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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Ugetsu
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
1953
Mizoguchi's ghost story is the one other directors mention when asked what changed them: two peasants chase money through a civil war, and the crossing through fog is unearthly.
★ 8.2
Lost in Translation
Directed by Sofia Coppola
2003
Almost nothing happens and it stays with people for years: jet lag, neon, a Tokyo hotel bar, and two people awake at the wrong hours keeping each other company.
★ 8.2
Harakiri
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi
1962
Kobayashi took the samurai film apart from the inside: an old warrior asks to die in a lord's courtyard, and what he says first dismantles the entire code of honor.
★ 8.2
My Neighbor Totoro
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
1988 · Japan
Children's films almost never dare to have no villain: Miyazaki made eighty minutes of pure safety out of two sisters and a forest spirit, and it became Ghibli's emblem.
★ 8.2
Full Metal Jacket
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1987
The first half is the most quoted boot camp ever filmed: Kubrick found a real Marine drill instructor, let him write half his own material, and made basic training terrifying.
★ 8.3
Grave of the Fireflies
Directed by Isao Takahata
1988 · Japan
Nobody recommends this one lightly: Takahata put two children through the last months of the war in Japan, and being animated makes it harder to bear, not easier.
★ 8.4
Yojimbo
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1961 · Japan
Leone took it wholesale for A Fistful of Dollars and Toho forced a settlement out of court: Kurosawa's samurai playing two gangs against each other is the template everyone still uses.
★ 8.4
Yi Yi
Directed by Edward Yang
2000
Nothing else captures an ordinary family like this: Yang holds three generations of a Taipei household in one frame, and the small boy photographing people's backs explains the whole method.
★ 8.4
Ikiru
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1952 · Japan
Kurosawa's answer to how a life should be spent: a bureaucrat gets one piece of terrible news and starts spending what is left deliberately, which will change how you see your job.
★ 8.5
Late Spring
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu
1949
Ozu made the same film over and over and this is the most perfect version: a daughter who will not marry, a father who will not say what he wants, and one vase.
★ 8.6
Ran
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1985 · Japan
Kurosawa was seventy-five and his eyesight was failing when he made it: King Lear moved to feudal Japan, with a great battle that plays to music and nothing else.
★ 8.7
Parasite
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
2019
The first film not in English to win Best Picture: Bong turned class rage into something so entertaining that the whole world watched it and then argued about what it meant.
★ 8.9
Rashomon
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1950 · Japan
Kurosawa gave the language a word for irreconcilable testimony and opened Japanese cinema to the world: four accounts of one killing, none of which can be squared with another.
★ 9.1
Spirited Away
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
2001 · Japan
The high point of hand-drawn animation: Miyazaki invented a spirit world so dense and so unexplained that it took the Animated Feature Oscar away from every American studio.
★ 9.3
In the Mood for Love
Directed by Wong Kar-wai
2000
Longing has never been filmed better than this: Wong Kar-wai gets more out of a stairwell and one repeated waltz than most directors manage with an entire script.
★ 9.3