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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
High and Low
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1963 · Japan
Kurosawa spends the entire first hour inside one house and it is unbearable: a rich man learns the kidnappers took the wrong child and still want his money.
★ 7.8
The Act of Killing
Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and Christine Cynn
2012
Oppenheimer asked the men who carried out Indonesia's mass killings to restage them as movie scenes, and they agreed gladly: no documentary has ever been braver or harder to sit through.
★ 7.8
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Directed by Ang Lee
2000 · Hong Kong
It won four Academy Awards and remains the highest grossing foreign language film ever released in America: wire work so graceful that gravity stops being a consideration.
★ 7.8
Oldboy
Directed by Park Chan-wook
2003 · South Korea
Korean cinema broke through in the West on the strength of this: fifteen years locked in a room without explanation, and a corridor fight staged in one take.
★ 7.8
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
The Hurt Locker
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
2009
Bigelow made war feel like an addiction rather than a duty: a bomb disposal sergeant works without much fear, and every defusal is stretched until the room turns physical.
★ 7.3
Platoon
Directed by Oliver Stone
1986
Oliver Stone served in Vietnam and made this to correct everyone else's version: no glamour, no clarity, and a platoon that splits between two sergeants and stays split.
★ 7.3
Zero Dark Thirty
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
2012
Bigelow filmed a decade-long manhunt as pure procedure and let the audience sit with what it cost: the torture scenes started an argument that has never been settled.
★ 7.2
The Thin Red Line
Directed by Terrence Malick
1998
Malick came back after twenty years and made a war film about grass, light and the voices in men's heads: Guadalcanal, filmed as though the island were the subject.
★ 7.2
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Directed by David Gelb
2011
It will alter how you think about doing one thing for an entire lifetime: an eighty-five-year-old sushi master in a Tokyo subway station, still not satisfied with himself.
★ 7.0
Letters from Iwo Jima
Directed by Clint Eastwood
2006
Eastwood made two films about the same battle, and the Japanese one is the better: shot almost entirely in Japanese, with a general nobody in America had heard of.
★ 6.9
MASH
Directed by Robert Altman
1970
Altman's overlapping dialogue turns up fully formed: army surgeons in Korea behave appallingly in order to stay sane, and the film was really about Vietnam all along.
★ 6.8
The Wind Rises
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
2013 · Japan
Miyazaki announced his retirement with it, a retirement he later took back: a young man designs beautiful aircraft that become weapons, and nothing about that is resolved.
★ 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