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.
On the Waterfront
Directed by Elia Kazan
1954
Screen acting changed with Brando in the back of that taxi: Kazan made the film to justify naming names, which gives the whole thing an uncomfortable heat.
★ 8.9
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
Breathless (A Bout de Souffle)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
1960 · France
Modern film editing starts here, and partly by accident: Godard shortened an overlong picture by cutting inside his own shots, and the jump cut has been legal ever since.
★ 8.3
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
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
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
Bonnie and Clyde
Directed by Arthur Penn
1967
New Hollywood starts here: the violence was unlike anything American films had shown, the Newsweek critic who panned it printed a retraction a week later, and the studio system collapsed.
★ 7.8
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
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
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
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
Traffic
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
2000
Soderbergh color-codes three separate drug-war stories so you always know which one you are in, then declines to let any of them resolve into a tidy lesson.
★ 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
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
Boyz n the Hood
Directed by John Singleton
1991
Singleton came straight out of USC film school and filmed the neighborhood he grew up in: South Central rendered as a place where a father raising his son is itself a full-time job.
★ 6.8
Mystic River
Directed by Clint Eastwood
2003
Eastwood's bleakest film: three boys from one Boston block grow into three men, and a murder pulls them back to the afternoon that separated them, with no interest in comforting anyone.
★ 6.6
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
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
Batman Begins
Directed by Christopher Nolan
2005
Serious superhero films begin here: Nolan built the car for real, kept Gotham plausible, and treated a man in a bat costume as a psychological problem rather than a joke.
★ 6.3
In the Heat of the Night
Directed by Norman Jewison
1967
Poitier refused to film in the Deep South, so Mississippi was recreated in Illinois: a Philadelphia detective is arrested for being Black in a small town and then asked to solve its murder.
★ 6.3
Band of Outsiders
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
1964 · France
Tarantino named his production company after this film: three young Parisians run through the Louvre in nine minutes and dance the Madison in a cafe, and Godard makes crime look like play.
★ 6.1
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
Carlito's Way
Directed by Brian De Palma
1993
De Palma's best film with Pacino, and it took people twenty years to notice: an ex-convict tries to go straight in 1975 New York, and the Grand Central chase is a masterclass.
★ 5.9
Gomorrah
Directed by Matteo Garrone
2008 · Italy
Garrone filmed the Camorra with no glamour, no arc and mostly non-actors from the neighborhood: five strands in a Naples housing block, and organized crime looks like a bad job.
★ 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
Paper Moon
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
1973
Tatum O'Neal was ten and is still the youngest winner of a competitive Academy Award: a Depression-era orphan running a Bible scam alongside someone who may be her father.
★ 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
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
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
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
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
Rope
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1948
Alfred Hitchcock disguised half the cuts so the film plays like one unbroken take: two students host a dinner party in the apartment where they have done something, and the camera never leaves.
★ 4.5
Drugstore Cowboy
Directed by Gus Van Sant
1989
William Burroughs turns up as a defrocked priest and somehow that is not the oddest thing here: Van Sant films a crew robbing pharmacies in 1971 Portland with no lecture attached.
★ 4.5
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
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
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