The Wizard of Oz
Directed by Victor Fleming
1939
Decades of television broadcasts made it what the Library of Congress calls the most-seen film in history: the switch from sepia Kansas into Technicolor Oz still lands like a door opening.
★ 9.1
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1939
Showing 5 films from 1939
The Rules of the Game
Directed by Jean Renoir
1939 · France
Banned in 1939, booed at its premiere, then in the top ten of every Sight and Sound poll for sixty years: Renoir turned a hunting party into a diagnosis of a doomed society.
★ 8.8
Gone with the Wind
Directed by Victor Fleming
1939
Adjusted for inflation no film has ever earned more, and it is still telling the old South's version of itself: enormous, ravishing, and not to be trusted.
★ 7.4
Stagecoach
Directed by John Ford
1939
It made John Wayne a star, invented Monument Valley as a place in the American mind, and put nine strangers in one coach: every road movie descends from it.
★ 7.0
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Directed by Frank Capra
1939
Capra built the most stirring film ever made out of parliamentary procedure: an amateur senator holds the floor with nothing but his voice and the rulebook, and Washington's press corps hated it.
★ 6.6