Schindler's List
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1993
More people have understood the Holocaust through this film than through any other: Spielberg took no fee, shot it in black and white, and gave the last word to the survivors.
★ 9.7
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.
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
Raging Bull
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1980
Scorsese shot boxing as penance rather than sport, and audiences come out feeling bruised: De Niro's jealousy destroys everyone near him, in the blackest black and white imaginable.
★ 9.6
The Social Network
Directed by David Fincher
2010
The film that got the internet age right before anyone else did: Sorkin's dialogue moves faster than you can follow, and the loneliness underneath it has only aged better.
★ 8.7
Amadeus
Directed by Milos Forman
1984
It sent a whole generation out to buy Mozart records: Salieri narrates his own jealousy from an asylum, and the music keeps making his case better than he can.
★ 7.8
Andrei Rublev
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
1966
The Soviets shelved it for years and cut it repeatedly: Tarkovsky follows an icon painter through a brutal Russia, and the bell casting sequence justifies the whole three hours.
★ 7.7
The Wolf of Wall Street
Directed by Martin Scorsese
2013
Three hours of pure excess that never once slow down: Scorsese was seventy-one years old, and it moves faster than films made by directors a third his age.
★ 7.5
The Pianist
Directed by Roman Polanski
2002
Polanski escaped the Krakow ghetto as a child and waited sixty years to film any of it: a pianist left alone in the ruins of Warsaw, and no heroism anywhere.
★ 7.4
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Directed by Julian Schnabel
2007 · France
Schnabel put the camera inside a paralyzed man's one working eye and left it there: the memoir it comes from was dictated letter by letter, by blinking, and the film feels weightless anyway.
★ 6.7
Downfall
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
2004
Bruno Ganz plays Hitler as a man rather than a symbol, and Germany argued about the film for a year: the last twelve days in the bunker, filmed without comment or consolation.
★ 6.7
Moneyball
Directed by Bennett Miller
2011
A film about a spreadsheet that plays like a thriller: Sorkin and Zaillian turn Billy Beane's 2002 Oakland roster into an argument between a broke general manager and every scout in his building.
★ 6.7
Patton
Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner
1970
Coppola co-wrote it before The Godfather and George C. Scott refused the Oscar: a monologue in front of an enormous flag opens the most ambivalent film Hollywood ever made about a general.
★ 6.5
Catch Me if You Can
Directed by Steven Spielberg
2002
Spielberg's lightest film runs on charm and a great John Williams theme: a teenager talks his way into a pilot's uniform and a doctor's coat, with an FBI agent always one hotel behind.
★ 6.4
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
Serpico
Directed by Sidney Lumet
1973
Frank Serpico was a real New York cop who would not take an envelope: Lumet films departmental corruption as an ordinary daily fact, and Pacino plays stubbornness as an entire personality.
★ 6.3
Into the Wild
Directed by Sean Penn
2007
Sean Penn spent ten years persuading the family to let him film this: a graduate burns his savings and walks into the Alaskan interior, and the film neither mocks him nor canonizes him.
★ 6.3
In the Name of the Father
Directed by Jim Sheridan
1993
Daniel Day-Lewis plays a man convicted of a bombing he had nothing to do with: the Guildford Four case, filmed while the wound in Britain was still fresh.
★ 6.2
Lincoln
Directed by Steven Spielberg
2012
Day-Lewis found a high, reedy voice for Lincoln because the historical accounts describe one: Spielberg and Tony Kushner build a whole film out of counting votes for the Thirteenth Amendment.
★ 6.0
Milk
Directed by Gus Van Sant
2008
Van Sant shot in the actual Castro Street storefront where Harvey Milk ran his campaigns: Sean Penn plays the first openly gay man elected to major office in California, and plays him delighted.
★ 5.7
Carlos
Directed by Olivier Assayas
2010
Nearly six hours across eight languages and a dozen countries: Olivier Assayas films a terrorist's whole career as a business, with clients, invoices, expense disputes and a payroll to meet.
★ 5.6
The Fighter
Directed by David O. Russell
2010
Christian Bale plays the older brother who threw away his own career and cannot stop coaching: Lowell, Massachusetts shot from inside the family, which is the hardest opponent in it.
★ 5.6
127 Hours
Directed by Danny Boyle
2010
Boyle built a thriller around someone who cannot move: James Franco is pinned by a boulder in a Utah canyon, and the camera keeps finding movement in a space three feet wide.
★ 5.5
Reds
Directed by Warren Beatty
1981
Beatty tracked down dozens of surviving witnesses and cut their interviews straight into the film: the Russian Revolution seen through two American radicals who cannot stop arguing.
★ 5.5
The Queen
Directed by Stephen Frears
2006
Helen Mirren plays a reigning monarch during the worst week of her reign and makes her sympathetic without softening her: the week after Diana died, reconstructed almost hour by hour.
★ 5.5
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
Capote
Directed by Bennett Miller
2005
Philip Seymour Hoffman spent months on the voice and it never sounds like an impression: Truman Capote gets the book of his life out of two condemned men, and knows what that costs.
★ 5.4
Walk the Line
Directed by James Mangold
2005
Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon sang everything themselves after months of training: Johnny Cash's early years, filmed with the music treated as the argument rather than the soundtrack.
★ 5.3
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 Motorcycle Diaries
Directed by Walter Salles
2004
Before he was a poster, Ernesto Guevara was a medical student on a broken motorcycle: Walter Salles shot the actual route through South America, and the politics arrive as things seen.
★ 4.8
My Left Foot
Directed by Jim Sheridan
1989
Christy Brown wrote and painted with one foot, and nothing here makes him saintly: Jim Sheridan films a Dublin family that treats him as theirs, loudly and without any ceremony.
★ 4.6
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
American Splendor
Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini
2003
The real Harvey Pekar appears in the film alongside the actor playing him, and they discuss it: a file clerk in Cleveland turned his ordinary life into comics, and stayed a file clerk.
★ 4.5
Ray
Directed by Taylor Hackford
2004
Jamie Foxx wore prosthetics that sealed his eyes shut for up to fourteen hours a day: Ray Charles approved the performance himself, then died months before the film opened.
★ 4.4
Erin Brockovich
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
2000
Julia Roberts took the Oscar playing someone still alive and still angry about it: a legal clerk with no training assembles the case against a utility poisoning a California town.
★ 4.4
A Beautiful Mind
Directed by Ron Howard
2001
Ron Howard took Best Picture for a mathematician's biography: Russell Crowe plays John Nash from Princeton prodigy to Cold War code work, and Jennifer Connelly matches him the whole way through.
★ 4.3
Yankee Doodle Dandy
Directed by Michael Curtiz
1942
James Cagney was known for gangsters and had started life as a hoofer: he plays George M. Cohan flat out, and improvised the dance down the White House staircase on the day.
★ 4.1
Cinderella Man
Directed by Ron Howard
2005
James Braddock was a broken-handed longshoreman on relief when he got a fight nobody expected him to survive: Ron Howard films the Depression as the real opponent, and Paul Giamatti steals it.
★ 4.1
La Vie en Rose
Directed by Olivier Dahan
2007 · France
Marion Cotillard ages from a young street singer to the end of Piaf's life and is unrecognizable throughout: the first Best Actress win for a performance given entirely in French.
★ 4.0
Shine
Directed by Scott Hicks
1996
Geoffrey Rush learned the Rachmaninov himself so the hands would be right: the pianist David Helfgott, filmed across three ages, and a father who cannot let a prodigy leave home.
★ 3.8