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
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.
The Way We Were
Directed by Sydney Pollack
1973
The blacklist plot was cut to almost nothing and Sydney Pollack called that his biggest regret: Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford are mismatched enough that the romance runs on friction alone.
★ 2.5
A Letter to Three Wives
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1949
Joseph Mankiewicz won for both writing and directing it: three women receive a single letter announcing that a woman they all know has left town with somebody's husband.
★ 2.9
Out of Africa
Directed by Sydney Pollack
1985
The flight over the Rift Valley is why anyone remembers it: Meryl Streep built Karen Blixen's Danish accent from recordings, and the film takes its time in a way nothing does now.
★ 3.1
An Affair to Remember
Directed by Leo McCarey
1957
Sleepless in Seattle sent an entire generation back to it: Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr agree to meet on the Empire State Building observation deck in six months, and then wait.
★ 3.1
Marty
Directed by Delbert Mann
1955
It holds both Best Picture and the Palme d'Or, which only three other films manage: a Bronx butcher who has given up on meeting anybody meets somebody, and it runs ninety-three minutes.
★ 3.4
Les Miserables
Directed by Tom Hooper
2012
Every note was sung live on set instead of lip-synced to a recording, which nobody had attempted at this scale: the camera sits inches from faces the entire time.
★ 3.5
Last Tango in Paris
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
1972
Pauline Kael called the premiere a landmark comparable to the Rite of Spring, and the reputation has since collapsed: Maria Schneider was nineteen and was not told the scene had been changed.
★ 4.0
Leaving Las Vegas
Directed by Mike Figgis
1995
Mike Figgis shot it on 16mm for almost nothing and Nicolas Cage took the Oscar: a fired screenwriter drives to Las Vegas with no plan beyond drinking, and meets someone who asks nothing.
★ 4.1
The Karate Kid
Directed by John G. Avildsen
1984
The director of Rocky did it again with a smaller kid: Pat Morita turns a handyman into a mentor half of America can still quote, and the training is all chores.
★ 4.8
My Fair Lady
Directed by George Cukor
1964
Audrey Hepburn's singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon and Julie Andrews was passed over for the part she created on stage: the Cecil Beaton costumes remain the most beautiful ever filmed.
★ 4.9
The Artist
Directed by Michel Hazanavicius
2011 · France
The first silent film to take Best Picture since 1929, made by a French director nobody in Hollywood knew: a star of the silents watches sound arrive and refuses to adapt.
★ 5.0
The English Patient
Directed by Anthony Minghella
1996
Minghella turned an unfilmable novel into the last great studio romance: a burned man in an Italian monastery remembers North Africa, and the desert photography is worth the length by itself.
★ 5.3
Terms of Endearment
Directed by James L. Brooks
1983
A mother and daughter argue on the telephone across three decades, and James L. Brooks makes it enormous: nobody else has moved this fluently between a joke and a gut punch.
★ 5.4
The Quiet Man
Directed by John Ford
1952
Ford spent twenty years trying to make it and shot Ireland in Technicolor so green it looks invented: an American boxer goes home to Mayo and runs straight into everyone else's customs.
★ 5.6
Harold and Maude
Directed by Hal Ashby
1971
It failed on release and then ran 115 straight weeks at a single Minnesota theater: a death-obsessed teenager falls for a seventy-nine-year-old, and Cat Stevens scores the whole thing.
★ 6.0
From Here to Eternity
Directed by Fred Zinnemann
1953
The kiss in the surf was scandalous enough to define the decade: Pearl Harbor sits at the end of it, and Sinatra took a role for almost nothing to save his career.
★ 6.1
Lone Star
Directed by John Sayles
1996
Sayles moves between past and present without a cut, panning from one decade into another: a Texas border town excavates a forty-year-old murder and finds the whole town's history attached.
★ 6.1
Band of Outsiders
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
1964 · France
Tarantino named his production company after this film: three young Parisians run through the Louvre in nine minutes and dance the Madison in a cafe, and Godard makes crime look like play.
★ 6.1
To Have and Have Not
Directed by Howard Hawks
1944
Hawks bet Hemingway he could film his worst book, and hired William Faulkner to help: Bacall was nineteen, met Bogart on set, and says the whistle line straight to him.
★ 6.2