I was playing with the pandas library on python and picked the IMDb dataset to explore.

To give myself a learning goal, I asked the following question:

What movies are generally regarded as the best that have multiple directors?

After some finagling the dataset (of multiple large CSV files) I arrived at the following list of twenty, in descending order of average rating:

1. The Matrix (1999) • 8.7
   Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski

2. City of God (2002) • 8.6
   Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund

3. The Intouchables (2011) • 8.5
   Olivier Nakache, Éric Toledano

4. Avengers: Endgame (2019) • 8.4
   Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

5. Avengers: Infinity War (2018) • 8.4
   Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

6. No Country for Old Men (2007) • 8.2
   Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

7. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) • 8.2
   Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones

8. Gone with the Wind (1939) • 8.2
   Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood

9. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) • 8.1
   Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert

10. The Big Lebowski (1998) • 8.1
    Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

11. Fargo (1996) • 8.1
    Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

12. The Wizard of Oz (1939) • 8.1
    Victor Fleming, King Vidor, Richard Thorpe, Norman Taurog, Mervyn LeRoy, George Cukor

13. Slumdog Millionaire (2008) • 8.0
    Danny Boyle, Loveleen Tandan

14. Sin City (2005) • 8.0
    Frank Miller, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez

15. Captain America: Civil War (2016) • 7.8
    Joe Russo, Anthony Russo

16. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) • 7.8
    Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

17. Little Miss Sunshine (2006) • 7.8
    Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris

18. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) • 7.7
    Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

19. True Grit (2010) • 7.6
    Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

20. The Butterfly Effect (2004) • 7.6
    Eric Bress, J. Mackye Gruber

Some thoughts on these results:

• Most of the films here are from the last twenty-five years. Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz are the two remarkable exceptions, surprisingly from the same year, 1939, and with the same main director, Victor Fleming.
• Gone with the Wind has a runtime of 238 minutes, which is far above any other film here, and that makes it additionally remarkable that it is on this list.
• Everything Everywhere All at Once was a surprise to see here, given its newness. I wonder if its rating will go up or down with time.
• I have seen seventeen of these films. The others are now on my to-watch list 😄

Notes on the data filtering and sorting process to get to the final list:

• Only movies. This eliminated shorts, TV, etc.
• Not animated. Apparently it is common for animated movies to have more than one director, so they were sort of skewing the results away from what I really intended to discover, even though I didn’t realize it at the time I asked myself that leading question.
• High rating (> 7.5) and high number of votes (> 250000). I tweaked these to narrow down a short list. If I only maximized one or the other, the results didn’t seem representative of the question.
• Year of release used as a tie breaker. I figured a more recent film with a high rating had a larger impact on the zeitgeist and so deserved to be higher on the list.

The script can be found here.

P.S. The dataset obviously has biases and those impact the results.