The Godfather
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1972
The summit of the American crime film: Coppola turned an immigrant family's rise and rot into the country's own epic, and made damnation look like a coronation.
★ 10.0
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 Godfather: Part II
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1974
Coppola did what almost nobody manages, and made a sequel with a real claim to surpassing the original: two eras of one family run side by side, and the colder one wins.
★ 9.8
Goodfellas
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1990
Every gangster film of the last thirty years is arguing with this one: Scorsese made the life so intoxicating for an hour that the comedown lands like a physical event.
★ 9.6
Once Upon a Time in America
Directed by Sergio Leone
1984
American distributors cut ninety minutes out of it and destroyed the reviews: restored to full length, Leone's fifty-year gangster elegy drifts between decades like an opium dream.
★ 7.9
La Haine
Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz
1995
France spent a year arguing over it and the government screened it for ministers: twenty-four hours with three young men in a Paris suburb after a riot.
★ 7.0
Miller's Crossing
Directed by Coen Brothers
1990
The Coens wrote it in the voice of a 1930s crime novel and never break character once: a hat blowing through woods is the famous image, and nobody explains it.
★ 6.9
Scarface
Directed by Brian De Palma
1983
No film has been quoted by more rappers: De Palma and Stone made a Miami cocaine epic so excessive that it turned into a genuine American myth.
★ 6.9
Casino
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1995
Scorsese's Las Vegas is a machine for taking money and the film shows you every gear: three hours of narration, costumes and a system that eats everyone inside it.
★ 6.8
Rififi
Directed by Jules Dassin
1955 · France
Dassin was blacklisted out of Hollywood and made this in France for almost nothing: the half-hour robbery at its center plays in near-total silence, and the genre has been imitating it since.
★ 6.5
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
Directed by Guy Ritchie
1998 · United Kingdom
Guy Ritchie raised the money out of favors and cast a professional footballer who had never acted: four London friends owe half a million pounds by Friday, and five plots collide getting it.
★ 5.2
Training Day
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
2001
Denzel Washington took an Academy Award playing against everything audiences trusted him with: Antoine Fuqua shot in real Los Angeles neighborhoods, and a rookie narcotics officer gets one day to prove himself.
★ 5.1
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