Only 5 Movies Have Better Acting Than 'The Godfather'

So, saying any movie has better acting than The Godfather or its sequel might sound like an outlandish claim to make, but hey, it’s worth a shot, as an exercise. There aren’t many candidates, because you sort of have to acknowledge that The Godfather scores highly when it comes to the quality of the acting, obviously, but also does well in terms of “quantity,” or like the number of great performances in those first two movies. So, the following films all have multiple great performances contained within, and most of them racked up a fair few nominations and/or wins at awards ceremonies for their respective years. If you want to argue that some movies have better acting than The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, the following can potentially support such an argument.

5 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' (1966)

Before celebrating the obviously great acting found throughout Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it’s also worth highlighting how well it’s directed, and the fact that it was a feature directorial debut on the part of Mike Nichols. It’s not surprisingly a film that was originally a play, seeing as there’s a limited setting and only a handful of characters who play a significant role in the story: a pair of couples, in fact. Most of the movie has them inside the one house, with the older couple getting drunk and generally angry at each other, and then gradually getting the younger couple to start doing the same, to the point where everyone is sort of just yelling and having a bad time.

Watching it makes for a good time, though… kind of. Maybe a good time if you like seeing great acting, because Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has the rare distinction of being a film where every single cast member was Oscar-nominated. Sure, there are only four credited cast members, but still. And Elizabeth Taylor won from her nomination (Best Actress), while the rest of the cast was made up of Richard Burton (nominated for Best Actor), Sandy Dennis (nominated for Best Supporting Actress), and George Segal (nominated for Best Supporting Actor). It’s a movie that’s all about the dialogue and acting, really, giving cast members ample opportunities to go big and flashy, and that’s what everyone does – quite successfully – throughout this entire film.

4 'On the Waterfront' (1954)

As mentioned before, Marlon Brando was in The Godfather, and it’s the performance he gave there that’s the one for which he’s arguably best-remembered, but he was equally great in On the Waterfront. That movie saw him win his first Oscar, and look, On the Waterfront isn't just here because of that Oscar win. It’s more just an instance of the Academy Awards getting things right, in terms of honoring Brando (even in 1954, a win seemed kind of overdue, seeing as Brando didn’t actually win for A Streetcar Named Desire). The other winner, as far as the Oscars go, for On the Waterfront was Eva Marie Saint, who won Best Supporting Actress (and it was her film debut), while On the Waterfront could well also boast one of the best assortments of supporting actors ever.

Like, Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, and Rod Steiger were also featured in the same category nomination-wise, but Edmond O'Brien won for The Barefoot Contessa. All those actors nominated were phenomenal, and instrumental in making On the Waterfront particularly riveting as a drama. Much of the acting here also feels natural in a way that ensures On the Waterfront really doesn’t feel its age, and it’s not that Brando hadn’t given an effortless performance before or anything, but he did so especially well here, and all the various supporting cast members rose to the occasion to match him, when it came to intensity, too.

3 'High and Low' (1963)

If Seven Samurai and Ran stand as Akira Kurosawa’s two best movies, then it’s possibly reasonable to call High and Low his third-best. Or, put another way, it’s his greatest film with a contemporary/non-historical setting, as this is a crime/mystery/thriller film rather than a period drama or a samurai film, and it more than demonstrates Kurosawa’s sometimes underappreciated range, as a filmmaker. The plot here concerns a kidnapping that goes wrong, with a criminal targeting a wealthy business executive by taking his child and then demanding a ransom, but he ends up taking the child of a poorer individual who works for the executive. The kidnapper demands the ransom anyway, which sets up a moral dilemma for the financially ruthless business executive.

It stars a few people who collaborated a decent number of times with Akira Kurosawa, including Toshirō Mifune, who’s the film’s central character, and Takashi Shimura, who’s probably best known for being the leader of the samurai in Seven Samurai, and for playing a large role in the original Godzilla (which, hey, came out the same year as Seven Samurai). Tatsuya Nakadai (who was later in Kagemusha and Ran) and Kyōko Kagawa were also prominent Japanese actors of this era, and are great here, as is Tsutomu Yamazaki, who’s underrated and lesser-known, but makes a real impression as the criminal behind the kidnapping plot. Since High and Low was a Japanese film, and foreign films didn’t always get a ton of love at the Academy Awards, it’s the only movie here without any Oscar nominations, but the acting is truly phenomenal (hell, the Oscars still aren’t the best at recognizing actors in foreign films; see Parasite, which won plenty of Academy Awards, but didn’t have a single Oscar-nominated cast member).

2 'Schindler's List' (1993)

Schindler’s List is an epic with its fair share of moving parts, filmmaking-wise, all the while also being a difficult film in other ways, since it has to double as a look at the horrors of the Holocaust and an exploration of an act of heroism that happened in and around it. Oskar Schindler is the central character, and the film’s about him saving the lives of various Jewish people by employing them in his factories, preventing them from being sent to concentration camps. Liam Neeson isn't as well-known for his dramatic work nowadays, since he’s done so many action movies (many of them not great), but his performance here shows what a great actor he is when he’s given the right role.

Having the right director likely also helped, because Steven Spielberg handled this particular story phenomenally well. Also, there’s a great supporting cast in Schindler’s List, with Ralph Fiennes making a seriously strong impression as a truly monstrous individual, and Ben Kingsley doing a lot with a quieter role. With its epic runtime, there are also so many other people who show up throughout Schindler’s List, sometimes for only a minute or two in total, but everyone’s phenomenal (even the background performers), contributing to the overall film’s sense of authenticity and adding to its inevitable power.

1 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' (1975)

If you have Jack Nicholson in your movie, he’s probably going to steal the show, and if you give him the lead role, then show-stealing (or movie-stealing?) is an inevitability. So, of course he makes the biggest impression in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, playing a prisoner who lies his way into a psychiatric hospital, believing that it'll be an easier time than being locked up in a traditional prison. When he’s there, he finds that’s not really the case, because the head nurse at this hospital (played by Louise Fletcher) is tyrannical, and she seems keen to make life for all the people there as hard as possible. So, Nicholson’s character rebels in increasingly outlandish ways, which makes him something of a hero among the other patients around him.

After Nicholson, Fletcher makes the biggest impression, and both of them won acting Oscars for their roles here, and deservedly so. There are plenty of other actors here, though, that make an impression, including some who had early roles here before becoming more famous later on (see Christopher Lloyd, Danny DeVito, and Brad Dourif). It is the kind of story that allows actors to go pretty big, a little like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and also, like that 1966 film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was adapted from a stage play. There are other things to be impressed by here beyond the acting, sure, since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is such a classic, but the performances (as in pretty much all of them) do really stand out.