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
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1946
Showing 71 works across all media from 1946
Notorious
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1946
Hitchcock's most grown-up film, and the one where the suspense is entirely about feeling: a woman is sent to seduce a Nazi by the man who loves her.
★ 8.4
Hiroshima
1946 · 152 pages
Six people survived the bomb at Hiroshima and Hersey follows them through the year after: a clerk, a widow, two doctors, and two clergymen. He writes flatly and it is unbearable.
★ 8.0
A Night in TunisiaDizzy Gillespie
A Night in Tunisia
1946
Written at a Kelly's Stables piano in 1942 under the title Interlude, with a bass line that refuses to walk.
★ 7.6
The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire)
1946
Tormé and Wells wrote it in a July heat wave, thinking cool, and Cole overruled Capitol about the strings.
★ 7.5
The Big Sleep
Directed by Howard Hawks
1946
Nobody has ever been able to follow the plot, including the men who wrote it: what you watch it for is Bogart and Bacall talking, which is more than enough.
★ 7.2
The Best Years of Our Lives
Directed by William Wyler
1946
Wyler cast a veteran who had lost both hands to play a veteran who had lost both hands, and audiences in 1946 recognized their own living rooms.
★ 7.1
A Matter of Life and Death
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
1946 · United Kingdom
Heaven is monochrome and earth is in Technicolor, which is the whole joke: a pilot bails out without a parachute and then has to argue for his life.
★ 7.0
Politics and the English Language · 1946
Man's Search for Meaning
1946 · 165 pages
Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist, lost his wife and parents to the camps and survived Auschwitz himself. He watched who endured and who gave up, and named the last freedom: choosing your own response.
★ 6.9
Mr. President
1946 · 320 pages
In an unnamed Latin American capital, a beggar's killing of a colonel gives a dictator the pretext to destroy his enemies. Asturias renders the terror as fever dream, in prose that hallucinates.
★ 6.8
Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bete)
Directed by Jean Cocteau
1946 · France
Cocteau made a fairy tale that looks the way one feels: human arms hold the candelabra along the corridor, and the Beast's castle behaves like a dream that has not decided to end.
★ 6.8
All The King's Men
1946 · 656 pages
Willie Stark rises from county treasurer to governor believing good can be made only out of bad. Warren wrote the American novel of power, narrated by the aide he sends to dig dirt.
★ 6.8
The Street
1946 · 448 pages
Lutie Johnson believes what Benjamin Franklin promised about work and thrift, and rents an apartment on 116th Street to raise her son. The men who watch her climb the stairs have other plans.
★ 6.7
Zorba the Greek
1946 · 368 pages
A bookish young Greek reopens a lignite mine on Crete and hires Alexis Zorba, an aging laborer who dances, plays the santuri, and treats his employer's reading as a substitute for living.
★ 6.5