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
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
Airplane!
Directed by David Zucker and Jim Abrahams
1980
It fires jokes at a rate almost nothing before it attempted and lands most of them: the trick was casting dramatic actors and telling them to play everything straight.
★ 7.8
Finding Nemo
Directed by Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich
2003
It became the highest grossing animated release to that point and pushed what animation could render: an ocean of light and current, and a frightened father crossing it.
★ 7.8
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
Boogie Nights
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
1997
Anderson was twenty-seven and announced himself completely: a San Fernando Valley porn crew who treat each other like family, filmed with far more warmth than the subject suggests.
★ 7.8
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
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
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
Brokeback Mountain
Directed by Ang Lee
2005
It changed what a mainstream American film could be about: Lee filmed twenty years of two men unable to say what they are, almost entirely in silence.
★ 7.7
The Gold Rush
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
1925
Chaplin said this was the film he wanted to be remembered for: the boiled boot eaten like a banquet, the dancing dinner rolls, and a cabin on a cliff edge.
★ 7.7
The Tree of Life
Directed by Terrence Malick
2011
It won the Palme d'Or and audiences walked out of it: Malick set a 1950s Texas boyhood against the formation of the universe and left the connections to you.
★ 7.7
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 Maltese Falcon
Directed by John Huston
1941
Huston's first film as a director, and the one that finally made Bogart a star: everyone chasing the black bird lies about it for a hundred straight minutes.
★ 7.7
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
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Directed by Werner Herzog
1972
Herzog shot it for almost nothing on a real Amazon river with a lead actor he fought with constantly: Kinski's stare and a shrinking raft do everything.
★ 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
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
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 Conversation
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1974
Written years before Watergate and released at its climax, it looked like prophecy: a surveillance expert starts hearing something terrible inside his own recording, and his paranoia does the rest.
★ 7.7
Touch of Evil
Directed by Orson Welles
1958
The opening crane shot is the most studied three minutes in film school: Welles was fired off his own picture, and the version we watch was restored from his memo.
★ 7.6
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
Lady Bird
Directed by Greta Gerwig
2017
Gerwig's first solo film became the best reviewed of its year: a Sacramento teenager and her mother fight about everything, and the film refuses to take a side.
★ 7.6
The French Connection
Directed by William Friedkin
1971
It made the car chase in Bullitt look choreographed: this one was shot without permits, at ninety miles an hour, through real Brooklyn traffic that nobody had cleared.
★ 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
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Directed by John Ford
1962
Ford's last word on the myths he spent forty years building: it gave American English the phrase about printing the legend, and it is the bleakest western he made.
★ 7.6
The Truman Show
Directed by Peter Weir
1998
Psychiatrists named a delusion after it: a man begins to suspect his whole town is a set and everyone in his life is paid, and 1998 had no idea.
★ 7.6
The Lion King
Directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff
1994
Still the highest grossing hand-drawn film ever made: Disney sent a young cub into exile with a Shakespeare plot, and the opening sunrise raises the hair every time.
★ 7.5
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Directed by David Hand
1937
Disney mortgaged his own house to make the first cel-animated feature, and the industry called it his folly: the queen's transformation still frightens small children exactly as intended.
★ 7.5
Nashville
Directed by Robert Altman
1975
Altman's method arrives here fully formed: twenty-four characters, overlapping microphones, and five days of country music and politics that add up to a portrait of the whole country.
★ 7.5
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
Inside Llewyn Davis
Directed by Coen Brothers
2013
The Coens made the saddest film about failure that anyone has managed to make funny: a folk singer plays beautifully, sleeps on couches, and gets absolutely nowhere at all.
★ 7.5
High Noon
Directed by Fred Zinnemann
1952
Written as an allegory about the blacklist by a man about to be blacklisted: a marshal has eighty-five minutes before the noon train, and the film runs them in step.
★ 7.5
The Wolf of Wall Street
Directed by Martin Scorsese
2013
Three hours of pure excess that never once slow down: Scorsese was seventy-one years old, and it moves faster than films made by directors a third his age.
★ 7.5
Cool Hand Luke
Directed by Stuart Rosenberg
1967
American English took a line about failure to communicate from it, and Newman his best role: a man who will not be broken, on a chain gang that keeps trying.
★ 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 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
Hoop Dreams
Directed by Steve James
1994
Its exclusion from the documentary Oscar shortlist caused enough outrage that the Academy changed its rules: five years with two Chicago teenagers, and it is barely about basketball.
★ 7.5
The Last Picture Show
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
1971
Bogdanovich insisted on monochrome in 1971, when absolutely nobody did that: a Texas town running out of reasons to exist, and the teenagers running out along with it.
★ 7.4
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
The Manchurian Candidate
Directed by John Frankenheimer
1962
It sat out of circulation for fifteen years over a rights dispute, not the assassination myth people repeat: a Korean War veteran cannot shake a dream about his own platoon.
★ 7.4
Out of the Past
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
1947
If you want to know what film noir means, this is the film people hand you: a gas station owner's past arrives in the form of a woman he once found.
★ 7.4
First Cow
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
2019
Reichardt makes the quietest films in American cinema, and this one is her warmest: two men on the Oregon frontier, one borrowed cow, and one very small crime.
★ 7.4
Toy Story 3
Directed by Lee Unkrich
2010
Pixar took a third film in a series somewhere nobody expected it to go: the toys end up far from a toy box, and the last act is genuinely harrowing.
★ 7.4
Gone with the Wind
Directed by Victor Fleming
1939
Adjusted for inflation no film has ever earned more, and it is still telling the old South's version of itself: enormous, ravishing, and not to be trusted.
★ 7.4
Brazil
Directed by Terry Gilliam
1985
The bleakest comedy ever made about paperwork: Gilliam imagined a state that tortures you politely and misfiles the forms afterward, and had to fight his own studio to release it.
★ 7.4
This is Spinal Tap
Directed by Rob Reiner
1984
Real musicians find it painful to watch because everything in it has happened to them: Reiner and his cast improvised almost the entire film from a bare outline.
★ 7.4
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
Reservoir Dogs
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
1992
Tarantino arrived fully formed with a heist film that never shows the heist: everyone is in a warehouse afterward, suspecting everyone else and talking far too much.
★ 7.3
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
Dazed and Confused
Directed by Richard Linklater
1993
Nothing happens and that is the entire point: Linklater catches the last day of school in 1976 so exactly that people who were not there remember it anyway.
★ 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
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
The Usual Suspects
Directed by Bryan Singer
1995
Almost nobody guesses where it is going the first time: five criminals meet in a police lineup, and the whole story reaches you secondhand from an interrogation room.
★ 7.3
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Directed by George Roy Hill
1969
Two men have never been better company on screen: Newman and Redford spend the film running out of frontier and enjoying each other far too much to panic.
★ 7.3
American Graffiti
Directed by George Lucas
1973
One night of cruising in 1962, with the radio playing wall to wall from start to finish: Lucas caught an America that was about to stop existing.
★ 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
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
2001 · Mexico
A road trip with a narrator who keeps interrupting to tell you things the characters will never know: Cuaron slips a portrait of Mexico under a teenage sex comedy.
★ 7.3
Gravity
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
2013
Nothing else has made space feel this physically dangerous: Cuaron opens on a shot running almost thirteen minutes, and ninety minutes later you notice you stopped breathing.
★ 7.3
West Side Story
Directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins
1961
Romeo and Juliet moved to two New York gangs, and the dancing spills out of the theater into real streets: nothing on film snaps like Robbins's choreography.
★ 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
East of Eden
Directed by Elia Kazan
1955
The only James Dean performance released while he was still alive: Steinbeck's Cain and Abel moved to a California lettuce valley, and Dean improvises his way through it.
★ 7.3
Almost Famous
Directed by Cameron Crowe
2000
Cameron Crowe was writing for Rolling Stone at fifteen and on the road with the Allman Brothers at sixteen: the film gets every detail right, including the boredom.
★ 7.3
A Serious Man
Directed by Coen Brothers
2009
The Coens' most personal film and their least forgiving: a Minnesota physics professor's life comes apart for no reason at all, and nobody in it will explain anything.
★ 7.3
The Rider
Directed by Chloe Zhao
2017
Chloe Zhao cast a real rodeo rider and his real family to play themselves: the line between documentary and fiction never appears, and neither does a false note.
★ 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
Midnight Cowboy
Directed by John Schlesinger
1969
The only X-rated film that ever took Best Picture: a Texas hustler and an ailing con man share a condemned New York apartment, and the friendship is the whole thing.
★ 7.2
Django Unchained
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
2012
Tarantino turned American slavery into a spaghetti western and got away with it: a freed slave rides with a German bounty hunter, and the dialogue never stops crackling.
★ 7.2
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
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 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
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
The Prestige
Directed by Christopher Nolan
2006
Nolan built a film about magicians the way a magician builds a trick, and tells you so in the first minute: two rivals destroy each other over one illusion.
★ 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
The Big Sleep
Directed by Howard Hawks
1946
Nobody has ever been able to follow the plot, including the men who wrote it: what you watch it for is Bogart and Bacall talking, which is more than enough.
★ 7.2
Titanic
Directed by James Cameron
1997
For twelve years no film made more money anywhere on earth: Cameron built the ship, sank it more or less in real time, and made a generation cry in public.
★ 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
Duck Soup
Directed by Leo McCarey
1933
The Marx Brothers at their fastest and most anarchic, and they left Paramount soon after it underperformed: the mirror sequence has been stolen by everybody in comedy since.
★ 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
Strangers on a Train
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1951
The premise is so clean that thrillers have been borrowing it for seventy years: two men meet on a train and one of them proposes swapping murders.
★ 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
Good Will Hunting
Directed by Gus Van Sant
1997
Two unknown actors in their twenties wrote it for themselves and it worked: a janitor at MIT can solve anything except himself, and Robin Williams sits opposite him.
★ 7.1
The Best Years of Our Lives
Directed by William Wyler
1946
Wyler cast a veteran who had lost both hands to play a veteran who had lost both hands, and audiences in 1946 recognized their own living rooms.
★ 7.1
The Right Stuff
Directed by Philip Kaufman
1983
It answers the only question that matters about the space race, which is why anyone would climb in: test pilots, astronauts, and the real Chuck Yeager tending bar in a cameo.
★ 7.1
Frankenstein
Directed by James Whale
1931
Karloff's monster became the face everyone pictures, which is not what Mary Shelley wrote: Whale made a horror film that keeps asking who the actual monster is.
★ 7.1
Ghostbusters
Directed by Ivan Reitman
1984
It should not work at all and it works completely: three academics start a small business catching ghosts in New York, and Murray ad-libs freely on top of the script.
★ 7.1
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1943
Churchill tried to stop it in production and then to bar it from export, convinced it made the British Army look ridiculous: Powell and Pressburger made it anyway.
★ 7.1
Bringing Up Baby
Directed by Howard Hawks
1938
Nobody talks faster than this: Hawks overlapped every line until the dialogue becomes a physical event, and it did badly enough that exhibitors called Hepburn box office poison.
★ 7.1
King Kong
Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack
1933
Willis O'Brien animated it a frame at a time and audiences in 1933 had never seen anything like it: the ape on that building is known to people who never watched it.
★ 7.1
Casino Royale
Directed by Martin Campbell
2006
It stripped Bond back to a man who bleeds: the parkour chase in the opening twenty minutes told audiences immediately that the gadgets and the winking were gone.
★ 7.1
Shane
Directed by George Stevens
1953
The western seen entirely through a small boy's worship, which is the honest way to look at it: a gunfighter tries to stop being one and cannot.
★ 7.1
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1989
Casting Sean Connery as the father was the best idea the series ever had: the bickering carries a treasure hunt that would otherwise just be a rerun.
★ 7.1
Stagecoach
Directed by John Ford
1939
It made John Wayne a star, invented Monument Valley as a place in the American mind, and put nine strangers in one coach: every road movie descends from it.
★ 7.0
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
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
Directed by Robert Altman
1971
Altman made a western out of mud, snow and Leonard Cohen songs: a small-time gambler and a businesslike madam build a frontier town out of almost nothing.
★ 7.0
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
Rio Bravo
Directed by Howard Hawks
1959
Hawks made it as an argument against High Noon: instead of a marshal begging for help, four flawed men hold a jail and enjoy each other's company doing it.
★ 7.0
The Hustler
Directed by Robert Rossen
1961
Nobody has filmed a game better: Newman's pool hustler wants to be great and cannot get out of his own way, and the smoke never leaves the room.
★ 7.0
The Thin Blue Line
Directed by Errol Morris
1988
A documentary that overturned a real murder conviction: Morris reconstructed the same killing over and over from contradictory testimony, and the case collapsed within a year of release.
★ 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
Man on Wire
Directed by James Marsh
2008
Petit walked a wire between the Twin Towers in 1974 and Marsh tells it as a heist: the planning, the break-in, and forty-five minutes in the air.
★ 7.0
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
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
Red River
Directed by Howard Hawks
1948
Ford said he never knew Wayne could act until he saw this: a cattle drive turns into a mutiny, and the man in charge becomes the thing to escape.
★ 7.0
Toy Story 2
Directed by John Lasseter and Ash Brannon
1999
Pixar scrapped the whole film and rebuilt it in nine months, and it came out better than expected: the song about being outgrown is what people remember.
★ 7.0
The Sting
Directed by George Roy Hill
1973
The con is played on the audience as much as on the mark, and every turn is earned: Newman and Redford again, with ragtime that put Scott Joplin back on the charts.
★ 7.0
A Woman Under the Influence
Directed by John Cassavetes
1974
Cassavetes mortgaged his house to finance it, and Gena Rowlands gives the most exposed performance in American film: a marriage where love and damage cannot be separated.
★ 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
Rebel Without a Cause
Directed by Nicholas Ray
1955
The teenager as a subject starts here: James Dean in a red jacket, a knife fight at an observatory, and parents who have no idea what is happening.
★ 7.0
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Directed by Mike Nichols
1966
Burton and Taylor were married and it shows in every line: a history professor and his wife drink through one night and take each other apart in front of guests.
★ 7.0
The Long Goodbye
Directed by Robert Altman
1973
Altman dropped Chandler's detective into 1973 Los Angeles and let him be completely out of step with it: Elliott Gould mumbles through a city that has stopped caring.
★ 7.0
Stand By Me
Directed by Rob Reiner
1986
Nothing else captures being twelve years old this exactly: four boys walk along a railway line for two days, and the narration knows precisely how much it mattered.
★ 7.0
Touching the Void
Directed by Kevin Macdonald
2003
You will not believe it is true and it is: two climbers in the Andes, one broken leg, and a decision that neither man has ever fully stopped explaining.
★ 7.0
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Directed by Woody Allen
1989
Allen's most serious film, and his only one that asks whether anyone is watching at all: a respected doctor is cornered by a woman he cannot pay off.
★ 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
True Grit
Directed by Coen Brothers
2010
The Coens went back to Charles Portis's actual sentences and rationed contractions almost out of existence: a fourteen-year-old girl hires a drunk marshal to avenge her father.
★ 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
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
The Breakfast Club
Directed by John Hughes
1985
Five teenagers in one room for a Saturday detention, and every teen film since has been rearranging the same five: Hughes let them talk instead of doing anything.
★ 6.9
Blazing Saddles
Directed by Mel Brooks
1974
Brooks spent years saying it could not be made today and has since changed his mind: a Black sheriff arrives in a frontier town built on racism, and everybody gets hit.
★ 6.9
Million Dollar Baby
Directed by Clint Eastwood
2004
Eastwood spends an hour making you love a boxing underdog story and then does something else entirely: nothing in American film is tougher than where it ends up.
★ 6.9
The King of Comedy
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1983
It flopped and now looks like prophecy: De Niro plays a man who believes fame is owed to him, and Scorsese refuses to let you laugh comfortably.
★ 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
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
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
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
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
Raising Arizona
Directed by Coen Brothers
1987
The Coens' funniest film and by some way their fastest: a childless couple steal one of a furniture magnate's quintuplets, and the chase never once slows down afterward.
★ 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
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
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
Magnolia
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
1999
Three hours, nine storylines, and a last act nobody sees coming: Anderson made the most ambitious American film of the nineties and dared it to collapse under itself.
★ 6.8
The Sixth Sense
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
1999
The ending changed how an entire generation watched films, and it is genuinely unguessable: a child psychologist takes on a boy who is frightened of something very specific.
★ 6.8
Minority Report
Directed by Steven Spielberg
2002
Spielberg hired futurists to design 2054 and most of what they invented has since arrived: gesture screens, targeted advertising, and a police force that arrests you beforehand.
★ 6.8
Black Swan
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
2010
Aronofsky filmed ballet as body horror and somehow made it work: a dancer's discipline turns on her, and Natalie Portman trained for a year to make it convincing.
★ 6.8
Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Directed by John Hughes
1986
Truancy has never looked this appealing: Ferris talks straight to the audience, takes a Ferrari and a parade, and the whole film is completely on his side.
★ 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
Kill Bill
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
2003
Tarantino built it out of every film he ever loved: kung fu, spaghetti westerns, anime and samurai pictures, and the House of Blue Leaves fight tops all of them.
★ 6.8
Rocky
Directed by John G. Avildsen
1976
Stallone wrote it himself and would not sell the script unless he could star: a club fighter from Philadelphia is handed a title shot as a publicity stunt, and takes it completely seriously.
★ 6.8
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Directed by Peter Weir
2003
No film has put an audience inside a wooden warship this completely: Weir's frigate is a working machine of rope and rank, chasing a faster enemy across the bottom of the world.
★ 6.8
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
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Directed by Coen Brothers
2000
Homer's Odyssey rerouted through Depression-era Mississippi: the soundtrack of gospel and bluegrass sold eight million copies and sent a mass audience back to music first recorded in the 1920s.
★ 6.8
The Grapes of Wrath
Directed by John Ford
1940
That a major studio released this in 1940 is still hard to believe: Ford films an Oklahoma family driven west by the banks, and Gregg Toland lights the migrant camps like documentary photographs.
★ 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
The Last Waltz
Directed by Martin Scorsese
1978
A rock concert storyboarded like a feature and shot on 35mm by seven camera crews: The Band's 1976 farewell is the concert film everything else gets measured against.
★ 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
Throne of Blood
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1957 · Japan
Shakespeare's Macbeth moved to sixteenth-century Japan with every line of the poetry gone: Kurosawa substitutes fog, Noh masks worn as faces, and a forest that seems to be watching the castle.
★ 6.8
How to Train Your Dragon
Directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois
2010
Animation has never conveyed the physical sensation of flight this well: Roger Deakins consulted on the lighting, and a Viking boy who cannot fight befriends the creature he was raised to kill.
★ 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
The African Queen
Directed by John Huston
1951
Huston took the production into the Congo and almost everyone fell ill: what came back is Bogart and Hepburn on a battered steam launch, insulting each other into something like love.
★ 6.7
Monsters, Inc.
Directed by Pete Docter and Lee Unkrich
2001
Pixar built an entire energy economy out of children's nightmares: the joke is that the monsters are salaried professionals, and the film turns on one of them being frightened of a toddler.
★ 6.7
Glory
Directed by Edward Zwick
1989
The Civil War film that finally noticed who else was fighting it: the 54th Massachusetts fights for boots, for pay equal to white soldiers, and for permission to be used at all.
★ 6.7
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
Amores Perros
Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
2000 · Mexico
Mexican cinema arrived on the world stage with this: Inarritu's first film braids three Mexico City lives around a single car crash and refuses to soften any of them.
★ 6.7
The Bourne Ultimatum
Directed by Paul Greengrass
2007
Handheld chases got shakier for a decade because of this film: Greengrass films spying as legwork rather than glamour, and the Waterloo Station chase is the most tightly constructed surveillance sequence ever filmed.
★ 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
Glengarry Glen Ross
Directed by James Foley
1992
The best-acted film about work ever made: Mamet's salesmen speak in a rhythm nobody actually uses, and an ensemble of stars took deep pay cuts for the chance to say the lines.
★ 6.7
Hero
Directed by Zhang Yimou
2002 · China
Zhang Yimou shot each retelling of one assassination attempt in a different color: Christopher Doyle's photography is so beautiful that the film's politics start an argument every single time.
★ 6.7
Grizzly Man
Directed by Werner Herzog
2005
A hundred hours of video shot by a man who camped among Alaskan grizzlies, edited by Werner Herzog, who disagrees with him completely: two views of nature, arguing across the cut.
★ 6.7
Moneyball
Directed by Bennett Miller
2011
A film about a spreadsheet that plays like a thriller: Sorkin and Zaillian turn Billy Beane's 2002 Oakland roster into an argument between a broke general manager and every scout in his building.
★ 6.7
Rushmore
Directed by Wes Anderson
1998
Wes Anderson's style arrives fully formed here, and so does the melancholy Bill Murray everyone loves: a prep-school boy who runs every club and fails every class declares war on a millionaire.
★ 6.7
Howl's Moving Castle
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
2004 · Japan
Miyazaki's most beautiful machine is a walking house held together by magic and bad temper: underneath the wonder is an angry anti-war film, made while he watched the invasion of Iraq.
★ 6.6
Skyfall
Directed by Sam Mendes
2012
Roger Deakins photographed a James Bond film and the series has never looked the same: the Shanghai fight plays out in silhouette against neon, and the plot finally asks what Bond is for.
★ 6.6
Deliverance
Directed by John Boorman
1972
The outdoors has never felt this hostile on film: Boorman shot in sequence and made his actors run the whitewater themselves, and a weekend canoe trip turns into something much older.
★ 6.6
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
United 93
Directed by Paul Greengrass
2006
Greengrass cast real air-traffic controllers and military officers as themselves, and shot in real time: the least exploitative film about September 11 because it refuses every note of uplift.
★ 6.6
Blow Out
Directed by Brian De Palma
1981
Travolta's best performance is in a thriller that flopped and spent forty years being rediscovered: a movie sound man records an accident and hears something that should not be on the tape.
★ 6.6
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
JFK
Directed by Oliver Stone
1991
A film that changed federal law: the outcry over Stone's conspiracy case pushed Congress to pass the JFK Records Act, and the editing that sells it remains the most aggressive in American film.
★ 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
Requiem for a Dream
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
2000
Nobody who has seen the last twenty minutes forgets them: Aronofsky films four people chasing different highs around Coney Island in split screen and body-mounted cameras, with Clint Mansell's string theme underneath.
★ 6.6
The Royal Tenenbaums
Directed by Wes Anderson
2001
The film where Wes Anderson's dollhouse precision finally serves real grief: Gene Hackman plays a father who lies his way back into a house full of ruined prodigies.
★ 6.6
Thelma and Louise
Directed by Ridley Scott
1991
Callie Khouri's script did something no American road movie had done: put two women in the car and let the country outside it turn hostile, while the friendship becomes the only reliable thing.
★ 6.6
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Directed by Frank Capra
1939
Capra built the most stirring film ever made out of parliamentary procedure: an amateur senator holds the floor with nothing but his voice and the rulebook, and Washington's press corps hated it.
★ 6.6
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
Intolerance
Directed by D. W. Griffith
1916
Nothing in 1916 looked remotely like this: Griffith cuts between four eras at once, and his Babylon set was so enormous it was left standing in Hollywood for years afterward.
★ 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
The Magnificent Seven
Directed by John Sturges
1960
Kurosawa liked this remake of his own film enough to send Sturges a ceremonial sword: Seven Samurai relocated to the Mexican border, with Elmer Bernstein's theme doing half the work.
★ 6.6
Five Easy Pieces
Directed by Bob Rafelson
1970
The diner scene has outlived the film's whole era: a classical pianist walked away from his family to work oil rigs, and nobody here will explain him or forgive him.
★ 6.6
Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
Directed by Richard Marquand
1983
The trilogy sticks its landing: the speeder chase through Endor still moves better than most digital work made since, and the whole climax runs on puppets, models and matte paintings.
★ 6.6
Easy Rider
Directed by Dennis Hopper
1969
New Hollywood found its proof here: two bikers ride east on drug money, a four-hundred-thousand-dollar film outgrossed studio pictures, and the men who had run the studios for forty years lost the argument.
★ 6.5
All Quiet on the Western Front
Directed by Lewis Milestone
1930
The Nazis sent brownshirts to disrupt its German screenings and banned it outright once in power: the first great sound film about war, told entirely from inside a German schoolboys' trench.
★ 6.5
Sullivan's Travels
Directed by Preston Sturges
1942
Preston Sturges aimed the sharpest dialogue of his career at Hollywood itself: a director of hit comedies decides to make something serious about poverty, and goes looking for it in person.
★ 6.5
The Great Dictator
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
1940
Chaplin attacked Hitler while America was still neutral, in his first talking picture: the two men were born four days apart, and the globe dance is the cruelest joke he ever staged.
★ 6.5
The Hidden Fortress
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1958 · Japan
Lucas took the two bickering peasants and turned them into R2-D2 and C-3PO: Kurosawa's first widescreen film tells an escape story from the point of view of its most useless characters.
★ 6.5
Doctor Zhivago
Directed by David Lean
1965
Critics savaged it on release and audiences ignored them completely: Lean shot the Russian winter in Spain, and Maurice Jarre's balalaika theme was inescapable for a decade afterward.
★ 6.5
Anatomy of a Murder
Directed by Otto Preminger
1959
The Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph Welch plays the judge and Duke Ellington wrote the score: a murder trial turning on an alleged rape, argued in language so frank that 1959 audiences were shocked.
★ 6.5
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
Infernal Affairs
Directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak
2002 · Hong Kong
Scorsese's The Departed is a remake of this, and the Hong Kong original is fifty minutes tighter: two moles assigned to find each other, and a plot that never stops to explain itself.
★ 6.5
Patton
Directed by Franklin J. Schaffner
1970
Coppola co-wrote it before The Godfather and George C. Scott refused the Oscar: a monologue in front of an enormous flag opens the most ambivalent film Hollywood ever made about a general.
★ 6.5
Being There
Directed by Hal Ashby
1979
Peter Sellers chased this part for years and considered it the best work he ever did: a gardener who has only ever watched television is mistaken for a sage.
★ 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
The Straight Story
Directed by David Lynch
1999
The strangest thing in David Lynch's filmography is this: a G-rated Disney picture in which an old man drives a riding lawnmower from Iowa to Wisconsin to reach his estranged brother.
★ 6.5
The Outlaw Josey Wales
Directed by Clint Eastwood
1976
Eastwood fired the director and took over, and the union wrote a rule to stop it happening again: a Missouri farmer rides out after the war and keeps collecting strays he never wanted.
★ 6.5
The Wrestler
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
2008
Mickey Rourke had been out of serious work for fifteen years and walked straight back into this: a broken-down wrestler working autograph shows in New Jersey, filmed like a documentary from behind.
★ 6.5
Dirty Harry
Directed by Don Siegel
1971
Pauline Kael called it fascist and the argument has never really ended: Eastwood's inspector chases a Zodiac-like killer through San Francisco with a .44 Magnum and open contempt for procedure.
★ 6.4
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
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
The Fugitive
Directed by Andrew Davis
1993
The train wreck was staged for real because it was cheaper than faking it: a surgeon convicted of his wife's murder runs, and Tommy Lee Jones's marshal is better company than the hero.
★ 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
The Last of the Mohicans
Directed by Michael Mann
1992
Michael Mann's most romantic film ends with twelve near-wordless minutes carried entirely by the score: Daniel Day-Lewis learned to live off the land for it, and the frontier looks genuinely unmapped.
★ 6.4
Captain Phillips
Directed by Paul Greengrass
2013
Barkhad Abdi had never acted and was cast out of a Minneapolis open call: he holds the screen against Tom Hanks through the last hour on a lifeboat off Somalia, and never blinks.
★ 6.4
Edward Scissorhands
Directed by Tim Burton
1990
A boy with blades for hands is brought down from a gothic mansion into a pastel suburb: Tim Burton's most personal fairy tale, with the Danny Elfman score he calls a career favorite.
★ 6.4
The Birds
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1963
Alfred Hitchcock threw live gulls at Tippi Hedren for five days and gave the film no conventional score: only electronic shrieks, a quiet California town, and crows gathering on a schoolyard jungle gym.
★ 6.4
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
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
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
The Last Emperor
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
1987
The Chinese government let Bertolucci shoot inside the Forbidden City, the first Western production ever allowed in: a child emperor is crowned before thousands and then history keeps rearranging him.
★ 6.4
Serpico
Directed by Sidney Lumet
1973
Frank Serpico was a real New York cop who would not take an envelope: Lumet films departmental corruption as an ordinary daily fact, and Pacino plays stubbornness as an entire personality.
★ 6.3
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
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
Ben Hur
Directed by William Wyler
1959
The chariot race took months to shoot and has never been bettered: Wyler's epic runs almost four hours and earns every minute of the nine it spends inside that arena.
★ 6.3
12 Monkeys
Directed by Terry Gilliam
1995
Gilliam built it from La Jetee, a French short told in still photographs: a prisoner is sent up from an underground future to trace a plague, and nobody in 1990 believes a word.
★ 6.3
Election
Directed by Alexander Payne
1999
Reese Witherspoon has never been better used: a high-school student council election becomes a study of ambition and resentment, and Payne refuses to let a single character off the hook.
★ 6.3
Borat
Directed by Larry Charles
2006
Baron Cohen stayed in character in front of real Americans who had no idea, and they told him what they actually thought: the funniest film of its decade and the most uncomfortable.
★ 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
Into the Wild
Directed by Sean Penn
2007
Sean Penn spent ten years persuading the family to let him film this: a graduate burns his savings and walks into the Alaskan interior, and the film neither mocks him nor canonizes him.
★ 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
Black Hawk Down
Directed by Ridley Scott
2001
Ridley Scott stripped out almost everything a war film normally has: no arcs, barely any backstory, just eighteen hours in Mogadishu in 1993 rendered as continuous, disorienting noise and dust.
★ 6.3
Leon: The Professional
Directed by Luc Besson
1994
Natalie Portman was twelve and had never acted: Besson pairs her with a hitman who waters his houseplant like a dependent, and the film has been argued about ever since.
★ 6.3
Clueless
Directed by Amy Heckerling
1995
Amy Heckerling relocated Jane Austen's Emma to Beverly Hills without losing a thing: she collected the vocabulary from real teenagers, the film sent it back amplified, and the heroine is never the joke.
★ 6.3
Mean Girls
Directed by Mark Waters
2004
Tina Fey adapted a parenting book about teenage girls into the most quoted comedy of its decade: the anthropology is accurate, and the cruelty is presented as a system rather than a person.
★ 6.3