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.
8 films
SortEditorial Year Title
Person·John Ford✕clear
Crime drama · Drama

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
Drama

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
Romantic drama · Comedy drama

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
Western

My Darling Clementine

Directed by John Ford
1946

Ford claimed Wyatt Earp himself described the gunfight to him: what stays with people is not the shootout but a church dance on a bare wooden floor under an unfinished roof.

★ 6.3
Drama

The Grapes of Wrath

Directed by John Ford
1940

That a major studio released this in 1940 is still hard to believe: Ford films an Oklahoma family driven west by the banks, and Gregg Toland lights the migrant camps like documentary photographs.

★ 6.8
Western

Stagecoach

Directed by John Ford
1939

It made John Wayne a star, invented Monument Valley as a place in the American mind, and put nine strangers in one coach: every road movie descends from it.

★ 7.0
Western

The Searchers

Directed by John Ford
1956

Other directors have been stealing from this western for seventy years: Ford put John Wayne's racism on screen without excusing it, and framed his story in a much-copied doorway.

★ 9.0