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
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.
Pulp Fiction
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
1994
Young filmmakers were allowed to sound different after this one: Tarantino let two hitmen argue about hamburgers for ten minutes, and an entire decade of American cinema followed.
★ 9.5
Sunset Boulevard
Directed by Billy Wilder
1950
Hollywood has never been crueler about itself: Louis B. Mayer told Wilder he had disgraced the industry, which is the highest praise the film could possibly have received.
★ 9.5
Double Indemnity
Directed by Billy Wilder
1944
Film noir gets its blueprint here: Wilder and Chandler wrote dialogue nobody has matched for hardness, and set the pattern of the doomed man telling his own story.
★ 9.0
No Country for Old Men
Directed by Coen Brothers
2007
The Coens made a chase film with almost no music in it at all: Javier Bardem's killer with a cattle gun became the most frightening figure of the decade.
★ 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
Fargo
Directed by Coen Brothers
1996
Marge Gunderson is the warmest character the Coens ever wrote, and the reason this one lasts: a kidnapping goes wrong in the snow and she is the only calm person in it.
★ 8.8
City of God
Directed by Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund
2002
Nothing else moves quite like it: Meirelles cast the favela itself, cut two hours into what feels like twenty minutes, and took a Brazilian crime film to four Oscar nominations.
★ 8.8
LA Confidential
Directed by Curtis Hanson
1997
Modern film noir does not get better than this: three Los Angeles cops with nothing in common, and a plot so tightly wired people rewatch it to follow the connections.
★ 8.5
The Night of the Hunter
Directed by Charles Laughton
1955
Charles Laughton never directed again after it failed, and critics have spent seventy years calling it a masterpiece: a preacher with tattooed knuckles and two children on a river.
★ 8.4
The Departed
Directed by Martin Scorsese
2006
Scorsese remade a Hong Kong thriller and made it entirely his own: a cop inside the mob, a mobster inside the police, and a pitch that never once relaxes.
★ 8.2
Memories of Murder
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
2003 · South Korea
Bong made a serial killer film in which the police are the problem: it is based on a real case, and rural Korea itself ends up looking like the suspect.
★ 8.1
Heat
Directed by Michael Mann
1995
Police forces train on the shootout and every heist film since has copied it: Mann also got De Niro and Pacino into one diner booth for the first time.
★ 8.1
Le Samourai
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
1967
Every filmmaker who has ever shot a hitman putting on a hat is quoting this: Melville stripped the crime film down to ritual, silence and a trench coat.
★ 8.1
Dog Day Afternoon
Directed by Sidney Lumet
1975
Pacino turned a real 1972 Brooklyn robbery into the most electric performance of the seventies: a bank job collapses in ten minutes and becomes a street carnival.
★ 8.0
Blue Velvet
Directed by David Lynch
1986
Lynch invented his own genre here and the word Lynchian dates from it: a severed ear in a field leads into the underside of an ordinary American town.
★ 8.0
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
The Maltese Falcon
Directed by John Huston
1941
Huston's first film as a director, and the one that finally made Bogart a star: everyone chasing the black bird lies about it for a hundred straight minutes.
★ 7.7
Badlands
Directed by Terrence Malick
1973
Malick's first film, and the model for every young couple on a killing spree since: the girl narrates it in the flat voice of a magazine horoscope.
★ 7.7
The French Connection
Directed by William Friedkin
1971
It made the car chase in Bullitt look choreographed: this one was shot without permits, at ninety miles an hour, through real Brooklyn traffic that nobody had cleared.
★ 7.6
A Prophet
Directed by Jacques Audiard
2009
The best prison film of this century, and it works like a business education: an illiterate nineteen-year-old walks into a French jail and starts learning very fast.
★ 7.6
Out of the Past
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
1947
If you want to know what film noir means, this is the film people hand you: a gas station owner's past arrives in the form of a woman he once found.
★ 7.4
Mean Streets
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1973
Scorsese found his whole method here at thirty: Little Italy, Catholic guilt, a handheld camera and a jukebox that never stops, most of it shot in Los Angeles.
★ 7.3
Reservoir Dogs
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
1992
Tarantino arrived fully formed with a heist film that never shows the heist: everyone is in a warehouse afterward, suspecting everyone else and talking far too much.
★ 7.3
The Usual Suspects
Directed by Bryan Singer
1995
Almost nobody guesses where it is going the first time: five criminals meet in a police lineup, and the whole story reaches you secondhand from an interrogation room.
★ 7.3
The Big Sleep
Directed by Howard Hawks
1946
Nobody has ever been able to follow the plot, including the men who wrote it: what you watch it for is Bogart and Bacall talking, which is more than enough.
★ 7.2
The Sting
Directed by George Roy Hill
1973
The con is played on the audience as much as on the mark, and every turn is earned: Newman and Redford again, with ragtime that put Scott Joplin back on the charts.
★ 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
Raising Arizona
Directed by Coen Brothers
1987
The Coens' funniest film and by some way their fastest: a childless couple steal one of a furniture magnate's quintuplets, and the chase never once slows down afterward.
★ 6.9
Drive
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
2011
It looks and sounds like nothing else from its decade: neon Los Angeles, a synth score, a driver who barely speaks, and sudden violence that arrives without warning.
★ 6.8
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
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
The Killer
Directed by John Woo
1989 · Hong Kong
Woo shoots gunfights the way other directors shoot musical numbers: two pistols, slow motion, doves, and underneath it a straight-faced story about honor between a hitman and the cop hunting him.
★ 6.8
The Untouchables
Directed by Brian De Palma
1987
Mamet wrote it and Morricone scored it: De Palma stages a shootout on a station staircase in open tribute to Battleship Potemkin, and turns Prohibition Chicago into pure American myth.
★ 6.6
Infernal Affairs
Directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak
2002 · Hong Kong
Scorsese's The Departed is a remake of this, and the Hong Kong original is fifty minutes tighter: two moles assigned to find each other, and a plot that never stops to explain itself.
★ 6.5
Dirty Harry
Directed by Don Siegel
1971
Pauline Kael called it fascist and the argument has never really ended: Eastwood's inspector chases a Zodiac-like killer through San Francisco with a .44 Magnum and open contempt for procedure.
★ 6.4
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
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
The Killing
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1956
Kubrick was twenty-seven and this is where he became Kubrick: a racetrack robbery told out of order, doubling back to catch each man's hour, thirty years before that felt like a style.
★ 6.2
American History X
Directed by Tony Kaye
1998
Edward Norton added thirty pounds of muscle for it and Tony Kaye tried to take his own name off the finished cut: a former neo-Nazi leaves prison and finds his brother following him.
★ 6.0
Ocean's Eleven
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
2001
The most relaxed heist film there is: Soderbergh assembles eleven movie stars, lets them amuse one another across two hours, and treats a Las Vegas vault as an excuse for the hangout.
★ 5.9
Wall Street
Directed by Oliver Stone
1987
Oliver Stone meant it as an indictment and a generation took it as a recruitment ad: Gordon Gekko's speech about greed is the most misread scene in American film.
★ 5.9
A Bronx Tale
Directed by Robert De Niro
1993
Chazz Palminteri turned down large offers for his one-man play until someone would let him star: De Niro directed his first film out of it, about a boy with two fathers competing.
★ 5.8
True Romance
Directed by Tony Scott
1993
Tarantino sold this script to pay for Reservoir Dogs and Tony Scott shot it with real affection: a comic book clerk and a call girl leave Detroit with the wrong suitcase.
★ 5.7
The Secret in Their Eyes
Directed by Juan Jose Campanella
2009 · Argentina
The camera drops out of the sky into a packed football stadium and does not cut for five minutes: an Argentine investigator reopens a case he could never leave alone.
★ 5.7
A Better Tomorrow
Directed by John Woo
1986 · Hong Kong
It made Chow Yun-fat a superstar and started an entire Hong Kong genre: two brothers on opposite sides of the law, and a gunman in a trenchcoat lighting a cigarette with money.
★ 5.7
The Town
Directed by Ben Affleck
2010
Affleck filmed in the Charlestown blocks the story is about: bank crews in nun masks, and a robber who wants out of a neighborhood with no intention of releasing him.
★ 5.6
Thief
Directed by Michael Mann
1981
Michael Mann's first theatrical feature, with Tangerine Dream on the score and real ex-burglars advising: a safecracker who has planned his whole future on a diner napkin tries to buy his way out.
★ 5.5
Snatch
Directed by Guy Ritchie
2000 · United Kingdom
Brad Pitt asked for a part and got one nobody can understand a word of: an unlicensed boxing promoter, a stolen diamond and several sets of London criminals converge at considerable speed.
★ 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
Sin City
Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller
2005
Rodriguez shot the whole thing on green screen and used Frank Miller's comic panels as storyboards: monochrome with single splashes of color, and Miller got a co-director credit for it.
★ 5.1
Get Carter
Directed by Mike Hodges
1971 · United Kingdom
Michael Caine plays a gangster with no charm whatsoever and it is his best performance: Newcastle in 1971 shot as a real place, and every British crime film since has borrowed the tone.
★ 4.8
American Hustle
Directed by David O. Russell
2013
David O. Russell rebuilt the real Abscam sting as a comedy of terrible hair: two con artists are pressed into working for the FBI, and everyone in it is lying about something.
★ 4.7
Point Break
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
1991
Kathryn Bigelow made the most physically committed action film anyone had attempted: an FBI agent infiltrates a crew of surfers who rob banks in president masks, and starts preferring their company.
★ 3.9
Basic Instinct
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
1992
Paul Verhoeven made the decade's most notorious mainstream thriller and never once blinked: an interrogation scene everyone still knows, and a novelist who may be writing what happens next.
★ 3.9
Tsotsi
Directed by Gavin Hood
2005 · South Africa
South Africa's first Academy Award for a foreign language film: a Johannesburg gang member steals a car and finds a baby in the back, and the film gives him no easy way out.
★ 2.7
The Italian Job
Directed by F. Gary Gray
2003
Three Mini Coopers through the Los Angeles storm drains and the Hollywood subway: a remake that keeps only the cars from the original, and stages the best getaway of its decade.
★ 2.6