Like a Rolling Stone
1965 · From Highway 61 Revisited
A snare crack, a sneer, and Kooper's uninvited organ swirling through the song that split rock open.
★ 10.0
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20th century
1901 – 2000
Showing 7,928 works across all media from the 20th century
The Godfather
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1972
The summit of the American crime film: Coppola turned an immigrant family's rise and rot into the country's own epic, and made damnation look like a coronation.
★ 10.0
Respect
1967 · From I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You
Aretha takes Otis Redding's song away from him for good, spells out the demand, and never gives it back.
★ 9.9
Citizen Kane
Directed by Orson Welles
1941
Welles was twenty-five and had never directed a feature before: he built a portrait of a man whose whole life nobody around him can add up, and changed everything.
★ 9.9
Pet Sounds
1966
Brian Wilson made it with session players while the rest of the band toured, using bicycle bells, dog whistles and a Coca-Cola can.
★ 9.9
A Day in the Life
1967 · From Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Two unfinished songs bolted together, an orchestra climbing to nothing, and the last piano chord in pop.
★ 9.9
Seven Samurai
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1954 · Japan
Every film about assembling a team for one last job descends from this one: Kurosawa makes seven men matter, then stages a battle in the mud nobody has equaled.
★ 9.9
Smells Like Teen Spirit
1991 · From Nevermind
Four chords, a mumble nobody could decipher, and the riff that ended one decade of rock and started another.
★ 9.9
Guernica
1937 · Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid
A screaming horse, a mother with her dead child, all in grey. Picasso painted it in weeks after German bombers leveled a Basque town.
★ 9.9
Revolver
1966
On Tomorrow Never Knows, engineers held five tape loops on pencils and mixed them live. No Beatle plays an instrument on Eleanor Rigby.
★ 9.9
Vertigo
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1958
Nobody has ever made obsession look this beautiful or this sick: a man falls for an image instead of a person, and Hitchcock follows him past every point it should stop.
★ 9.9
What's Going OnMarvin Gaye
What's Going On
1971 · From What's Going On
Party chatter, a sax that sighs, and Gaye asking the question Motown begged him not to ask.
★ 9.9
Kind of Blue
1959
Davis handed the players sketches on the day and most of what you hear is a first take. Two sessions, and it was done.
★ 9.8
2001: A Space Odyssey
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1968 · United Kingdom
Kubrick took the audience from the first bone tool to the far side of Jupiter, explained almost nothing, and made every science fiction film since look domestic by comparison.
★ 9.8
(I Can't Get No) SatisfactionThe Rolling Stones
(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction
1965 · From Out of Our Heads
Keith dreamt the fuzz riff, taped it half-asleep, and woke up holding the sound of teenage frustration.
★ 9.8
Tokyo Story
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu
1953 · Japan
The quiet masterpiece of ordinary life: Ozu finds the ache of a whole century in parents visiting children who have no time for them, and it will find you too.
★ 9.8
Good Vibrations
1966 · From Smiley Smile
Brian Wilson's pocket symphony, months and a fortune spent chasing one shimmering theremin line into the sunlight.
★ 9.8
Highway 61 Revisited
1965
Al Kooper was not the organ player and sat down at it anyway, which is the sound everybody remembers from Like a Rolling Stone.
★ 9.8