Basic Instinct
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
1992
Paul Verhoeven made the decade's most notorious mainstream thriller and never once blinked: an interrogation scene everyone still knows, and a novelist who may be writing what happens next.
★ 3.9
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.
Kiss Me Deadly
Directed by Robert Aldrich
1955
Film noir's meanest specimen: Robert Aldrich turned Mickey Spillane's detective into a thug worse than the criminals he chases, and gave the genre an ending nobody in 1955 was ready for.
★ 4.9
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
Directed by Joseph Sargent
1974
Tarantino took the color-coded aliases straight from this for Reservoir Dogs: four men hijack a subway car under Manhattan and Walter Matthau negotiates with them by radio, entirely deadpan.
★ 5.0
In the Heat of the Night
Directed by Norman Jewison
1967
Poitier refused to film in the Deep South, so Mississippi was recreated in Illinois: a Philadelphia detective is arrested for being Black in a small town and then asked to solve its murder.
★ 6.3
Serpico
Directed by Sidney Lumet
1973
Frank Serpico was a real New York cop who would not take an envelope: Lumet films departmental corruption as an ordinary daily fact, and Pacino plays stubbornness as an entire personality.
★ 6.3
The Killer
Directed by John Woo
1989 · Hong Kong
Woo shoots gunfights the way other directors shoot musical numbers: two pistols, slow motion, doves, and underneath it a straight-faced story about honor between a hitman and the cop hunting him.
★ 6.8
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
The French Connection
Directed by William Friedkin
1971
It made the car chase in Bullitt look choreographed: this one was shot without permits, at ninety miles an hour, through real Brooklyn traffic that nobody had cleared.
★ 7.6
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
High and Low
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1963 · Japan
Kurosawa spends the entire first hour inside one house and it is unbearable: a rich man learns the kidnappers took the wrong child and still want his money.
★ 7.8
Seven
Directed by David Fincher
1995
The studio wanted the ending changed and Fincher refused, and studios then spent a decade trying to reproduce the atmosphere: a procedural so bleak the rain never stops.
★ 8.1
Memories of Murder
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
2003 · South Korea
Bong made a serial killer film in which the police are the problem: it is based on a real case, and rural Korea itself ends up looking like the suspect.
★ 8.1
LA Confidential
Directed by Curtis Hanson
1997
Modern film noir does not get better than this: three Los Angeles cops with nothing in common, and a plot so tightly wired people rewatch it to follow the connections.
★ 8.5
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