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
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 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
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
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
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
Best in Show
Directed by Christopher Guest
2000
The mockumentary found its permanent subject here, the American hobbyist: five sets of owners take their dogs to a national championship, and each of them reveals far more than intended.
★ 5.7
Breaking Away
Directed by Peter Yates
1979
No sports film is sweeter, and the sport barely matters: an Indiana teenager pretends to be Italian because he loves bicycle racing, and the town's class divide does the rest.
★ 5.7
Silver Linings Playbook
Directed by David O. Russell
2012
A widow and a man just out of a state hospital strike a deal: David O. Russell keeps the camera close enough to be uncomfortable, and Jennifer Lawrence shot it at twenty-one.
★ 5.5
Trading Places
Directed by John Landis
1983
A regulation passed in 2010 is nicknamed after this film: two rich brothers bet a dollar on whether a broker and a hustler can swap lives, and Eddie Murphy runs away with it.
★ 5.4
A Christmas Story
Directed by Bob Clark
1983
American television runs it for twenty-four straight hours every Christmas: Jean Shepherd narrates his own childhood, and it is honest enough about children to stay genuinely funny.
★ 4.8
Philadelphia
Directed by Jonathan Demme
1993
The first major studio film to take AIDS seriously, aimed squarely at people who had not: a lawyer sues the firm that fired him, and Bruce Springsteen wrote the opening song.
★ 4.7
Hoosiers
Directed by David Anspaugh
1986
Indiana still argues about how close it is to what actually happened in 1954: Gene Hackman coaches a town of a few hundred people who care about nothing else at all.
★ 4.5
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Directed by Stephen Chbosky
2012
Stephen Chbosky wrote the novel, wrote the screenplay and directed it himself, which almost never works: a freshman is taken up by two seniors, and the tunnel scene earned its reputation.
★ 4.4
Rudy
Directed by David Anspaugh
1993
Notre Dame had not allowed a film crew on campus in fifty years: a kid with no size and no grades wants to dress for one game, and everybody tells him no.
★ 3.7