8.5
Directed by Federico Fellini
1963 · Italy
Fellini could not think of a film to make, so he made one about that: the result is a circus of memory and fantasy that every artist since has borrowed from.
★ 9.2
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.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Directed by Michel Gondry
2004
No romance this century has come close: Kaufman's premise, that you could pay to have someone erased, turns out to be the most honest thing anyone has said about breakups.
★ 8.9
Parasite
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
2019
The first film not in English to win Best Picture: Bong turned class rage into something so entertaining that the whole world watched it and then argued about what it meant.
★ 8.9
La Dolce Vita
Directed by Federico Fellini
1960 · Italy
It put the word paparazzi into every language on earth: Fellini drifts through seven Roman nights of parties and beautiful exhaustion, and the fountain at dawn became permanent.
★ 8.8
The Apartment
Directed by Billy Wilder
1960
A comedy that breaks your heart and stays funny while doing it: Wilder took the sourest possible subject, a man lending his bed to his bosses, and made it warm.
★ 8.8
The Rules of the Game
Directed by Jean Renoir
1939 · France
Banned in 1939, booed at its premiere, then in the top ten of every Sight and Sound poll for sixty years: Renoir turned a hunting party into a diagnosis of a doomed society.
★ 8.8
Yi Yi
Directed by Edward Yang
2000
Nothing else captures an ordinary family like this: Yang holds three generations of a Taipei household in one frame, and the small boy photographing people's backs explains the whole method.
★ 8.4
Groundhog Day
Directed by Harold Ramis
1993
The title became a phrase people use without knowing the film: a comedy about repeating one day turned into the most quietly serious argument about how to live.
★ 8.2
Do the Right Thing
Directed by Spike Lee
1989
No American film has been braver about refusing to resolve: one Brooklyn block on the hottest day of the year, and Lee will not tell you who was right.
★ 8.2
Lost in Translation
Directed by Sofia Coppola
2003
Almost nothing happens and it stays with people for years: jet lag, neon, a Tokyo hotel bar, and two people awake at the wrong hours keeping each other company.
★ 8.2
Manhattan
Directed by Woody Allen
1979
It opens with the best love letter any city has received: Gershwin over black and white Manhattan, and then two hours of people ruining their lives beautifully.
★ 7.9
Lady Bird
Directed by Greta Gerwig
2017
Gerwig's first solo film became the best reviewed of its year: a Sacramento teenager and her mother fight about everything, and the film refuses to take a side.
★ 7.6
The Truman Show
Directed by Peter Weir
1998
Psychiatrists named a delusion after it: a man begins to suspect his whole town is a set and everyone in his life is paid, and 1998 had no idea.
★ 7.6
Inside Llewyn Davis
Directed by Coen Brothers
2013
The Coens made the saddest film about failure that anyone has managed to make funny: a folk singer plays beautifully, sleeps on couches, and gets absolutely nowhere at all.
★ 7.5
Dazed and Confused
Directed by Richard Linklater
1993
Nothing happens and that is the entire point: Linklater catches the last day of school in 1976 so exactly that people who were not there remember it anyway.
★ 7.3
American Graffiti
Directed by George Lucas
1973
One night of cruising in 1962, with the radio playing wall to wall from start to finish: Lucas caught an America that was about to stop existing.
★ 7.3
Trainspotting
Directed by Danny Boyle
1996
It made a heroin film feel like a night out without ever pretending the squalor was not there: Boyle cut the whole thing to a soundtrack that never sits still.
★ 7.3
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
2001 · Mexico
A road trip with a narrator who keeps interrupting to tell you things the characters will never know: Cuaron slips a portrait of Mexico under a teenage sex comedy.
★ 7.3
Almost Famous
Directed by Cameron Crowe
2000
Cameron Crowe was writing for Rolling Stone at fifteen and on the road with the Allman Brothers at sixteen: the film gets every detail right, including the boredom.
★ 7.3
A Serious Man
Directed by Coen Brothers
2009
The Coens' most personal film and their least forgiving: a Minnesota physics professor's life comes apart for no reason at all, and nobody in it will explain anything.
★ 7.3