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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
When We Were Kings
Directed by Leon Gast
1996
Leon Gast shot the footage in 1974 and could not finish the film for twenty-two years: Ali in Kinshasa, talking constantly, in the weeks before the biggest fight of his life.
★ 6.2
The Ten Commandments
Directed by Cecil B. DeMille
1956
American television has run it every Easter for over fifty years: DeMille parted the Red Sea with gelatin, dumped water and a reversed film, and nobody has topped the sheer nerve of it.
★ 5.5
The Constant Gardener
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
2005 · United Kingdom
Fernando Meirelles shot Kenya the way he shot Rio, handheld and saturated: a mild British diplomat starts pulling at what his wife was investigating, and Rachel Weisz took the Oscar for playing her.
★ 5.3
Hotel Rwanda
Directed by Terry George
2004
Don Cheadle plays a hotel manager who used bribes and telephone calls to shelter over a thousand people: the 1994 Rwandan genocide, seen mostly through the absence of anyone coming to help.
★ 4.9
The Last King of Scotland
Directed by Kevin Macdonald
2006
Forest Whitaker learned Swahili and studied Idi Amin's speeches for months: the film watches him through a young Scottish doctor who mistakes charisma for something safe to be near.
★ 4.4
Out of Africa
Directed by Sydney Pollack
1985
The flight over the Rift Valley is why anyone remembers it: Meryl Streep built Karen Blixen's Danish accent from recordings, and the film takes its time in a way nothing does now.
★ 3.1
Tsotsi
Directed by Gavin Hood
2005 · South Africa
South Africa's first Academy Award for a foreign language film: a Johannesburg gang member steals a car and finds a baby in the back, and the film gives him no easy way out.
★ 2.7
Cry Freedom
Directed by Richard Attenborough
1987 · United Kingdom
Richard Attenborough got Steve Biko into cinemas while apartheid was still standing: Denzel Washington's first Oscar nomination, and a white newspaper editor learning what Black South Africans already knew.
★ 2.3
Road to Morocco
Directed by David Butler
1942
Bob Hope and Bing Crosby keep telling the audience it is only a film, and a camel gets a line: the fourth wall came down here long before anyone named it.
★ 1.1