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
The Diary of Anne Frank
Directed by George Stevens
1959
George Stevens built the annex to the actual dimensions so the cast would feel it: two years in a few rooms above a warehouse, and nothing outside them is ever shown.
★ 2.3
North Dallas Forty
Directed by Ted Kotcheff
1979
The NFL refused all cooperation and players said it was the only accurate football film ever made: Nick Nolte plays a receiver held together by painkillers and stubbornness for one more season.
★ 2.3
Cry Freedom
Directed by Richard Attenborough
1987 · United Kingdom
Richard Attenborough got Steve Biko into cinemas while apartheid was still standing: Denzel Washington's first Oscar nomination, and a white newspaper editor learning what Black South Africans already knew.
★ 2.3
High Sierra
Directed by Raoul Walsh
1941
Ida Lupino had top billing and Bogart got the part after George Raft turned it down: John Huston co-wrote it, and an aging gunman takes one last job in the Sierra Nevada.
★ 2.4
Mutiny on the Bounty
Directed by Frank Lloyd
1935
Three of its actors were nominated for Best Actor in the same year, and the supporting categories were created the next: Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh remains the definition of a tyrant.
★ 2.5
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
The Thomas Crown Affair
Directed by John McTiernan
1999
John McTiernan's remake is better than the original and knows how adult it is: a billionaire steals a Monet for entertainment, and the insurance investigator enjoys the chase as much as he does.
★ 2.5
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
Directed by Peter R. Hunt
1969
George Lazenby played Bond once and quit, and it took decades for anyone to admit how good this is: the ski chases are the best in the series, and Diana Rigg is extraordinary.
★ 2.6
The Italian Job
Directed by F. Gary Gray
2003
Three Mini Coopers through the Los Angeles storm drains and the Hollywood subway: a remake that keeps only the cars from the original, and stages the best getaway of its decade.
★ 2.6
The Longest Yard
Directed by Robert Aldrich
1974
Burt Reynolds played college football and you can see it in every collision: a disgraced quarterback in a Georgia prison is ordered to build a team out of the inmates.
★ 2.6
White Christmas
Directed by Michael Curtiz
1954
The first film shot in VistaVision, which was invented to compete with CinemaScope: Bing Crosby sings a song he had already made famous twelve years earlier, and it still works.
★ 2.6
Driving Miss Daisy
Directed by Bruce Beresford
1989
Jessica Tandy was eighty when she won Best Actress, the oldest ever: twenty-five years of an Atlanta employer and her chauffeur, played so lightly that people underrate what the film is doing.
★ 2.7
Oliver!
Directed by Carol Reed
1968
The last musical to hold Best Picture for thirty-four years, and the last G-rated winner: Carol Reed turns Dickens into an enormous street spectacle and the songs never let up.
★ 2.7
Cross of Iron
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
1977
Sam Peckinpah's only war film, told entirely from the German side of the Eastern Front: Orson Welles called it the finest anti-war film since All Quiet on the Western Front.
★ 2.7
A Man For All Seasons
Directed by Fred Zinnemann
1966
Paul Scofield had played it on stage and was not a film star, and he won anyway: Thomas More refuses to say one sentence, and the whole English state comes for him.
★ 2.7
Tsotsi
Directed by Gavin Hood
2005 · South Africa
South Africa's first Academy Award for a foreign language film: a Johannesburg gang member steals a car and finds a baby in the back, and the film gives him no easy way out.
★ 2.7
Tender Mercies
Directed by Bruce Beresford
1983
Robert Duvall wrote and sang his own songs, then took Best Actor for the quietest work of his life: a broken country singer stops drinking at a Texas motel and stays.
★ 2.8
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Directed by Hector Babenco
1985
William Hurt took Best Actor and the film became the first independent production nominated for Best Picture: two cellmates in a Brazilian prison, one political and one who describes old movies.
★ 2.8
El Cid
Directed by Anthony Mann
1961
Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren in the last great historical epic before the genre collapsed: real castles in Spain, thousands of extras on horseback, and Miklos Rozsa's score doing the heavy lifting.
★ 2.8
Reversal of Fortune
Directed by Barbet Schroeder
1990
Jeremy Irons plays Claus von Bulow as completely unreadable and was rewarded for it: the film is narrated by his wife from the coma she never woke from, and takes no position.
★ 2.8
Where Eagles Dare
Directed by Brian G. Hutton
1968 · United Kingdom
Alistair MacLean wrote it as a screenplay first and a novel second: Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood go into an Alpine castle after a captured general, and the cable car fight is superb.
★ 2.8
Gates of Heaven
Directed by Errol Morris
1978
Herzog promised to eat his shoe if Errol Morris ever finished it, then did: two California pet cemeteries, and the people talking about their animals reveal everything about themselves.
★ 2.9
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
On Golden Pond
Directed by Mark Rydell
1981
Henry Fonda won his only competitive Oscar at seventy-six and died four months later: he and Jane Fonda play an estranged father and daughter, which was not much of a stretch for either.
★ 2.9
Of Mice and Men
Directed by Gary Sinise
1992
Gary Sinise directed it and played George opposite John Malkovich, the best casting the book has ever had: two migrant workers and one plan they will not stop describing.
★ 2.9
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
Directed by Frank Capra
1936
Frank Capra and Gary Cooper at the height of the New Deal: a tuba-playing greeting card poet inherits twenty million dollars and finds out what New York wants from him.
★ 2.9
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
The Gunfighter
Directed by Henry King
1950
Gregory Peck plays the fastest gun alive as an exhausted man who wants a quiet drink: every revisionist western owes the premise, and Zanuck blamed the mustache for the box office.
★ 3.0
The Big Country
Directed by William Wyler
1958
Jerome Moross wrote the score American westerns have been quoting ever since: a sea captain arrives in Texas and refuses to prove anything to anybody, which nobody there can forgive.
★ 3.0
Spaceballs
Directed by Mel Brooks
1987
George Lucas allowed it on condition that no merchandise be sold, so Mel Brooks put a merchandising joke in the film: Star Wars parodied by someone who clearly loves it.
★ 3.0
Funny Face
Directed by Stanley Donen
1957
Richard Avedon served as visual consultant and shot the photographs himself: Audrey Hepburn is a bookshop clerk turned Paris model, and the darkroom sequence is the most beautiful red ever filmed.
★ 3.0
Hamlet
Directed by Laurence Olivier
1948 · United Kingdom
The first film made outside America to be named Best Picture: Laurence Olivier cut half the play, shot it in high-contrast monochrome, and moves the camera through Elsinore like a ghost.
★ 3.0
Three Amigos
Directed by John Landis
1986
Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short play silent film stars mistaken for real gunfighters: a Mexican village hires them in earnest, and the singing bush is exactly as stupid as it sounds.
★ 3.0
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
Rush Hour
Directed by Brett Ratner
1998
Jackie Chan had been a superstar everywhere except America and this finally fixed that: he does all his own stunts, and Chris Tucker talks at a frequency nobody else reaches.
★ 3.1
White Men Can't Jump
Directed by Ron Shelton
1992
Nobody has ever written trash talk this well: Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson hustle Los Angeles playground courts, and the insults are more athletic than the basketball.
★ 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
The Spy Who Loved Me
Directed by Lewis Gilbert
1977
The ski jump off the cliff opening a parachute painted like a Union Jack is the single best Bond stunt: Roger Moore's finest hour, with Jaws and an underwater Lotus.
★ 3.1
The Lost Boys
Directed by Joel Schumacher
1987
Vampires got young, good-looking and sold on a soundtrack here: Joel Schumacher put them on a California boardwalk in 1987, and the horror genre never went back to castles.
★ 3.1
Marnie
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1964
The Hitchcock film scholars argue about most, and the production that ruined his working relationship with Tippi Hedren: a compulsive thief is caught by someone who decides to keep her.
★ 3.2
Silverado
Directed by Lawrence Kasdan
1985
Lawrence Kasdan set out to prove the western was not dead and assembled half of Hollywood: four men ride into a town run by the wrong sheriff, and the pleasures are entirely traditional.
★ 3.2
Pretty in Pink
Directed by Howard Deutch
1986
Molly Ringwald's prom dress is stitched together from two others, an image the whole film runs on: Howard Deutch directs a John Hughes script about who gets to sit where.
★ 3.2
The NeverEnding Story
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
1984
Michael Ende hated the adaptation enough to sue: a bullied boy steals a book from a shop and reads himself into a world being eaten by nothing, and the puppetry is extraordinary.
★ 3.2
The Seven Year Itch
Directed by Billy Wilder
1955
The subway grate photograph is more famous than the film: Billy Wilder strands a Manhattan husband alone for the summer, Marilyn Monroe moves in upstairs, and the fantasies start immediately.
★ 3.2
Chariots of Fire
Directed by Hugh Hudson
1981 · United Kingdom
The Vangelis theme is so famous that people forget the film underneath is about religion: two runners at the 1924 Olympics, one running for God and one against English antisemitism.
★ 3.3
Eight Men Out
Directed by John Sayles
1988
The 1919 World Series fix filmed as a labor dispute rather than a scandal: John Sayles shows eight underpaid White Sox taking money from gamblers, and an owner who pays them nothing.
★ 3.3
The Big Red One
Directed by Samuel Fuller
1980
Samuel Fuller fought in the division he is filming and waited thirty-five years to tell it: a squad from North Africa to Sicily to Normandy, filmed as a job that does not end.
★ 3.3
March of the Penguins
Directed by Luc Jacquet
2005
The American release swapped the French version's talking penguins for Morgan Freeman narrating, and it became a phenomenon: a colony walks seventy miles inland to breed in the Antarctic winter.
★ 3.3
The Bad News Bears
Directed by Michael Ritchie
1976
The children swear constantly, the coach drinks in the dugout, and nobody learns very much: Walter Matthau took a Little League team and made the least sentimental sports film ever released.
★ 3.3
Scent of a Woman
Directed by Martin Brest
1992
Al Pacino spent months learning to hold his eyes unfocused and never once looks at anything: a blind retired colonel hires a prep school student for one enormous weekend in New York.
★ 3.3
Henry V (1944)
Directed by Laurence Olivier
1944 · United Kingdom
Made during the war and dedicated to the commandos and airborne troops of Britain: Laurence Olivier opens inside the Globe and then simply walks the film out into the real world.
★ 3.4
The Naked Spur
Directed by Anthony Mann
1953
Five people and a mountain, and no town or fort anywhere in it: Anthony Mann pushed James Stewart into playing a bounty hunter with nothing likable left, shot entirely outdoors.
★ 3.4
The Miracle Worker
Directed by Arthur Penn
1962
The dining room fight took five days to shoot: Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke both took Oscars, and neither Helen Keller nor her teacher gives an inch anywhere in it.
★ 3.4
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
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
The Endless Summer
Directed by Bruce Brown
1966
Bruce Brown could not get a distributor so he rented cinemas himself, starting in Wichita in January snow: two surfers follow summer around the world, and the narration is unhurried and dry.
★ 3.4
Love Actually
Directed by Richard Curtis
2003 · United Kingdom
Nine storylines, two hours, and half the country reruns it every December while the other half writes essays about why it is bad: Richard Curtis knew exactly what he was doing.
★ 3.5
Zoolander
Directed by Ben Stiller
2001
The World Trade Center had to be digitally erased from the skyline two weeks before release: an idiot male model, and Ben Stiller commits to the stupidity absolutely and without apology.
★ 3.5
Napoleon Dynamite
Directed by Jared Hess
2004
It cost under half a million and grossed a hundred times that: an Idaho teenager, his brother's internet girlfriend, and a deadpan rhythm nobody has successfully copied.
★ 3.5
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
Team America: World Police
Directed by Trey Parker
2004
The puppetry is entirely straight-faced and never winks: Trey Parker and Matt Stone spent a fortune on marionettes so they could aim a Jerry Bruckheimer parody at absolutely everyone.
★ 3.5
The Quiet American
Directed by Phillip Noyce
2002
Miramax delayed releasing it after September 11 because the politics looked unpatriotic: Graham Greene's novel about American certainty in 1952 Saigon, with Michael Caine giving his best late performance.
★ 3.5
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
1973
Bob Dylan wrote the score, appears in it, and gave the world Knockin on Heaven's Door: MGM cut Peckinpah's version to pieces, and the restoration is a great elegiac western.
★ 3.6
Big Trouble in Little China
Directed by John Carpenter
1986
It flopped completely and then found everybody on video: Kurt Russell's swaggering trucker is really the useless sidekick, and nothing in it is ever explained to anyone.
★ 3.6
The Year of Living Dangerously
Directed by Peter Weir
1982
Linda Hunt is the only person ever to win an Oscar for playing someone of another sex: Jakarta in 1965, and an Australian correspondent who understands almost nothing about it.
★ 3.6
Miracle
Directed by Gavin O'Connor
2004
They cast hockey players and taught them to act rather than the reverse: Kurt Russell plays Herb Brooks skating his young Olympic squad into the ground before Lake Placid in 1980.
★ 3.6
Wayne's World
Directed by Penelope Spheeris
1992
The car scene put Bohemian Rhapsody back in the American top ten seventeen years after its release: two men broadcast a public access show from a basement and address the camera constantly.
★ 3.6
Crazy Heart
Directed by Scott Cooper
2009
It was set for direct-to-video release until Jeff Bridges' performance changed the studio's mind: a country singer down to bowling alleys in the Southwest, and a reporter who wants his story.
★ 3.6
Rudy
Directed by David Anspaugh
1993
Notre Dame had not allowed a film crew on campus in fifty years: a kid with no size and no grades wants to dress for one game, and everybody tells him no.
★ 3.7
Shakespeare in Love
Directed by John Madden
1998 · United Kingdom
Tom Stoppard rewrote the script and you can hear him in every scene: a blocked Shakespeare finds his Juliet, and nothing else is this funny about how theater actually gets made.
★ 3.7
Harvey
Directed by Henry Koster
1950
James Stewart played it on Broadway and returned to the part for decades: an unfailingly pleasant man insists his closest friend is a six-foot-three invisible rabbit, and his family wants him committed.
★ 3.7
Like Water for Chocolate
Directed by Alfonso Arau
1992 · Mexico
Food is the only language anyone in it is allowed: a Mexican daughter forbidden to marry cooks her feelings into every dish, and everyone at the table has to eat them.
★ 3.7
The Full Monty
Directed by Peter Cattaneo
1997 · United Kingdom
Made in Sheffield for just over two million pounds and it outgrossed everything in Britain that year: six unemployed steelworkers decide to strip for money, and the comedy comes out of genuine desperation.
★ 3.7
Shine
Directed by Scott Hicks
1996
Geoffrey Rush learned the Rachmaninov himself so the hands would be right: the pianist David Helfgott, filmed across three ages, and a father who cannot let a prodigy leave home.
★ 3.8
The Shootist
Directed by Don Siegel
1976
John Wayne's last film has him playing a gunfighter running out of time, which he knew he was: Don Siegel shot it plainly, and the whole genre says goodbye at once.
★ 3.8
Spellbound
Directed by Jeffrey Blitz
2002
Eight children and one spelling bee, and it is unbearably tense: Jeffrey Blitz found that how American families prepare for it reveals everything about them, and the finals are agony.
★ 3.8
Strictly Ballroom
Directed by Baz Luhrmann
1992 · Australia
Baz Luhrmann's debut already has the whole style in place: competitive ballroom dancing filmed like grand opera, where a dancer using his own steps counts as a moral crisis.
★ 3.8
Sleuth
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1972
Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine were both up for Best Actor, which has happened only a handful of times: a mystery writer invites his wife's lover to a country house full of games.
★ 3.8
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 Sandlot
Directed by David Mickey Evans
1993
It has become the film American men quote at each other about being eleven: a new kid in 1962 learns baseball on a vacant lot, and the stakes are imaginary and total.
★ 3.9
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
Directed by Jeremiah Chechik
1989
Written by John Hughes, with Chevy Chase back as the same hapless father a third time: a man books two weeks off to build the perfect family Christmas out of things that break.
★ 3.9
The Outsiders
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1983
Coppola cast almost every young male star of the coming decade before any of them were famous: Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon and Rob Lowe, filmed in Tulsa like a fever dream.
★ 3.9
Point Break
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
1991
Kathryn Bigelow made the most physically committed action film anyone had attempted: an FBI agent infiltrates a crew of surfers who rob banks in president masks, and starts preferring their company.
★ 3.9
Wedding Crashers
Directed by David Dobkin
2005
Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn talk across each other at speed and the rhythm carries the film: two divorce lawyers crash strangers' weddings as a hobby, with rules they have written down.
★ 3.9
The Mission
Directed by Roland Joffe
1986 · United Kingdom
Ennio Morricone said he recognized himself in this score technically and spiritually: Jesuits build a mission above the Iguazu falls in the 1750s, and Europe decides its fate from several thousand miles away.
★ 4.0
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
La Vie en Rose
Directed by Olivier Dahan
2007 · France
Marion Cotillard ages from a young street singer to the end of Piaf's life and is unrecognizable throughout: the first Best Actress win for a performance given entirely in French.
★ 4.0
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
He Got Game
Directed by Spike Lee
1998
Spike Lee scored a basketball film with Aaron Copland and cast an NBA guard in the lead: a father is released from prison for a week to talk his son into a school.
★ 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
Meet the Parents
Directed by Jay Roach
2000
De Niro spent thirty years teaching audiences to fear him and then rented that out to a comedy: a man meets his girlfriend's father, and every single thing he does makes it worse.
★ 4.0
Grease
Directed by Randal Kleiser
1978
It was the highest-grossing musical ever made for more than twenty years: John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John are both obviously too old for high school, and it has never mattered.
★ 4.0
48 Hrs
Directed by Walter Hill
1982
Eddie Murphy's first film role and he takes the whole thing over: Walter Hill built the interracial buddy-cop formula here, and the bar scene made a twenty-one-year-old a movie star overnight.
★ 4.0
The Color of Money
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1986
Paul Newman got his Oscar twenty-five years late, for playing the same character a second time: Scorsese films pool halls like boxing rings, and Tom Cruise is the new hustler.
★ 4.1
Cooley High
Directed by Michael Schultz
1975
The Black American Graffiti, and better: Chicago teenagers in 1964 with a wall-to-wall Motown soundtrack, and Michael Schultz films a few days of hanging around as if nothing mattered more.
★ 4.1
The Jerk
Directed by Carl Reiner
1979
Steve Martin's first starring role opens with him claiming to have been born a poor black child, and never stops that far from the line: pure stupidity performed with total commitment.
★ 4.1
Cinderella Man
Directed by Ron Howard
2005
James Braddock was a broken-handed longshoreman on relief when he got a fight nobody expected him to survive: Ron Howard films the Depression as the real opponent, and Paul Giamatti steals it.
★ 4.1
Chicago
Directed by Rob Marshall
2002
Bob Fosse spent years trying to film his own 1975 stage musical and never did: every number plays inside the head of a woman on trial, and the trial is staged as vaudeville.
★ 4.1
Norma Rae
Directed by Martin Ritt
1979
Sally Field took Best Actress and the union organizing is filmed as actual work: a North Carolina textile mill, a hired organizer from New York, and a millhand who starts asking questions.
★ 4.1