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.
Citizen Kane
Directed by Orson Welles
1941
Welles was twenty-five and had never directed a feature before: he built a portrait of a man whose whole life nobody around him can add up, and changed everything.
★ 9.9
The Godfather: Part II
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1974
Coppola did what almost nobody manages, and made a sequel with a real claim to surpassing the original: two eras of one family run side by side, and the colder one wins.
★ 9.8
Chinatown
Directed by Roman Polanski
1974
Screenwriters still take this one apart scene by scene to see how it works: Towne and Polanski built a mystery about stolen water that ends without a shred of mercy.
★ 9.4
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