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
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 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
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
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
My Cousin Vinny
Directed by Jonathan Lynn
1992
Law schools use it to teach cross-examination, which no other comedy can claim: two students are arrested in rural Alabama and defended by a cousin who has never tried a case.
★ 4.4
Dallas Buyers Club
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee
2013
They shot it in twenty-five days for five million dollars and won two acting Oscars: a Texas electrician starts importing unapproved drugs for himself and ends up supplying half the city.
★ 4.5
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Directed by Benh Zeitlin
2012
Quvenzhane Wallis was five when she auditioned and became the youngest Best Actress nominee ever: a bayou community below the levee refuses to leave, filmed like a child's own mythology.
★ 5.2
The Green Mile
Directed by Frank Darabont
1999
Darabont's second Stephen King prison film runs three hours and nobody notices: a death row guard in 1935 takes delivery of the largest, quietest inmate the block has ever held.
★ 5.4
Friday Night Lights
Directed by Peter Berg
2004
High-school football is the surface; the subject is a town with nothing else: Odessa, Texas in 1988, filmed handheld and close, where a losing season is a civic emergency.
★ 5.9
Sex, Lies and Videotape
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
1989
American independent film became a business the week Soderbergh took the Palme d'Or at twenty-six: he made it for a million dollars, and it is four people talking about what they want.
★ 6.1
In the Heat of the Night
Directed by Norman Jewison
1967
Poitier refused to film in the Deep South, so Mississippi was recreated in Illinois: a Philadelphia detective is arrested for being Black in a small town and then asked to solve its murder.
★ 6.3
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
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Directed by Coen Brothers
2000
Homer's Odyssey rerouted through Depression-era Mississippi: the soundtrack of gospel and bluegrass sold eight million copies and sent a mass audience back to music first recorded in the 1920s.
★ 6.8
Gone with the Wind
Directed by Victor Fleming
1939
Adjusted for inflation no film has ever earned more, and it is still telling the old South's version of itself: enormous, ravishing, and not to be trusted.
★ 7.4
Nashville
Directed by Robert Altman
1975
Altman's method arrives here fully formed: twenty-four characters, overlapping microphones, and five days of country music and politics that add up to a portrait of the whole country.
★ 7.5
To Kill a Mockingbird
Directed by Robert Mulligan
1962
Gregory Peck gave America the father it wanted to believe in: a small-town lawyer defends a Black man in a case the town has already decided, seen through his daughter's eyes.
★ 8.2
12 Years a Slave
Directed by Steve McQueen
2013
The first Best Picture from a Black director, and the least evasive film ever made about American slavery: McQueen holds shots long past comfort and refuses to look away.
★ 8.3
A Streetcar Named Desire
Directed by Elia Kazan
1951
Three of its four leads won Academy Awards and the fourth was Brando: this is where screen acting stopped being theatrical and started being something else entirely.
★ 8.4
Moonlight
Directed by Barry Jenkins
2016
One life told in three chapters by three different actors, and shot in blues and purples so tender the film almost hums: nothing about it looks like anything else.
★ 8.4
The General
Directed by Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman
1926
Keaton did every stunt himself and dropped a real locomotive through a burning bridge: it flopped, cost him his independence within two years, and is now considered the great silent comedy.
★ 8.6