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
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.
All the King's Men
Directed by Robert Rossen
1949
Robert Penn Warren's novel about Huey Long, filmed with real Californians pulled off the street as extras: a country lawyer discovers what he can do with a crowd.
★ 2.9
Taxi to the Dark Side
Directed by Alex Gibney
2007
Alex Gibney's father was a naval interrogator and told him to make it: an Afghan taxi driver died in American custody at Bagram, and the film follows the policy up the chain.
★ 3.4
Fahrenheit 9/11
Directed by Michael Moore
2004
Disney refused to release it and it held the documentary box office record for five years: Michael Moore won at Cannes with an argument aimed squarely at an election five months away.
★ 4.0
Wag the Dog
Directed by Barry Levinson
1997
It opened a month before the Lewinsky scandal broke and eight months before Bill Clinton bombed Sudan, and the title became shorthand: a spin doctor and a producer fabricate a war.
★ 4.0
Roger and Me
Directed by Michael Moore
1989
Michael Moore invented a whole documentary style here, himself as the persistent nuisance: Flint, Michigan after General Motors leaves, filmed by someone who grew up in it.
★ 4.5
Reds
Directed by Warren Beatty
1981
Beatty tracked down dozens of surviving witnesses and cut their interviews straight into the film: the Russian Revolution seen through two American radicals who cannot stop arguing.
★ 5.5
Milk
Directed by Gus Van Sant
2008
Van Sant shot in the actual Castro Street storefront where Harvey Milk ran his campaigns: Sean Penn plays the first openly gay man elected to major office in California, and plays him delighted.
★ 5.7
Lincoln
Directed by Steven Spielberg
2012
Day-Lewis found a high, reedy voice for Lincoln because the historical accounts describe one: Spielberg and Tony Kushner build a whole film out of counting votes for the Thirteenth Amendment.
★ 6.0
The Hunt for Red October
Directed by John McTiernan
1990
John McTiernan solves the language problem with a slow push in on the Russian political officer, and everyone speaks English from then on: submarine cat-and-mouse with almost no violence in it.
★ 6.0
Election
Directed by Alexander Payne
1999
Reese Witherspoon has never been better used: a high-school student council election becomes a study of ambition and resentment, and Payne refuses to let a single character off the hook.
★ 6.3
The Killing Fields
Directed by Roland Joffe
1984 · United Kingdom
Haing Ngor had never acted in his life and won an Academy Award for this: Roland Joffe films the fall of Phnom Penh through an American reporter and the Cambodian colleague beside him.
★ 6.4
Z
Directed by Costa-Gavras
1969 · France
Banned by the Greek junta it was made to indict: Costa-Gavras films a political assassination and its cover-up as a procedural thriller, and the pace never lets the outrage go abstract.
★ 6.4
Being There
Directed by Hal Ashby
1979
Peter Sellers chased this part for years and considered it the best work he ever did: a gardener who has only ever watched television is mistaken for a sage.
★ 6.5
The Great Dictator
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
1940
Chaplin attacked Hitler while America was still neutral, in his first talking picture: the two men were born four days apart, and the globe dance is the cruelest joke he ever staged.
★ 6.5
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Directed by Frank Capra
1939
Capra built the most stirring film ever made out of parliamentary procedure: an amateur senator holds the floor with nothing but his voice and the rulebook, and Washington's press corps hated it.
★ 6.6
JFK
Directed by Oliver Stone
1991
A film that changed federal law: the outcry over Stone's conspiracy case pushed Congress to pass the JFK Records Act, and the editing that sells it remains the most aggressive in American film.
★ 6.6
Blow Out
Directed by Brian De Palma
1981
Travolta's best performance is in a thriller that flopped and spent forty years being rediscovered: a movie sound man records an accident and hears something that should not be on the tape.
★ 6.6
The Bourne Ultimatum
Directed by Paul Greengrass
2007
Handheld chases got shakier for a decade because of this film: Greengrass films spying as legwork rather than glamour, and the Waterloo Station chase is the most tightly constructed surveillance sequence ever filmed.
★ 6.7
Duck Soup
Directed by Leo McCarey
1933
The Marx Brothers at their fastest and most anarchic, and they left Paramount soon after it underperformed: the mirror sequence has been stolen by everybody in comedy since.
★ 7.2
Brazil
Directed by Terry Gilliam
1985
The bleakest comedy ever made about paperwork: Gilliam imagined a state that tortures you politely and misfiles the forms afterward, and had to fight his own studio to release it.
★ 7.4
The Manchurian Candidate
Directed by John Frankenheimer
1962
It sat out of circulation for fifteen years over a rights dispute, not the assassination myth people repeat: a Korean War veteran cannot shake a dream about his own platoon.
★ 7.4
All the President's Men
Directed by Alan J. Pakula
1976
Every journalism film gets held up against this one: two reporters chase Watergate through phone calls and parking garages, and verifying a single fact becomes unbearably tense.
★ 7.9
Notorious
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1946
Hitchcock's most grown-up film, and the one where the suspense is entirely about feeling: a woman is sent to seduce a Nazi by the man who loves her.
★ 8.4