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
The Movies canon
Sourced and screened.
Every film chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
Viva Las Vegas
Directed by George Sidney
1964
Elvis Presley made thirty-one films and only this one holds up: Ann-Margret matches him move for move, the studio got nervous about it, and the title song outlived everything.
★ 1.2
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
The Informer
Directed by John Ford
1935
Dublin in 1922, shot entirely on a fogged soundstage: John Ford won his first directing Oscar for it, and a slow-witted man sells out a friend for twenty pounds.
★ 1.5
Will Penny
Directed by Tom Gries
1968
Charlton Heston called it his own best film and almost nobody saw it: an illiterate middle-aged cowhand with no property and no prospects, and the frontier offers him nothing.
★ 1.6
Love Story
Directed by Arthur Hiller
1970
The novel was written from the screenplay and not the other way around: a Harvard hockey player and a Radcliffe music student marry against his father, and one line became inescapable.
★ 1.6
Quo Vadis
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy
1951
Peter Ustinov plays Nero as a needy child with an empire, and steals the entire picture: MGM built ancient Rome at Cinecitta and the film rescued the studio's finances.
★ 1.7
You Can't Take it With You
Directed by Frank Capra
1938
A household where everyone does exactly as they like collides with a banking family: Frank Capra won his third directing Oscar in five years, and the argument is still the one America has.
★ 1.7
The Long, Hot Summer
Directed by Martin Ritt
1958
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward fell in love making this and married before it opened: William Faulkner boiled down into one Mississippi town, and the heat is doing most of the acting.
★ 1.7
Grand Hotel
Directed by Edmund Goulding
1932
It took Best Picture without a single other nomination, which nothing else has managed: Greta Garbo says the line about wanting to be alone, and the one-building ensemble format begins here.
★ 1.8
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
Silver Streak
Directed by Arthur Hiller
1976
Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor met on this and made three more together: a book editor takes a slow train from Los Angeles to Chicago and sees something through a window.
★ 1.9
Smokey and the Bandit
Directed by Hal Needham
1977
It was the second biggest film of 1977 behind Star Wars, which nobody remembers: Burt Reynolds runs beer across state lines in a black Trans Am and grins at the camera throughout.
★ 1.9
The Defiant Ones
Directed by Stanley Kramer
1958
Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis are chained together at the wrist, which was the entire argument in 1958: two convicts break out of a crash in the South and cannot move separately.
★ 1.9
Hamburger Hill
Directed by John Irvin
1987
The least mythologizing Vietnam film anyone made: ten days in May 1969 taking one hill that the army abandoned immediately afterward, filmed as almost pure exhaustion and mud.
★ 2.0
A Grin Without a Cat
Directed by Chris Marker
1977
Chris Marker assembled hours of the global left arguing with itself between 1967 and 1977: a chorus of narrators reads his commentary, and none of them is given the last word.
★ 2.0
La Chienne
Directed by Jean Renoir
1931 · France
Jean Renoir was recording live street sound in 1931 when almost nobody could: a meek bank cashier who paints on Sundays falls for a woman he meets one night in Montmartre.
★ 2.0
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
Grumpy Old Men
Directed by Donald Petrie
1993
Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon had been perfecting this act for twenty-five years and it still lands: two Minnesota neighbors have hated each other since one married the other's girl.
★ 2.2
Gigi
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
1958
It won all nine awards it was nominated for, the biggest clean sweep the Oscars had seen: Lerner and Loewe wrote it straight for the screen, and Paris in 1900 looks fabulously expensive.
★ 2.2