Singin' in the Rain
Directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen
1952
Nothing else on film is this happy, and the subject is an industry in a panic: Hollywood's terror at the arrival of sound became two hours of pure delight.
★ 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.
City Lights
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
1931
Chaplin's own favorite of his films, and the one people cry at: he refused to make it a talkie, then built ninety minutes toward a final thirty seconds.
★ 9.3
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
Annie Hall
Directed by Woody Allen
1977
The romantic comedy has never recovered from it: Allen talks to the camera, walks into his own memories, drops subtitles over small talk, and breaks every rule the form had.
★ 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
Modern Times
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
1936
Chaplin's farewell to silence, made nine years into the sound era out of pure stubbornness: the factory gears swallow him, and he answers the talkies entirely on his own terms.
★ 8.7
WALL-E
Directed by Andrew Stanton
2008
Pixar's bravest film: the first forty minutes have almost no dialogue at all, and a robot with two expressions carries more feeling than most live actors manage.
★ 8.5
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
It Happened One Night
Directed by Frank Capra
1934
It helped launch the screwball comedy and left fingerprints on every romance that followed: a runaway heiress, a broke reporter, a night bus, and a blanket hung between two beds.
★ 7.7
The Princess Bride
Directed by Rob Reiner
1987
It barely registered in cinemas and built its whole following on video: pirates, giants, a six-fingered man, and a grandfather reading to a boy who does not want the story.
★ 7.5
When Harry Met Sally
Directed by Rob Reiner
1989
Every romantic comedy since has been trying to write this conversation: two people argue for twelve years about whether men and women can be friends, and Ephron's dialogue wins.
★ 7.2
Tootsie
Directed by Sydney Pollack
1982
Hoffman said the part permanently changed how he saw women, and what he learned is worked out here as farce: an unemployable actor becomes a soap opera star.
★ 7.2
Forrest Gump
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
1994
People still argue about whether it is sentimental or sly, and both readings hold: a simple man walks through forty years of American history without ever noticing.
★ 7.2
His Girl Friday
Directed by Howard Hawks
1940
Hawks made the reporter a woman and the ex-husband her editor, then had them talk over each other so fast the film runs at over two hundred words a minute.
★ 7.0
Amelie
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
2001 · France
The most exported French film of its generation: Jeunet saturated Paris into green and gold and sent a shy waitress out to quietly rearrange other people's lives.
★ 7.0
Sideways
Directed by Alexander Payne
2004
It measurably dented cheap merlot sales and sent pinot noir soaring: two middle-aged men drive through wine country, one about to be married and one unable to move on.
★ 6.9
The Philadelphia Story
Directed by George Cukor
1940
Katharine Hepburn was labeled box-office poison and controlled the rights to her comeback vehicle: she picked the director and approved the cast, then let Cary Grant and James Stewart crash her wedding.
★ 6.6
Roman Holiday
Directed by William Wyler
1953
Audrey Hepburn became a star overnight and Dalton Trumbo wrote the script while blacklisted: a princess slips her handlers for one unscheduled day in Rome, with a reporter who knows who she is.
★ 6.6
Moonrise Kingdom
Directed by Wes Anderson
2012
Twelve-year-olds run away together across a New England island in 1965: Wes Anderson's warmest film, and the adults chasing them are lonelier than the children they are trying to catch.
★ 6.4
Broadcast News
Directed by James L. Brooks
1987
James L. Brooks got the newsroom exactly right and predicted what television news would become: three colleagues tangled up in each other, and the one who is best on camera knows the least.
★ 6.4
Midnight in Paris
Directed by Woody Allen
2011
Woody Allen's biggest hit at the box office is also his gentlest: a screenwriter stuck on a novel steps into a car at midnight in Paris and is driven straight into the 1920s.
★ 6.3
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
Big
Directed by Penny Marshall
1988
Penny Marshall became the first woman to direct a film that made a hundred million dollars: Tom Hanks plays a thirteen-year-old in an adult body and never once winks at the audience.
★ 5.6
Silver Linings Playbook
Directed by David O. Russell
2012
A widow and a man just out of a state hospital strike a deal: David O. Russell keeps the camera close enough to be uncomfortable, and Jennifer Lawrence shot it at twenty-one.
★ 5.5
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
The Artist
Directed by Michel Hazanavicius
2011 · France
The first silent film to take Best Picture since 1929, made by a French director nobody in Hollywood knew: a star of the silents watches sound arrive and refuses to adapt.
★ 5.0
Bull Durham
Directed by Ron Shelton
1988
Ron Shelton played five years of minor league baseball and wrote what he actually saw: the mound conference about wedding presents is the funniest scene in any sports film.
★ 4.8
Moonstruck
Directed by Norman Jewison
1987
Cher and Olympia Dukakis both took Oscars from it, and the screenplay took a third: John Patrick Shanley wrote a Brooklyn Italian family who argue at operatic volume and mean every word.
★ 4.8
As Good as it Gets
Directed by James L. Brooks
1997
Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt both won Academy Awards for a romantic comedy, which almost never happens: he plays a novelist nobody can stand, and the film does not soften him much.
★ 4.8
(500) Days of Summer
Directed by Marc Webb
2009
The split screen between what he expects and what happens is the best scene of its decade: a romantic comedy scrambled out of sequence that keeps insisting it is not a love story.
★ 4.7
Sabrina
Directed by Billy Wilder
1954
Humphrey Bogart hated making it and it barely shows: Billy Wilder puts Audrey Hepburn between two brothers on a Long Island estate and lets Paris do the transformation offscreen.
★ 4.2
The Awful Truth
Directed by Leo McCarey
1937
Cary Grant became Cary Grant in this film: Leo McCarey threw out the script daily and improvised on set, and a divorcing couple sabotage each other's new engagements out of pure spite.
★ 4.2
Grease
Directed by Randal Kleiser
1978
It was the highest-grossing musical ever made for more than twenty years: John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John are both obviously too old for high school, and it has never mattered.
★ 4.0
Wedding Crashers
Directed by David Dobkin
2005
Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn talk across each other at speed and the rhythm carries the film: two divorce lawyers crash strangers' weddings as a hobby, with rules they have written down.
★ 3.9
Strictly Ballroom
Directed by Baz Luhrmann
1992 · Australia
Baz Luhrmann's debut already has the whole style in place: competitive ballroom dancing filmed like grand opera, where a dancer using his own steps counts as a moral crisis.
★ 3.8
Shakespeare in Love
Directed by John Madden
1998 · United Kingdom
Tom Stoppard rewrote the script and you can hear him in every scene: a blocked Shakespeare finds his Juliet, and nothing else is this funny about how theater actually gets made.
★ 3.7
Love Actually
Directed by Richard Curtis
2003 · United Kingdom
Nine storylines, two hours, and half the country reruns it every December while the other half writes essays about why it is bad: Richard Curtis knew exactly what he was doing.
★ 3.5
The Seven Year Itch
Directed by Billy Wilder
1955
The subway grate photograph is more famous than the film: Billy Wilder strands a Manhattan husband alone for the summer, Marilyn Monroe moves in upstairs, and the fantasies start immediately.
★ 3.2
Pretty in Pink
Directed by Howard Deutch
1986
Molly Ringwald's prom dress is stitched together from two others, an image the whole film runs on: Howard Deutch directs a John Hughes script about who gets to sit where.
★ 3.2
Funny Face
Directed by Stanley Donen
1957
Richard Avedon served as visual consultant and shot the photographs himself: Audrey Hepburn is a bookshop clerk turned Paris model, and the darkroom sequence is the most beautiful red ever filmed.
★ 3.0