WatchMoviesFree

Year by year, the best

WatchMoviesFree is an English guide to the best rated films of twelve years, from 2006 to 2017. For each year it keeps the thirteen films with the highest rating on TMDB among those with at least 3,000 votes, and it ranks them from first to thirteenth: 156 films in all, on twelve shelves, one per year, grouped in three families of four years. Every film has an English synopsis, the cast, the director, the genres and a Watch now button that opens it on JustWatch, which shows where it can be watched in your country.

The twelve years come from the old site itself. In the spring of 2017, the menu of watchmoviesfree.tv had a Years list that ran from 2000 to 2017, beside its genres, its countries and its lists of the most popular films; this guide takes the last twelve years of that list and asks a single question of each of them: which films of that year do viewers rate the highest today? The answers run from The best of 2006, led by The Prestige, to The best of 2017, led by Coco. The guide Start with WatchMoviesFree picks one film from each family for a first evening, and the guide How the years were ranked sets out the rules.

The 156 films carry about 1,921,000 votes on TMDB, with an average rating of 7.78, and 39 of them reach a rating of 8 or more. The most voted film of the guide is Interstellar, of 2014, with about 41,500 votes, ahead of Inception, of 2010, and The Avengers, of 2012, and three films share the best rating, an 8.5: The Dark Knight, of 2008, Interstellar and Your Name, of 2016. Christopher Nolan directed three of those five films, and four of the twelve films at the head of their year; the guide The number ones gathers the twelve leaders.

The three families

The first family, 2006 to 2009, holds the last four years of the 2000s, with 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. It is the family of The Dark Knight and Avatar, of the first films of Pixar's great run, Ratatouille, WALL·E and Up, and of the Harry Potter films of David Yates. It carries about 579,000 votes, with an average rating of 7.73, and the guide 2006 to 2009 sums it up.

The second family, 2010 to 2013, holds 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013: the years of Inception and Django Unchained, of the end of the Harry Potter saga and of the first Avengers, but also of a French comedy that became one of the most loved films of the decade, The Intouchables. It carries about 628,000 votes, with an average of 7.74, and the guide 2010 to 2013 sums it up.

The third family, 2014 to 2017, holds 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. It is the strongest of the three, with about 715,000 votes and an average of 7.87, and it holds the best year of the guide, 2016, when two Japanese anime films, a Korean thriller and an Australian war film took the first four places. The guide 2014 to 2017 sums it up.

Three more lists cut across the years. Rated 8 or more gathers the 39 films with a rating of 8 or more, best first; Animated films gathers the 22 animated films, oldest first, from Pixar and DreamWorks to Studio Ghibli; and World cinema gathers the 27 films in other languages than English, from The Lives of Others to The Invisible Guest.

How the years were ranked

For each year, the pool holds the films first released that year that had at least 3,000 votes on TMDB when this guide was made, documentaries aside. The films of each pool were sorted by their rating, and the thirteen best stayed. Two titles that would have made the list were left aside because their names break the house style of this guide, and the next film of the year took their place. Each film sits on the shelf of its own year, and each card carries its rank, from Rank 1 to Rank 13, on a navy band at the bottom of the poster.

The ranking uses the full rating of TMDB, with its two decimals, while the cards show it rounded to one decimal. So two films can show the same 8.2 and still sit at Rank 1 and Rank 2: in 2006, The Prestige, at 8.21, leads The Departed, at 8.16. The ratings of TMDB move a little every day as new votes come in, so the order of a few close films may shift over time; the shelves keep the order of the day the guide was made. The rule favours films that viewers loved over films that were simply seen by many, which is why a quiet Danish drama, The Hunt, sits above The Avengers in 2012, and why the most voted film of a year, such as Avatar in 2009, can sit as low as Rank 8.

The vote floor keeps the shelves to films that many people have seen and rated. A floor of 3,000 votes leaves room for a few smaller films that viewers rate very highly, such as The Man from Earth, of 2007, a science fiction story told almost entirely in one room, Flipped, of 2010, or Two Is a Family, of 2016, and for many films in other languages, from Incendies and Wild Tales to The Best Offer and Perfect Strangers. The guide The directors lists the directors who appear most often, and the guide The stars does the same for the actors.

2006 to 2009

The first family of the guide holds the films of the last four years of the 2000s: 52 films, with about 579,000 votes and an average rating of 7.73. These were the years when the superhero film grew up with The Dark Knight and Iron Man, when Pixar released three of its most loved films in a row, when James Cameron returned with Avatar and when the films of Mexico, Germany, Sweden and Japan reached a wide audience in the English-speaking world. Each year holds thirteen films, and three of the four years hold three films rated 8 or more.

The best of 2006

The shelf The best of 2006 holds thirteen films with about 130,000 votes and an average rating of 7.8. At Rank 1 is The Prestige, by Christopher Nolan, with an 8.2 and about 18,300 votes, the most voted film of the year: in Victorian London, two rival stage magicians, played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, sacrifice everything to outdo each other's greatest trick, with Michael Caine as the engineer between them, Scarlett Johansson as an assistant and David Bowie as the inventor Nikola Tesla. Close behind it, at Rank 2, is The Departed, by Martin Scorsese, with an 8.2 as well, the remake of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs that finally brought Scorsese the Academy Award for best director: an undercover police officer, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and a mole for the Irish mob inside the police, played by Matt Damon, hunt each other in Boston, with Jack Nicholson as the gangster Frank Costello.

Rank 3 goes to the first film in another language than English of the guide, The Lives of Others, by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, with an 8.0, the winner of the Academy Award for best foreign language film: in East Berlin in 1984, an officer of the Stasi listens day and night to the flat of a playwright and his partner, and slowly changes sides. Two more films of the year speak other languages. Pan's Labyrinth, by Guillermo del Toro, in Spanish, with a 7.8, follows a girl in the Spain of 1944 who escapes her cruel stepfather, a captain of Franco's army, into a dark fairy tale of fauns and monsters, and Paprika, by Satoshi Kon, with a 7.8, an anime of Japan, follows a psychiatrist who enters her patients' dreams with a machine until a stolen device lets dreams flood the waking world.

The American films of the year range widely. V for Vendetta, by James McTeigue, with a 7.9, from the graphic novel of Alan Moore and David Lloyd, puts Natalie Portman beside a masked rebel, voiced and played by Hugo Weaving, against a fascist Britain; The Pursuit of Happyness, by Gabriele Muccino, with a 7.9, tells the true story of Chris Gardner, a salesman who becomes homeless with his young son while competing for a place at a brokerage firm, with Will Smith and his own son Jaden. Little Miss Sunshine, by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, with a 7.7, sends a family across the Southwest in a yellow Volkswagen bus to a beauty pageant, and Apocalypto, by Mel Gibson, with a 7.7, follows a young hunter of the Maya world on the run from the warriors who destroyed his village, in the Yucatec Maya language.

The second half of the shelf turns darker. Children of Men, by Alfonso Cuarón, with a 7.6, imagines a Britain of 2027 where humanity has lost the power to bear children, and Clive Owen escorts the first pregnant woman in eighteen years through a country at war, in long single shots that became famous. Casino Royale, by Martin Campbell, with a 7.6, introduces Daniel Craig as James Bond, in a game of poker at Montenegro against a banker of terrorists, with Eva Green as Vesper Lynd; Blood Diamond, by Edward Zwick, with a 7.6, sends a smuggler played by Leonardo DiCaprio and a fisherman played by Djimon Hounsou after a rare pink diamond during the civil war of Sierra Leone; and Lucky Number Slevin, by Paul McGuigan, with a 7.5, Rank 13, drops Josh Hartnett into a war between two crime bosses played by Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley. DiCaprio thus appears twice in the year. The guide The year 2006 sums it up.

The best of 2007

The shelf The best of 2007 holds thirteen films with about 116,000 votes, the fewest of the twelve years, and an average rating of 7.6; only one of its films reaches 8, and all thirteen are in English. At Rank 1 is There Will Be Blood, by Paul Thomas Anderson, with an 8.1: Daniel Day-Lewis, who won his second Academy Award for the role, plays Daniel Plainview, an oil man of California at the turn of the twentieth century whose greed collides with a young preacher played by Paul Dano. The most voted film of the year is Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the first of the four films of David Yates in the saga, with a 7.7 and about 21,400 votes, at Rank 4; Imelda Staunton plays the smiling tyrant Dolores Umbridge.

Rank 2 goes to Ratatouille, by Brad Bird, with a 7.9, the Pixar film of a rat of Paris who dreams of becoming a chef and finds a clumsy kitchen boy to cook for him, and Rank 3 to Into the Wild, by Sean Penn, with a 7.8, the true story of Christopher McCandless, played by Emile Hirsch, who gave away his savings and walked into the wilderness of Alaska. Atonement, by Joe Wright, with a 7.6, follows a lie told by a girl in an English country house of 1935 through the lives of her sister and a young man, played by Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, into the Second World War and the beaches of Dunkirk.

The Man from Earth, by Richard Schenkman, with a 7.6 and about 3,100 votes, is the smallest film of the year: a professor at his farewell party tells his colleagues that he has lived for fourteen thousand years, and the whole film is their evening of questions. The crime films of the year are many. American Gangster, by Ridley Scott, with a 7.6, sets Denzel Washington, as the heroin dealer Frank Lucas, against Russell Crowe, as the detective who brought him down; Zodiac, by David Fincher, with a 7.5, follows the hunt for the Zodiac killer of San Francisco through a cartoonist, a reporter and a detective, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo; Eastern Promises, by David Cronenberg, with a 7.3, sends Viggo Mortensen into the Russian mob of London; and Gone Baby Gone, the first film of Ben Affleck as a director, with a 7.3, sets his brother Casey on the trail of a missing girl in Boston. Hot Fuzz, by Edgar Wright, with a 7.6, sends a London police officer to a village where the accidents pile up; The Bourne Ultimatum, by Paul Greengrass, with a 7.4, sends Matt Damon on the last run of the first trilogy; and Bridge to Terabithia, by Gábor Csupó, with a 7.4, follows two children who invent a secret kingdom in the woods. The guide The year 2007 sums it up.

The best of 2008

The shelf The best of 2008 holds thirteen films with about 162,000 votes and an average rating of 7.79. At Rank 1 is The Dark Knight, by Christopher Nolan, with an 8.5 and about 37,000 votes, the most voted film of the year and one of the three best rated films of the guide: Batman, played by Christian Bale, faces the Joker, played by Heath Ledger, who won a posthumous Academy Award for the role, in a Gotham where the district attorney Harvey Dent, played by Aaron Eckhart, becomes the last hope of the city. Rank 2 goes to WALL·E, by Andrew Stanton, with an 8.1, the Pixar film of a small robot left to clean an abandoned Earth for seven hundred years, who falls in love with a sleek probe named EVE and follows her into space; its first half hour is told almost entirely in sounds and gestures.

Clint Eastwood has two films in the year. Gran Torino, with an 8.0, at Rank 3, casts him as Walt Kowalski, a retired Korean War veteran of Detroit who slowly befriends the Hmong family next door, and Changeling, with a 7.6, at Rank 11, tells the true story of a mother of Los Angeles, played by Angelina Jolie, whose missing son is replaced by a boy whom the police insist is hers, in 1928. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, by Mark Herman, with a 7.8, follows the eight-year-old son of a camp commandant, played by Asa Butterfield, who befriends a boy on the other side of the fence.

Three films of the year come from Asia and Scandinavia. Ip Man, by Wilson Yip, in Cantonese, with a 7.8, tells the life of the master of Wing Chun, played by Donnie Yen, in Foshan under the Japanese occupation; Ponyo, by Hayao Miyazaki, with a 7.8, follows a goldfish princess who wants to become a girl for the love of a boy of five on the coast of Japan; and Let the Right One In, by Tomas Alfredson, in Swedish, with a 7.5, follows a lonely boy of twelve in a snowy suburb of Stockholm and the strange girl, a vampire, who moves in next door.

The rest of the shelf mixes prestige and spectacle. Slumdog Millionaire, by Danny Boyle, with a 7.7, the winner of eight Academy Awards including best picture, follows a young man of the slums of Mumbai, played by Dev Patel, through the questions of a television quiz show, each answered by a memory of his life. Iron Man, by Jon Favreau, with a 7.7 and about 29,000 votes, the second most voted film of the year, opened the Marvel saga with Robert Downey Jr. as the arms maker Tony Stark. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, by David Fincher, with a 7.6 and 166 minutes, follows a man, played by Brad Pitt, who is born old and grows younger through the twentieth century, with Cate Blanchett as the woman he loves. Seven Pounds, by Gabriele Muccino, with a 7.6, reunites the director with Will Smith two years after The Pursuit of Happyness, and The Wrestler, by Darren Aronofsky, with a 7.5, at Rank 13, gave Mickey Rourke the role of an aging professional wrestler, with Marisa Tomei as a dancer. The guide The year 2008 sums it up.

The best of 2009

The shelf The best of 2009 holds thirteen films with about 171,000 votes and an average rating of 7.72. At Rank 1 is Inglourious Basterds, by Quentin Tarantino, with an 8.2: in occupied France, a unit of Jewish American soldiers led by Brad Pitt and a young Jewish woman who runs a cinema in Paris, played by Mélanie Laurent, plot against the leaders of Nazi Germany, while Christoph Waltz, who won an Academy Award, plays the SS colonel Hans Landa. Rank 2 goes to Hachi: A Dog's Tale, by Lasse Hallström, with an 8.0, the American version of the true Japanese story of the Akita who waited for his master at the station every day for years after his death, with Richard Gere.

Animation has three of the first five places. Up, by Pete Docter, with an 8.0 and about 22,300 votes, at Rank 3, ties thousands of balloons to the house of a widower of seventy-eight, voiced by Ed Asner, and carries him and a young scout to South America, after an opening of a few minutes that tells a whole marriage; Coraline, by Henry Selick, with a 7.9, the stop-motion film of Laika from the novel of Neil Gaiman, finds a girl a door to an Other Mother with buttons for eyes; and Fantastic Mr. Fox, by Wes Anderson, with a 7.8, also in stop motion, from the book of Roald Dahl, gives George Clooney and Meryl Streep the voices of a fox and his wife against three farmers.

The most voted film of the year is Avatar, by James Cameron, with a 7.6 and about 34,900 votes, at Rank 8: a paralysed marine, played by Sam Worthington, takes control of an alien body on the moon Pandora and joins the Na'vi against the mining company that wants their land, with Zoe Saldaña and Sigourney Weaver. It became the highest-grossing film of all time. The science fiction of the year continues with Moon, the first feature of Duncan Jones, with a 7.6, in which Sam Rockwell plays a lone miner on the far side of the Moon near the end of his three-year contract, and District 9, by Neill Blomkamp, with a 7.5, in which stranded aliens live in a slum of Johannesburg, and with Star Trek, by J.J. Abrams, with a 7.4, which recast the crew of the Enterprise with Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by David Yates, with a 7.7, the sixth film of the saga, sits at Rank 6; The Blind Side, by John Lee Hancock, with a 7.7, tells the true story of the football player Michael Oher and the family who took him in, with Sandra Bullock, who won an Academy Award; and the Swedish The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Niels Arden Oplev, with a 7.5, the first adaptation of the novel of Stieg Larsson, with Noomi Rapace as the hacker Lisbeth Salander, sits at Rank 10, two years before the American version of David Fincher reached Rank 11 of 2011. Law Abiding Citizen, by F. Gary Gray, with Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler, closes the year at Rank 13. The guide The year 2009 sums it up.

2010 to 2013

The second family of the guide holds 52 films from 2010 to 2013, with about 628,000 votes and an average rating of 7.74. These four years saw the end of the Harry Potter saga, the first gathering of the Avengers, the last Batman film of Christopher Nolan and the return of Peter Jackson to Middle-earth with The Hobbit, but also a wave of films from Canada, France, Denmark, Korea, Spain and Italy among the best rated of their years.

The best of 2010

The shelf The best of 2010 holds thirteen films with about 174,000 votes and an average rating of 7.88, the third best of the twelve years; four of its films reach 8. At Rank 1 is Inception, by Christopher Nolan, with an 8.4 and about 40,500 votes, the most voted film of the year and the second most voted of the guide: a thief who steals secrets from inside dreams, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, gathers a crew for the opposite task, to plant an idea in the mind of an heir, through dreams nested inside dreams. DiCaprio holds Rank 2 too, with Shutter Island, by Martin Scorsese, with an 8.2, in which he plays a US marshal sent in 1954 to an asylum on an island of Boston Harbor to find a missing patient, with Mark Ruffalo as his partner.

Rank 3 goes to Incendies, by Denis Villeneuve, in French, with an 8.1, the film that made its Canadian director known to the world: after the death of their mother, twins of Montreal travel to an unnamed country of the Middle East to find the father they thought dead and a brother whose existence was kept from them, a search that ends in a revelation. Rank 4 is a small American film, Flipped, by Rob Reiner, with an 8.0, the story of a girl and a boy across the street from each other, told in turn by each of them, from the second grade to the eighth, in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The animated films of the year are four. How to Train Your Dragon, by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois for DreamWorks, with a 7.9, follows a young Viking, Hiccup, who befriends the wounded dragon he was meant to kill; Toy Story 3, by Lee Unkrich, with a 7.8, sends Woody, Buzz and the others to a daycare centre when their owner leaves for college; Arrietty, by Hiromasa Yonebayashi for Studio Ghibli, with a 7.7, from the novel The Borrowers of Mary Norton, follows a girl four inches tall who lives under the floor of a house near Tokyo; and Tangled, by Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, with a 7.6, at Rank 13, retells the story of Rapunzel for Disney.

Two films of the year speak other languages. I Saw the Devil, by Kim Jee-woon, in Korean, with a 7.8, sets a secret agent, played by Lee Byung-hun, on a long revenge against the killer of his fiancée, played by Choi Min-sik, and Three Steps Above Heaven, by Fernando González Molina, in Spanish, with a 7.7, follows the love of a rich girl of Barcelona and a violent young rider of motorcycles, with Mario Casas and María Valverde. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, by David Yates, with a 7.7, sends Harry, Ron and Hermione on the run across Britain in search of the horcruxes; The King's Speech, by Tom Hooper, with a 7.7, the winner of the Academy Award for best picture, follows King George VI, played by Colin Firth, and his speech therapist, played by Geoffrey Rush; and Black Swan, by Darren Aronofsky, with a 7.7, gave Natalie Portman an Academy Award for the role of a ballerina who loses her mind while dancing Swan Lake. The guide The year 2010 sums it up.

The best of 2011

The shelf The best of 2011 holds thirteen films with about 125,000 votes and an average rating of 7.65. At Rank 1 is a French comedy, The Intouchables, by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano, with an 8.3 and about 18,900 votes: a rich man of Paris, made quadriplegic by a paragliding accident and played by François Cluzet, hires as his carer a young man from the suburbs, played by Omar Sy, and the two become friends, in a story taken from life. At Rank 2 is The Help, by Tate Taylor, with an 8.2, from the novel of Kathryn Stockett: in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, a young writer played by Emma Stone collects the stories of the black maids of the town, played by Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, who won an Academy Award.

The most voted film of the year is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, by David Yates, with an 8.1 and about 22,600 votes, at Rank 3, the end of the saga and the battle of Hogwarts. Two more films in French and Spanish follow it: The Artist, by Michel Hazanavicius, with a 7.4, a silent film in black and white about a star of the silent screen in Hollywood at the coming of sound, which won the Academy Award for best picture, and The Skin I Live In, by Pedro Almodóvar, with a 7.5, in which Antonio Banderas plays a plastic surgeon who keeps a woman prisoner in his house in Toledo.

Warrior, by Gavin O'Connor, with a 7.8, at Rank 4, sets two estranged brothers, played by Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy, against each other in a mixed martial arts tournament, with Nick Nolte as their father; Drive, by Nicolas Winding Refn, with a 7.6, follows a stunt driver of Los Angeles, played by Ryan Gosling, who works nights as a getaway driver; and We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lynne Ramsay, with a 7.5, at Rank 6, follows a mother, played by Tilda Swinton, haunted by the crime of her son, played by Ezra Miller. Midnight in Paris, by Woody Allen, with a 7.5, sends a screenwriter played by Owen Wilson back to the Paris of the 1920s every night at midnight; One Day, by Lone Scherfig, with a 7.4, follows two friends, played by Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, on the same day of July over twenty years; and the American The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by David Fincher, with Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, sits at Rank 11. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, by Rupert Wyatt, with a 7.4, in which Andy Serkis plays the chimpanzee Caesar, and Source Code, by Duncan Jones, with a 7.3, in which Jake Gyllenhaal relives the last eight minutes of a man on a train over and over, close the year. The guide The year 2011 sums it up.

The best of 2012

The shelf The best of 2012 holds thirteen films with about 187,000 votes, the second most of the twelve years, and an average rating of 7.64. At Rank 1 is Django Unchained, by Quentin Tarantino, with an 8.2 and 165 minutes: in the American South of 1858, a German bounty hunter played by Christoph Waltz, who won his second Academy Award, frees a slave named Django, played by Jamie Foxx, and the two set out to rescue Django's wife from the plantation of a cruel owner played by Leonardo DiCaprio, with Samuel L. Jackson as his butler. Rank 2 goes to a Danish film, The Hunt, by Thomas Vinterberg, with an 8.1: a kindergarten teacher of a small town, played by Mads Mikkelsen, is falsely accused by a child, and the whole community turns against him.

The most voted film of the year is The Avengers, by Joss Whedon, with an 8.1 and about 40,100 votes, at Rank 3, the first gathering of Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye against Loki over New York. Batman returns at Rank 5 with The Dark Knight Rises, by Christopher Nolan, with a 7.8, the end of his trilogy, in which Tom Hardy plays the masked Bane and Anne Hathaway the cat burglar Selina Kyle, and Rank 4 goes to The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, from his own novel, with a 7.8, in which a shy freshman played by Logan Lerman finds friends in two seniors played by Emma Watson and Ezra Miller.

Moonrise Kingdom, by Wes Anderson, with a 7.7, sends two runaway children of twelve across an island of New England in 1965, with Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand on their trail. Life of Pi, by Ang Lee, with a 7.4, who won the Academy Award for best director, puts a boy and a Bengal tiger on a lifeboat in the Pacific; The Impossible, by J. A. Bayona, with a 7.4, tells the true story of a family caught in the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, with Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor; and The Raid, by Gareth Evans, in Indonesian, with a 7.4, sends a police squad up a tower block of Jakarta held by a crime lord, floor by floor, with the martial art of silat.

The rest of the shelf is for the family and for the road. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, by Peter Jackson, with a 7.4 and 169 minutes, sends Bilbo Baggins, played by Martin Freeman, with thirteen dwarves and Gandalf toward the Lonely Mountain; Rise of the Guardians, by Peter Ramsey, with a 7.4, gathers Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and the Sandman around Jack Frost; and Wreck-It Ralph, by Rich Moore, with a 7.4, follows the villain of an old arcade game who wants to be a hero. End of Watch, by David Ayer, with a 7.4, at Rank 13, follows two police officers of South Central Los Angeles, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña, through the footage of their own cameras. The guide The year 2012 sums it up.

The best of 2013

The shelf The best of 2013 holds thirteen films with about 141,000 votes and an average rating of 7.78; two of them reach 8. At Rank 1 is Prisoners, by Denis Villeneuve, with an 8.1, his first film in English: when his young daughter and her friend vanish on Thanksgiving in a town of Pennsylvania, a father played by Hugh Jackman takes the law into his own hands, while a detective played by Jake Gyllenhaal follows the clues. Rank 2 goes to the most voted film of the year, The Wolf of Wall Street, by Martin Scorsese, with an 8.0, about 26,800 votes and 180 minutes, in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays the stockbroker Jordan Belfort through the excesses of the 1990s, with Jonah Hill and Margot Robbie.

The prize winners of the year follow. 12 Years a Slave, by Steve McQueen, with a 7.9, the winner of the Academy Award for best picture, tells the true story of Solomon Northup, a free black man of New York kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, with Michael Fassbender and Lupita Nyong'o, who won an Academy Award; Dallas Buyers Club, by Jean-Marc Vallée, with a 7.9, gave Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto Academy Awards for the story of an electrician of Texas who smuggles medicines for people with AIDS in 1985. About Time, by Richard Curtis, with a 7.9, gives a young man of Cornwall, played by Domhnall Gleeson, the family gift of travelling back in time, which he spends on love and on his father, played by Bill Nighy, and Her, by Spike Jonze, with a 7.8, follows a lonely writer of Los Angeles, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who falls in love with the voice of an operating system, Scarlett Johansson.

Three films of the year come from Italy and Japan. The Best Offer, by Giuseppe Tornatore, with a 7.8, follows an art auctioneer played by Geoffrey Rush who becomes obsessed with a young heiress who hides in her villa; The Wind Rises, by Hayao Miyazaki, with a 7.8, tells a dreamlike life of the aircraft engineer Jiro Horikoshi; and The Great Beauty, by Paolo Sorrentino, with a 7.5, at Rank 13, the winner of the Academy Award for best foreign language film, follows a writer of sixty-five, played by Toni Servillo, through the nights of Rome. Rush, by Ron Howard, with a 7.7, tells the rivalry of James Hunt and Niki Lauda, played by Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl, in the Formula One season of 1976; The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, with a 7.6, brings the dwarves to the dragon; The Conjuring, by James Wan, with a 7.5, sends the paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, to a farmhouse of Rhode Island; and Captain Phillips, by Paul Greengrass, with a 7.5, tells the hijacking of a cargo ship by Somali pirates in 2009, with Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi. The guide The year 2013 sums it up.

2014 to 2017

The third family of the guide holds 52 films from 2014 to 2017, with about 715,000 votes and an average rating of 7.87, the most votes and the best average of the three families. It holds the most voted film of the guide, Interstellar, and the best year of the guide, 2016, as well as the two years with the most films rated 8 or more, 2016 and 2017, with six each. Animation is strong here, from Big Hero 6 and Inside Out to Zootopia and Coco, and so is Japanese anime, with two of the best rated films of the guide.

The best of 2014

The shelf The best of 2014 holds thirteen films with about 227,000 votes, the most of the twelve years, and an average rating of 7.92; four of its films reach 8. At Rank 1 is Interstellar, by Christopher Nolan, with an 8.5 and about 41,500 votes, the most voted film of the guide: on an Earth slowly dying of blight, a former pilot played by Matthew McConaughey leaves his children to lead a mission through a wormhole near Saturn in search of a new home for humanity, with Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain and Michael Caine. At Rank 2 is Whiplash, by Damien Chazelle, with an 8.4, in which a young drummer of a New York conservatory, played by Miles Teller, meets a brutal bandleader, played by J.K. Simmons, who won an Academy Award.

The Grand Budapest Hotel, by Wes Anderson, with an 8.0, at Rank 3, follows the concierge Monsieur Gustave, played by Ralph Fiennes, and his lobby boy through the theft of a painting in an invented country of central Europe, and The Imitation Game, by Morten Tyldum, with an 8.0, at Rank 4, tells how the mathematician Alan Turing, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, broke the Enigma code at Bletchley Park. Guardians of the Galaxy, by James Gunn, with a 7.9 and about 30,500 votes, the second most voted film of the year, gathers a thief, an assassin, a warrior, a talking raccoon and a walking tree; Gone Girl, by David Fincher, with a 7.9, follows a husband played by Ben Affleck whose wife, played by Rosamund Pike, vanishes on their fifth wedding anniversary.

The only film in another language of the year is Wild Tales, by Damián Szifron, from Argentina, with a 7.9: six short stories of revenge, from a plane full of passengers who all know the same man to a wedding that goes very wrong, with Ricardo Darín. The Theory of Everything, by James Marsh, with a 7.8, gave Eddie Redmayne an Academy Award for the role of Stephen Hawking, with Felicity Jones as his first wife, Jane; Love, Rosie, by Christian Ditter, with a 7.8, follows two friends of Dublin, played by Lily Collins and Sam Claflin, who miss each other for twelve years; and Nightcrawler, by Dan Gilroy, with a 7.7, follows a thief turned crime cameraman of Los Angeles, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. The animated films of the year are Big Hero 6, by Don Hall and Chris Williams, with a 7.7, the Disney film of a boy genius of San Fransokyo and his inflatable robot Baymax, and How to Train Your Dragon 2, by Dean DeBlois, with a 7.7, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, by Anthony and Joe Russo, with a 7.7, closes the year at Rank 13. The guide The year 2014 sums it up.

The best of 2015

The shelf The best of 2015 holds thirteen films with about 175,000 votes and an average rating of 7.7; only its first film reaches 8, and all thirteen are in English. At Rank 1 is Room, by Lenny Abrahamson, with an 8.0, from the novel of Emma Donoghue: a young woman, played by Brie Larson, who won an Academy Award, has been held captive for seven years in a garden shed, where she raises her five-year-old son, played by Jacob Tremblay, who has known only that one room, until they plan their escape. Rank 2 goes to Inside Out, by Pete Docter, with a 7.9 and about 24,000 votes, the Pixar film set inside the mind of an eleven-year-old girl, where Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust steer her through a move to San Francisco.

Spotlight, by Tom McCarthy, with a 7.8, at Rank 3, the winner of the Academy Award for best picture, follows the team of investigative reporters of the Boston Globe who uncovered the abuse of children by priests of the Catholic Church in 2001 and 2002, with Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton and Rachel McAdams. Straight Outta Compton, by F. Gary Gray, with a 7.8, tells the rise of the rap group N.W.A, and The Hateful Eight, by Quentin Tarantino, with a 7.8 and 188 minutes, the longest film of the guide, shuts eight strangers in a stagecoach lodge of Wyoming during a blizzard, with Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

The most voted film of the year is Mad Max: Fury Road, by George Miller, with a 7.6 and about 24,800 votes, at Rank 7, a chase across a desert wasteland in which Charlize Theron, as Imperator Furiosa, and Tom Hardy, as Max, carry the wives of a warlord to freedom. The Martian, by Ridley Scott, with a 7.7, leaves Matt Damon alone on Mars, where he grows potatoes to survive; Ex Machina, the first film of Alex Garland as a director, with a 7.6, invites a young programmer to test the mind of a robot played by Alicia Vikander; and The Revenant, by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, with a 7.5, finally gave Leonardo DiCaprio his Academy Award, as a trapper left for dead after a bear attack in the winter of 1823. Kingsman: The Secret Service, by Matthew Vaughn, with Colin Firth and Taron Egerton; The Longest Ride, from a novel of Nicholas Sparks; The Little Prince, by Mark Osborne, an animated version of the book of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; and The Danish Girl, by Tom Hooper, at Rank 13, with Eddie Redmayne as the painter Lili Elbe, complete the year. The guide The year 2015 sums it up.

The best of 2016

The shelf The best of 2016 is the best year of the guide: its thirteen films have an average rating of 8.01, the only year above 8, and six of them reach 8. It is also the most international year, with six films in other languages, two in Japanese, two in Korean, one in Italian and one in French. At Rank 1 is Your Name., by Makoto Shinkai, with an 8.5 and about 13,100 votes, one of the three best rated films of the guide: a high school boy of Tokyo and a high school girl of a small mountain town begin to wake up in each other's bodies, and their search for each other leads to a comet. Rank 2 is another anime, A Silent Voice: The Movie, by Naoko Yamada for Kyoto Animation, with an 8.4, in which a former bully seeks forgiveness from the deaf girl he tormented at primary school.

Rank 3 goes to Korea, with The Handmaiden, by Park Chan-wook, with an 8.2, which moves the novel Fingersmith of Sarah Waters to Korea under Japanese rule in the 1930s: a pickpocket becomes the maid of a rich Japanese heiress as part of a swindle, and the plan turns in directions that surprise everyone. Rank 4 is Hacksaw Ridge, by Mel Gibson, with an 8.2, the true story of Desmond Doss, played by Andrew Garfield, a medic who refused to carry a rifle and saved dozens of wounded soldiers on Okinawa in 1945. Hidden Figures, by Theodore Melfi, with an 8.1, tells the story of three black women mathematicians of NASA, played by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe, during the race to put John Glenn in orbit, and Lion, by Garth Davis, with an 8.0, follows a man adopted from India by an Australian couple, played by Dev Patel, who searches for his lost family with Google Earth twenty-five years later.

The romance and the music of the year sit at Ranks 7 and 8. Me Before You, by Thea Sharrock, with a 7.9, from the novel of Jojo Moyes, follows a carer played by Emilia Clarke and the paralysed young banker she looks after, played by Sam Claflin, and La La Land, by Damien Chazelle, with a 7.9, follows an actress and a jazz pianist of Los Angeles, played by Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, through the seasons of a love story told in songs; Stone won an Academy Award, and Chazelle became the youngest winner of the award for best director. Captain Fantastic, by Matt Ross, with a 7.9, follows a father, played by Viggo Mortensen, who has raised his six children in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

The second half of the shelf returns to the world. Perfect Strangers, by Paolo Genovese, with a 7.8, gathers seven friends at a dinner in Rome who agree to share every message and call on their phones for one evening, an idea remade in dozens of countries since; Train to Busan, by Yeon Sang-ho, with a 7.8, traps a father and his daughter on a high-speed train during an outbreak of zombies; and Two Is a Family, by Hugo Gélin, with a 7.7, at Rank 13, follows a carefree man of the Riviera, played by Omar Sy, to whom a former lover leaves a baby girl. The most voted film of the year is Zootopia, by Byron Howard and Rich Moore, with a 7.8 and about 18,600 votes, at Rank 11, the Disney film of a rabbit who becomes the first bunny police officer of a city of animals. The guide The year 2016 sums it up.

The best of 2017

The shelf The best of 2017 holds thirteen films with about 182,000 votes and an average rating of 7.86; six of them reach 8, as in 2016. At Rank 1 is Coco, by Lee Unkrich, with an 8.2, the Pixar film of Miguel, a boy of a Mexican village who dreams of becoming a musician in a family of shoemakers that has banned music, and who crosses into the Land of the Dead on the Day of the Dead to find his great-great-grandfather. Unkrich thus has two films in the guide, seven years apart, both of them among the best rated of their year. Rank 2 goes to Wonder, by Stephen Chbosky, with an 8.1, in which a boy born with a facial difference, played by Jacob Tremblay, goes to school for the first time, with Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson as his parents.

Call Me by Your Name, by Luca Guadagnino, with an 8.1, at Rank 3, follows the summer of 1983 in the north of Italy, when a boy of seventeen, played by Timothée Chalamet, falls in love with the student who comes to work with his father, played by Armie Hammer. Rank 4 goes to the only film of the year in another language, The Invisible Guest, by Oriol Paulo, in Spanish, with an 8.1, a thriller in which a businessman accused of murder, played by Mario Casas, tells his story to a defence lawyer in a single night. Rank 5 is Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, by Martin McDonagh, with an 8.1, with Frances McDormand, who won an Academy Award as a mother who rents three billboards to shame the police of her small town over the unsolved murder of her daughter, with Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell, who won one too. Gifted, by Marc Webb, with an 8.0, at Rank 6, puts Chris Evans in the role of an uncle raising his niece, a mathematical prodigy, in Florida.

The spectacle of the year comes after. The Greatest Showman, by Michael Gracey, with a 7.9, gives the story of P. T. Barnum and his circus to Hugh Jackman and a set of songs that became hits; Logan, by James Mangold, with a 7.8, gives Jackman what was long billed as his farewell to Wolverine, an old and tired man protecting a young mutant girl; A Dog's Purpose, by Lasse Hallström, with a 7.6, follows one dog through several lives, so that Hallström has two dog films in the guide, eight years apart; Get Out, by Jordan Peele, with a 7.6, sends a young black man to meet the family of his white girlfriend; and Blade Runner 2049, by Denis Villeneuve, with a 7.6 and 164 minutes, sends a new blade runner, played by Ryan Gosling, in search of Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford. The most voted film of the year is Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, by James Gunn, with a 7.6 and about 23,600 votes, at Rank 12, and Thor: Ragnarok, by Taika Waititi, with a 7.6, closes the whole guide at Rank 13 of the last year. The guide The year 2017 sums it up.

The number ones

Twelve films sit at Rank 1 of their year: The Prestige, There Will Be Blood, The Dark Knight, Inglourious Basterds, Inception, The Intouchables, Django Unchained, Prisoners, Interstellar, Room, Your Name and Coco. Christopher Nolan made four of them, in 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2014, and Quentin Tarantino two, in 2009 and 2012, so that two directors hold half of the twelve places. Two of the number ones are in other languages, the French comedy of 2011 and the Japanese anime of 2016, and two are animated, Your Name and Coco. Their ratings run from Room, with an 8.0, to The Dark Knight, Interstellar and Your Name, with an 8.5 each, and their votes from about 7,800 for There Will Be Blood to about 41,500 for Interstellar. The guide The number ones lists them.

The directors

Christopher Nolan is the director of the guide, with five films in five different years: The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar, four of them at Rank 1 and the fifth at Rank 5 of 2012. David Fincher has four films, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the American The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, and David Yates four too, the last four films of Harry Potter. Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson and Denis Villeneuve have three each: Tarantino with Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight; Scorsese with The Departed, Shutter Island and The Wolf of Wall Street, all three with Leonardo DiCaprio; Anderson with Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel; and Villeneuve with Incendies, Prisoners and Blade Runner 2049. James Gunn, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, Ridley Scott, Peter Jackson, Byron Howard and Rich Moore are among the directors with two. The guide The directors lists them.

The stars

Counted on the cast lists of TMDB, two actors appear seven times. Michael Caine is the faithful companion of Christopher Nolan, in The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar, and adds Children of Men and Kingsman. Leonardo DiCaprio has The Departed and Blood Diamond in 2006, Inception and Shutter Island in 2010, Django Unchained, The Wolf of Wall Street and The Revenant. David Thewlis follows with six films, four of them as Remus Lupin in Harry Potter, with The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Theory of Everything. Tom Hardy, Mark Ruffalo, Samuel L. Jackson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Octavia Spencer, Emma Watson, Michael Gambon, Helena Bonham Carter and John Ratzenberger, the lucky voice of Pixar, have five each. The guide The stars lists them.

Animated films

The collection Animated films gathers 22 films, with an average rating of 7.85. Pixar has six, Ratatouille, WALL·E, Up, Toy Story 3, Inside Out and Coco; Disney four, Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6 and Zootopia; and DreamWorks three, Rise of the Guardians and the two Dragon films. Japan gives six: Paprika of Satoshi Kon, Ponyo and The Wind Rises of Hayao Miyazaki, Arrietty of Studio Ghibli, Your Name of Makoto Shinkai and A Silent Voice of Naoko Yamada. Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox are stop-motion films, and The Little Prince was made in France. The best rated is Your Name, with an 8.5. The guide Animation follows them.

World cinema

The collection World cinema gathers the 27 films in other languages than English, with an average rating of 7.84: six in Japanese, five in Spanish, four in French, three in Korean, three in Italian, two in Swedish and one each in Danish, German, Cantonese and Indonesian. The year with the most is 2016, with six, while the shelves of 2007 and 2015 are all in English. By first production country, 74 films of the guide come from the United States and 31 from Britain, ahead of France with eight and Canada with six. The guide World cinema sorts them.

WatchMoviesFree in figures

The 156 films of the guide carry about 1,921,000 votes on TMDB, with an average rating of 7.78; 39 of them reach 8, led by The Dark Knight, Interstellar and Your Name with an 8.5 each, and the collection Rated 8 or more gathers them, best first. The most voted year is 2014, with about 227,000 votes, and the least voted 2007, with about 116,000; the best rated year is 2016, with an average of 8.01, and the lowest 2007, with 7.6. Together the films last about 19,200 minutes, more than 319 hours, an average of 123 minutes a film; the longest is The Hateful Eight, with 188 minutes, and the shortest are Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Man from Earth, with 87 each. The guide The figures gathers every number.

The look of WatchMoviesFree

The design follows the page of watchmoviesfree.tv as the Internet Archive kept it on 2 April 2017. Its style sheet was lost, so the layout follows the page itself: a dark header with the words Watching Movies and For Free, a blue menu bar, #336699, whose items are divided by thin rules of #4777A8, a wide column of boxes titled in capitals, like the old RECENT UPDATED MOVIES AND TV SERIES, and a right column of numbered lists of the most popular films. The colours come from the styles written inside the page: the deeper blue #255381, the navy #17365D and the pale blue #CCE5FE. Here the right column holds the Years list, numbered from 1 to 12, and each year sits in a white box under a blue band. The guide The look of WatchMoviesFree explains each colour.

Where to begin

For a first evening, start with one number one from each family: The Dark Knight for 2006 to 2009, Inception for 2010 to 2013 and Interstellar for 2014 to 2017, the three films of Nolan. Then follow the year of your choice from Rank 1 to Rank 13, or try a film from each language: The Lives of Others, Pan's Labyrinth, Incendies, The Hunt, The Handmaiden and Your Name. Families can start with Up, Coco and Inside Out, and anyone who likes a long evening can take on The Wolf of Wall Street or The Hateful Eight.

How to use WatchMoviesFree

The home page opens with the introduction, the twelve years in the wide column and the numbered Years list on the right. Each entry of the Years list shows the family, the year and its number of films, and leads to its box; each box holds twelve posters and a View more link that opens the full year. The menu in the header leads to the three families, and the search box finds any film by its title; the guide Search tips explains how. Each poster carries the rank of the film in its year, from Rank 1 to Rank 13, and under it come the title, the first genre and the running time.

The film page has the English synopsis, the cast, the director and the genres. The Watch now button opens the film on JustWatch, which shows the services that offer it in your country, and the button Add to My List keeps it in My list, stored in your browser. The guide How to use WatchMoviesFree explains each part, and the guide The Watch now button explains how JustWatch works.

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