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
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Directed by David Lean
1957
Lean built an epic about the seduction of a job well done: a British colonel in a Japanese prison camp finds a strange satisfaction in building their bridge properly.
★ 8.2
Ugetsu
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
1953
Mizoguchi's ghost story is the one other directors mention when asked what changed them: two peasants chase money through a civil war, and the crossing through fog is unearthly.
★ 8.2
The Wages of Fear
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
1953
Suspense does not get more physical than this: four desperate men drive truckloads of nitroglycerin over mountain roads, and every rut in the surface becomes an ordeal.
★ 7.9
La Strada
Directed by Federico Fellini
1954 · Italy
It took the very first competitive foreign language Academy Award, and Giulietta Masina is the reason: her face does more with one shrug than most performances manage in full.
★ 7.9
Wild Strawberries
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
1957 · Sweden
Bergman cast the founding father of Swedish cinema as an old man reckoning with his own coldness: a drive across the country, punctuated by dreams that keep ambushing him.
★ 7.8
Nights of Cabiria
Directed by Federico Fellini
1957 · Italy
Giulietta Masina gives the performance that everyone remembers from Fellini: a Roman streetwalker keeps hoping harder than her luck deserves, and the film never once pities her.
★ 7.7
Touch of Evil
Directed by Orson Welles
1958
The opening crane shot is the most studied three minutes in film school: Welles was fired off his own picture, and the version we watch was restored from his memo.
★ 7.6
High Noon
Directed by Fred Zinnemann
1952
Written as an allegory about the blacklist by a man about to be blacklisted: a marshal has eighty-five minutes before the noon train, and the film runs them in step.
★ 7.5
East of Eden
Directed by Elia Kazan
1955
The only James Dean performance released while he was still alive: Steinbeck's Cain and Abel moved to a California lettuce valley, and Dean improvises his way through it.
★ 7.3
Strangers on a Train
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1951
The premise is so clean that thrillers have been borrowing it for seventy years: two men meet on a train and one of them proposes swapping murders.
★ 7.2
Diabolique
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
1955 · France
Clouzot got to the material just before Hitchcock could buy it and made the more frightening film: a wife and a mistress conspire against the same terrible man.
★ 7.1
Shane
Directed by George Stevens
1953
The western seen entirely through a small boy's worship, which is the honest way to look at it: a gunfighter tries to stop being one and cannot.
★ 7.1
Rio Bravo
Directed by Howard Hawks
1959
Hawks made it as an argument against High Noon: instead of a marshal begging for help, four flawed men hold a jail and enjoy each other's company doing it.
★ 7.0
Rebel Without a Cause
Directed by Nicholas Ray
1955
The teenager as a subject starts here: James Dean in a red jacket, a knife fight at an observatory, and parents who have no idea what is happening.
★ 7.0
Throne of Blood
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1957 · Japan
Shakespeare's Macbeth moved to sixteenth-century Japan with every line of the poetry gone: Kurosawa substitutes fog, Noh masks worn as faces, and a forest that seems to be watching the castle.
★ 6.8
The African Queen
Directed by John Huston
1951
Huston took the production into the Congo and almost everyone fell ill: what came back is Bogart and Hepburn on a battered steam launch, insulting each other into something like love.
★ 6.7
Roman Holiday
Directed by William Wyler
1953
Audrey Hepburn became a star overnight and Dalton Trumbo wrote the script while blacklisted: a princess slips her handlers for one unscheduled day in Rome, with a reporter who knows who she is.
★ 6.6
The Hidden Fortress
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1958 · Japan
Lucas took the two bickering peasants and turned them into R2-D2 and C-3PO: Kurosawa's first widescreen film tells an escape story from the point of view of its most useless characters.
★ 6.5
Anatomy of a Murder
Directed by Otto Preminger
1959
The Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph Welch plays the judge and Duke Ellington wrote the score: a murder trial turning on an alleged rape, argued in language so frank that 1959 audiences were shocked.
★ 6.5
Rififi
Directed by Jules Dassin
1955 · France
Dassin was blacklisted out of Hollywood and made this in France for almost nothing: the half-hour robbery at its center plays in near-total silence, and the genre has been imitating it since.
★ 6.5