Saving Private Ryan
Directed by Steven Spielberg
1998
War films look different since the first twenty minutes of this one: Spielberg put the camera in the surf at Omaha Beach and veterans left cinemas unable to speak.
★ 8.8
The 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.
The Rules of the Game
Directed by Jean Renoir
1939 · France
Banned in 1939, booed at its premiere, then in the top ten of every Sight and Sound poll for sixty years: Renoir turned a hunting party into a diagnosis of a doomed society.
★ 8.8
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
1928
No screen performance has been called greater, and its actress never made another film: Dreyer shot Renee Falconetti's face in close-up, and his original cut went missing for fifty years.
★ 8.7
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
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
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
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
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
Before Sunset
Directed by Richard Linklater
2004
Very little else works the way this does: eighty minutes of two people walking around Paris talking, in close to real time, and it is over far too soon.
★ 8.0
Cleo from 5 to 7
Directed by Agnes Varda
1962
Varda was the one woman the New Wave could not leave out, and this is her breakthrough: ninety minutes of a singer walking Paris, waiting on news.
★ 8.0
Au Hasard Balthazar
Directed by Robert Bresson
1966
Godard said it contained the world in an hour and a half: a donkey passes from owner to owner, and Bresson makes cruelty and grace arrive without warning.
★ 7.8
Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis)
Directed by Marcel Carne
1945 · France
France's greatest film, and its Jewish designer and composer worked in hiding under German occupation: three hours of theater, mime and love among people who cannot afford it.
★ 7.7
Cache (Hidden)
Directed by Michael Haneke
2005 · France
The most quietly frightening film anyone has made about guilt: videotapes of a family's own front door start arriving, and Haneke cares far more about what nobody says.
★ 7.7
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
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
Beauty and the Beast
Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise
1991
The peak of the Disney Renaissance, and the moment computers earned a place in hand-drawn animation: the ballroom sequence still looks like nothing anyone had done before.
★ 7.3
Ratatouille
Directed by Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava
2007
Almost nothing else takes both cooking and criticism this seriously: a rat with a palate steers a hapless human around a Paris kitchen, and the food looks extraordinary.
★ 7.3
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