Cast Away
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
2000
Production shut down a year so Tom Hanks could lose fifty pounds: for an hour there is barely a word spoken, and a volleyball becomes a genuinely moving character.
★ 5.4
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.
Hugo
Directed by Martin Scorsese
2011
Scorsese made a children's film in 3D to argue for film preservation: an orphan living inside a Paris railway station keeps a broken automaton his father left him, and the station watches him.
★ 5.5
Into the Wild
Directed by Sean Penn
2007
Sean Penn spent ten years persuading the family to let him film this: a graduate burns his savings and walks into the Alaskan interior, and the film neither mocks him nor canonizes him.
★ 6.3
Deliverance
Directed by John Boorman
1972
The outdoors has never felt this hostile on film: Boorman shot in sequence and made his actors run the whitewater themselves, and a weekend canoe trip turns into something much older.
★ 6.6
Fitzcarraldo
Directed by Werner Herzog
1982 · Germany
Herzog dragged a 320-ton steamship over a mountain with no models and no effects: his hero wants an opera house in the Amazon, and the production came to resemble the obsession it filmed.
★ 6.8
L'Avventura
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
1960 · Italy
It was booed off the screen at Cannes and won a prize at the same festival: Antonioni made drift and boredom into subjects, and cinema has been arguing since.
★ 7.6
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Directed by Werner Herzog
1972
Herzog shot it for almost nothing on a real Amazon river with a lead actor he fought with constantly: Kinski's stare and a shrinking raft do everything.
★ 7.7
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
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1977
Spielberg made the rare first-contact film that treats the aliens as something to hope for: an ordinary man starts building a mountain in his living room and cannot say why.
★ 8.0
Apocalypse Now
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1979
No production has ever gone further off the rails or shown it more clearly: Coppola's Vietnam abandons the war film for pure hallucination, and the helicopters over the trees are permanent.
★ 9.7