10 Movies Better Than The Godfather, Including A Clint Eastwood Masterpiece

Published Oct 11, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT Shawn S. Lealos is an entertainment writer who is a voting member of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle. He has written for Screen Rant, CBR, ComicBook, The Direct, The Sportster, Chud, 411mania, Renegade Cinema, Yahoo Movies, and many more. Shawn has a bachelor's degree in professional writing and a minor in film studies from the University of Oklahoma. He also has won numerous awards, including several Columbia Gold Circle Awards and an SPJ honor. He also wrote Dollar Deal: The Story of the Stephen King Dollar Baby Filmmakers, the first official book about the Dollar Baby film program. Shawn is also currently writing his first fiction novel under a pen name, based in the fantasy genre. To learn more, visit his website at shawnlealos.net. The Godfather remains widely considered one of the greatest movies of all time. Released in 1972, the movie was a box office success and went on to win Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor for Marlon Brando, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It also earned seven other Oscar nominations, including Best Director for Francis Ford Coppola and Best Supporting Actor for Al Pacino, James Caan, and Robert Duvall. The movie was also added to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress and is listed on most countdowns of the best movies in film history. The Godfather has a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score and a 98% audience score. It also ranks second all-time on the IMDb audience rankings with a 9.2 out of 10 score. There is no discounting how great The Godfather is, but it isn't the only great movie in cinema history. Since the advent of cinema, there have been many films listed among the best in history. Citizen Kane was often called the best movie of all time for many years, but it has fallen off in recent times, although its influence on filmmaking is still great. The Godfather remains highly praised, but it even has a sequel that many critics list as the better movie, and several films made since then surpass the gangster epic in quality. Schindler's List (1993) In 1993, Steven Spielberg released two different movies. One ended up as a massive box office success and spawned a franchise that is still going to this day. The other received critical acclaim and awards recognition, and it remains one of the most harrowing and eye-opening war movies ever made. Those movies were Jurassic Park and Schindler's List, and both remain among the best in film history in their genres. For Schindler's List, Spielberg takes viewers into World War II, focusing on the Polish-Jewish refugees during the Holocaust who were attempting to escape persecution during the war. Liam Neeson stars as Oskar Schindler, the man who employed them in his factory to hide and protect them, while Ralph Fiennes was an SS officer hunting them down. The film has a 98% Rotten Tomatoes score, and it won seven Oscars in 12 nominations. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975) Based on the novel by Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a movie about a man who is found guilty of statutory rape and feigns mental illness so he can spend his sentence in a mental health facility rather than jail. However, when he arrives, he meets the other patients and tries to stand up for them against the terrifying Nurse Ratched, only to find out that he would have been better off in jail. The Godfather is a movie about how even a good man can become a monster when the family won't release their grip on him. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is also about the downfall of a man, but Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) is never a good man, and while he tries to do good, he learns the system will never let him reach those goals. It went on to become one of only three films to sweep the major Oscar categories, and Nurse Ratched is one of cinema's greatest villains. Goodfellas (1990) The Godfather is often called the best gangster movie of all time, but there are a few options that are better than it in many ways. While Francis Ford Coppola created the template that most movies in the genre followed after its release, Martin Scorsese is the director who took that template and ran with it. Scorsese directed several gangster movies over his career, and while The Departed is the one that won the Oscar, Goodfellas is still his masterpiece. While The Godfather took viewers inside the mafia family and showed the machinations and inner workings of the organization, Goodfellas introduced someone working as a lower-level mobster in an organization, and someone who would betray the family in the end. Seeing the mafia from the point of view of a grunt was an incredible experience, and Goodfellas went on to earn six Oscar nominations and is a much more entertaining experience than The Godfather in many ways. Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) One thing to note about The Godfather is that it is a long movie that feels like a long movie. Francis Ford Coppola set out to make it an epic experience, and the plodding runtime is part of its charm. However, when looking at epic films, there is another movie that did the same thing for the Western genre, and it did it better than Coppola's masterpiece. That movie is Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West. Once Upon A Time In The West follows a man known as Harmonica (Charles Bronson) who is trying to find an outlaw named Frank (Henry Fonda) to seek revenge. At the time of its release, the reviews were polarizing, thanks in large part to the United States version being edited down and distilled. Reappraisals have been kinder to the original version, and it has a 96% Rotten Tomatoes score, often considered one of the best Westerns in history. No Country For Old Men (2007) Joel and Ethan Coen released their masterpiece in 2007 when the two directed the neo-Western crime thriller No Country for Old Men. The movie follows a man who drives across a drug drop-off that goes wrong, and he takes the money he finds there, believing he has hit the jackpot. However, when a man named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is sent to retrieve the money, the bodies begin to pile up. When the New York Times released its list of the best movies of the 21st century so far, there were only two Westerns on the list. Those movies came out in the same year, with No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. No Country won the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor (Bardem), and it remains the best crime thriller of this century. It is also better than The Godfather in the genre. Casablanca (1942) One of the best movies of all time remains the 1942 romantic drama Casablanca. The movie stars Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine, an expatriate who owns a nightclub in Casablanca during World War II. While he claims to be neutral in all matters, he ends up being convinced to help his former lover, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), when she asks him to help her smuggle her husband out of the country before the Nazis find him. The movie has one of the best scripts of all time, and it was made at the height of Bogart's career in Hollywood. It went on to win Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, with five other nominations. It is listed on Rotten Tomatoes with an almost-perfect 99% Rotten Tomatoes score, and it was added to the National Film Registry in its inaugural class. Unforgiven (1992) By the 1990s, the Western genre had died in popularity, and it seemed it would become a forgotten genre as the years passed. That all changed in 1992 when Clint Eastwood directed and starred in his greatest movie, Unforgiven. This is a revisionist Western that subverts what viewers expect from the genre, with Eastwood's William Munny as the reluctant hero and Gene Hackman's lawman Little Bill Daggett as the villain of the film. Unlike The Godfather, which was a movie where all the main characters were bad men, William Munny wanted to be left alone, and he only came out of retirement as a gunslinger when one of his oldest friends was killed, and Daggett then humiliated him after his death. The movie is a more realistic look at Westerns than anything that came before. It won four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor (Hackman), and it sits at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. Chinatown (1974) Chinatown is the movie that historians widely believe features the best screenplay ever written. Written by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski, the movie follows a private investigator who is pulled into a case that ends up dovetailing into political corruption and dark hidden secrets. The neo-noir film follows a case about water rights in California, but the mysteries are much deeper than that. Jack Nicholson is great as PI Jake Gittes, and he is hired to trail the chief engineer of the Department of Water and Power by a woman claiming to be the man's wife. However, after he gives the photos to the woman, the man's real wife threatens to sue him, and the mystery just grows more deranged from there. The ending seems almost hopeless, and the line "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown," remains iconic in the sense of the truth constantly getting buried. The Shawshank Redemption (1994) When it comes to movie lovers on IMDb, the Top 250 movies on the site, based on ratings, see The Godfather sitting in the number two position. As far as audience voting is concerned, there is only one movie they consider better than The Godfather, and that movie is The Shawshank Redemption. While The Godfather has an impressive 9.2 rating, audiences gave The Shawshank Redemption a 9.3. It is even more impressive because 3.3 million people voted for The Shawshank Redemption, while The Godfather has a million fewer voters on the site. The Shawshank Redemption is based on a Stephen King novella about a man wrongfully imprisoned for his wife's murder and his time in prison before his eventual escape. While The Godfather is a movie about decaying morals, Shawshank is a movie about hope. The Godfather Part II (1974) While many critics and audience members proclaim that The Godfather is the best gangster movie of all time, the truth is that The Godfather Part II is the better film in every single way. Both movies are long, but the first movie feels long, while the second is better paced and is a better experience to watch. The second movie also has a perfect pair of contrasting stories that deliver an even better morality tale. The first movie is mainly one long story, with Michael Corleone returning home from the war and then getting sucked back into the family business, which ends with him becoming a merciless mafia don himself. However, The Godfather Part II shows Michael's continued downward spiral while also having flashback scenes of his father's rise, with Robert De Niro winning an Oscar for playing a young Vito Corleone.