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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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 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
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
Wild Strawberries
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
1957 · Sweden
Bergman cast the founding father of Swedish cinema as an old man reckoning with his own coldness: a drive across the country, punctuated by dreams that keep ambushing him.
★ 7.8
Au Hasard Balthazar
Directed by Robert Bresson
1966
Godard said it contained the world in an hour and a half: a donkey passes from owner to owner, and Bresson makes cruelty and grace arrive without warning.
★ 7.8
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis)
Directed by Marcel Carne
1945 · France
France's greatest film, and its Jewish designer and composer worked in hiding under German occupation: three hours of theater, mime and love among people who cannot afford it.
★ 7.7
Cache (Hidden)
Directed by Michael Haneke
2005 · France
The most quietly frightening film anyone has made about guilt: videotapes of a family's own front door start arriving, and Haneke cares far more about what nobody says.
★ 7.7
Nights of Cabiria
Directed by Federico Fellini
1957 · Italy
Giulietta Masina gives the performance that everyone remembers from Fellini: a Roman streetwalker keeps hoping harder than her luck deserves, and the film never once pities her.
★ 7.7
Andrei Rublev
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
1966
The Soviets shelved it for years and cut it repeatedly: Tarkovsky follows an icon painter through a brutal Russia, and the bell casting sequence justifies the whole three hours.
★ 7.7
Monty Python's Life of Brian
Directed by Terry Jones
1979 · United Kingdom
Councils across Britain banned it and Norway would not show it at all: the Pythons went after zealotry rather than faith, which is exactly why it still works.
★ 7.7
L'Avventura
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
1960 · Italy
It was booed off the screen at Cannes and won a prize at the same festival: Antonioni made drift and boredom into subjects, and cinema has been arguing since.
★ 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
Young Frankenstein
Directed by Mel Brooks
1974
Brooks has called it his best film and he shot it using the original 1931 laboratory equipment: black and white, played completely straight, and funnier for the discipline.
★ 7.6
Amour
Directed by Michael Haneke
2012 · France
The film everyone should see once and nobody wants to see twice: Haneke barely leaves one Paris apartment while a marriage of decades reaches its last stretch.
★ 7.5
Belle de Jour
Directed by Luis Bunuel
1967
Bunuel's most seductive film, and the role Deneuve never quite escaped: a bored bourgeois wife takes afternoon work in a brothel, and her fantasies blur in without warning.
★ 7.5
Gladiator
Directed by Ridley Scott
2000
It dragged the Roman epic back after thirty-five years of dormancy: Russell Crowe's fury is the whole engine, and the arena sequences still deliver everything they promise.
★ 7.5
Wings of Desire
Directed by Wim Wenders
1987 · Germany
Wenders filmed a divided Berlin two years before the Wall came down and caught something nobody could stage again: angels listening in on what the people below are thinking.
★ 7.5
The Pianist
Directed by Roman Polanski
2002
Polanski escaped the Krakow ghetto as a child and waited sixty years to film any of it: a pianist left alone in the ruins of Warsaw, and no heroism anywhere.
★ 7.4
Beauty and the Beast
Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise
1991
The peak of the Disney Renaissance, and the moment computers earned a place in hand-drawn animation: the ballroom sequence still looks like nothing anyone had done before.
★ 7.3
Ratatouille
Directed by Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava
2007
Almost nothing else takes both cooking and criticism this seriously: a rat with a palate steers a hapless human around a Paris kitchen, and the food looks extraordinary.
★ 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
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Directed by Cristian Mungiu
2007
The Romanian New Wave announced itself with this: an illegal abortion arranged across one day in 1987, filmed in long static takes that give you nowhere to look.
★ 7.2
The Sound of Music
Directed by Robert Wise
1965
It saved a studio from bankruptcy and has never left the culture since: Salzburg in the mountains, a nun who cannot behave, and songs everyone somehow already knows.
★ 7.2
The Great Beauty
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
2013 · Italy
The closest anyone has come to remaking La Dolce Vita and surviving it: an aging Roman journalist drifts through parties and ruins, and the city has never looked better.
★ 7.2
Rome Open City
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
1945 · Italy
Rossellini shot it in the streets months after the Germans pulled out, on mismatched surplus stock scrounged from an army supplier: this is where Italian neorealism arrives.
★ 7.2
Diabolique
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
1955 · France
Clouzot got to the material just before Hitchcock could buy it and made the more frightening film: a wife and a mistress conspire against the same terrible man.
★ 7.1
Play Time
Directed by Jacques Tati
1967 · France
Tati built a working modern city on the edge of Paris and it bankrupted him: there is no plot, no close-up, and something funny in every corner of the frame.
★ 7.1
Shoah
Directed by Claude Lanzmann
1985 · France
Nine hours long, with no archive footage at all: Lanzmann spent eleven years getting survivors, bystanders and perpetrators to describe what they saw, standing on the actual sites.
★ 7.0
La Haine
Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz
1995
France spent a year arguing over it and the government screened it for ministers: twenty-four hours with three young men in a Paris suburb after a riot.
★ 7.0
The Spirit of the Beehive
Directed by Victor Erice
1973
A small girl in Franco's Spain sees Frankenstein at a traveling cinema and decides the monster is real: almost nothing is said, and the silence is the point.
★ 7.0
A Matter of Life and Death
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1946 · United Kingdom
Heaven is monochrome and earth is in Technicolor, which is the whole joke: a pilot bails out without a parachute and then has to argue for his life.
★ 7.0
The Hunt
Directed by Thomas Vinterberg
2012 · Denmark
Few films are this hard to endure: a kindergarten teacher is accused of something he did not do, and Vinterberg shows how fast a village makes up its mind.
★ 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
Amarcord
Directed by Federico Fellini
1973 · Italy
Fellini remembering his own seaside town under Mussolini and admitting he is embroidering it: no plot at all, just a year of weather, sex, food and fascism.
★ 6.9
Brief Encounter
Directed by David Lean
1945
Two married people meet by chance in a railway station and keep meeting, and what they hold back is what destroys audiences: Lean does it in glances and Rachmaninov.
★ 6.9
Contempt
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
1963 · France
Godard put Brigitte Bardot and Fritz Lang together in a story about a marriage falling apart on a Capri terrace: the most beautiful thing he ever shot.
★ 6.9
L'Atalante
Directed by Jean Vigo
1934 · France
Vigo was dying at twenty-nine when he finished it and the studio hacked it apart anyway: restored, it is the most sensual thing ever filmed about being newly married on a working barge.
★ 6.8
Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bete)
Directed by Jean Cocteau
1946 · France
Cocteau made a fairy tale that looks the way one feels: human arms hold the candelabra along the corridor, and the Beast's castle behaves like a dream that has not decided to end.
★ 6.8
The Great Escape
Directed by John Sturges
1963
Captivity has never looked like this much fun: Sturges rebuilt a real 1944 breakout from a German camp into tunnel engineering, forged papers and men who refuse to sit still.
★ 6.8
Fitzcarraldo
Directed by Werner Herzog
1982 · Germany
Herzog dragged a 320-ton steamship over a mountain with no models and no effects: his hero wants an opera house in the Amazon, and the production came to resemble the obsession it filmed.
★ 6.8
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Directed by Robert Hamer
1949 · United Kingdom
Alec Guinness plays eight members of the same family, including one of the women: the blackest comedy the British ever made, narrated in perfect drawing-room manners by a man counting off his relatives.
★ 6.8
Cinema Paradiso
Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore
1988 · Italy
Morricone wrote the theme that reduces grown men to tears: a Sicilian boy grows up in a village projection booth, and the subject underneath is what movies do to a life.
★ 6.7
Shaun of the Dead
Directed by Edgar Wright
2004 · United Kingdom
A zombie comedy that works as an actual zombie film: Wright plants every joke twice, so the second half pays off setups you laughed at an hour earlier without noticing they were setups.
★ 6.7
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Directed by Julian Schnabel
2007 · France
Schnabel put the camera inside a paralyzed man's one working eye and left it there: the memoir it comes from was dictated letter by letter, by blinking, and the film feels weightless anyway.
★ 6.7
Downfall
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
2004
Bruno Ganz plays Hitler as a man rather than a symbol, and Germany argued about the film for a year: the last twelve days in the bunker, filmed without comment or consolation.
★ 6.7
Pierrot le Fou
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
1965 · France
Godard at his most beautiful and least patient: Belmondo walks out of a party and drives south with Anna Karina, and the film keeps dissolving into color, quotation and pure play.
★ 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
A Fistful of Dollars
Directed by Sergio Leone
1964 · Italy
The spaghetti western became a genre with this, and Clint Eastwood became a star: Ennio Morricone's whistle, a poncho and a cheroot, and a drifter who tells nobody what he wants.
★ 6.5
Rififi
Directed by Jules Dassin
1955 · France
Dassin was blacklisted out of Hollywood and made this in France for almost nothing: the half-hour robbery at its center plays in near-total silence, and the genre has been imitating it since.
★ 6.5
Z
Directed by Costa-Gavras
1969 · France
Banned by the Greek junta it was made to indict: Costa-Gavras films a political assassination and its cover-up as a procedural thriller, and the pace never lets the outrage go abstract.
★ 6.4
Slumdog Millionaire
Directed by Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan
2008 · United Kingdom
Boyle shot Mumbai on small digital cameras in real streets and Rahman's score carried it around the world: a contestant from the slums is detained for cheating, and each question opens a memory.
★ 6.4
The Killing Fields
Directed by Roland Joffe
1984 · United Kingdom
Haing Ngor had never acted in his life and won an Academy Award for this: Roland Joffe films the fall of Phnom Penh through an American reporter and the Cambodian colleague beside him.
★ 6.4
Hot Fuzz
Directed by Edgar Wright
2007 · United Kingdom
Wright's parody is better constructed than most of the films it mocks: a London supercop is exiled to a picture-perfect village, and the final act is staged better than the real thing.
★ 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
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Directed by Anthony Minghella
1999
Nothing else captures the pull of wanting somebody else's life this well: Minghella fills the Italian coast with sunlight and good clothes, and lets a young man's envy curdle in plain sight.
★ 6.3
Braveheart
Directed by Mel Gibson
1995
Historians have been correcting it for thirty years and nobody cares: Gibson staged medieval battle with a physical brutality nothing before it had, and the speeches still work on an audience.
★ 6.3
A Fish Called Wanda
Directed by Charles Crichton
1988
A Danish audiologist reportedly died laughing during a screening: Charles Crichton was seventy-seven and made the fastest farce of the decade, with four thieves who all intend to betray the others.
★ 6.2
In the Name of the Father
Directed by Jim Sheridan
1993
Daniel Day-Lewis plays a man convicted of a bombing he had nothing to do with: the Guildford Four case, filmed while the wound in Britain was still fresh.
★ 6.2
For a Few Dollars More
Directed by Sergio Leone
1965 · Italy
Leone found the shape of his westerns here: two bounty hunters circle each other for two hours, a musical pocket watch counts down the duel, and Morricone times the whole film.
★ 6.1
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
An American in Paris
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
1951
It ends with a seventeen-minute ballet and no dialogue, staged against sets copied from French painters: Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli bet a whole musical on one uninterrupted dance.
★ 6.0
Life is Beautiful
Directed by Roberto Benigni
1998 · Italy
Benigni argued that a comedian could make a film about the camps, and half the critics said he was wrong: a father convinces his small son the whole thing is an elaborate game.
★ 6.0
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
Rebecca
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1940
Alfred Hitchcock's only Best Picture, collected by his producer, and the heroine never gets a name: a young bride arrives at an English house where the first wife's housekeeper still rules.
★ 5.8
Henry V (1989)
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
1989 · United Kingdom
Branagh was twenty-eight and directing himself in Shakespeare, which should have been a disaster: the long single take across the mud after Agincourt is the finest shot in eighties British cinema.
★ 5.8
Stalag 17
Directed by Billy Wilder
1953
Wilder made a POW comedy in 1953 and refused to soften the Americans in it: a barracks works out that somebody inside is trading information to the Germans, and starts looking around.
★ 5.8
The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et La Putain)
Directed by Jean Eustache
1973 · France
Nearly four hours of three people talking in Paris apartments, and nothing else defines what happened after 1968 so exactly: Eustache made it once and never made anything like it again.
★ 5.8
Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage)
Directed by Georges Franju
1960 · France
Viewers fainted at its first festival screenings and horror has been quietly borrowing from it ever since: a surgeon keeps trying to give his daughter a face, and her mask is unforgettable.
★ 5.8
Withnail and I
Directed by Bruce Robinson
1987 · United Kingdom
Richard E. Grant does not drink and had to be taught to be convincing: two unemployed actors leave London for a cottage in 1969 with no money, no food and no plan whatsoever.
★ 5.8
The Innocents
Directed by Jack Clayton
1961 · United Kingdom
Freddie Francis lit it so the corners of every frame stay dark and you keep looking into them: a governess with two children in a huge house becomes certain they are being visited.
★ 5.8
The Quiet Man
Directed by John Ford
1952
Ford spent twenty years trying to make it and shot Ireland in Technicolor so green it looks invented: an American boxer goes home to Mayo and runs straight into everyone else's customs.
★ 5.6
Dangerous Liaisons
Directed by Stephen Frears
1988
Glenn Close and John Malkovich play two aristocrats who ruin people for entertainment: Frears films eighteenth-century seduction as a campaign with objectives, and the wit stays lethal to the end.
★ 5.5
The Queen
Directed by Stephen Frears
2006
Helen Mirren plays a reigning monarch during the worst week of her reign and makes her sympathetic without softening her: the week after Diana died, reconstructed almost hour by hour.
★ 5.5
Hugo
Directed by Martin Scorsese
2011
Scorsese made a children's film in 3D to argue for film preservation: an orphan living inside a Paris railway station keeps a broken automaton his father left him, and the station watches him.
★ 5.5
The Constant Gardener
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
2005 · United Kingdom
Fernando Meirelles shot Kenya the way he shot Rio, handheld and saturated: a mild British diplomat starts pulling at what his wife was investigating, and Rachel Weisz took the Oscar for playing her.
★ 5.3
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
Directed by Guy Ritchie
1998 · United Kingdom
Guy Ritchie raised the money out of favors and cast a professional footballer who had never acted: four London friends owe half a million pounds by Friday, and five plots collide getting it.
★ 5.2
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
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
The King's Speech
Directed by Tom Hooper
2010
Made for eight million pounds and returned thirty times its budget: Colin Firth plays a duke who dreads a microphone, and Geoffrey Rush the unqualified Australian who will not defer to him.
★ 5.0
Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows: Part 2
Directed by David Yates
2011
Ten years and eight films with the same three actors growing up on camera, which no other series has managed: David Yates closes it with the largest battle the series ever attempted.
★ 4.9
My Fair Lady
Directed by George Cukor
1964
Audrey Hepburn's singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon and Julie Andrews was passed over for the part she created on stage: the Cecil Beaton costumes remain the most beautiful ever filmed.
★ 4.9
Rush
Directed by Ron Howard
2013
Ron Howard made the best racing film by making it about two men who need each other: James Hunt and Niki Lauda in 1976, and the engines were recorded from the actual cars.
★ 4.8
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
The Intouchables
Directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano
2011 · France
A French box office phenomenon built on two performances: a quadriplegic aristocrat hires a man from the projects precisely because he refuses to be careful around him, and Omar Sy took the Cesar.
★ 4.6
My Left Foot
Directed by Jim Sheridan
1989
Christy Brown wrote and painted with one foot, and nothing here makes him saintly: Jim Sheridan films a Dublin family that treats him as theirs, loudly and without any ceremony.
★ 4.6
The Trip
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
2010 · United Kingdom
Two comedians play unpleasant versions of themselves and improvise the whole thing: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon drive around northern England eating well and competing over Michael Caine impressions.
★ 4.3
Cyrano de Bergerac
Directed by Jean-Paul Rappeneau
1990 · France
Anthony Burgess translated the subtitles into rhyming couplets so English audiences would get the verse: Gerard Depardieu plays the nose and the poetry equally, and the swordfight is a poem too.
★ 4.2
Judgment at Nuremberg
Directed by Stanley Kramer
1961
Stanley Kramer put real concentration camp footage into a Hollywood film in 1961 and made audiences sit with it: the trial is of judges, which makes the question about everybody.
★ 4.2
Last Tango in Paris
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
1972
Pauline Kael called the premiere a landmark comparable to the Rite of Spring, and the reputation has since collapsed: Maria Schneider was nineteen and was not told the scene had been changed.
★ 4.0
La Vie en Rose
Directed by Olivier Dahan
2007 · France
Marion Cotillard ages from a young street singer to the end of Piaf's life and is unrecognizable throughout: the first Best Actress win for a performance given entirely in French.
★ 4.0
The Mission
Directed by Roland Joffe
1986 · United Kingdom
Ennio Morricone said he recognized himself in this score technically and spiritually: Jesuits build a mission above the Iguazu falls in the 1750s, and Europe decides its fate from several thousand miles away.
★ 4.0
Sleuth
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1972
Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine were both up for Best Actor, which has happened only a handful of times: a mystery writer invites his wife's lover to a country house full of games.
★ 3.8
The Full Monty
Directed by Peter Cattaneo
1997 · United Kingdom
Made in Sheffield for just over two million pounds and it outgrossed everything in Britain that year: six unemployed steelworkers decide to strip for money, and the comedy comes out of genuine desperation.
★ 3.7
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
Les Miserables
Directed by Tom Hooper
2012
Every note was sung live on set instead of lip-synced to a recording, which nobody had attempted at this scale: the camera sits inches from faces the entire time.
★ 3.5
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
Henry V (1944)
Directed by Laurence Olivier
1944 · United Kingdom
Made during the war and dedicated to the commandos and airborne troops of Britain: Laurence Olivier opens inside the Globe and then simply walks the film out into the real world.
★ 3.4
Chariots of Fire
Directed by Hugh Hudson
1981 · United Kingdom
The Vangelis theme is so famous that people forget the film underneath is about religion: two runners at the 1924 Olympics, one running for God and one against English antisemitism.
★ 3.3
Hamlet
Directed by Laurence Olivier
1948 · United Kingdom
The first film made outside America to be named Best Picture: Laurence Olivier cut half the play, shot it in high-contrast monochrome, and moves the camera through Elsinore like a ghost.
★ 3.0
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
Where Eagles Dare
Directed by Brian G. Hutton
1968 · United Kingdom
Alistair MacLean wrote it as a screenplay first and a novel second: Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood go into an Alpine castle after a captured general, and the cable car fight is superb.
★ 2.8
El Cid
Directed by Anthony Mann
1961
Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren in the last great historical epic before the genre collapsed: real castles in Spain, thousands of extras on horseback, and Miklos Rozsa's score doing the heavy lifting.
★ 2.8
A Man For All Seasons
Directed by Fred Zinnemann
1966
Paul Scofield had played it on stage and was not a film star, and he won anyway: Thomas More refuses to say one sentence, and the whole English state comes for him.
★ 2.7
Cross of Iron
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
1977
Sam Peckinpah's only war film, told entirely from the German side of the Eastern Front: Orson Welles called it the finest anti-war film since All Quiet on the Western Front.
★ 2.7
Oliver!
Directed by Carol Reed
1968
The last musical to hold Best Picture for thirty-four years, and the last G-rated winner: Carol Reed turns Dickens into an enormous street spectacle and the songs never let up.
★ 2.7
Cry Freedom
Directed by Richard Attenborough
1987 · United Kingdom
Richard Attenborough got Steve Biko into cinemas while apartheid was still standing: Denzel Washington's first Oscar nomination, and a white newspaper editor learning what Black South Africans already knew.
★ 2.3
The Diary of Anne Frank
Directed by George Stevens
1959
George Stevens built the annex to the actual dimensions so the cast would feel it: two years in a few rooms above a warehouse, and nothing outside them is ever shown.
★ 2.3
Gigi
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
1958
It won all nine awards it was nominated for, the biggest clean sweep the Oscars had seen: Lerner and Loewe wrote it straight for the screen, and Paris in 1900 looks fabulously expensive.
★ 2.2
How Green Was My Valley
Directed by John Ford
1941
John Ford built an entire Welsh mining village in the California hills and shot it like memory: a colliery family in a valley the pit is slowly ruining, narrated by the youngest son.
★ 2.1
La Chienne
Directed by Jean Renoir
1931 · France
Jean Renoir was recording live street sound in 1931 when almost nobody could: a meek bank cashier who paints on Sundays falls for a woman he meets one night in Montmartre.
★ 2.0
Sergeant York
Directed by Howard Hawks
1941
Alvin York blocked a film about himself for two decades and gave in only to fund a Bible school: a Tennessee pacifist wins the Medal of Honor and Gary Cooper wins Best Actor.
★ 1.8
Grand Hotel
Directed by Edmund Goulding
1932
It took Best Picture without a single other nomination, which nothing else has managed: Greta Garbo says the line about wanting to be alone, and the one-building ensemble format begins here.
★ 1.8
Quo Vadis
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy
1951
Peter Ustinov plays Nero as a needy child with an empire, and steals the entire picture: MGM built ancient Rome at Cinecitta and the film rescued the studio's finances.
★ 1.7
The Informer
Directed by John Ford
1935
Dublin in 1922, shot entirely on a fogged soundstage: John Ford won his first directing Oscar for it, and a slow-witted man sells out a friend for twenty pounds.
★ 1.5
Mrs. Miniver
Directed by William Wyler
1942 · United Kingdom
Roosevelt had the vicar's closing speech printed on leaflets and dropped over occupied Europe: an English family absorbs the first year of the war, and America was watching very closely.
★ 1.4