Table of contents for TIME 100 Must-See Movies in TIME Magazine

THE KID

1921 Though it sometimes seems there’s an invisible force in the universe decreeing that we must all love Charlie Chaplin, complicated feelings are allowed. As the great critic Robert Warshow has said: If Chaplin’s insistent, naked message is “love me,” we’re also entitled to ask if he loves us back, and the answer may not be what we want to hear. “He does not love us; and maybe he doesn’t love anything,” Warshow writes. “Even in his most genial moments we get now and then a glimpse of how cold a heart has gone into his great blaze.” But even among those of us who don’t worship at the altar of Chaplin, his first full-length film as a director, The Kid, is a close to perfect picture in both…

THE THIEF OF BAGDAD

1924 Of all the Swashbucklers featuring the swinging king of the silents, Douglas Fairbanks, none is more fanciful and dreamlike than The Thief of Bagdad. In this One Thousand and One Nights-inspired escapade, the suave, wiry Fairbanks is Ahmed, a devil-may-care thief who delights in stealing whatever he wishes, wheeling through the city in a pair of billowing chiffon pants, heedless of the laws of God or man or anyone who insists men shouldn’t wear printed silk. While the upstanding citizens of the city are distracted by their daily prayers, he steals a magic rope, a whatnot with a thousand and one nefarious uses. But his plans swerve when he falls in love with a stunningly beautiful princess (Julanne Johnston): He must win her love, even if that means…

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC

1928 A face can make a movie. We’re used to that idea today, though it’s hard to comprehend that the mere notion of the movie close-up—anecdotally, at least, popularized by D.W. Griffith—was still relatively young when Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer embarked on his film version of the story of Joan of Arc. Broken down into its basic filmmaking components, The Passion of Joan of Arc is a brazen, experimental work, a symphony of sharp angles and austerely expressive lighting. But once you’ve seen this film, the face of its star, Renée-Jeanne Falconetti, sometimes known also as Maria Falconetti, becomes its most haunting element. As the doomed 15th century political prisoner, tortured and taunted for adhering to her faith, Falconetti holds the film around her in something close to…

SCARFACE

1932 The true horror of Howard Hawks’ grimly satisfying pre-code gangster elegy Scarface is that you find yourself falling in love, at least a little, with the scrappy, heartless thug at its center: Paul Muni’s Tony is a rising star in the Chicago mob, swaggering his way toward total control of the city. He has a suave right-hand man who’ll do anything for him, George Raft’s laconic Rinaldo, and a sister he adores, Ann Dvorak’s Cesca, though he’s possessive of her in a darkly unhealthy way. Tony has no morals and no manners, but there’s also something naively cheerful about him. When Rinaldo hands him his first tommy gun, his delight hits like a flare. “Look,” he says, “you can carry it around like a baby!”—he’s awful and bitterly…

TOP HAT

1935 Choosing the best Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical is a task no one should take lightly. But for the crazy exuberance of its sets, for its fantastic trio of second bananas (Eric Blore as an all-seeing gentleman’s gentleman, Edward Everett Horton as an innocently flirtatious society rake, and Erik Rhodes as a preening Euro-suitor), and most of all for the exquisite “Cheek to Cheek” dance number, let’s go with Mark Sandrich’s Top Hat. The plot is your standard mistaken-identity loop-de-loop. But to watch the slow-burning romance between Astaire’s eternal playboy Jerry Travers and Rogers’ no-nonsense charmer Dale Tremont is bliss: You almost don’t want them to get together so their fox-trotting courtship can go on forever. When Astaire looks at her, sings to her, he somehow appears…

STAGECOACH

1939 John Wayne had appeared in some 80 movies, sometimes in uncredited roles, by the time he showed up as the Ringo Kid in John Ford’s majestically modest western Stagecoach. It was the role that made him a star, and it’s easy to see why: He moves with the easy, lanky grace of a lynx, and phrases his lines with the same languorous poise. In Stagecoach, a group of seven mismatched passengers, the Ringo Kid among them, rumble unsteadily through hostile Apache territory, all aware they may not reach their destination alive. There are two ladies aboard, Louise Platt’s prim, pregnant army wife Lucy Mallory, and Claire Trevor’s pensive, wary Dallas, a woman of ill repute. Several of the passengers—like John Carradine’s Hatfield, a professional gambler and a gentleman…

HIS GIRL FRIDAY

1940 Nothing at the beginning of Howard Hawks’ glorious screwball comedy His Girl Friday—not even the coat worn by star Rosalind Russell, a sharp confection of mitred stripes as meticulous as an airtight lede—prepares you for what’s coming, and for how much work you’ll have to do to keep pace. But in His Girl Friday, the work is fun. Cary Grant is charmingly manipulative newspaper editor Walter Burns, and he’s just about to lose his star reporter, who also happens to be his former wife, Russell’s Hildy Johnson. (The movie’s source material is Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page, one of the greatest American plays, retooled by Hawks as a romantic comedy.) Walter wants Hildy back, both as a wife and as an employee, but he’s about…

MILDRED PIERCE

1945 Though Joan Crawford was a hugely successful Hollywood star throughout the 1930s—it was a stardom she herself willed into being, taking a hyperactive role in self-promotion that would leave even today’s biggest social-media influencers in the dust—it’s the Joan Crawford of the 1940s that tends to linger in our imagination. The square-shouldered, she-means-business fur coats, the hair artfully arranged into lush curls, those enormous, voracious eyes fringed with spidery mascara’ed lashes. That’s the Crawford of Mildred Pierce, a women’s drama nestled within the contours of your classic film noir, adapted from James M. Cain’s novel and directed by the great journeyman director Michael Curtiz. Crawford’s Mildred is a dutiful housewife turned restaurant tycoon, a woman who’ll do anything to give her spoiled daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) the best…

THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES

1946 When William Wyler returned home after serving in the Second World War—his hearing in one ear irreparably damaged from participating in combat missions over Europe, which he chronicled as a wartime documentary filmmaker—he wasn’t sure what to tackle next. A script that had begun as a blank-verse novella caught his attention. The film he made from that screenplay is itself a cornerstone of postwar American history, a fictional story so keyed into lived experience that it continues to find an audience across generations. Frederic March, Dana Andrews, and a young nonprofessional actor named Harold Russell star as servicemen returning from the war, struggling to readjust to civilian life. March’s Al Stephenson has misgivings about returning to his old banking job, and though his all-knowing, no-nonsense wife Milly (played…

BICYCLE THIEVES

1948 The problem with the idea of an accepted movie canon—not to mention the abhorrent “1,000 movies to see before you die” approach—is that it relegates great films to a checklist of good-for-you vegetables, when the whole point of film watching is to sink into an experience. And there are few greater film-watching experiences than Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. Antonio—played by Lamberto Maggiorani, a nonprofessional actor—is a father and husband in postwar Rome struggling to support his family. He has a chance at a good job, but he needs his bicycle to do it; on his first day of work, the bicycle is stolen, and he and his young son Bruno (Enzo Staiola, also a nonprofessional) set out to get it back, a quest of desperation and need…

SEVEN SAMURAI

1954 We think of epic filmmaking as being grand in scope, and Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai certainly is that. Yet what’s most surprising about it—and what makes it truly great—is Kurosawa’s delicacy of touch. This movie, about a group of late-16th-century farmers who enlist the aid of samurai warriors to help them fend off bandits, speaks in a bold language of symphonically precise battle scenes and rough-and-tumble violence that’s more stately than scrappy. There’s eloquence in the corners, too, as when the loose-cannon samurai-wannabe Kikuchiyo, played with boisterous vitality by Toshiro Mifune, teases the village kids while distributing the warriors’ rice rations among them. And then there’s the moment, so offhanded you barely see how it begins, when the resplendent Takashi Shimura—as Kambei Shimada, the veteran samurai leading the…

VERTIGO

1958 Many movie people, and especially movie critics, adore Vertigo, a movie about a man’s obsession with a woman who isn’t real—or, rather, she is real, but he fails to acknowledge any reality existing outside of his own view of her. The obvious metaphor is that this is like being obsessed with the movies, which are similarly not-real and yet, within our imaginations, staggeringly alive. But seeing Vertigo mostly as a movie about oneself is missing the point. It’s great precisely because it isn’t—or Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t—particularly interested in catering to our personal obsessions. Instead, it’s a film so pure in its emotional selfishness that it achieves something like a state of grace. This is a romance of self-absorption and deep sadness, about the undiluted tragedy of a man’s…

RIO BRAVO

1959 In a story that could be apocryphal, but probably isn’t, just before the great British-Canadian critic Robin Wood died in 2009, he dictated a list of his favorite movies to a close friend. At the top was Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo. What a way to go. In this perfect western—this perfect movie—John Wayne is an aging sheriff named Chance who takes a stand against a gang of criminals with the help of a deputy with a bum leg (Walter Brennan), a barely-dry and still shaky recovering alcoholic (Dean Martin) and a baby-faced, guitar-strumming youngster (Ricky Nelson). A wanted woman named Feathers (Angie Dickinson) also happens to be shimmering around Chance’s periphery, stirring up a different kind of trouble. Though there are shootouts in Rio Bravo, the picture is…

BREATHLESS

1960 The 1960s kicked off with a shout, and it was in French: Breathless, the debut feature from the impishly brilliant young Franco-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, changed the landscape of filmmaking forever by mining Hollywood tradition, specifically the classic genre of gangster films. Jean-Paul Belmondo is a suave small-time thief who goes on the lam after killing a motorcycle cop. Jean Seberg is his femme fatale, a seemingly guileless young American whose pixie cut is by itself an emblem of youthful freedom. Their adventure—shot using brashly inventive low-budget techniques that would later become part of nearly every filmmaker’s bag of tricks—is both exhilarating and tragic, and more than 60 years on, it still feels disarmingly fresh. For younger audiences today, this is the training-wheels Godard, the first work by…

THE LEOPARD

1963 Some films perfectly capture the tone and texture of their source material, and The Leopard is one of them. Adapted from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 end-of-an-era reverie, Luchino Visconti’s film, as mournful as a moonlit dream, stars Burt Lancaster as Don Fabrizio Corbera, a Sicilian prince caught in the shifting winds of Italian unification. His own nephew, Tancredi (Alain Delon), is an insurgent, having signed on with revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, though his allegiance will fluctuate as the national landscape changes. And both prince and nephew will find themselves enchanted by the dazzling Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), the daughter of a rich schemer, who seems perfectly suited to thrive in the new Italy. MGM, one of the studios behind the picture, had insisted on putting Lancaster, at the time…

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

1968 George A. Romero’s ultra-low-budget Night of the Living Dead was released in October 1968, just months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which was shortly followed by that of Robert F. Kennedy. The dream of the Civil Rights Movement seemed to be over. What would America now become? Romero’s debut film offered a possible answer in unsparing black-and-white. Seven people huddle in the house in the country, fending off a group of hungry zombie hordes outside. Of the seven, Ben (Duane Jones) is the only Black man. He’s also the voice of calm and reason in a dire situation, soothing one of the movie’s more fragile characters, Barbra (Judith O’Dea). The white men have refused to help her, and they also view Ben with distrust, even…

MCCABE & MRS. MILLER

1971 The male gaze has gotten a lot of bad press, but aside from the fact that feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s original ideas have often been carelessly applied, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of men looking at women. Ogling is one thing. But what about the way Warren Beatty, as bumbling early 20th-century Northwestern entrepreneur John McCabe, watches Julie Christie’s brusquely practical madam Constance Miller devour a plateful of eggs, her hands streaked with grease as she shovels one forkful after another into her gob? He’s never seen anything like it—his eyes practically have little stars in them, even with no star filter—and from that moment he’s a goner, a man green with lovesickness. Meanwhile, she finishes up and wipes her hand across her mouth with…

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN

1974 Mel Brooks’ Riff on the James Whale Frankenstein movies of the 1930s—conceived and co-written with one of the actors he’d worked with on Blazing Saddles, Gene Wilder—is so exquisite that even among comedies and farces, it deserves a special, gloriously cobwebby niche of its own. Wilder is Dr. Frederick “Fronkensteen,” the grandson of mad scientist Victor, who ends up reanimating a corpse of his own, which comes to life as Peter Boyle’s confused and bumbling but sympathetic monster. These two characters alone make a golden team—their “Puttin on the Ritz” top-hat-and-tails routine, which almost didn’t make it into the film (Brooks had thought it might break the mood), is a work of unhinged brilliance. But the cast that surrounds them—including Marty Feldman, Cloris Leachman, Teri Garr and Madeline…

HARLAN COUNTY U.S.A

1976 When Barbara Kopple and her small crew first rolled into Harlan County, Kentucky, to document a bitter miners’ strike that would last 13 months, the locals viewed her suspiciously, at first refusing to talk to her. But Kopple, in her 20s at the time, eventually earned their trust, and her unassuming demeanor offered other benefits too. Officials at Duke Power, the entity which had refused to let its workers join the United Mine Workers, had no reason to take her seriously. “I was free to talk to anyone,” she has said. “They just thought I was a funny little girl who carried a tape recorder and a camera.” Kopple’s casual doggedness is key to the film’s power—Harlan County U.S.A. has a lived-in immediacy that still feels fresh today.…

KILLER OF SHEEP

1978 The Maverick filmmakers of 1970s Hollywood—Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma—took big-studio money and spun it into works of thrilling inventiveness. But the decade also belongs to another kind of risk taker: Independent filmmaker Charles Burnett shot his first feature, Killer of Sheep, on weekends in the community of Watts, where he’d grown up. His budget was less than $10,000, much of it grant money; the film would be his MFA thesis project at UCLA. Killer of Sheep is a movie about family life, about neighborhoods, about the perennial business of kids’ going around just doing what kids do. Stan (Henry G. Sanders) works in a slaughterhouse to support his wife (Kaycee Moore) and their two young kids (played by Angela Burnett, the director’s daughter, and Jack Drummond). The job…

E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL

1982 For kids born after roughly the mid-1970s, a world without E.T. seems unimaginable. The film became a huge hit upon its release, and children continue to watch it today, often via streaming rather than a VHS tape gone threadbare after being run through the VCR too many times. It’s easy to take E.T. for granted. But few filmmakers have captured the texture of childhood loneliness and anxiety as well as Steven Spielberg does here, even as he spins a fantasy adventure that’s captivating on its own terms. Young Elliott (Henry Thomas) is rumbling through a rocky transition: His father has just left the family, and he and his older brother Michael (Robert McNaughton) and preschool-age sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore) watch as their mother, Mary (Dee Wallace), tries to…

THE RIGHT STUFF

1983 Jean-Luc Godard once said all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. How about astronauts and Sam Shepard? Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s bestseller about the early days of high-speed aircraft and the original Project Mercury astronauts is a story, largely, about men: their dreams, their sense of discipline, their fierce urge to compete among one another. But Kaufman doesn’t let men get away with their usual crap. He’s sensitive both to their hubris and their capacity for wonder, capturing the worst of them, the best of them, and the stuff in the middle that’s just right. Ed Harris, Scott Glen, Dennis Quaid and Fred Ward star as John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gordon Cooper and Gus Grissom, the first men chosen and trained…

MOONSTRUCK

1987 There weren’t many great romantic comedies in the late 1980s, which made the appearance of Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck a small miracle, like the special, glowing, love-bestowing moon that figures in the movie’s plot. Cher plays Loretta Castorini, a 37-year-old widow who has dutifully agreed to marry a man who’s all wrong for her, Danny Aiello’s stolid Johnny Cammareri. When Johnny is called away to Sicily to tend to his dying mother, he sends Loretta on a mission to connect with his estranged brother. Ronny (Nicolas Cage) is a bitter and somewhat socially inept baker with a prosthetic hand, and he blames Johnny for the accident that caused it. But Loretta is having none of his complaints and nonsense, and that’s how he knows immediately she’s the woman for…

MALCOLM X

1992 In the wrong hands, a biographical epic can be a real snooze. In the right ones—and with a perceptive, expressive actor at its center—it can have a kind of transportive energy. Across three hours and then some, Spike Lee maps the life of the slain civil rights activist whose controversial words and deeds often cut against the grain of other, more moderate voices—like Martin Luther King Jr.—who sought to change the lives of Black people in mid-20th century America. Malcolm X didn’t play nice with anyone; he was ideologically uncompromising, to the point of pious inflexibility. But as Denzel Washington plays him, his flaws and remarkable strengths merge into a dazzling whole. Washington plays Malcolm X’s charisma as a mode of seeking, a desire not to tamp down…

BEFORE SUNRISE

1995 Though it’s hard to fathom today, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise—now cherished by so many as one of the most romantic movies ever made—wasn’t a huge box-office hit upon its release. Though critics loved it, and though it made money because its budget was so modest to begin with, it found its true viewership later on VHS and DVD. Now, a world without Before Sunrise—or its two remarkable sequels, Before Sunset and Before Midnight—seems almost unimaginable. Two students, Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Celine, meet on a train from Budapest to Vienna. Celine, who is French, is headed home to Paris. Jesse, the quintessential spontaneous American, persuades her to disembark with him in Vienna. Jesse’s flight home leaves in the morning, but he’s almost completely broke; getting a…

JACKIE BROWN

1997 There’s a generation of people who adore Pulp Fiction (1994) because it practically blew the tops of their heads off—its brash energy counts for a lot. But Jackie Brown is Quentin Tarantino’s great picture of the 1990s. It’s less showy than the earlier film, but filled to the brim with feeling, a movie that brings the past into the present and reminds us to be careful about what we throw away—starting with the casting. Pam Grier, a goddess of ’70s grindhouse films who, by the ’90s, wasn’t exactly seeing the plum roles pour in, plays the Jackie of the title, a flight attendant for a low-rent airline who makes a little scratch on the side by smuggling money for her firearms-dealer boss (Samuel L. Jackson). She gets busted;…

THE CIRCLE

2000 Embattled Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been an irritant in the eyes of his government for at least a quarter century, and even after years of off-and-on imprisonment—and the persistent threat of worse punishments—he shows no sign of backing down. The Circle, his third full-length feature, was, unsurprisingly, banned in his home country. Decades after its appearance, it stands as a statement of defiance, a cry of quiet anguish over the way Iranian women are continually oppressed by their government—though it also shows how sticking together is their best hope. Panahi follows a group of women who have just been released from prison, their stories interconnected and ever-shifting. Arezou (Maryiam Palvin Almani) and Nargess (Nargess Mamizadeh) scramble to make a plan for their future—though even more immediate needs,…

YI YI: A ONE AND A TWO

2000 Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang was trained as an electrical engineer and worked in high tech for years before turning to filmmaking. Is it possible that having some life under your belt before you start trying to capture it on film can make you a better director? Early in Yang’s extraordinary Yi Yi, middle-aged Taipei family man N.J. (Wu Nien-jen) runs into his first love from long ago, Sherry (Ko Su-Yun), and their chance meeting rattles him. He seems to be living his life as he should, whatever that may be: His wife Min-Min (Elaine Jin) is attractive and efficient. He has two children he adores, teenage Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee) and 8-year-old Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang). Then his mother-in-law (Tang Ru-Yun) suffers a stroke, intensifying the family’s anxiety, and money…

25TH HOUR

2002 One of the ways humans respond to large-scale tragedies is by making art. Unfortunately, it’s not always good art. In the years after 9/11, several filmmakers attempted to scale both the enormity and the haunting details of the event. But there’s only one great 9/11 movie—a movie that isn’t overtly about 9/11, yet holds its dust like a reliquary—and it’s Spike Lee’s 25th Hour. Edward Norton’s drug dealer Monty Brogan, about to go to prison for seven years, spends his last night of freedom in his always-home, New York City. He connects with his two oldest friends (Barry Pepper and Philip Seymour Hoffman), and spends some wistful, stressful time with his girlfriend, Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), who just may have betrayed him. Set in the time when the spot…

MARIE ANTOINETTE

2006 When Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette premiered in Cannes, some of the very serious critics of the day had a major problem with it: It didn’t address the suffering of the starving peasants, instead focusing on the excessive shopping habits of a lonely teenage queen. But that was exactly Coppola’s point. Using Antonia Fraser’s 2001 book as her source, she sought to see beyond the shallow thoughtlessness we so easily attribute to this doomed queen; she knew she would find a person there, and she did. Kirsten Dunst brings that dauphine-at-14 to life in a performance as translucent, but also as surprisingly sturdy, as a porcelain teacup. As young Marie leaves her home and family in Austria, crossing into an uptight France full of rules and regulations, we see…

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

2013 In Jim Jarmusch’s world, vampires aren’t opportunistic, blood-sucking ghouls—at least not all of them. Some are alert, intuitive beings who, because they’ve been alive for centuries, have formed certain attachments to the physical culture around them—to the papery certainty of a book’s pages as you turn them, or to a record that you put on a turntable, the better to sink into its grooves, as opposed to letting it wash over you in a watery Spotify sea. In Only Lovers Left Alive, a morose musician named Adam (played by a wanly gorgeous Tom Hiddleston), holed up in a decrepit but stately Detroit Victorian, longs to see his wife of several hundred years, who has her own digs in Tangiers. (Perhaps separate living quarters are the key to a…

SELMA

2014 Historical timelines tend to show the Civil Rights Movement as an era of the past, a chapter of American history that was snapped shut with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. But as a way of thinking, a push toward the equality that’s essential to American ideals, the movement is ongoing. With Selma, Ava DuVernay details the three marches—from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama—led by King in 1965 to protest restrictions that prevented Black Americans from registering to vote. DuVernay doesn’t shy away from depicting violence, like the beating of marching citizens, at the hands of Sheriff Jim Clark and a group of police on horseback, during their first attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But she’s careful with these sequences, too, conveying the horror of the…

THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI

1920 It has always been the job of movies to mess with our heads, which you know if you’ve ever seen Robert Wiene’s nerve-jangling work of mad genius The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, now more than 100 years old and as chilling as ever. The unhinged hypnotist Caligari (Werner Krauss) keeps, like a pet, a 23-year-old sleepwalker whom he calls Cesare the Somnambulist (Conrad Veidt). Caligari has put Cesare to work as a sideshow attraction, parading him before audiences as a curiosity. But Caligari also uses this zombie servant to do his murderous bidding. In a shivery, archetypically psychosexual tableau, Cesare, with his zinc-white pallor, his eyes blank and tragic, enters the gauze-shrouded bedroom of a sleeping woman and startles her awake with the aim of killing her. Stunned…

ORPHANS OF THE STORM

1921 D.W. Griffith was a racist, and his most famous and infamous film, the 1915 Birth of a Nation, is filled with made-up events and setups that glorified the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacy in general. It’s also an astonishingly effective and affecting piece of filmmaking, revolutionary in its complex staging, in the way it propelled cinema toward greater realism, in its use of techniques like the close-up and the fade-in (which Griffith didn’t necessarily invent but used brilliantly). Isn’t it better to be realistic about the truth that filmmaking’s power can be marshaled for causes other than noble ones? By 1921, Griffith’s star had begun its descent, as other filmmakers—many of whom he’d influenced—raced faster into the modern world. But Orphans of the Storm, once you get…

SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS

1927 The director of the gorgeously stylized 1922 horror film Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau was already considered a master of German Expressionism when he emigrated to Hollywood in 1926. The first film he made there, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, was also one of the first films to feature a synchronized score and sound effects, pointing the way to the future of talkies. But Sunrise seems to exist in a world without time. It’s a close to perfect story, universal in its painful, iridescent truth: that even when two people truly love each other, the human desire for novelty can exert a dangerous pull. George O’Brien is the character known only as the Man, a country farmer who was happy with his life until he fell under the sway…

PANDORA’S BOX

1929 There are few tragic heroines more alluring than Lulu, the heartbeat of Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, brought to life by a performer whose image—the winsome, mischievous eyes, the glossy, art-deco bob—remains a symbol of sexual charisma and freedom. Louise Brooks’ Lulu is both a wily opportunist and a sympathetic survivor. She’s the kept woman of a powerful newspaper publisher (played by German stage actor Fritz Kortner, who’s said to have despised Brooks, stomping off the set the instant he’d finished a scene with her), and when her position is threatened by his bland blonde fiancée, she summons infinite reserves of petulance to get him to marry her instead. She’ll be the death of him, he knows, but her ill-advised marriage is also the beginning of her own…

L’ATALANTE

1934 Marriage can be the most romantic thing in the world, until reality hits: Is it even possible to mesh two lives? At the beginning of Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, one of the most poetic movies about romantic partnership ever made, a young bargemaster, Jean (Jean Dasté) takes a radiant country girl, Juliette (Dita Parlo), as his bride. The two will begin their life together on the barge, gliding along in the water in an idyll of lovemaking. But it doesn’t turn out quite that way: There’s friction when Jean becomes jealous of Juliette’s burgeoning friendship with his outlandishly tattooed, grunting first mate, Old Jules (Michel Simon). Jean has promised Juliette he’ll take her to Paris when the barge docks there, but Jules and the cabin boy slip off first,…

MY MAN GODFREY

1936 The comedies of the 1930s held people together in the darkest of days. But as we watch them today, what’s even more remarkable is how so many of them seem to be driven by a mysterious bristling energy, a force born, maybe, of a devotion to craftsmanship and a desire to delight. In Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, one of the greatest romantic comedies in a decade full of terrific ones, Carole Lombard plays ditzy heiress Irene, who makes a down-on-his-luck “forgotten man,” William Powell’s Godfrey, an unwilling participant in a party game. She takes a liking to him and wrangles a job for him as her family’s butler. Then she falls in love with him—because who wouldn’t? Powell, among the slyest and most debonair comic actors…

THE RULES OF THE GAME

1939 Any personalized list of great films is bound to contain films we’ve watched so many times they’ve practically crawled into our DNA. The Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir’s wry, ruefully affectionate look at the foibles of Parisian aristocrats on the eve of World War II, is so intimate and observant that its contours change dramatically every time you watch it. In this glorious ensemble escapade, perched halfway between comedy and tragedy, Marcel Dalio plays a flippant aristocrat obsessed with expensive mechanical novelties. Yet even so, his feelings for real people take precedence: He fears he’s losing his wife (Nora Gregor) to a dashing but earnest aviator (Roland Toutain). Renoir’s characters are shallow, selfish, and at times nearly unbearable. But he has such deep love for them that…

THE LADY EVE

1941 When anyone asks my favorite movie of all time, my answer is immediate and always the same. Writer-director Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve is the greatest American movie comedy, period, a definitive movie about the unreliability of other humans, about the cruelties people can inflict upon each other in the name of love (played for laughs, and easily getting them), about the ways in which people need to truly see themselves, and one another, for love to work. Barbara Stanwyck is Jean Harrington, a card sharp plying her trade on an ocean liner when she spots a delectable mark: the awkward but handsome herpetologist and brewery heir Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) sits there in the dining room, his nose buried in a book. (It’s called Are Snakes Necessary?)…

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

1946 Possibly the most exquisite film to emerge in the wake of wartime deprivation, Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast is a romantic fantasy born from the belief that finding beauty in our fractured and sordid world is the surest survival tactic. Jean Marais, Cocteau’s lover at the time, plays the magnificent, soulful beast: Marais’ gallantly handsome visage is hidden behind an intricately crafted mask of shaggy fur and makeup that took five hours to apply each day. (It was modeled on the face of his beloved dog, Moulouk.) This is the tragic face that the at-first clueless Belle (Josette Day) comes to love, as we do, in a surprise melding of the erotic and the spiritual. Beauty and the Beast is a triumph of illusion, especially when you…

BLACK NARCISSUS

1947 From the Quasi-Mystical Melodrama of The Red Shoes to the earthy fighting spirit of I Know Where I’m Going! to the all-out fantastical romantic weirdness of A Matter of Life and Death: how to determine the greatest film made by the British-based team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger? When forced to choose, I go with the mad matte-painting glory of Black Narcissus, a story of nuns driven wild with desire in the Himalayas (drawn from source material by Rumer Godden). Deborah Kerr’s Sister Clodagh is a mother superior newly arrived in this remote, desolate locale to establish a school and hospital; Kathleen Byron’s Sister Ruth is one of her teachers. But can any of these virtuous women resist the allure of David Farrar’s Mr. Dean, a robust…

THE BAND WAGON

1953 Even though musicals are almost always more than the sum of their parts, Vincente Minnelli’s Crayola-box wonder The Band Wagon enfolds more than its share of elegant truths. Fred Astaire plays aging song-and-dance man Tony Hunter, pulling into New York City by train and realizing there’s no one there to greet him. Is he officially a has-been? Tony is hardly old—Astaire himself was only 54 at the time—but still old enough to foresee a future of creaky limbs and even creakier career prospects. So what does he do? He turns his anxiety into a musical number, “By Myself,” a modestly scaled anthem of self-determination. “I’ll face the unknown, I’ll build a world of my own,” he sings in that downy-soft, conversationally expressive voice—one that also happens to be…

PATHER PANCHALI

1955 Because of funding problems, it took Calcutta-born filmmaker Satyajit Ray three years to complete his debut film, Pather Panchali. It’s one of those movies that exists almost against all odds, and also one of the most beautiful films ever made, in any language. It’s unlikely your childhood was anything like Apu’s, yet his story is a dream of every childhood, a recollection—or a wish—of love and family that reaches deep inside us. Young Apu (Subir Banerjee) lives in the Bengali countryside with his mother and father (Karuna Banerjee and Kanu Banerjee), his older sister, Durga (Shampa “Runki” Banerjee) and an elderly live-in auntie (Chunibala Devi). Apu’s father comes from a long, proud lineage of writers, but he has failed to make a good living for his little family;…

THE 400 BLOWS

1959 In critic-turned-filmmaker François Truffaut’s debut film, a picture telling some version of his own life story, the young protagonist Antoine Doinel—played by fledgling actor Jean-Pierre Léaud—gets into dozens of scrapes of his own making. Having intuited, as children can, that his mother cares nothing for him, he tells a schoolteacher who’s hounding him that she has died, which is of course a lie. Antoine yearns only to break out and live life on his own terms, even though he’s only 12. With his closest friend, he skips school to go to the movies, hiding their telltale book bags, which would mark them as boys playing hooky, though you need only look at their faces to see the truth. Antoine runs away from home overnight, stealing a bottle of…

SOME LIKE IT HOT

1959 It’s said that Austrian-born filmmaker Billy Wilder arrived by boat in America in 1934 with $20 in his pocket and a vocabulary of 100 English words. Within just a few years he would become one of the most versatile and entertaining writer-directors Hollywood has ever known, as gifted at crafting drumskin-tight films noir (Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd.) as he was at fashioning buoyant, gorgeously syncopated comedies. Some Like It Hot is nothing short of glorious: Marilyn Monroe’s Sugar Kane Kowalczyk is the lead singer of a roaring-20s, all-girl band infiltrated by two male musicians in drag, played by Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, on the run from mobsters. Curtis’ Joe—a.k.a. Josephine—falls for Sugar and, when he’s not dressed in women’s clothes, tries to woo her by pretending to…

CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7

1962 Film depictions of things women have historically enjoyed—shopping, for instance—have long gotten short shrift from male critics, as if standing against frivolity were by itself a proclamation of seriousness. In Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, the Cléo of the title, a self-absorbed pop singer played by Corinne Marchand, spends an anxious day in her home city of Paris awaiting a possible cancer diagnosis; her doctor has promised her an answer that evening. Throughout the day she argues with her assistant and rails against the boisterous songwriters who come by her spare, chic, spacious digs to bring her some new songs. She’s electric with worry—but at one point she pauses in front of a shop window, marveling at a display of fanciful hats, and dips inside, trying…

BONNIE AND CLYDE

1967 The French New Wave took American gangster films and interpreted them anew. With Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn—by that point an established, Oscar-nominated director in his mid-40s—refracted the vision of directors like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut and made a fresh American gangster film with New Wave energy, only it was more violent and more nervy in its stylized brutality than any New Wave film had been. Faye Dunaway is a dazzling, surprisingly vulnerable Bonnie Parker; Warren Beatty is her swaggering beau Clyde Barrow, fearless when it comes to robbing banks but tragically unable to perform in the bedroom. The movie divided audiences at first—some thought it glorified real-life bloodshed. But its preoccupation with bloody remorselessness isn’t beside the point; it is the point. Bonnie and Clyde is…

ARMY OF SHADOWS

1969 Jean-Pierre Melville’s extraordinary 1969 French Resistance drama Army of Shadows was dismissed by French critics upon its initial release and remained unseen in the United States until 2006, when it topped critics’ best-of lists nationwide and became a 37-year-old overnight success—one that Melville, who died in 1973 at age 55, didn’t live to see. The film is gorgeous—and shattering. The regally leonine Lino Ventura plays a Resistance operative who’s captured by the authorities, uses his wiles to escape, and oversees the quietly brutal execution of the man who betrayed him—and that’s just in the first 45 minutes or so. In adapting Joseph Kessel’s 1943 book of the same name, Melville—who was himself a member of the Resistance—focuses not on spy-thriller heroics but on the workaday grind of fighting…

LAST TANGO IN PARIS

1972 Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris is a demanding film. It’s also one of the great films about loneliness. Marlon Brando plays a man grieving after his wife’s suicide. By chance, he meets a young woman, played by Maria Schneider, when both turn up to look at a Paris apartment rental. The two embark on an affair—the rules are set by the man—in which they meet at the apartment regularly to have anonymous, consensual sex. They will not exchange names. But we do know the woman’s name: Schneider’s character is Jeanne. And even if Brando is the big star actor here, he is nothing without her. The sex in Last Tango is carnal and immediate; sometimes it’s also tender and funny. But it’s not sexy: The movie’s opening…

THE GODFATHER PART II

1974 If you could pour despair into a movie shape, it would be Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather Part II. Is Part II a greater movie than the one that precedes it, released in 1972? Maybe only by a hair, but let’s consider that fraction of a millimeter’s worth of difference. Coppola’s sequel, a tale of two dons, contrasts the early 20th-century rise of the syndicate boss Vito Corleone (played by Marlon Brando in the first movie, and here, in his younger incarnation, by Robert De Niro) with the slow unraveling suffered by his heir and favorite son, Michael (played once again by Al Pacino). Having left his native Italy as a young, trauma-scarred orphan, Vito builds a life for himself and his young family in New York. De Niro,…

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES

1975 The stuff of most lives wouldn’t make much of a movie. But that’s exactly the point of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, which, over the course of more than three hours, details the routine of a widowed mother (Delphine Seyrig) whose days have a regimented fullness: Her mornings are filled with errands, tidying up and preparing meals. In the afternoons, before her son returns from school, she has sex with one client or another in her bedroom (though we don’t see those encounters). This, too, is just another part of her day, though there’s something unraveling in her that we don’t immediately see. Akerman’s camera doesn’t lead us as we’re accustomed to being led in a film; it doesn’t show us exactly where to look or tell us what…

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

1980 Of all the movies in the Star Wars constellation, Irvin Kershner’s grand adventure is the only one that works on its own, vivid and dramatic and redolent of classic Hollywood craftsmanship. The story, written by George Lucas, Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, takes place three years after the cheesy space opera that started it all; the movie works because its creators take the story just seriously enough, leaning into the darker undertones of its central father-son conflict and giving its three primary characters—a warrior princess (Carrie Fisher), a swaggering, authority-defying smuggler (Harrison Ford) and a knight who doesn’t yet know his worth (Mark Hamill)—more depth and dimension than they had in the first film. No one had expected the first Star Wars movie to be the huge hit…

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH

1982 Beginning in the fall of 1979, a 22-year-old Cameron Crowe, who at the time already had several years of experience writing for Rolling Stone and Creem, spent a school year undercover at Clairemont High School in San Diego. He drew from the experience to write his 1981 novel Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which he adapted himself for the screen: It was his first movie credit, and the first for director Amy Heckerling. Though teenage high jinks—and insecurities—are a staple of American comedies, Fast Times stands tall among them, not just for its brisk, breezy pacing, or for the vivid quality of its characters (like Sean Penn’s glassy-eyed stoner-surfer Spicoli), but for its frankness about teenage abortion, and its refusal to address the termination of a pregnancy as…

SANS SOLEIL

1983 The first three times i saw Chris Marker’s experimental documentary Sans Soleil, I couldn’t explain it at all. The next three times, I felt less articulate than ever. But by that point the movie had entered my bloodstream, and there was no fighting it. Let’s explain it this way: Sans Soleil examines the interlocking intricacies of how we see the world and how we remember seeing it. The movie is a sort of travelogue diary stitched together from images captured mostly in Japan and West Africa, though Marker’s camera—and his eye—also roams in Paris, Iceland and San Francisco. The movie’s ideas unfold through letters one man—a fictional one, with the delightful name Sandor Krasna—has written to the woman who narrates the film. (In the movie’s English version, the…

WINGS OF DESIRE

1987 If, in 1987, you had never been to Berlin, Wim Wenders’ melancholy romance Wings of Desire was enough to make you fall in love with it, in all its tattered, muted-silver splendor. Berlin was, at the time, a city still divided by a wall, and there were ragged, muddy fields where, years later, modern office buildings and shopping plazas would spring up. But it was also, in Wenders’ vision, a place where angels roamed. Bruno Ganz, with his great, bruised-boxer face, plays Damiel, an angel who watches people from various perches high above the city, including the golden-tipped Victory Column and the broken-but-mended Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. As an angel, he can hear the thoughts of the humans below, a cacophony of often-half-formed musings that constitute a kind…

CARLITO’S WAY

1993 There are a million stories about criminals sprung from jail who vow to go straight. And then there’s Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way. Al Pacino—swaggering, streetwise, lovesick—gives one of his strongest performances as convicted drug felon Carlito Brigante, whose crooked lawyer (played, fabulously, by Sean Penn) somehow gets him freed after just five years of a 30-year sentence. Carlito’s post-prison dream is to buy into a car-rental joint in the Bahamas—all the better if he can persuade the love of his life, Gail (Penelope Ann Miller), to join him, though he broke her heart before going up the river. Few movies give you pretty much everything—exhilarating action and diamond-hard violence, doomed romance, bitterly funny dialogue—in such a compact package. But there’s something else: Movie craftsmanship can be deeply…

DEAD MAN

1995 The Old American west was a place of bleak poetry, of people dying tragically young, of rugged, unwelcoming landscapes and self-righteous settlers thinking nothing of calling stolen land their own. In Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Johnny Depp is William Blake—but not that William Blake—a meek late-19th-century accountant in a plaid suit, newly arrived in a desolate town called Machine. On his first night there, he becomes the third party in a lover’s altercation and kills a man, though the encounter also leaves him with a bullet lodged deep in his chest. He will have to die, sooner rather than later. But before he does, he meets a Native American—played, with huge reservoirs of both dry humor and grandeur, by Gary Farmer—who goes by the name of Nobody. Nobody…

BEAU TRAVAIL

1999 To watch Claire Denis’ Beau Travail for the first time is to be handed a key, without knowing exactly what it opens or how to use it. The story is based, loosely, on Herman Melville’s unfinished and posthumously published novel Billy Budd. Galoup, an officer in the French Foreign Legion, stationed in Djibouti—he’s played by the astonishing actor Denis Lavant, like a man with a willful snake coiled inside him—takes an instant dislike to one of the new men under his command, Sentain (Grégoire Colin), who’s tall, beautiful, well liked and acts with spontaneous bravery when it’s called for. Galoup longs to be respected and loved by his men, as he loves his own commander, Forestier (Michel Subor), but Sentain is his stumbling block, drawing out all his…

THE GLEANERS & I

2000 At one point in this radiant, generous documentary about people—including herself—who salvage things that others have thrown away or rejected, director Agnès Varda trains the camera on the crinkled skin of her own hand. “My hands keep telling me that the end is near,” she says plainly in voiceover, though she doesn’t linger on the moment; instead, she jumps back into the business of filming people picking up bits of plastic tubing to incorporate into their artwork, or celebrating the shape of this or that bumpy root vegetable, deemed too ugly to sell but certainly good enough to eat. Varda, one of the central figures of the French New Wave, was in her early seventies when she made The Gleaners & I, and even though she was clear-eyed…

MULHOLLAND DR.

2001 We’d Barely gotten our footing in the new century when David Lynch rode in with a movie that would jostle us right off it. With its liquid pacing and codeine-glorious imagery, Mulholland Dr. has magic powers that put your head into a very weird place. It’s also one of the most visually beautiful films ever made, set in a modern-day Hollywood where the ghosts of the old one continue to walk among us, superimposed over everyday life. Everyone goes to Hollywood with a dream, and Mulholland Dr. suggests that those dreams never die, even after the people who clung to them draw their last death. Blond, bright-eyed Betty (Naomi Watts) has just arrived in Hollywood from Smalltown, USA, ready for stardom. No sooner has she unlocked the door…

CHILDREN OF MEN

2006 Only true masters should be allowed to make dystopian dramas. In the hands of Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men—adapted from P. D. James’ bleak futuristic novel—is a cautious incantation for a hopeful future, rather than a doomy death sentence for our beleaguered planet and its inhabitants. Children of Men takes place in the London of 2027, in a world where humans have lost the ability to procreate. Pandemics have further decimated the population. Terrorism and war have torn countries apart. In Britain, citizens are encouraged to report illegal immigrants to the authorities, and once the offenders are arrested, they’re either imprisoned or executed. Clive Owen’s Theo is a weary former activist who’s given up on the idea of change, until his former lover, Julianne Moore’s Julian, a radical…

HOLY MOTORS

2012 Movies often have meaning beyond their components. We stammer to explain what a film is about, only to find words drifting away from us. All we know is that a movie has picked us up, like an Oz-style tornado, and left us somewhere we didn’t expect to be. That’s the effect of Leos Carax’s extraordinary, exhilarating and not-fully-sane Holy Motors, an ode to the life of the imagination as it’s reflected in art, and in cinema specifically. The magnificently acrobatic French actor Denis Lavant plays a mysterious gent named Monsieur Oscar, who’s whisked off to his job every day in an elegant stretch limo. Its driver is the equally elegant Edith Scob, who, as a young woman, played the disfigured daughter in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face.…

PHOENIX

2014 In a story where the man can’t see the woman right in front of him—the theme Hitchcock mined so hypnotically in Vertigo—no one comes out a winner. The woman may suffer more deeply, but she can at least emerge with her dignity intact. In Christian Petzold’s rapturous film noir Phoenix, based on a novel by French crime writer Hubert Monteilhet and set in a nearly demolished post-World War II Berlin, it’s Ronald Zehrfeld’s Johnny—a piano player who survived the war by betraying others—who’s the biggest loser of all. He’s blind to the woman who loves him most in the world, Nina Hoss’ Nelly, a former cabaret singer who has survived Auschwitz but whose face has been badly disfigured: Postwar, a surgeon attempts to restore it, but he can’t…

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO

2016 The best documentaries aren’t instructive vehicles stuffed with facts; they’re vast wells of ideas that continue to take shape even after you’ve finished watching. That’s the kind of documentary Raoul Peck gives us with I Am Not Your Negro, a reconstruction of a book that never came to fruition: Before he died, in 1987, James Baldwin had embarked on an ambitious work that was to be titled Remember This House, an account of the lives and legacies of three of his closest friends, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Baldwin had completed only 30 pages by the time of his death, but Peck obtained the notes for the manuscript from Baldwin’s estate, and he uses them here—combined with clips from Baldwin’s public appearances—to assemble a…

MOONLIGHT

2016 There was nothing like Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight when it showed up in movie theaters in 2016, and there has been nothing quite like it since, a coming-of-age story—and a portrait of fledgling adult love and sexuality—rendered with such tenderness that it practically shimmered on the screen. Set in Miami and Atlanta, Jenkins’ movie—adapted from a short play by Tarell Alvin McCraney—plays out across the decades in the life of one man, portrayed at different ages by three actors: Alex Hibbert is the scrawny, bullied kid known as Little; Ashton Sanders is the reserved, watchful teenager, who at that point goes by his given name, Chiron; and Trevante Rhodes is Black, the bulked-up, closed-off adult who won’t let anyone mess with him. Little finds the attentive care he needs…

LITTLE WOMEN

2019 What does it mean to take a very old and much-loved book, one that has been adapted (often very well) several times before, and breathe life into it for a new audience, all while preserving the rugged purity of its spirit? That’s what Greta Gerwig does with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a novel that has been passed with love from one generation to the next since its publication in two volumes, in 1868 and 1869. Saoirse Ronan is the teenaged aspiring writer and adventure-seeker Jo March, being raised in a family of women in 1860s New England. Older sister Meg (Emma Watson) is the sensible, conventional one; younger sister Beth (Eliza Scanlen), is the fragile, quiet one; the baby, Amy (Florence Pugh), is a brat who turns…

WITHIN OUR GATES

1920 The story of writer, producer, and director Oscar Micheaux is that of a ghost industry that might have been—in other words, an American film industry with plenty of latitude, opportunity and breathing space for filmmakers who weren’t white. From the teens to the early 1950s, there was a small but thriving industry of films made primarily for Black audiences, commonly called race films. Micheaux was one of the genre’s most significant figures, and Within Our Gates stands both as a model of American film melodrama and an expression of the mores and attitudes in its day, in terms of how Black Americans saw themselves—as opposed to how they were seen by whites at the time. Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer) is a young woman from the South visiting her…

NANOOK OF THE NORTH

1922 Is Robert Flaherty’s celebrated picture a 100% unstaged and fully accurate picture of how members of the Inuit population of the Canadian Arctic lived in the early 1920s? Of course not. At the time of its release, audiences may have taken it as a kind of cinema verité, a concept that at the time did not yet have a name—in fact, the filmmaking techniques necessary to achieve it hadn’t even been developed. But Nanook of the North represents another kind of filmic truth: an artist and explorer’s desire to understand a way of life among a specific group of people and to capture some version of that reality for a greater audience. In that sense, Nanook of the North stands as a work of enduring beauty. Photographer and…

STEAMBOAT BILL, JR.

1928 In the last of Buster Keaton’s independently made features, Steamboat Bill, Jr., co-directed with Charles Reisner, Keaton plays recent college grad William Canfield Jr., who reconnects with the father he hasn’t seen since he was a baby, a crabby steamboat operator (Ernest Torrence) who wants nothing to do with him. Keaton’s William spends the movie alternately defying and trying to win over his father, and ultimately saving him from a deadly storm. (That’s when he also wins his pixiesh lady love, Kitty, played by 16-year-old Marion Byron.) Keaton’s stunts here—including the collapsing house, the most elaborate version of a feat he’d pulled off in earlier movies like One Week—are both astonishing and astonishingly dangerous. Yet there’s so much deadpan joy in them, as if this generally unhappy and…

I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG

1932 In the 1930s, Warner Bros. was the scrappiest studio, specializing in jagged gangster films (Scarface, The Public Enemy) and escapist musicals with a social conscience (42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933) alike. It was a studio deeply in tune with a country in the dumps, and one of its signature pictures was the muckraking social-issues drama I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, made by the prolific journeyman director Mervyn LeRoy. Paul Muni, one of the decade’s most respected and sought-after stars, is James Allen, a World War I veteran who, having gained engineering experience in the service, returns home hoping to launch a career in construction. But he hits the skids after being laid off from one job after another, through no fault of his own.…

THE 39 STEPS

1935 Even though so many of his films are mischievously funny, we don’t commonly think of Alfred Hitchcock as a filmmaker of wit and levity. In The 39 Steps—among the films Hitchcock made in England before coming to the United States to become enormously famous—Robert Donat plays Hannay, a debonair yet average Canadian in London who, as the result of information he gleans from a chance encounter, treks to the Scottish moors to prevent a spy from spiriting top-secret information out of the country. Hannay’s story, as Hitchcock unfurls it, goes like this: Within the span of a few days, a mysterious and alluring secret agent is murdered in his flat; he hops a train only to be forced to literally hop off; a group of sneaky baddies posing…

HOLIDAY

1938 Romantic comedies are designed to make us feel great. But sometimes, even as we’re wrapped in that cottony cloud of pleasure, we can’t help feeling just a wisp of melancholy. George Cukor’s blissful, wistful romantic comedy, adapted from a 1928 play by high-society playwright Philip Barry, echoes some of the biggest questions we ever ask ourselves as we make our way in the world: What do we want out of life? And who do we want around while we do it? Cary Grant is Johnny Case, a freewheeling sort who almost literally tumbles his way through his days. His plan is to retire young and have fun, and he thinks he’s in love with frosty heiress Julia Seton (Doris Nolan), a woman he barely knows and who he…

GONE WITH THE WIND

1939 Love it, hate it, or, perhaps most reasonably, love-hate it, Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind can’t and shouldn’t be reduced to one monolithic statement. It’s too complex a work for that, too much a lightning rod for all sorts of potent American feelings; its greatness lies in the way it so readily seduces us with its sun-dappled, julep-on-the-porch vision, only to—quite literally—burn it all down. It’s also just too damn entertaining. The easiest route to classifying Gone with the Wind is to decry it as a sentimental piece of wish fulfillment riffing on white Southerners’ longing for the good old days. But what if, as the late, great critic James Harvey posited, it’s really a “kind of ultimate tough comedy, its vitality more a development of ’30s…

THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS

1942 It’s surely an act of cockeyed optimism to love something so monstrously flawed, to prefer it, even, to the chiseled artistry of Citizen Kane. But The Magnificent Ambersons—which exists, for now, only in a cut that Orson Welles didn’t authorize and never would have—is dappled with such delicate, elegiac beauty that it’s hard to turn away from it, even with its gaps, its curious ellipses, its odd, patched-on ending. Drawn from Booth Tarkington’s 1918 novel, the story follows the decline of a wealthy midwestern family, the Ambersons, a fall they don’t see coming until it’s too late. Joseph Cotten plays Eugene Morgan, deeply in love with Isabel Amberson (Dolores Costello), but she spurns him for another man, with whom she bears a child, George, who will grow up…

LET THERE BE LIGHT

1946 John Huston, the tough-guy director of early pictures like The Maltese Falcon and later ones like Prizzi’s Honor, made a documentary in the immediate aftermath of World War II that almost no one was able to see until 1980, and even then, only in murky, badly damaged prints. Huston got the assignment to make the film that would become Let There Be Light when he was a major in the Army Signal Corps. The idea was to film veterans hospitalized for what was at the time called “psychoneurosis” or “neuropsychosis” (what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder), capturing both the nature of their suffering and the types of treatment available to them. What Huston came up with is a deeply moving documentary that captures, specifically, the effects…

OUT OF THE PAST

1947 When American GIs returned from World War II, they went to school and they went to work, building lives and families and sturdy, respectable legacies. But the movies seemed to know a secret that many Americans wouldn’t acknowledge, and they mined that dark side in film noir. Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past is one of the greatest of the genre, unsparing and bleakly beautiful. Robert Mitchum’s Jeff Markham is the ex-private eye looking to bury his shady past in a clean new life with a good woman, Virginia Huston’s Ann. But he can’t escape the woman who sent him round the bend in the first place, the double-dealing Kathie, played by the disarmingly composed Jane Greer. Tragedy will entwine these two, but there’s no other way for…

ON THE WATERFRONT

1954 Elia Kazan is famous for lots of things: for being a founder of the Actors Studio, for his collaborative friendships with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, for having discovered James Dean—and for going before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 to inform, as a former Communist Party member himself, against eight of his old Group Theatre colleagues. Unironically, On the Waterfront is itself a story about informants: One of its writers was Budd Schulberg, who’d also given names to HUAC. Operating on shaky logic, he and Kazan intended On the Waterfront as a justification for their actions. But how do you weigh the damage wrought by Kazan against the fact that this film changed the landscape of film acting forever? Method acting historian Isaac Butler has…

NIGHTS OF CABIRIA

1957 To watch Giulietta Masina as Cabiria, a woman who sells her body but never betrays her sense of self, is to experience a kind of melancholy delight. When we first meet her, we know nothing of how she makes a living. She has a lover, though we quickly learn how little he cares for her: In an early scene, he grabs her purse and pushes her into a river, running off to leave her to drown. She survives, though she’s dejected and humiliated; then she goes back to her little house, a ramshackle refuge on the outskirts of Rome, and proceeds to burn her ex-lover’s shirts, clothes she’d bought for him in the first place. This is just the beginning of Masina’s seduction as Cabiria: Later we’ll see…

IMITATION OF LIFE

1959 Melodrama is one of the most maligned genres, often denigrated by people who think they’re above being manipulated by a movie. But a great melodrama is really a vessel, a place for us to put overwhelming feelings that have nowhere else to go. In Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life—adapted from a 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst and filmed previously in 1934—Lana Turner and Juanita Moore star as Lora Meredith and Annie Johnson, single mothers who join forces out of need and forge a lifelong friendship. Lora is an aspiring but struggling actor. Annie may be a close friend, but she’s also essentially a servant, helping Lora along on her rise to stardom as the two raise their children together. Sirk, a master of big feelings writ large on…

PSYCHO

1960 Many of US who love movies, and love Alfred Hitchcock, have watched this one a million times, and somehow the millionth viewing electrifies as much as the first. A secretary (Janet Leigh) who meets her grisly fate behind a semi-opaque shower curtain, a seemingly gentle motel proprietor (Anthony Perkins) whose relationship with his mother is conflicted at best: The details of Psycho are etched knifepoint-sharp in our brains. This is evidence of Hitchcock’s greatest pleasure as a filmmaker. His enduring desire was to get a rise out of his audience, and once Psycho had become a box-office hit, he knew he’d pulled off something extraordinary. As he suggested to his great interviewer, François Truffaut: “I don’t care about the subject matter; I don’t care about the acting; but…

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

1962 After returning from the Korean War, former army captain turned major Bennet Marco (Frank Sinatra) is reassigned to army intelligence, only to be haunted by a recurring nightmare involving a ladies’ gardening club and a murderous act committed by one of his men, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey). John Frankenheimer’s lethal ice pick of a political thriller, adapted from Richard Condon’s novel and involving a brainwashed assassin whose actions are controlled by communist operatives, opened in late October 1962, smack in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. That confluence is hair-raising enough, but if anything, The Manchurian Candidate has come to feel more relevant since 2016. The picture deftly walks the line between being pleasurably suspenseful and so unnerving that it teases out fears you didn’t know you…

BLACK GIRL

1966 For better or worse, we live in a world where a nearly 60-year-old movie can be a revelation. Senegalese filmmaker and novelist Ousmane Sembène’s debut film Black Girl is already loved by many, but it deserves to find an even wider audience. Mbissine Thérèse Diop gives a harrowing, quietly fiery performance as Diouana, a woman who’s brought from Dakar to the South of France to work for a young family; though the ostensible head of the household (Robert Fontaine) treats her with moderate indifference, it’s his icy wife Madame (Ann-Marie Jelinek) who makes the rules, and she berates Diouana constantly. Diouana has been brought to France to care for the couple’s children, but instead she’s expected to cook and clean. Her employers’ male dinner guests kiss her and…

SHAME

1968 The fictional civil war at the heart of Ingmar Bergman’s beautiful, somber masterpiece has no name, but it does have faces: those of Liv Ullman’s Eva, fresh as a haystack in sunshine, and Max von Sydow’s Jan, sturdy and thoughtful but with a twinge of scholarly absentmindedness. These two are a married couple living on a farm, scrounging to get by and doing their best to avoid the war raging around them—until avoidance becomes impossible. They’re captured, turned into pawns, but they’re also offered choices, and the moral compromises they make tear at the already frayed fabric of their marriage. Shame arrived as the world was fixated on the Vietnam War, and although Bergman claimed it wasn’t political, it’s a movie that fits easily into its time. But…

CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING

1974 Somehow we’ve come to distrust stories about friendships between women when they’re made by men, without considering how few men actually care to think much about such friendships in the first place. But French New Wave filmmaker Jacques Rivette cared, and his affection and curiosity ring out through every minute of this three-hour (plus) whirl of theatrical experimentation and delight. Dominique Labourier’s Julie is a dreamy librarian; Juliet Berto’s Celine is a flaky magician. The two meet as Julie, sitting on a bench in a Parisian park, engrossed in a book about magic, looks up and sees a woman flying along the path on spindly legs, dropping silk scarves and invisible stardust in her wake. Julie runs after her, and a friendship is born, one that draws the…

JAWS

1975 The shark looks phony—even Steven Spielberg knew it—but the delicate calibration of tension around it is sublime. Spielberg was only 26 when he made Jaws, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to pull it off: Plagued by malfunctioning mechanical sharks, not to mention a feud between two of his stars, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss, the picture seemed doomed as he was filming it on Martha’s Vineyard. But the movie he delivered betrayed none of that anxiety. Roy Scheider plays a new police chief trying hard to make the beaches of fictitious Amity Island safe from a hungry killer with very sharp teeth. Dreyfuss and Shaw butt heads as, respectively, a brainy oceanographer and a weatherbeaten shark hunter. (Offscreen, Shaw viewed the younger actor as an arrogant…

TAXI DRIVER

1976 You don’t need to have lived through the American ’70s to see how Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader captured its essence—the sense of hopelessness and helplessness, of cities and a whole country spun out of control—in Taxi Driver. Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle, a loner—and a veteran—seems possibly harmless at first. Maybe he’s just the sad, self-pitying teen of Paul Anka’s late-’50s hit “Lonely Boy” grown into an anxious, sleepless man. He’s trying to hold everything together, pouring his energy into long hours at work, keeping his diary of bromides, but we can see that his emotional logic, bolstered by judgment-day certainty, is frayed at the edges. De Niro gets right inside Travis, looking out with a steely gaze that claims to see all and yet also…

BLOW OUT

1981 Brian De Palma came of age working in the New Hollywood of the 1970s, alongside peers (and friends) like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola. Yet his films, though often admired, weren’t treated as great feats of artistry, as theirs were. History, shifted by the enthusiasm of younger movie lovers, has changed that in the past few years—but no matter when or how you’ve found your way to it, Blow Out has always been great. John Travolta’s Jack is a sound guy, unambitious and stuck working on B movies, who’s collecting wind noises out in the field one night when he sees a car swerve off a bridge and into a creek. He dives in after it and rescues the woman trapped inside, Nancy Allen’s Sally,…

THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS

1982 If you were a serious, semi-highbrow moviegoer in the early 1980s, this was the film you went to see on a date. Yet somehow it seems to have fallen out of our collective moviegoing memory. Directed by brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, The Night of the Shooting Stars, set in Tuscany in 1944, follows a group of citizens who leave their village just before their houses are set to be blown up by the Nazis, in advance of the liberating American troops’ arrival. The story is told through the eyes of six-year-old Cecilia (Micol Guidelli), who sees the event as a great adventure, though not even she can be protected from fear or tragedy. The Tavianis blend comedy, fantasy and mournful drama in such a heady swirl that…

BLUE VELVET

1986 By now, the world is used to David Lynch’s weirdness. But in 1986, Blue Velvet—so peculiar, so disturbing, so exhilarating—felt like the beginning of an amorphous revolution, and even if the movie left you feeling shaken, you automatically knew which side you were on. A guileless college student, Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont, returns to his hometown of Lumberton North Carolina, where he finds a severed ear in a field—it lies there, pale and bloodless, like an inedible mushroom. Following the trail of its mystery, and with the help of a local detective’s daughter—Laura Dern’s Sandy, practically vibrating with small-town sweetness—he’s drawn into the world of gangster sicko Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has a wholly unhealthy hold on a local nightclub singer, Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). Jeffrey is…

HARD BOILED

1992 Before violent action excess became the norm—extended, shapeless, exhausting sequences of dudes blamming other dudes ad nauseam, wholly lacking in visual logic, poetry, or wit—there was John Woo, one of the princes of Hong Kong’s action-film golden age. Don’t even try to tally the body count in Hard Boiled—you’ll run out of fingers and toes before you know it. The criminally charismatic Hong Kong star Chow Yun Fat is Tequila, a cop who plays jazz clarinet during his off hours and improvises similarly when he’s on the job: An early shootout in a mob-ridden café festooned with birdcages results in the death of a cop, and it’s Tequila’s fault. Eventually, he’ll tangle with a sly junior triad member on the rise, played by another actor with soulfulness to…

CHUNGKING EXPRESS

1994 Tony Leung, one of the stars of Wong Kar-wai’s epic pop romance Chungking Express, is the most New Wave of the Hong Kong New Wave actors. His face has an old-school Hollywood movie-star quality—his sensuality is the slow-burning kind, lurking beneath quizzical boyishness—though it also feels modern and fresh. It’s a face that might take you anywhere, and in Chungking Express, you follow willingly. The movie consists of two love stories loosely connected by, literally, the brushing of shoulders: In the first section, a plainclothes cop, Takeshi Kaneshiro’s He Zhiwu (or Cop 223), falls for a heroin trafficker played by Brigitte Lin, a mystery vixen in a trench coat and sunglasses, her windblown blond wig marking her as the heir to dozens of movie femme fatales before her.…

IRMA VEP

1996 What does film mean? what does making a film mean? Watching movies can be all-consuming by itself; why on Earth would anyone want to make one? Olivier Assayas’ dazzling Irma Vep answers all of those questions and none of them. Hong Kong film star Maggie Cheung appears as a version of herself, brought to Paris to star in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1915 crime serial Les Vampires. The director is an idealistic old-school auteur, René, played by New Wave legend Jean-Pierre Léaud. He has very specific ideas of what he wants, so intricately personal that those around him don’t always know how to follow his directives. He’s also on the cusp of a breakdown, having burrowed so deeply into the nautilus of his ideas that he can’t…

ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER

1999 We live in a world fixated on identity, dependent on sorting people into handy groups. But how can any human be just one thing? This seems to be a question the great Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar has been asking, consciously or otherwise, for decades, and it comes to the fore with both pathos and joy in his 1999 masterstroke All About My Mother. Cecilia Roth gives a vibrantly shaded performance as Manuela, a devoted single mother who suddenly loses her 17-year-old son, Esteban. The boy had never known his other parent, but Manuela now feels the need to connect with her, a transgender woman named Lola (Toni Cantó). As she searches for Lola, Manuela reunites with old friends, like the ebullient, generous trans sex worker Agrado (Antonia San…

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

2000 It’s doubtful that anyone who has seen it ever forgets it. Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love leaves a mark on you, like the ghost imprint of the touch of a long-lost lover. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, two of the most beautiful actors in screen history, star as neighbors in a Hong Kong apartment building, circa 1962, who discover that their respective spouses are involved in an affair. They have already noticed one another, of course, passing on the stairs of their local noodle shop, each carrying home a takeout dinner to be eaten in solitude; they barely exchange glances, each adhering to an internal code of propriety, yet the air around them seems more golden when they’re near each other. They become cautious friends, wary…

FAR FROM HEAVEN

2002 Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven, made in the spirit of Douglas Sirk’s searching melodramas of the 1950s, appeared in 2002, a not-particularly hopeful year in American politics, with the aftershock of 9/11 still reverberating. But by the end of the decade, it seemed we were at least on our way toward solving some of our problems: Gay marriage had been accepted, even embraced, by many if not most Americans; racial inequality was nowhere near being erased, but a path forward seemed possible. How many steps forward will we ever be able to take before being yanked back? Far from Heaven is more than 20 years old now, but it has as much to say as ever about the complexity of the human heart, and the dangers posed by…

PAN’S LABYRINTH

2006 Fairy tales are stories with a million and one lives: Whether they’re used to scare children into obedience or to plumb certain adult fears that aren’t easily expressed aloud, they have a way of surviving, and regenerating, across centuries. Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is one of the greatest fantasy films ever made, an adult fairy tale of both twisted-root darkness and vibrant, shimmering light. It’s an allegory, set in Franco’s Spain a few years after that country’s civil war, but Del Toro has no interest in heavy-handed symbolism. Instead, he presents us with images that reach us in a place beyond words. There’s a faceless, amphibian-like creature with wrinkly alabaster skin, its eyes located in the palms of its hands instead of in its head, a nearly…

UNDER THE SKIN

2013 Only once every 10 years or so does Jonathan Glazer emerge from his secret batcave of genius to bestow a picture upon us, and it’s usually an unnerving one. In his shivery, unshakable science-fiction reverie Under the Skin, adapted from a novel by Michael Faber, Scarlett Johansson plays an alien with no name, a killer who has come to earth to prey upon men for some unspoken, sinister purpose. She seduces them not just with her amphora shapeliness, but also with her milk-and-honey voice, with eyes that say, “I’m listening to you,” only to lure them—literally—into a pool of something that looks like inky black oil. They sink and disappear into a suggested erasure of the self, which somehow—Glazer never explains it—serves the needs of Johansson’s alien race.…

THE LOST CITY OF Z

2016 James Gray is one of our most classically elegant contemporary filmmakers and, in the United States, at least, one of our most underappreciated. His films have an ambitious, sweeping vision, but they’re deeply intimate, too. The Lost City of Z, based on David Grann’s best-selling book, is the story of a man who, once he’s gotten a taste of a secret world buried deep in the Amazon, no longer feels wholly comfortable either in his own country or his own skin. Charlie Hunnam stars as real-life British explorer Percy Fawcett, who, in 1925, disappeared in the Amazonian jungle while seeking a long-lost civilization. Others doubted its existence, and scoffed at Fawcett’s obsession. But Fawcett knew in his bones, and in his heart, that the place was real, and…