TIME Magazine TIME 100 Must-See Movies

If you’re like most people, you probably freeze when someone asks you what you think is the best movie of all time. What if you give a confident answer, only to wake up in the middle of the night, certain you should have said something else? And do you choose the movie you love most, or one you know is commonly identified as great? After all, if you go with one of the classic, default choices—Citizen Kane, Casablanca, The Godfather—no one can accuse you of having bad taste, or strange taste. Or the wrong taste. After compiling and annotating my own list of the best movies of the past century—broken down by decade, 10 films in each—I’m here to reassure you that there’s no such thing as the wrong…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…