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
Browse by time · decade
1940s
1940 – 1949
Showing 567 works across all media 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
White Christmas
1942
Berlin's snowless Christmas song, the best-selling physical single ever pressed, and the sound of every soldier's homesickness.
★ 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
1984
1949 · 328 pages
Winston Smith rewrites old newspapers so history agrees with the Party, then risks a diary and a love affair. Orwell built the machinery so exactly that reading it feels like being watched.
★ 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
The Stranger
1942 · 123 pages
Meursault buries his mother without crying, takes a lover, and shoots a man on a hot Algiers beach. At his trial the tears he never shed matter more than the killing.
★ 8.9
Nighthawks
1942 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Four people sit under fluorescent light behind a curved sheet of glass, and Hopper gave the diner no door in or out.
★ 8.9
Animal Farm
1945 · 128 pages
The animals drive out the farmer and run the place themselves, until the rules painted on the barn wall start changing. Orwell reduced the Russian Revolution to a fable no adult forgets.
★ 8.9
The Second Sex
1949 · 832 pages
One is not born a woman, Beauvoir argues, but becomes one. She works through biology, history, myth, marriage, and old age to prove it, and modern feminism begins in these pages.
★ 8.7
Death of a Salesman
1949 · 139 pages
Willy Loman, a traveling salesman worn down to nothing, argues with his grown sons and with people who are not in the room. Audiences have recognized their own fathers in him since 1949.
★ 8.7
A Streetcar Named Desire
1947 · 128 pages
Blanche DuBois arrives at her sister's New Orleans apartment with nothing left, and her brother-in-law Stanley sets about destroying what remains. No American play has staged desire and cruelty this nakedly.
★ 8.7
The Plague
1947 · 308 pages
Rats die in the streets of an Algerian port, the gates shut, and a doctor named Rieux keeps working. Camus meant the German occupation, and every epidemic since has proved him right.
★ 8.6
If This is a Man and The Truce
1947 · 400 pages
Levi was an Italian chemist deported to Auschwitz at twenty-four. He survived, then spent months making his way home across a ruined Europe, and reports all of it without raising his voice.
★ 8.6
The Diary of a Young Girl
1947 · 283 pages
Two years in hiding behind an Amsterdam office, set down by a girl who wrote about her mother, her boredom, and who she meant to become. She was fifteen when they were found.
★ 8.6
The Little Prince
1943 · 96 pages
Crash-landed in the Sahara, a pilot meets a boy from a tiny planet who worries about his rose. Saint-Exupéry writes for children and lands hardest on adults who have stopped looking properly.
★ 8.6
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
I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry
1949 · From 40 Greatest Hits
Issued as a B-side because jukeboxes wanted uptempo, with Jerry Byrd's steel guitar shadowing every line Williams sings.
★ 8.5
Being and Nothingness · 1943
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
Take the "A" Train
1941
Strayhorn turned Ellington's subway directions into a theme song; Ray Nance's trumpet solo got copied note for note ever after.
★ 8.2
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
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
1944 · Tate Modern, London
Three flayed creatures crane and scream on orange grounds. Shown as the war ended in 1945, they made Bacon's reputation overnight.
★ 8.0
Hiroshima
1946 · 152 pages
Six people survived the bomb at Hiroshima and Hersey follows them through the year after: a clerk, a widow, two doctors, and two clergymen. He writes flatly and it is unbearable.
★ 8.0
Under the Volcano
1947 · 402 pages
Drinking himself to death in Mexico, a British ex-consul is visited by the wife who left him. Lowry gives them one Day of the Dead, written from inside the bottle.
★ 8.0
Round Midnight
1947 · From Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 1
Monk wrote it around 1940, cutting it for Blue Note in 1947; no jazz composer's tune is recorded more.
★ 7.8
God Bless the ChildBillie Holiday
God Bless the Child
1941
A quarrel with her mother over money, by Holiday's own account, gave the song its title line and its steel.
★ 7.8
La Vie en Rose (Edith Piaf)Edith Piaf
La Vie en Rose (Edith Piaf)
1947
Piaf's own lyric, dismissed by her collaborators as foolishness, then a million American sales and a French national possession.
★ 7.8
Broadway Boogie Woogie
1943 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Mondrian broke his own grid into blinking squares after moving to New York, where he loved the traffic and the jazz.
★ 7.7
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
Casablanca · 1942
A Night in TunisiaDizzy Gillespie
A Night in Tunisia
1946
Written at a Kelly's Stables piano in 1942 under the title Interlude, with a bass line that refuses to walk.
★ 7.6
Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red
1942 · Tate Modern, London
Black lines, white ground, three primary colors and nothing else. Mondrian spent decades taking painting down to this and called it Neo-Plasticism.
★ 7.5
The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire)
1946
Tormé and Wells wrote it in a July heat wave, thinking cool, and Cole overruled Capitol about the strings.
★ 7.5
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
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949
The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
For Whom the Bell Tolls · 1940
Self-portrait With Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird
1940 · Harry Ransom Center, Austin
A thorn necklace draws blood at her throat, a dead hummingbird hangs from it, and a monkey and a black cat watch from behind.
★ 7.2
Native Son
1940 · 504 pages
Bigger Thomas drives for a rich white family in 1930s Chicago and kills their daughter in a panic his first night. Wright keeps you inside his head and will not soften him.
★ 7.2
The Myth of Sisyphus
1942 · 212 pages
The only serious philosophical question, Camus opens, is whether to kill yourself. His answer: the universe will never explain itself, so you live anyway, unreconciled, like Sisyphus happy pushing his rock uphill forever.
★ 7.2
The Bridge on the Drina
1945 · 314 pages
Four centuries of Bosnian life pass over one stone bridge, built by an Ottoman vizier taken from these hills as a boy. Andric ends in 1914 and you feel it coming.
★ 7.2
Snow Country
1948 · 175 pages
At a hot spring in Japan's snow country, a wealthy Tokyo idler keeps visiting a geisha who loves him past anything he can give. Kawabata states almost nothing and it lands anyway.
★ 7.2
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