Greatest Movies of All Time
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50 free Greatest Movies of All Time trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every few years a new list of the 100 greatest movies of all time arrives, and the arguments start again. The American Film Institute has its ranking, the critics and directors polled by Sight and Sound have theirs, and audiences keep their own running tally online. The same titles keep turning up: Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, Jaws. This quiz is built from the films those lists agree on. It covers Hollywood's studio-era classics, the 1970s landmarks, world cinema from Japan, Italy, France and beyond, and the modern favorites that have joined the canon. Expect questions on directors and stars, famous scenes, Oscar-night history and the stories behind the productions. It is for anyone working through a top 100 watchlist, and for movie-night hosts who want questions a mixed table can enjoy. The quiz opens with the best-known films and gets harder as it goes, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who directed and starred in Citizen Kane, number one on both American Film Institute top 100 lists?
Orson Welles
Orson Welles made Citizen Kane as his first feature film, co-writing and producing it as well as playing the newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane.
Q 02Dorothy's ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz were what color in L. Frank Baum's original book?
Silver
Silver shoes became ruby slippers because red made a better showcase for the three-strip Technicolor process the film was shot in.
Q 03Which candy does Elliott leave in a trail to lure the alien home in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial?
Reese's Pieces
Reese's Pieces got the part only after Mars refused to let M&M's appear, and the candy's sales jumped once the film opened.
Q 04Which film was wrongly announced as Best Picture at the 2017 Oscars before Moonlight was declared the winner?
La La Land
La La Land's producers were midway through their acceptance speeches when the mix-up surfaced: the presenters had been handed the wrong envelope.
Q 05Who became the first African American to win an Oscar, for playing Mammy in Gone with the Wind?
Hattie McDaniel
Hattie McDaniel collected her award at a segregated ceremony, where she had to sit at a separate table at the side of the room.
Q 06Which actor refused his Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather, sending Sacheen Littlefeather to decline it for him?
Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando stayed away in protest at the film industry's treatment of Native Americans, and Littlefeather would not even touch the statuette.
Q 07The Shawshank Redemption, a box-office flop turned rental favorite, was adapted from a novella by which author?
Stephen King
Stephen King's name was mostly kept off the advertising, because the studio feared a writer known for horror would put off a prestige audience.
Q 08Which Pixar film was the first feature-length movie made entirely with computer animation?
Toy Story
Toy Story earned its director, John Lasseter, a Special Achievement Oscar for the techniques that made a computer-animated feature possible.
Q 09What nickname did the crew of Jaws give the mechanical shark, borrowed from Steven Spielberg's lawyer?
Bruce
Bruce malfunctioned so often once salt water got into the hoses that Spielberg mostly hinted at the shark, letting the music signal its approach.
Q 10Which actor voiced Darth Vader in the original Star Wars while David Prowse wore the costume?
James Earl Jones
James Earl Jones dubbed the lines afterwards because George Lucas felt Prowse's strong West Country accent was wrong for the villain.
Q 11In Citizen Kane, the mystery of Charles Foster Kane's dying word is solved by which childhood object?
A sled
A sled, the one Kane was playing on the day he was taken from his Colorado home, is thrown into a furnace by staff who never learn what it meant.
Q 12What is the name of the ship's computer that turns on its astronaut crew in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
HAL 9000
HAL 9000 got its calm voice from a replacement actor, hired after Stanley Kubrick decided his first choice sounded too colloquially American.
Q 13Which actor won a posthumous Oscar for playing the Joker in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight?
Heath Ledger
Heath Ledger died months before the film opened, so his family accepted the Best Supporting Actor award on his behalf.
Q 21Which Steven Spielberg drama, shot mostly in black and white, picks out one little girl in a red coat?
Schindler's List
Schindler's List was filmed without color because Spielberg wanted it to match the feel of documentary footage from the era.
Q 22Which 1991 thriller swept the Big Five Academy Awards, a feat managed only twice before?
The Silence of the Lambs
The Silence of the Lambs took Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Adapted Screenplay, matching It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Q 23Which 1952 Gene Kelly musical pokes fun at Hollywood's awkward switch from silent films to talkies?
Singin' in the Rain
Q 14Which South Korean thriller made history as the first non-English-language winner of the Best Picture Oscar?
Parasite
Parasite had already taken the Palme d'Or at Cannes by a unanimous jury vote before it made Academy Awards history.
Q 15Which film won all 11 Oscars it was nominated for, tying the record held by Ben-Hur and Titanic?
The Return of the King
The Return of the King went eleven for eleven and became the first fantasy film ever to take Best Picture.
Q 16Which wartime romance stars Humphrey Bogart as an American nightclub owner who helps an old flame escape the Nazis?
Casablanca
Casablanca grew out of a stage play that had never been produced, yet the film went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture.
Q 17Which Best Picture winner stars Tom Hanks as an Alabama man who drifts through decades of American history?
Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump relied on extensive visual effects to slip Hanks into archived footage of real events, part of a haul of six Oscars.
Q 18Which guardian angel earns his wings by saving George Bailey in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life?
Clarence
Clarence, an angel second class, changes George's mind by showing him what the world would be like if he had never existed.
Q 19Which actor won an Oscar for playing the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II?
Robert De Niro
Robert De Niro spoke mainly in Sicilian dialects for the part, delivering only a few of his lines in English.
Q 20Which Quentin Tarantino film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and revived John Travolta's career?
Pulp Fiction
Pulp Fiction brought Travolta a Best Actor nomination, and the film's success reinvigorated a career that had gone quiet.
Singin' in the Rain is set in the late 1920s because many of its songs had been written back then, during the real changeover to sound.
Q 24Which Shakespeare play inspired the story of rival New York gangs in the musical West Side Story?
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet was moved to 1950s Manhattan, with the feuding families replaced by two teenage street gangs, the Jets and the Sharks.
Q 25Which folk-rock duo recorded the soundtrack to the 1967 Dustin Hoffman film The Graduate?
Simon & Garfunkel
Simon & Garfunkel saw their profile boosted by the film, whose soundtrack produced the hit single Mrs. Robinson.
Q 26Who wrote, directed and starred in City Lights, released without spoken dialogue after talkies had taken over?
Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin began the script as talking pictures were on the rise, yet gave his Tramp only a musical score and sound effects.
Q 27Which Hayao Miyazaki film follows a girl whose parents are turned into pigs by a witch?
Spirited Away
Spirited Away shared the Golden Bear at the Berlin festival and went on to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
Q 28Which character, played by Gregory Peck in 1962, did the American Film Institute name its greatest movie hero?
Atticus Finch
Atticus Finch, the principled lawyer of To Kill a Mockingbird, also won Peck the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Q 29Which actor won an Oscar as the hot-tempered gangster Tommy DeVito in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas?
Joe Pesci
Joe Pesci's Best Supporting Actor award came out of six nominations for the film, which was also up for Best Picture and Best Director.
Q 30Which Brazilian city's slums are the setting of the 2002 crime drama City of God?
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro's Cidade de Deus suburb gives the film its title, and the story follows organized crime there from the 1960s into the 1980s.