The Godfather
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1972
The summit of the American crime film: Coppola turned an immigrant family's rise and rot into the country's own epic, and made damnation look like a coronation.
★ 10.0
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.
Citizen Kane
Directed by Orson Welles
1941
Welles was twenty-five and had never directed a feature before: he built a portrait of a man whose whole life nobody around him can add up, and changed everything.
★ 9.9
Seven Samurai
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1954 · Japan
Every film about assembling a team for one last job descends from this one: Kurosawa makes seven men matter, then stages a battle in the mud nobody has equaled.
★ 9.9
Vertigo
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1958
Nobody has ever made obsession look this beautiful or this sick: a man falls for an image instead of a person, and Hitchcock follows him past every point it should stop.
★ 9.9
2001: A Space Odyssey
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1968 · United Kingdom
Kubrick took the audience from the first bone tool to the far side of Jupiter, explained almost nothing, and made every science fiction film since look domestic by comparison.
★ 9.8
Tokyo Story
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu
1953 · Japan
The quiet masterpiece of ordinary life: Ozu finds the ache of a whole century in parents visiting children who have no time for them, and it will find you too.
★ 9.8
The Godfather: Part II
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1974
Coppola did what almost nobody manages, and made a sequel with a real claim to surpassing the original: two eras of one family run side by side, and the colder one wins.
★ 9.8
Lawrence of Arabia
Directed by David Lean
1962 · United Kingdom
There is no better argument for seeing a film on the largest screen you can find: Lean's desert swallows the frame, and a British officer dissolves inside it over nearly four hours.
★ 9.8
Schindler's List
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1993
More people have understood the Holocaust through this film than through any other: Spielberg took no fee, shot it in black and white, and gave the last word to the survivors.
★ 9.7
Casablanca
Directed by Michael Curtiz
1942
Proof that a studio picture thrown together in a hurry can outlive everything around it: eighty years on, the lines are still in the language and the romance still lands.
★ 9.7
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
Apocalypse Now
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1979
No production has ever gone further off the rails or shown it more clearly: Coppola's Vietnam abandons the war film for pure hallucination, and the helicopters over the trees are permanent.
★ 9.7
Dr. Strangelove
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1964
Nuclear annihilation has never been this funny, and never will be again: Kubrick worked out that the strategy was already absurd, and simply let his generals talk.
★ 9.6
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
Taxi Driver
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1976
Travis Bickle escaped the picture and entered the language: Scorsese and De Niro made a lonely man's interior so exact that it stopped being about one man at all.
★ 9.6
Raging Bull
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1980
Scorsese shot boxing as penance rather than sport, and audiences come out feeling bruised: De Niro's jealousy destroys everyone near him, in the blackest black and white imaginable.
★ 9.6
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1981
Every adventure film since is measured against it: Spielberg and Lucas built a machine of chases and near misses so efficient that forty years of imitation have not worn it out.
★ 9.5
Psycho
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1960
The film that invented modern horror: Hitchcock broke an unspoken rule about how a story is meant to behave, and every thriller since has been working in the space he opened.
★ 9.5
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
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Directed by George Lucas
1977
Modern Hollywood begins here: Lucas told the oldest story there is inside a universe that looked used and lived in, and the blockbuster has run the business ever since.
★ 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
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Directed by Irvin Kershner
1980
Everyone learned how to make a sequel from this: the pressure builds for two hours, the tone stays darker than anyone expected, and one line near the close rearranged a generation's childhood.
★ 9.4
Chinatown
Directed by Roman Polanski
1974
Screenwriters still take this one apart scene by scene to see how it works: Towne and Polanski built a mystery about stolen water that ends without a shred of mercy.
★ 9.4
Some Like it Hot
Directed by Billy Wilder
1959
American comedy has never been funnier, and the Legion of Decency was appalled: Wilder ran a single disguise for two hours without ever letting the joke thin out.
★ 9.4
There Will Be Blood
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
2007
Day-Lewis builds an American monster out of oil and resentment, and Jonny Greenwood's score scrapes at the nerves for two and a half hours without once letting up.
★ 9.4
In the Mood for Love
Directed by Wong Kar-wai
2000
Longing has never been filmed better than this: Wong Kar-wai gets more out of a stairwell and one repeated waltz than most directors manage with an entire script.
★ 9.3
Rear Window
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1954
Suspense has never been constructed more purely, and the real subject is the audience: Hitchcock traps you in one room with a man who cannot stop watching his neighbors.
★ 9.3
The Third Man
Directed by Carol Reed
1949
Britain has never made a better one, and nothing else sounds like it: a ruined postwar Vienna, and a zither score by a musician Reed first heard playing for the crew.
★ 9.3
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
Spirited Away
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
2001 · Japan
The high point of hand-drawn animation: Miyazaki invented a spirit world so dense and so unexplained that it took the Animated Feature Oscar away from every American studio.
★ 9.3
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
Jaws
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1975
Summer blockbusters start here: the mechanical shark kept breaking, so Spielberg hid it, and accidentally proved that what you cannot see is worse than what you can.
★ 9.2
The Dark Knight
Directed by Christopher Nolan
2008
Adults started arguing about superhero films because of this one: Ledger's Joker is so unnerving that the Academy gave a posthumous Oscar to a man in clown makeup.
★ 9.2
The Shining
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1980
Whole documentaries exist about what this film means: Kubrick threw out most of King's novel, sent a Steadicam gliding down those corridors, and left a dread nobody can explain away.
★ 9.2
Blade Runner
Directed by Ridley Scott
1982
It flopped, then quietly redesigned the future: every rainy neon city of the last forty years is borrowing from Ridley Scott, and the mood still outlasts the plot.
★ 9.2
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Directed by Peter Jackson
2003
Eleven nominations and eleven wins, a clean sweep no film has bettered: Jackson closed a decade-long gamble with battles at an unattempted scale and an ending that earns its farewells.
★ 9.1
Bicycle Thieves
Directed by Vittorio De Sica
1948 · Italy
Italian neorealism starts with this, and it still guts people: De Sica cast a factory worker as his lead and found a whole society inside one stolen bicycle.
★ 9.1
Mulholland Drive
Directed by David Lynch
2001
Lynch built a Hollywood that runs entirely on dream logic and trusted the audience to assemble it: the whole thing feels like a half-remembered dream, and people keep returning.
★ 9.1
The Wizard of Oz
Directed by Victor Fleming
1939
Decades of television broadcasts made it what the Library of Congress calls the most-seen film in history: the switch from sepia Kansas into Technicolor Oz still lands like a door opening.
★ 9.1
North by Northwest
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1959
Every spy thriller since owes it something, James Bond most of all: Hitchcock chases an innocent man across America by crop duster and over Mount Rushmore, enjoying himself throughout.
★ 9.1
Rashomon
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1950 · Japan
Kurosawa gave the language a word for irreconcilable testimony and opened Japanese cinema to the world: four accounts of one killing, none of which can be squared with another.
★ 9.1
Once Upon a Time in the West
Directed by Sergio Leone
1968 · Italy
The western as ritual: Leone holds on faces until the tension turns physical, gives every character a Morricone theme, and makes three hours feel like a ceremony.
★ 9.0
Alien
Directed by Ridley Scott
1979
Giger's creature is still the most frightening thing anyone has designed for a screen: Scott fused haunted house and space opera, and put a woman at the center of both.
★ 9.0
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
The Searchers
Directed by John Ford
1956
Other directors have been stealing from this western for seventy years: Ford put John Wayne's racism on screen without excusing it, and framed his story in a much-copied doorway.
★ 9.0
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Directed by Milos Forman
1975
Nicholson against Nurse Ratched is the great screen battle of wills: a convict fakes insanity to serve his time in a hospital, and finds the ward already has a ruler.
★ 9.0
It's a Wonderful Life
Directed by Frank Capra
1946
A commercial failure that decades of Christmas television turned into a national ritual: it is far darker than its reputation, and the ending earns every tear it gets.
★ 9.0
The Silence of the Lambs
Directed by Jonathan Demme
1991
Hopkins is on screen for a fraction of the film and won an Oscar anyway: Demme shot the interviews straight down the lens so Lecter looks directly at you.
★ 8.9
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
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
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Directed by Peter Jackson
2001
Everyone said the book could not be filmed: Jackson shot three films at once in New Zealand and delivered a Middle-earth so furnished you stop noticing it was invented.
★ 8.9
The Matrix
Directed by The Wachowskis
1999
Action filmmaking divides neatly into before and after this one: the Wachowskis fused Hong Kong wire work with a philosophy seminar's premise and everyone spent five years copying it.
★ 8.9
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
M
Directed by Fritz Lang
1931 · Germany
Serial killer films begin here: Lang used sound as a weapon in his first talkie, gave the murderer a whistled tune, and turned a whole city into a trap.
★ 8.9
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
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
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Directed by Sergio Leone
1966 · Italy
No spaghetti western got higher, and no film score is better known: Leone shoots faces like landscapes, and Morricone's music does as much work as the dialogue.
★ 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
Back to the Future
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
1985
Screenwriting teachers use it as the worked example: every joke and every prop planted early comes back later, and the whole machine runs without a single wasted second.
★ 8.8
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
Saving Private Ryan
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1998
War films look different since the first twenty minutes of this one: Spielberg put the camera in the surf at Omaha Beach and veterans left cinemas unable to speak.
★ 8.8
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
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
ET the Extra-Terrestrial
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1982
Highest grossing film in the world for a decade, and it earns every cent: Spielberg shot at child height so the adults are legs and voices, and wrecks entire cinemas.
★ 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
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
Metropolis
Directed by Fritz Lang
1927
Science fiction has been raiding its designs for a century: Lang built a vertical city and a metal woman in 1927, and both are still turning up in new films.
★ 8.8
12 Angry Men
Directed by Sidney Lumet
1957
Nothing beats it as a filmed argument, and it happens in a single room: eleven jurors want to go home, one will not, and the temperature keeps rising.
★ 8.7
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
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 Passion of Joan of Arc
Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
1928
No screen performance has been called greater, and its actress never made another film: Dreyer shot Renee Falconetti's face in close-up, and his original cut went missing for fifty years.
★ 8.7
Ran
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1985 · Japan
Kurosawa was seventy-five and his eyesight was failing when he made it: King Lear moved to feudal Japan, with a great battle that plays to music and nothing else.
★ 8.7
Unforgiven
Directed by Clint Eastwood
1992
Eastwood spent thirty years building the myth this film takes apart: no western has been harder on the pleasure of violence, or on the men who deal it out.
★ 8.7
The Social Network
Directed by David Fincher
2010
The film that got the internet age right before anyone else did: Sorkin's dialogue moves faster than you can follow, and the loneliness underneath it has only aged better.
★ 8.7
A Clockwork Orange
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1971
Kubrick pulled it from British cinemas himself after the reaction, and it stayed unavailable there for twenty-seven years: a state that enforces goodness, an invented slang, imagery nobody forgets.
★ 8.7
Children of Men
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
2006
It looked like science fiction in 2006 and looks like the news now: Cuaron's roaming takes put you inside a collapsing Britain, and the ambush in the car is astonishing.
★ 8.7
Inception
Directed by Christopher Nolan
2010
Proof that a summer blockbuster can be genuinely difficult: Nolan stacked four levels of dream on top of each other and audiences argued about the last shot for years.
★ 8.6
The Exorcist
Directed by William Friedkin
1973
Still the one people watch with the lights on fifty years later: Friedkin shot a possession story like a documentary, and the restraint is what makes it unbearable.
★ 8.6
Fight Club
Directed by David Fincher
1999
Twenty-five years of argument have still not settled what it is actually saying: Fincher made consumer despair look genuinely thrilling, which is either the joke or the problem.
★ 8.6
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
Directed by F. W. Murnau
1927
It won the only Academy Award ever given for Unique and Artistic Picture: Murnau's camera never stops moving, and the film is astonishing to look at a century on.
★ 8.6
The General
Directed by Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman
1926
Keaton did every stunt himself and dropped a real locomotive through a burning bridge: it flopped, cost him his independence within two years, and is now considered the great silent comedy.
★ 8.6
All About Eve
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1950
The sharpest script ever written about ambition: an aging star takes in an adoring young fan, and theater people have been quoting the lines for three-quarters of a century.
★ 8.6
The 400 Blows
Directed by Francois Truffaut
1959 · France
The French New Wave announces itself: Truffaut put his own miserable childhood on screen at twenty-seven, and the last shot changed what an ending was allowed to do.
★ 8.6
Late Spring
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu
1949
Ozu made the same film over and over and this is the most perfect version: a daughter who will not marry, a father who will not say what he wants, and one vase.
★ 8.6
Aliens
Directed by James Cameron
1986
Almost no sequel changes genre and survives it: Cameron turned Scott's haunted house into a war picture, and an action performance drew a rare Academy Award nomination.
★ 8.6
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Directed by Peter Jackson
2002
Gollum changed what a digital character could be: Andy Serkis acted him fully and the industry rebuilt itself around motion capture, all inside a four-month night siege in the rain.
★ 8.6
Come and See
Directed by Elem Klimov
1985 · Russia
No other war film can follow it: Klimov put a boy's face through the destruction of Belarus and let it age visibly, and nobody watches it twice lightly.
★ 8.6
The Wild Bunch
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
1969
Peckinpah showed at once what the new ratings system had licensed: slow motion, six cameras firing together, and a body count that made every western before it look polite.
★ 8.6
Pan's Labyrinth
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
2006
Del Toro put a child's fairy tale and Franco's Spain in the same film and refused to make either one safer: the creature with eyes in its hands follows people home.
★ 8.5
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Directed by Celine Sciamma
2019
Sciamma made a love story with almost no men in it and built the entire thing out of glances, firelight and the things two people decline to say.
★ 8.5
Persona
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
1966 · Sweden
More has been written about this film than almost any other: Bergman put two women on an island until their faces merged, and left everyone to explain what happened.
★ 8.5
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
Pather Panchali
Directed by Satyajit Ray
1955
Indian cinema arrived in the world with this: Ray shot it on weekends with a first-time crew and no money, and the children seeing a train is pure wonder.
★ 8.5
Boyhood
Directed by Richard Linklater
2014
Nobody had tried this before: Linklater filmed the same cast a few days a year for twelve years, so you watch a real child turn into a real adult.
★ 8.5
Ikiru
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1952 · Japan
Kurosawa's answer to how a life should be spent: a bureaucrat gets one piece of terrible news and starts spending what is left deliberately, which will change how you see your job.
★ 8.5
The Graduate
Directed by Mike Nichols
1967
A generation was told their parents were wrong and believed it: Nichols made aimlessness look cinematic, and the soundtrack put Simon and Garfunkel into every house in America.
★ 8.5
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
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
Yojimbo
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1961 · Japan
Leone took it wholesale for A Fistful of Dollars and Toho forced a settlement out of court: Kurosawa's samurai playing two gangs against each other is the template everyone still uses.
★ 8.4
A Separation
Directed by Asghar Farhadi
2011
The first Iranian film to win the foreign language Oscar: Farhadi built a moral maze where every person is partly right, and you will change sides several times.
★ 8.4
Grave of the Fireflies
Directed by Isao Takahata
1988 · Japan
Nobody recommends this one lightly: Takahata put two children through the last months of the war in Japan, and being animated makes it harder to bear, not easier.
★ 8.4
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
Moonlight
Directed by Barry Jenkins
2016
One life told in three chapters by three different actors, and shot in blues and purples so tender the film almost hums: nothing about it looks like anything else.
★ 8.4
Nosferatu
Directed by F. W. Murnau
1922
A court ordered every print destroyed and the film survived anyway: Murnau's unauthorized Dracula gave horror its first permanent image, a shadow climbing a staircase toward a door.
★ 8.4
Notorious
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1946
Hitchcock's most grown-up film, and the one where the suspense is entirely about feeling: a woman is sent to seduce a Nazi by the man who loves her.
★ 8.4
A Streetcar Named Desire
Directed by Elia Kazan
1951
Three of its four leads won Academy Awards and the fourth was Brando: this is where screen acting stopped being theatrical and started being something else entirely.
★ 8.4
Barry Lyndon
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1975
Cinematographers still study every frame: Kubrick lit interiors by candlelight alone using lenses built for NASA, and the result looks like walking through a gallery of paintings.
★ 8.4
Paths of Glory
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1957
France stayed uncomfortable enough to keep it out of cinemas for eighteen years: Kubrick tracked the camera down the trenches and staged an injustice that still makes people furious.
★ 8.3
The Lives of Others
Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
2006 · Germany
It made an entire country look at its own surveillance state: a Stasi officer listens in on a playwright's apartment, and the last line of the film lands like a blow.
★ 8.3
12 Years a Slave
Directed by Steve McQueen
2013
The first Best Picture from a Black director, and the least evasive film ever made about American slavery: McQueen holds shots long past comfort and refuses to look away.
★ 8.3
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
Full Metal Jacket
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1987
The first half is the most quoted boot camp ever filmed: Kubrick found a real Marine drill instructor, let him write half his own material, and made basic training terrifying.
★ 8.3
The Seventh Seal
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
1957 · Sweden
No image from any film has been parodied more: a knight plays chess with Death on a beach, and Bergman is completely serious about the question underneath it.
★ 8.3
Rosemary's Baby
Directed by Roman Polanski
1968
Horror discovered it did not need monsters: Polanski built two hours out of a young wife nobody believes, and the dread comes entirely from politeness and closed doors.
★ 8.3
Stalker
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
1979
Nothing else in cinema moves this slowly and holds this completely: Tarkovsky walks three men into a forbidden zone for nearly three hours, and almost nothing happens.
★ 8.3
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Directed by David Lean
1957
Lean built an epic about the seduction of a job well done: a British colonel in a Japanese prison camp finds a strange satisfaction in building their bridge properly.
★ 8.2
To Kill a Mockingbird
Directed by Robert Mulligan
1962
Gregory Peck gave America the father it wanted to believe in: a small-town lawyer defends a Black man in a case the town has already decided, seen through his daughter's eyes.
★ 8.2
My Neighbor Totoro
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
1988 · Japan
Children's films almost never dare to have no villain: Miyazaki made eighty minutes of pure safety out of two sisters and a forest spirit, and it became Ghibli's emblem.
★ 8.2
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Directed by James Cameron
1991
Computer effects became believable overnight: Cameron spent more money than anyone ever had, put a liquid metal killer on screen, and every studio in town immediately started writing checks.
★ 8.2
Beau Travail
Directed by Claire Denis
1999
Denis turned Melville's Billy Budd into something closer to dance than to drama: Foreign Legionnaires drilling in the Djibouti heat, all bodies and sun and things nobody will say.
★ 8.2
Harakiri
Directed by Masaki Kobayashi
1962
Kobayashi took the samurai film apart from the inside: an old warrior asks to die in a lord's courtyard, and what he says first dismantles the entire code of honor.
★ 8.2
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
Network
Directed by Sidney Lumet
1976
Written as satire in 1976 and now indistinguishable from television: Chayefsky imagined a network that would put a man's breakdown on air for ratings, and got everything right.
★ 8.2
Jurassic Park
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1993
The moment the first dinosaur appears is the moment audiences stopped trusting their own eyes: Spielberg mixed puppets and computers so well that the seams still do not show.
★ 8.2
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
Ugetsu
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
1953
Mizoguchi's ghost story is the one other directors mention when asked what changed them: two peasants chase money through a civil war, and the crossing through fog is unearthly.
★ 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
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
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
Close-Up
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
1990
Kiarostami blurred documentary and fiction so completely that nobody has quite untangled it since: a man caught impersonating a director, with everyone involved playing themselves on camera.
★ 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
Seven
Directed by David Fincher
1995
The studio wanted the ending changed and Fincher refused, and studios then spent a decade trying to reproduce the atmosphere: a procedural so bleak the rain never stops.
★ 8.1
Fanny & Alexander
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
1982 · Sweden
Bergman meant it as his farewell to cinema and made it the warmest thing he ever did: five hours in its full version, of Christmas light, ghosts, cruelty and childhood.
★ 8.1
Das Boot
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
1981 · Germany
No war film has ever been this claustrophobic: Petersen ran a camera the length of a U-boat again and again until the steel walls start pressing in on you.
★ 8.1
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Directed by John Huston
1948
Huston won two Oscars for it and directed his own father to a third: three men look for gold in Mexico and the heat does the rest.
★ 8.0
The Red Shoes
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1948 · United Kingdom
Scorsese has been watching it since childhood and has never stopped: Powell and Pressburger put a ballet on screen in Technicolor so saturated that it plays like a fever.
★ 8.0
Whiplash
Directed by Damien Chazelle
2014
Shot in nineteen days on three million dollars, and cut like a thriller: a drummer, a teacher who throws chairs, and the question of what greatness costs.
★ 8.0
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
Before Sunset
Directed by Richard Linklater
2004
Very little else works the way this does: eighty minutes of two people walking around Paris talking, in close to real time, and it is over far too soon.
★ 8.0
Die Hard
Directed by John McTiernan
1988
Hollywood spent the next decade pitching films as Die Hard on a boat, a bus, a plane: McTiernan built the action machine everyone has been copying since 1988.
★ 8.0
Memento
Directed by Christopher Nolan
2000
Nolan told it backwards and the trick is not a trick: the reverse order strands you exactly where its amnesiac protagonist lives, knowing only the last five minutes.
★ 8.0
Princess Mononoke
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
1997 · Japan
It held the Japanese box office record until Titanic arrived: Miyazaki staged a war between an iron town and the forest gods and refused to name a villain.
★ 8.0
Cleo from 5 to 7
Directed by Agnes Varda
1962
Varda was the one woman the New Wave could not leave out, and this is her breakthrough: ninety minutes of a singer walking Paris, waiting on news.
★ 8.0
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1977
Spielberg made the rare first-contact film that treats the aliens as something to hope for: an ordinary man starts building a mountain in his living room and cannot say why.
★ 8.0
The Deer Hunter
Directed by Michael Cimino
1978
Cimino spends a whole first act on a steel town and a wedding, so that when the war arrives it lands on people you already know by name.
★ 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
Before Midnight
Directed by Richard Linklater
2013
The third film is the one that hurts: Linklater and his two actors let nine more years pass, then take it somewhere the first two politely refused to go.
★ 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
Inglourious Basterds
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
2009
Christoph Waltz plays four languages and makes every one of them frightening: Tarantino builds his scenes as long conversations where somebody at the table already knows too much.
★ 7.9
The Wages of Fear
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
1953
Suspense does not get more physical than this: four desperate men drive truckloads of nitroglycerin over mountain roads, and every rut in the surface becomes an ordeal.
★ 7.9
The Battle of Algiers
Directed by Gillo Pontecorvo
1966 · Italy
Both armies and revolutionaries have studied it as a manual: Pontecorvo staged the Algerian insurgency so plainly that audiences have always mistaken parts of it for newsreel footage.
★ 7.9
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones
1975 · United Kingdom
No comedy has been quoted more relentlessly for fifty years: the Pythons could not afford horses, banged coconuts instead, and turned the budget problem into the joke.
★ 7.9
La Strada
Directed by Federico Fellini
1954 · Italy
It took the very first competitive foreign language Academy Award, and Giulietta Masina is the reason: her face does more with one shrug than most performances manage in full.
★ 7.9
All the President's Men
Directed by Alan J. Pakula
1976
Every journalism film gets held up against this one: two reporters chase Watergate through phone calls and parking garages, and verifying a single fact becomes unbearably tense.
★ 7.9
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
The Terminator
Directed by James Cameron
1984
Cameron made it for six million dollars and launched two careers and a franchise: a machine that cannot be bargained with, cannot be reasoned with, and absolutely will not stop.
★ 7.9
Amadeus
Directed by Milos Forman
1984
It sent a whole generation out to buy Mozart records: Salieri narrates his own jealousy from an asylum, and the music keeps making his case better than he can.
★ 7.8
Up
Directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson
2009
The four-minute marriage montage is the most devastating thing Pixar has ever done, and it is wordless: after that, an old man flies his house away on balloons.
★ 7.8