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
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1950s
1950 – 1959
Showing 67 films from the 1950s
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
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
Singin' in the Rain
Directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen
1952
Nothing else on film is this happy, and the subject is an industry in a panic: Hollywood's terror at the arrival of sound became two hours of pure delight.
★ 9.7
Sunset Boulevard
Directed by Billy Wilder
1950
Hollywood has never been crueler about itself: Louis B. Mayer told Wilder he had disgraced the industry, which is the highest praise the film could possibly have received.
★ 9.5
Some Like it Hot
Directed by Billy Wilder
1959
American comedy has never been funnier, and the Legion of Decency was appalled: Wilder ran a single disguise for two hours without ever letting the joke thin out.
★ 9.4
Rear Window
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1954
Suspense has never been constructed more purely, and the real subject is the audience: Hitchcock traps you in one room with a man who cannot stop watching his neighbors.
★ 9.3
North by Northwest
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1959
Every spy thriller since owes it something, James Bond most of all: Hitchcock chases an innocent man across America by crop duster and over Mount Rushmore, enjoying himself throughout.
★ 9.1
Rashomon
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1950 · Japan
Kurosawa gave the language a word for irreconcilable testimony and opened Japanese cinema to the world: four accounts of one killing, none of which can be squared with another.
★ 9.1
The Searchers
Directed by John Ford
1956
Other directors have been stealing from this western for seventy years: Ford put John Wayne's racism on screen without excusing it, and framed his story in a much-copied doorway.
★ 9.0
On the Waterfront
Directed by Elia Kazan
1954
Screen acting changed with Brando in the back of that taxi: Kazan made the film to justify naming names, which gives the whole thing an uncomfortable heat.
★ 8.9
12 Angry Men
Directed by Sidney Lumet
1957
Nothing beats it as a filmed argument, and it happens in a single room: eleven jurors want to go home, one will not, and the temperature keeps rising.
★ 8.7
All About Eve
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1950
The sharpest script ever written about ambition: an aging star takes in an adoring young fan, and theater people have been quoting the lines for three-quarters of a century.
★ 8.6
The 400 Blows
Directed by Francois Truffaut
1959 · France
The French New Wave announces itself: Truffaut put his own miserable childhood on screen at twenty-seven, and the last shot changed what an ending was allowed to do.
★ 8.6
Pather Panchali
Directed by Satyajit Ray
1955
Indian cinema arrived in the world with this: Ray shot it on weekends with a first-time crew and no money, and the children seeing a train is pure wonder.
★ 8.5
Ikiru
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1952 · Japan
Kurosawa's answer to how a life should be spent: a bureaucrat gets one piece of terrible news and starts spending what is left deliberately, which will change how you see your job.
★ 8.5
The Night of the Hunter
Directed by Charles Laughton
1955
Charles Laughton never directed again after it failed, and critics have spent seventy years calling it a masterpiece: a preacher with tattooed knuckles and two children on a river.
★ 8.4
A Streetcar Named Desire
Directed by Elia Kazan
1951
Three of its four leads won Academy Awards and the fourth was Brando: this is where screen acting stopped being theatrical and started being something else entirely.
★ 8.4
Paths of Glory
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1957
France stayed uncomfortable enough to keep it out of cinemas for eighteen years: Kubrick tracked the camera down the trenches and staged an injustice that still makes people furious.
★ 8.3
The Seventh Seal
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
1957 · Sweden
No image from any film has been parodied more: a knight plays chess with Death on a beach, and Bergman is completely serious about the question underneath it.
★ 8.3