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
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1940s
1940 – 1949
Showing 44 films from the 1940s
Casablanca
Directed by Michael Curtiz
1942
Proof that a studio picture thrown together in a hurry can outlive everything around it: eighty years on, the lines are still in the language and the romance still lands.
★ 9.7
The Third Man
Directed by Carol Reed
1949
Britain has never made a better one, and nothing else sounds like it: a ruined postwar Vienna, and a zither score by a musician Reed first heard playing for the crew.
★ 9.3
Bicycle Thieves
Directed by Vittorio De Sica
1948 · Italy
Italian neorealism starts with this, and it still guts people: De Sica cast a factory worker as his lead and found a whole society inside one stolen bicycle.
★ 9.1
Double Indemnity
Directed by Billy Wilder
1944
Film noir gets its blueprint here: Wilder and Chandler wrote dialogue nobody has matched for hardness, and set the pattern of the doomed man telling his own story.
★ 9.0
It's a Wonderful Life
Directed by Frank Capra
1946
A commercial failure that decades of Christmas television turned into a national ritual: it is far darker than its reputation, and the ending earns every tear it gets.
★ 9.0
Late Spring
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu
1949
Ozu made the same film over and over and this is the most perfect version: a daughter who will not marry, a father who will not say what he wants, and one vase.
★ 8.6
Notorious
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1946
Hitchcock's most grown-up film, and the one where the suspense is entirely about feeling: a woman is sent to seduce a Nazi by the man who loves her.
★ 8.4
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Directed by John Huston
1948
Huston won two Oscars for it and directed his own father to a third: three men look for gold in Mexico and the heat does the rest.
★ 8.0
The Red Shoes
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1948 · United Kingdom
Scorsese has been watching it since childhood and has never stopped: Powell and Pressburger put a ballet on screen in Technicolor so saturated that it plays like a fever.
★ 8.0
The Maltese Falcon
Directed by John Huston
1941
Huston's first film as a director, and the one that finally made Bogart a star: everyone chasing the black bird lies about it for a hundred straight minutes.
★ 7.7
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis)
Directed by Marcel Carne
1945 · France
France's greatest film, and its Jewish designer and composer worked in hiding under German occupation: three hours of theater, mime and love among people who cannot afford it.
★ 7.7
Out of the Past
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
1947
If you want to know what film noir means, this is the film people hand you: a gas station owner's past arrives in the form of a woman he once found.
★ 7.4
The Big Sleep
Directed by Howard Hawks
1946
Nobody has ever been able to follow the plot, including the men who wrote it: what you watch it for is Bogart and Bacall talking, which is more than enough.
★ 7.2
Rome Open City
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
1945 · Italy
Rossellini shot it in the streets months after the Germans pulled out, on mismatched surplus stock scrounged from an army supplier: this is where Italian neorealism arrives.
★ 7.2
The Best Years of Our Lives
Directed by William Wyler
1946
Wyler cast a veteran who had lost both hands to play a veteran who had lost both hands, and audiences in 1946 recognized their own living rooms.
★ 7.1
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1943
Churchill tried to stop it in production and then to bar it from export, convinced it made the British Army look ridiculous: Powell and Pressburger made it anyway.
★ 7.1
His Girl Friday
Directed by Howard Hawks
1940
Hawks made the reporter a woman and the ex-husband her editor, then had them talk over each other so fast the film runs at over two hundred words a minute.
★ 7.0
A Matter of Life and Death
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1946 · United Kingdom
Heaven is monochrome and earth is in Technicolor, which is the whole joke: a pilot bails out without a parachute and then has to argue for his life.
★ 7.0
Red River
Directed by Howard Hawks
1948
Ford said he never knew Wayne could act until he saw this: a cattle drive turns into a mutiny, and the man in charge becomes the thing to escape.
★ 7.0
Brief Encounter
Directed by David Lean
1945
Two married people meet by chance in a railway station and keep meeting, and what they hold back is what destroys audiences: Lean does it in glances and Rachmaninov.
★ 6.9
The Grapes of Wrath
Directed by John Ford
1940
That a major studio released this in 1940 is still hard to believe: Ford films an Oklahoma family driven west by the banks, and Gregg Toland lights the migrant camps like documentary photographs.
★ 6.8
Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bete)
Directed by Jean Cocteau
1946 · France
Cocteau made a fairy tale that looks the way one feels: human arms hold the candelabra along the corridor, and the Beast's castle behaves like a dream that has not decided to end.
★ 6.8
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Directed by Robert Hamer
1949 · United Kingdom
Alec Guinness plays eight members of the same family, including one of the women: the blackest comedy the British ever made, narrated in perfect drawing-room manners by a man counting off his relatives.
★ 6.8
The Philadelphia Story
Directed by George Cukor
1940
Katharine Hepburn was labeled box-office poison and controlled the rights to her comeback vehicle: she picked the director and approved the cast, then let Cary Grant and James Stewart crash her wedding.
★ 6.6
Sullivan's Travels
Directed by Preston Sturges
1942
Preston Sturges aimed the sharpest dialogue of his career at Hollywood itself: a director of hit comedies decides to make something serious about poverty, and goes looking for it in person.
★ 6.5
The Great Dictator
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
1940
Chaplin attacked Hitler while America was still neutral, in his first talking picture: the two men were born four days apart, and the globe dance is the cruelest joke he ever staged.
★ 6.5
My Darling Clementine
Directed by John Ford
1946
Ford claimed Wyatt Earp himself described the gunfight to him: what stays with people is not the shootout but a church dance on a bare wooden floor under an unfinished roof.
★ 6.3
To Have and Have Not
Directed by Howard Hawks
1944
Hawks bet Hemingway he could film his worst book, and hired William Faulkner to help: Bacall was nineteen, met Bogart on set, and says the whistle line straight to him.
★ 6.2
Rebecca
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1940
Alfred Hitchcock's only Best Picture, collected by his producer, and the heroine never gets a name: a young bride arrives at an English house where the first wife's housekeeper still rules.
★ 5.8
The Lost Weekend
Directed by Billy Wilder
1945
Distillers reportedly offered to buy the negative and destroy it: Wilder filmed four days of a writer's drinking with none of the period's usual comedy, and Best Picture followed.
★ 5.8
Bambi
Directed by David Hand
1942
Disney kept live fawns at the studio so the animators could watch them move: the backgrounds are painted like Chinese landscape scrolls, and the film trusts weather and silence where other cartoons talk.
★ 5.0
Rope
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1948
Alfred Hitchcock disguised half the cuts so the film plays like one unbroken take: two students host a dinner party in the apartment where they have done something, and the camera never leaves.
★ 4.5
Miracle on 34th Street
Directed by George Seaton
1947
The studio released a Christmas film in May and hid the fact from its own advertising: Edmund Gwenn won an Oscar as a department store Santa who insists he is the real one.
★ 4.2
Yankee Doodle Dandy
Directed by Michael Curtiz
1942
James Cagney was known for gangsters and had started life as a hoofer: he plays George M. Cohan flat out, and improvised the dance down the White House staircase on the day.
★ 4.1
Henry V (1944)
Directed by Laurence Olivier
1944 · United Kingdom
Made during the war and dedicated to the commandos and airborne troops of Britain: Laurence Olivier opens inside the Globe and then simply walks the film out into the real world.
★ 3.4
Hamlet
Directed by Laurence Olivier
1948 · United Kingdom
The first film made outside America to be named Best Picture: Laurence Olivier cut half the play, shot it in high-contrast monochrome, and moves the camera through Elsinore like a ghost.
★ 3.0
A Letter to Three Wives
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1949
Joseph Mankiewicz won for both writing and directing it: three women receive a single letter announcing that a woman they all know has left town with somebody's husband.
★ 2.9
All the King's Men
Directed by Robert Rossen
1949
Robert Penn Warren's novel about Huey Long, filmed with real Californians pulled off the street as extras: a country lawyer discovers what he can do with a crowd.
★ 2.9
High Sierra
Directed by Raoul Walsh
1941
Ida Lupino had top billing and Bogart got the part after George Raft turned it down: John Huston co-wrote it, and an aging gunman takes one last job in the Sierra Nevada.
★ 2.4
How Green Was My Valley
Directed by John Ford
1941
John Ford built an entire Welsh mining village in the California hills and shot it like memory: a colliery family in a valley the pit is slowly ruining, narrated by the youngest son.
★ 2.1
Sergeant York
Directed by Howard Hawks
1941
Alvin York blocked a film about himself for two decades and gave in only to fund a Bible school: a Tennessee pacifist wins the Medal of Honor and Gary Cooper wins Best Actor.
★ 1.8
Mrs. Miniver
Directed by William Wyler
1942 · United Kingdom
Roosevelt had the vicar's closing speech printed on leaflets and dropped over occupied Europe: an English family absorbs the first year of the war, and America was watching very closely.
★ 1.4
Road to Morocco
Directed by David Butler
1942
Bob Hope and Bing Crosby keep telling the audience it is only a film, and a camel gets a line: the fourth wall came down here long before anyone named it.
★ 1.1