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.
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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