M
Directed by Fritz Lang
1931 · Germany
Serial killer films begin here: Lang used sound as a weapon in his first talkie, gave the murderer a whistled tune, and turned a whole city into a trap.
★ 8.9
The 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.
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
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
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
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 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
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
Stalag 17
Directed by Billy Wilder
1953
Wilder made a POW comedy in 1953 and refused to soften the Americans in it: a barracks works out that somebody inside is trading information to the Germans, and starts looking around.
★ 5.8
Judgment at Nuremberg
Directed by Stanley Kramer
1961
Stanley Kramer put real concentration camp footage into a Hollywood film in 1961 and made audiences sit with it: the trial is of judges, which makes the question about everybody.
★ 4.2
Grand Hotel
Directed by Edmund Goulding
1932
It took Best Picture without a single other nomination, which nothing else has managed: Greta Garbo says the line about wanting to be alone, and the one-building ensemble format begins here.
★ 1.8