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
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 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
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
Good Morning, Vietnam
Directed by Barry Levinson
1987
Robin Williams was handed a microphone and the cameras simply ran: an armed forces disc jockey lands in Saigon in 1965, and everyone above him wants the broadcast back the way it was.
★ 4.1
Born on the Fourth of July
Directed by Oliver Stone
1989
Ron Kovic wrote the book and then the screenplay with Oliver Stone, who had been to the same war: a Long Island boy enlists in 1967, and Tom Cruise abandons his own image.
★ 4.7
Gandhi
Directed by Richard Attenborough
1982
The funeral scene used around three hundred thousand extras, more than any film before or since: Richard Attenborough spent twenty years raising the money, and Ben Kingsley disappears completely.
★ 4.8
The Last Temptation of Christ
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1988
A Paris cinema showing it was firebombed and Scorsese needed years to get it financed: Christ imagined as someone who could refuse, with Peter Gabriel's score sounding like the actual Middle East.
★ 5.3
Empire of the Sun
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1987
Christian Bale was thirteen and carries the entire film: Spielberg follows an English boy separated from his parents in occupied Shanghai, and never lets the war become an adventure.
★ 5.4
Ip Man
Directed by Wilson Yip
2008
Donnie Yen plays Bruce Lee's future teacher and does his own fighting throughout: Wing Chun filmed at full speed with long takes, in a Foshan under Japanese occupation.
★ 5.4
A Better Tomorrow
Directed by John Woo
1986 · Hong Kong
It made Chow Yun-fat a superstar and started an entire Hong Kong genre: two brothers on opposite sides of the law, and a gunman in a trenchcoat lighting a cigarette with money.
★ 5.7
Three Kings
Directed by David O. Russell
1999
Russell shot it on bleached film stock so the desert looks radioactive: four American soldiers go looking for Kuwaiti gold in the days after the Gulf War stops, carrying a stolen map.
★ 6.0
Argo
Directed by Ben Affleck
2012
The CIA really did produce a fake science fiction movie to get six Americans out of Tehran, and kept it classified until 1997: Affleck plays the operation completely straight.
★ 6.1
The Man Who Would Be King
Directed by John Huston
1975
Huston tried to make this for twenty years and finally got Connery and Caine: two British soldiers walk into Kafiristan intending to be crowned as gods, and the joke gets serious slowly.
★ 6.1
The Last Emperor
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
1987
The Chinese government let Bertolucci shoot inside the Forbidden City, the first Western production ever allowed in: a child emperor is crowned before thousands and then history keeps rearranging him.
★ 6.4
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
Slumdog Millionaire
Directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan
2008 · United Kingdom
Boyle shot Mumbai on small digital cameras in real streets and Rahman's score carried it around the world: a contestant from the slums is detained for cheating, and each question opens a memory.
★ 6.4
Infernal Affairs
Directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak
2002 · Hong Kong
Scorsese's The Departed is a remake of this, and the Hong Kong original is fifty minutes tighter: two moles assigned to find each other, and a plot that never stops to explain itself.
★ 6.5
The Hidden Fortress
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1958 · Japan
Lucas took the two bickering peasants and turned them into R2-D2 and C-3PO: Kurosawa's first widescreen film tells an escape story from the point of view of its most useless characters.
★ 6.5
Deliverance
Directed by John Boorman
1972
The outdoors has never felt this hostile on film: Boorman shot in sequence and made his actors run the whitewater themselves, and a weekend canoe trip turns into something much older.
★ 6.6
Howl's Moving Castle
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
2004 · Japan
Miyazaki's most beautiful machine is a walking house held together by magic and bad temper: underneath the wonder is an angry anti-war film, made while he watched the invasion of Iraq.
★ 6.6
Hero
Directed by Zhang Yimou
2002 · China
Zhang Yimou shot each retelling of one assassination attempt in a different color: Christopher Doyle's photography is so beautiful that the film's politics start an argument every single time.
★ 6.7
Throne of Blood
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1957 · Japan
Shakespeare's Macbeth moved to sixteenth-century Japan with every line of the poetry gone: Kurosawa substitutes fog, Noh masks worn as faces, and a forest that seems to be watching the castle.
★ 6.8
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
MASH
Directed by Robert Altman
1970
Altman's overlapping dialogue turns up fully formed: army surgeons in Korea behave appallingly in order to stay sane, and the film was really about Vietnam all along.
★ 6.8
The Wind Rises
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
2013 · Japan
Miyazaki announced his retirement with it, a retirement he later took back: a young man designs beautiful aircraft that become weapons, and nothing about that is resolved.
★ 6.8
Letters from Iwo Jima
Directed by Clint Eastwood
2006
Eastwood made two films about the same battle, and the Japanese one is the better: shot almost entirely in Japanese, with a general nobody in America had heard of.
★ 6.9
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Directed by David Gelb
2011
It will alter how you think about doing one thing for an entire lifetime: an eighty-five-year-old sushi master in a Tokyo subway station, still not satisfied with himself.
★ 7.0
The Thin Red Line
Directed by Terrence Malick
1998
Malick came back after twenty years and made a war film about grass, light and the voices in men's heads: Guadalcanal, filmed as though the island were the subject.
★ 7.2
Zero Dark Thirty
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
2012
Bigelow filmed a decade-long manhunt as pure procedure and let the audience sit with what it cost: the torture scenes started an argument that has never been settled.
★ 7.2
Platoon
Directed by Oliver Stone
1986
Oliver Stone served in Vietnam and made this to correct everyone else's version: no glamour, no clarity, and a platoon that splits between two sergeants and stays split.
★ 7.3
The Hurt Locker
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
2009
Bigelow made war feel like an addiction rather than a duty: a bomb disposal sergeant works without much fear, and every defusal is stretched until the room turns physical.
★ 7.3
Monty Python's Life of Brian
Directed by Terry Jones
1979 · United Kingdom
Councils across Britain banned it and Norway would not show it at all: the Pythons went after zealotry rather than faith, which is exactly why it still works.
★ 7.7
Oldboy
Directed by Park Chan-wook
2003 · South Korea
Korean cinema broke through in the West on the strength of this: fifteen years locked in a room without explanation, and a corridor fight staged in one take.
★ 7.8
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Directed by Ang Lee
2000 · Hong Kong
It won four Academy Awards and remains the highest grossing foreign language film ever released in America: wire work so graceful that gravity stops being a consideration.
★ 7.8
The Act of Killing
Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and Christine Cynn
2012
Oppenheimer asked the men who carried out Indonesia's mass killings to restage them as movie scenes, and they agreed gladly: no documentary has ever been braver or harder to sit through.
★ 7.8
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
The Deer Hunter
Directed by Michael Cimino
1978
Cimino spends a whole first act on a steel town and a wedding, so that when the war arrives it lands on people you already know by name.
★ 8.0
Princess Mononoke
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
1997 · Japan
It held the Japanese box office record until Titanic arrived: Miyazaki staged a war between an iron town and the forest gods and refused to name a villain.
★ 8.0
Close-Up
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
1990
Kiarostami blurred documentary and fiction so completely that nobody has quite untangled it since: a man caught impersonating a director, with everyone involved playing themselves on camera.
★ 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