25 Best Screenplays of All Time, Ranked

Few roles within the filmmaking process are as important as writing a movie’s script. It’s probably not even outrageous to say it is the most important, given that actors, directors, and everyone else involved with making a film need a great screenplay if they’re to excel at their job. It’s rare to see a movie with creative visuals or great performances without an initial screenplay that’s at least solid, meaning that the best scripts out there ought to be celebrated and cherished.

As such, ranking the best screenplays of all time gives you a similar range of titles you’d see if it came to ranking the best movies of all time; little else is such a strong testament to the necessity of a good screenplay than this observation. The following movies all stand out for being exceptionally well written, and were made possible due to having some of the best screenplays of all time, with them being ranked below in order from fantastic to masterful.

25 ‘Parasite’ (2019)

Screenwriters: Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won

After spending two decades making a series of films that were largely great, 2019 saw Bong Joon-ho write his best film yet: Parasite (with co-writer Han Jin-won). Bong Joon-ho also co-produced and directed the film, making it clear that it was a project he had a great amount of passion for, and the end result shows as much.

Parasite’s hard to fault from a writing perspective. It blends comedy, drama, and thriller elements into one perfectly paced screenplay, delivers plenty of social commentary, and has a cast filled with interesting characters. It deservedly won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, with its script being one of the best in recent memory. If there’s one key reason why Parasite is a borderline perfect movie, it’s the writing, because that’s the foundation upon which the perfect direction and perfect performances can exist.

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24 ‘The Social Network’ (2010)

Screenwriter: Aaron Sorkin

Going from an amazingly written movie at the end of the 2010s to one of the best of the early 2010s, The Social Network is certainly the best feature film screenplay Aaron Sorkin‘s written. It’s far more than just a movie about the formation of Facebook, emerging as a complex 21st-century tragedy (in a way) about betrayal, greed, and high-stakes legal disputes.

It’s a story that could’ve been presented in a very dry, by-the-numbers way, yet Sorkin – adapting a non-fiction book by author Ben Mezrich – keeps things fast-paced, exciting, and dynamic. The dialogue is what truly makes The Social Network soar, and when it’s coupled with the performances, music, and cinematography, it all makes for one of the best films of its decade.

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23 ‘Do the Right Thing’ (1989)

Screenwriter: Spike Lee

Spike Lee is credited as the sole writer, director, and producer of Do the Right Thing, and he also stars as its main character. Since it’s one of the best movies of 1989, it’s a given that Lee nailed his four roles as far as this movie’s concerned, with all the pieces of Do the Right Thing fitting perfectly in place, ensuring it’s aged remarkably well.

It only runs for two hours, yet explores numerous issues surrounding race and prejudice in that time while also having a large cast of characters, all of whom get progressively more stressed and/or angry as the tension-filled narrative progresses. It’s all incredibly well-balanced, and arguably stands as Lee’s best screenplay to date, being the basis for a movie that’s also fantastic in all other areas of its overall execution.

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22 ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ (1994)

Screenwriter: Frank Darabont

A movie’s going to have a difficult time standing out if it’s released in a year as strong as 1994, but The Shawshank Redemption has endured as one of the greatest of not just its year, but the entire decade. It’s a bittersweet and life-affirming movie about finding hope and friendship in the darkest of places, here being the brutal maximum-security Shawshank prison.

As well as directing the film, Frank Darabont also wrote the screenplay, basing it on a Stephen King novella called Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. King’s stories often (but not necessarily always) result in great scripts/films, with The Shawshank Redemption’s hard-to-fault screenplay ensuring it’s one of the best Stephen King movie adaptations of all time.

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21 ‘Thelma & Louise’ (1991)

Screenwriter: Callie Khouri

Thelma & Louise is an iconic road movie/thriller/drama film that builds up to one of the most famous endings of all time. It’s not just about the destination, though, because the journey here is also engrossing, following two women who go on the run after killing a man in self-defense, bonding as they travel while at large from the law.

Its Oscar-winning screenplay was written by Callie Khouri, whose best-known work besides Thelma & Louise would be creating the TV show Nashville, which ran for 124 episodes between 2012 and 2018. For breathing new life into the road movie genre and being a great character study for its two titular protagonists, Thelma & Louise is a well-written classic, and also benefits from Ridley Scott‘s overall direction, with this being one of his very best films.

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20 ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (2004)

Screenwriters: Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, and Pierre Bismuth

It’s hard enough to write an excellent screenplay for a romance movie, let alone write something that works as both a great sci-fi screenplay and a great romance screenplay. Thankfully, Charlie Kaufman is one of the best screenwriters working today, meaning he was able to do just that with 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Two additional people were credited with writing the story for this film – director Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth – which follows two exes who erase each other from their memories, only for complications to arise when they meet again. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a mind-bending and complex film that’s written in a way that allows viewers to (just) keep up, and overall contains an ideal balance of material that’s intense, perplexing, and heartbreakingly relatable.

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19 ‘Schindler’s List’ (1993)

Screenwriter: Steven Zaillian

Out of all the Best Picture winners from the various Academy Awards ceremonies over the years, Schindler’s List would have to rank as one of the very best of the best. Schindler’s List is an emotionally powerful World War Two movie based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a wealthy businessman who managed to save 1000 Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

Steven Spielberg naturally deserves a great deal of credit for how the film looks, feels, and moves (and it’s the best historical drama he’s ever directed, in addition to being an all-time great Oscar-winning epic), but its screenplay shouldn’t go unnoticed either. Screenwriter Steven Zaillian won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (based on a non-fiction novel by Thomas Keneally), and deservedly so, with its story being arguably one of the most emotional in film history.

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18 ‘Bicycle Thieves’ (1948)

Screenwriter: Cesare Zavattini

A movie being simple doesn’t mean writing it was necessarily a simple task. Some of the best art is straight to the point, direct, and sometimes not particularly surprising, yet making something down-to-earth or ordinary feel compelling in a screenplay format takes skill, as the straightforward and surprisingly devastating Bicycle Thieves shows. Bicycle Thieves is as perfect as Italian Neorealism films get, and it’s also perhaps as good as films get in general, given how timeless it all is.

This Italian film was adapted for the screen by Cesare Zavattini, and tells the story of a man and his son searching for a stolen bicycle, as the man needs it to do his job and thereby provide for his family. 75 years have done nothing to dull the power of this narrative, which is still capable of moving even those with the hardest of hearts.

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17 ‘Fargo’ (1996)

Screenwriters: Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

You don’t need to look at Fargo to know that the Coen Brothers are capable of writing some fantastic scripts, given their filmography is filled with fantastic writing. Whether it’s more serious movies, crime-focused movies, or comedies of either the goofy or dark variety, they usually nail things writing-wise. Yet it is ultimately 1996’s Fargo – a classic dark comedy/crime film about various stupid criminals being thwarted by a heavily pregnant and very charming Police Chief – that’s arguably their best.

Though their most successful film Oscar-wise ended up being 2007’s No Country for Old Men, Fargo still got them awards recognition, with the pair winning a Best Original Screenplay award. Fargo is funny, tense, excellently paced, and also very quotable, all around being a terrifically written film.

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16 ‘Network’ (1976)

Screenwriter: Paddy Chayefsky

Satirical movies don’t always age the best, considering they tend to try and capture the zeitgeist of the times they were made in. Network stands out in this regard, being an exceptional satirical dramedy about the lengths network TV stations will go to for ratings that was biting when it came out in 1976 while still holding relevancy to this day.

Its screenplay was by playwright/novelist/screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, and won him his third and final writing Oscar. Network remains a darkly effective movie to this day, and even if network TV has been getting taken over by online avenues in more recent years, the script’s insight into people’s willingness to exploit for exposure remains applicable to any form of media, really. Also, as far as great satirical movies go, they don’t overall get much better than Network.

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15 ‘Taxi Driver’ (1976)

Screenwriter: Paul Schrader

Almost every Martin Scorsese film is great, and the vast majority of them are exceptionally well-written, too. However, there’s a case to be made that from a pure writing perspective, Taxi Driver is Scorsese’s most complete, effective, and maybe even his deepest, tracking one man deteriorating psychologically because of a combination of PTSD, insomnia, and a pessimistic view of the world he inhabits.

It was written by Paul Schrader, and is one of four movies he either wrote or co-wrote for Scorsese (the others being Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Bringing Out the Dead). It didn’t receive a nomination for Best Screenplay at the Oscars, though given the aforementioned Network also came out in 1976, it was a good year for screenplays.

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14 ‘Annie Hall’ (1977)

Screenwriters: Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman

A successful Oscar-winning movie from 1977, Annie Hall is probably the best screenplay Woody Allen ever wrote. It’s a romantic comedy with a little drama added for good measure, following two people falling in love and then growing apart, with it presenting what feels like an overall realistic and honest look at 20th-century romance.

Of the four Oscar wins the film received, one was for Best Original Screenplay, which Allen shared with co-writer Marshall Brickman. Allen’s reputation has become more complicated and problematic in recent years, though this remains a film that’s easy to label his most celebrated, with it proving influential on the overall development of the romantic comedy genre. Annie Hall also has a snappy and well-paced screenplay, given the film itself packs a lot into a relatively short runtime.

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13 ‘Get Out’ (2017)

Screenwriter: Jordan Peele

Before 2017, the idea of Jordan Peele writing and directing a horror movie – let alone a great one – might’ve sounded absurd. Before Get Out, Peele was best known for being one half of the comedic duo Key & Peele (with Keegan-Michael Key), yet it was this 2017 horror/thriller that established him as one of the most exciting new directors of the 2010s.

Get Out satirizes neoliberalist attitudes while also being a tense and exciting horror movie, following a young Black man who meets his white girlfriend’s family, and finds the experience to be far more terrifying than anticipated. Peele won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for writing the film, and his career has continued to build following Get Out’s success with 2019’s Us and 2022’s Nope.

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12 ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ (1975)

Screenwriters: Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of the few films to have won the “Big Five” at the Oscars (Best Director, Screenplay, Picture, Actor, and Actress) alongside It Happened One Night and The Silence of the Lambs. It should go without saying, but for a film to be so successful across so many categories, it clearly needs a great screenplay for a foundation.

That’s exactly what One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has, thanks to screenwriters Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, who based their screenplay on the novel of the same name by Ken Kesey. An emotionally resonant movie with fantastic characters, exceptional dialogue, and a perfectly bittersweet finale, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest certainly serves as a triumph of screenwriting, and the film overall is one of the greatest within the entire drama genre.

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11 ‘Some Like It Hot’ (1959)

Screenwriters: Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond

It’s hard to talk about fantastically written movies without mentioning Billy Wilder. 1959’s Some Like It Hot happens to be one of the best written in his filmography, being a film that’s over 60 years old while still being hilarious, telling the story of two musicians who, while on the run from the mob, disguise themselves as women and sneak into an all-girl band. Shenanigans ensue.

Wilder wrote the screenplay with his frequent collaborator I. A. L. Diamond, with their script being based on a 1935 French film called Fanfare of Love, written by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan. Wilder and Diamond received an Oscar nomination for Some Like It Hot’s screenplay, and then won a screenplay Oscar the very next year for The Apartment (1960).

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10 ’12 Angry Men’ (1957)

Screenwriter: Reginald Rose

12 Angry Men is so dialogue-driven that it’s arguably possible to watch the film without visuals and still follow what’s going on. It’s a movie that has to balance 12 primary characters (as the title implies), and the entire movie is essentially these men – all sitting on a jury back when it was considered a male-only job – confined to one room, debating whether a young man is guilty of murder.

A film like this could obviously falter if the screenplay were even just occasionally inadequate, though thankfully that’s not the case, as 12 Angry Men is one of the very best-written movies of the 1950s. Reginald Rose wrote the screenplay, based on his own television play of the same name from 1954, and earned a Screenplay Oscar nomination in the process.

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9 ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ (1969)

Screenwriter: William Goldman

William Goldman was such a brilliant novelist and screenwriter that it’s hard to pick out a single screenplay of his as “the best.” He wrote a genre-busting classic with 1987’s The Princess Bride, a brutal and stomach-churning thriller with Marathon Man, and a grippingly realistic political/historical drama with All the President’s Men.

It was the last of those and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid which earned William Goldman his two screenplay Oscars, and the 1969 film that might ultimately be the best of the two. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has got action, it’s got crime elements, it’s a buddy comedy of sorts, and it’s also a Western all in one, balancing various elements perfectly and merging them into one cohesive and thrillingly entertaining whole.

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8 ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (1950)

Screenwriters: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and D. M. Marshman Jr.

Sunset Boulevard is another Billy Wilder-directed film that he had a hand in writing, though tonally, this one’s not as broadly comedic as Some Like It Hot. There are still some darkly humorous moments throughout, but it’s overall bleaker and more downbeat, being a quintessential film noir about a screenwriter’s life being changed forever after meeting an aging and reclusive silent movie star.

Hollywood has seldom been presented as quite so cruel or cutthroat as it is here, thanks to a screenplay by Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D. M. Marshman Jr. Its refusal to pull punches while also being very entertaining and savagely satirical has given Sunset Boulevard a reputation for being one of the best-written of all time, with it also being recognized upon release with an Oscar for Best Story and Screenplay (which is what the Best Original Screenplay award was called back in 1950).

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7 ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ (1964)

Screenwriters: Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, and Peter George

From its chaotic, uncertain start, all the way to its surprisingly morbid and harrowing end, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a wild ride. It’s a comedy about the world being on the edge of nuclear war, with very few other pre-apocalyptic movies being quite as funny as this ends up being.

It’s perhaps Stanley Kubrick’s first undisputed masterpiece, and alongside directing and producing the film, he also co-wrote it with Terry Southern and Peter George (with the screenplay being loosely based on George’s novel Red Alert). They received a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for their work, with Dr. Strangelove enduring to this day as one of the best films of the 1960s.

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6 ‘All About Eve’ (1950)

Screenwriter: Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Alongside Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve showed that 1950 was a surprisingly strong year for well-written movies about the darker sides of showbiz, aging, and fame. Instead of being set in Hollywood and revolving around films like Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve is concerned with Broadway and stage acting.

While Sunset Boulevard took home an Oscar for (the 1950 equivalent of) Best Original Screenplay, All About Eve scored a win for Best Adapted Screenplay, as it was based on a short story by Mary Orr. The screenplay was written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, whose brother also had a hand in writing one of the most acclaimed screenplays of all time (more on him later).

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