-ranked films on Letterboxd in the decade of the 1950s, within certain qualifications, as of 11 February 2025.
To make a list like this meaningful, you need to set a threshold for numbers of ratings before including a film, mitigating the effect of spurious high ratings and helping ensure the rankings really do represent a significant consensus of viewers. The current threshold for the overall Letterboxd Top 250 is 15,000 ratings, but on average fewer people rate older films and with such a high bar the list would be heavily slanted towards well-known Hollywood productions with a good few interesting films excluded. So I've set a threshold of 2,000 to allow a sufficiently long and sufficiently varied list, revised up from 1,000 in February 2025 in line with an overall increase in the number of ratings.
Another difference from the Letterboxd 250 is that I've included shorts, documentaries and non-narrative films besides narrative features.
There are 120 titles because I figure that the world's film industry should be able to manage at least one really great film per month on average.
This is one of a series of work-in-progress decade by decade lists along similar lines. See letterboxd.com/desdemoor/tag/highest-rated-by-decade/lists/
<- Back to 1940-1949.
-> Forward to 1960-1969.
My own recommendations for 1950s films to watch are here: boxd.it/ldibM
Pedant's corner: I personally believe the 1950s began on 1 January 1951, but sadly most of the rest of the world seems to disagree with me, including Letterboxd. So to make life easier, all the films listed were released between 1950 and 1959 inclusive.
List first posted 28 March 2021.
