The Shawshank Redemption
Directed by Frank Darabont
1994
It lost money in cinemas and has sat at the top of IMDb's ranking since 2008: a prison friendship, told patiently, that pays off better than almost anything.
★ 8.9
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.
Toy Story
Directed by John Lasseter
1995
First feature film animated entirely on computers, and the start of Pixar's extraordinary run: it holds up because underneath the toys it is a sharp story about jealousy.
★ 8.7
The Big Lebowski
Directed by Coen Brothers
1998
It underwhelmed in cinemas and then grew a festival, a religion and a vocabulary: the Coens built a Chandler plot around a man whose only ambition is getting his rug replaced.
★ 8.1
Toy Story 3
Directed by Lee Unkrich
2010
Pixar took a third film in a series somewhere nobody expected it to go: the toys end up far from a toy box, and the last act is genuinely harrowing.
★ 7.4
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Directed by George Roy Hill
1969
Two men have never been better company on screen: Newman and Redford spend the film running out of frontier and enjoying each other far too much to panic.
★ 7.3
Midnight Cowboy
Directed by John Schlesinger
1969
The only X-rated film that ever took Best Picture: a Texas hustler and an ailing con man share a condemned New York apartment, and the friendship is the whole thing.
★ 7.2
Rio Bravo
Directed by Howard Hawks
1959
Hawks made it as an argument against High Noon: instead of a marshal begging for help, four flawed men hold a jail and enjoy each other's company doing it.
★ 7.0
Toy Story 2
Directed by John Lasseter and Ash Brannon
1999
Pixar scrapped the whole film and rebuilt it in nine months, and it came out better than expected: the song about being outgrown is what people remember.
★ 7.0
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
Easy Rider
Directed by Dennis Hopper
1969
New Hollywood found its proof here: two bikers ride east on drug money, a four-hundred-thousand-dollar film outgrossed studio pictures, and the men who had run the studios for forty years lost the argument.
★ 6.5
Hot Fuzz
Directed by Edgar Wright
2007 · United Kingdom
Wright's parody is better constructed than most of the films it mocks: a London supercop is exiled to a picture-perfect village, and the final act is staged better than the real thing.
★ 6.4
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Directed by John Hughes
1987
John Hughes wrote it in three days: two men try to get home for Thanksgiving, and John Candy turns what starts as a comic irritant into the most devastating performance of his career.
★ 6.2
The Man Who Would Be King
Directed by John Huston
1975
Huston tried to make this for twenty years and finally got Connery and Caine: two British soldiers walk into Kafiristan intending to be crowned as gods, and the joke gets serious slowly.
★ 6.1
The Blues Brothers
Directed by John Landis
1980
It held the record for cars destroyed on film and works as a music documentary besides: Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown and Cab Calloway all get a full number.
★ 6.1
Harold and Maude
Directed by Hal Ashby
1971
It failed on release and then ran 115 straight weeks at a single Minnesota theater: a death-obsessed teenager falls for a seventy-nine-year-old, and Cat Stevens scores the whole thing.
★ 6.0
Withnail and I
Directed by Bruce Robinson
1987 · United Kingdom
Richard E. Grant does not drink and had to be taught to be convincing: two unemployed actors leave London for a cottage in 1969 with no money, no food and no plan whatsoever.
★ 5.8
Rain Man
Directed by Barry Levinson
1988
Hoffman spent a year with autistic men before shooting and the film changed what most people thought autism was: two brothers, one Buick, and a drive across America neither of them wanted.
★ 5.6
Bridesmaids
Directed by Paul Feig
2011
Studios genuinely believed women would not carry a raunchy comedy, and this ended the argument in one weekend: Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo wrote it, and the real romance is between friends.
★ 5.3
Lethal Weapon
Directed by Richard Donner
1987
Shane Black sold the script at twenty-three and set the buddy-cop template for two decades: one cop is counting down to his pension, the other is a widower nobody trusts to be careful.
★ 5.3
Midnight Run
Directed by Martin Brest
1988
De Niro is funnier here than in any comedy he tried to be funny in: a bounty hunter has to move an embezzling accountant coast to coast, and the accountant never stops talking.
★ 4.9
Swingers
Directed by Doug Liman
1996
Jon Favreau wrote it about his own bad year and they shot in real bars without permits: two hundred thousand dollars total, and the answering machine scene is unbearable in the best way.
★ 4.8
Beverly Hills Cop
Directed by Martin Brest
1984
Sylvester Stallone rewrote the script into an action picture, then quit two weeks before shooting: Eddie Murphy came in days later, and nobody escaped that synthesizer theme for years.
★ 4.6
Dumb and Dumber
Directed by Farrelly Brothers
1994
Jim Carrey had three hits in a single year and this one has aged best: two men drive to Aspen to return a briefcase, understanding nothing about anything at any point.
★ 4.6
Friday
Directed by F. Gary Gray
1995
Ice Cube wrote it because he was tired of films that made his neighborhood look like a war zone: one Friday, one porch, and a comedy built out of nothing happening.
★ 4.4
The Trip
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
2010 · United Kingdom
Two comedians play unpleasant versions of themselves and improvise the whole thing: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon drive around northern England eating well and competing over Michael Caine impressions.
★ 4.3
The Hangover
Directed by Todd Phillips
2009
It withholds the night itself and works entirely on reconstruction: four men wake in a wrecked Las Vegas suite with the groom missing, and piece the evening back together from the evidence.
★ 4.3
The Odd Couple
Directed by Gene Saks
1968
Neil Simon's play handed American comedy a permanent shape: Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau share an apartment badly, and the television series that followed ran for five years.
★ 4.2
48 Hrs
Directed by Walter Hill
1982
Eddie Murphy's first film role and he takes the whole thing over: Walter Hill built the interracial buddy-cop formula here, and the bar scene made a twenty-one-year-old a movie star overnight.
★ 4.0
White Men Can't Jump
Directed by Ron Shelton
1992
Nobody has ever written trash talk this well: Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson hustle Los Angeles playground courts, and the insults are more athletic than the basketball.
★ 3.1
Rush Hour
Directed by Brett Ratner
1998
Jackie Chan had been a superstar everywhere except America and this finally fixed that: he does all his own stunts, and Chris Tucker talks at a frequency nobody else reaches.
★ 3.1
Driving Miss Daisy
Directed by Bruce Beresford
1989
Jessica Tandy was eighty when she won Best Actress, the oldest ever: twenty-five years of an Atlanta employer and her chauffeur, played so lightly that people underrate what the film is doing.
★ 2.7
Grumpy Old Men
Directed by Donald Petrie
1993
Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon had been perfecting this act for twenty-five years and it still lands: two Minnesota neighbors have hated each other since one married the other's girl.
★ 2.2
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
Silver Streak
Directed by Arthur Hiller
1976
Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor met on this and made three more together: a book editor takes a slow train from Los Angeles to Chicago and sees something through a window.
★ 1.9
Road to Morocco
Directed by David Butler
1942
Bob Hope and Bing Crosby keep telling the audience it is only a film, and a camel gets a line: the fourth wall came down here long before anyone named it.
★ 1.1