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