The long arc of the canon.
Showing 15,530 works across all media from all time
Like a Rolling Stone
A snare crack, a sneer, and Kooper's uninvited organ swirling through the song that split rock open.
The Godfather
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.
The Garden of Earthly Delights
Three panels run from Eden to hell, with a whole naked humanity climbing into giant fruit in between. Nobody has settled what it means.
Respect
Aretha takes Otis Redding's song away from him for good, spells out the demand, and never gives it back.
The Iliad
Achilles withdraws from the fighting over a stolen prize and his friends die outside Troy for it. Nothing written about war since has matched Homer's fury, or the mercy of the final scene.
Citizen Kane
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.
Pet Sounds
Brian Wilson made it with session players while the rest of the band toured, using bicycle bells, dog whistles and a Coca-Cola can.
Mona Lisa
She was probably Lisa Gherardini, a merchant's wife, and Leonardo kept reworking her for years and never handed the portrait over.
A Day in the Life
Two unfinished songs bolted together, an orchestra climbing to nothing, and the last piano chord in pop.
Seven Samurai
Every film about assembling a team for one last job descends from this one: Kurosawa makes seven men matter, then stages a battle in the mud nobody has equaled.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Hamlet's father appears as a ghost and demands revenge, and the prince spends the play failing to take it. Four centuries of readers have found their own divided minds in his hesitation.
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Four chords, a mumble nobody could decipher, and the riff that ended one decade of rock and started another.
Guernica
A screaming horse, a mother with her dead child, all in grey. Picasso painted it in weeks after German bombers leveled a Basque town.
Revolver
On Tomorrow Never Knows, engineers held five tape loops on pencils and mixed them live. No Beatle plays an instrument on Eleanor Rigby.
The Odyssey
Ten years of storms, monsters, and a goddess who will not let him go stand between a soldier and his own front door. Every adventure story since descends from Odysseus.
Vertigo
Nobody has ever made obsession look this beautiful or this sick: a man falls for an image instead of a person, and Hitchcock follows him past every point it should stop.