Movies: Top 100

Directed by Orson Welles

One word: Rosebud. It's still the greatest movie of all time. Telling the story of a newspaper tycoon based on William Randolph Hearst, the 25-year-old genius Orson Welles poured his own swaggering, larger-than-life soul into a tragic and exuberant American saga of journalism, power, celebrity, idealism, betrayal, and lost love. No matter how many times you've seen Kane, it always feels like the first time. That's because Welles' filmmaking remains spectacularly alive: The thrill of invention is there in every shot, every performance, every breathless narrative surge.

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Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Coppola's tale of crime and family is the most mythic cinematic landmark of the past half century. It heightens Mafia violence into a metaphor for American corporate ruthlessness, presenting Marlon Brando's Don Corleone as the grandest of movie criminals — a monster we revere for his courtly loyalty.

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Directed by Michael Curtiz

WWII movie perfection. Hollywood's most celebrated love story was made as just an average studio pic but now exemplifies old-movie magic. Story, lighting, music, craftsmanship, and every glance between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman resonate with a magnificence that even the brashest studio mogul couldn't have predicted.

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Directed by Arthur Penn

A touchstone of screen violence, the exhilarating account of '30s bank robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker kicked open the door to the cinematic freedom of the post-studio-system era.

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Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

The granddaddy of all slasher films (as well as the most profound horror movie ever made), Hitchcock's famous thriller takes the revolutionary step of killing off its heroine (Janet Leigh) halfway through, all as a way of placing the audience in the mind of a madman (Anthony Perkins).

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Directed by Frank Capra

In Capra's eternal holiday classic, James Stewart gives one of the best big-screen performances as a small-town good guy who learns what life would have been like without him. The movie is really about how hard it is for us to see the magic of life as we're living it.

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Directed by Martin Scorsese

Scorsese's film about low-level New York Mob hoods is still the director's greatest exploration of crime, rock & roll, Italian-American manhood, and the wages of sin. The ''Be My Baby'' opening credits may be the single most electrifying use of pop music in Hollywood history.

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Directed by Charles Chaplin

Divine slapstick and social commentary from a silent-film genius, as Chaplin's Little Tramp prospects for gold in the Yukon. It's the most iconic performance by Hollywood's most indelible movie star.

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Directed by Robert Altman

Altman's organically structured masterpiece turns the stories of 24 linked characters in the country & western music capital into a crazy quilt of politics, celebrity, and American life in the '70s.

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Directed by Victor Fleming

The sweeping tale of the Civil War, a plantation named Tara, and a girl named Scarlett O'Hara was long thought of as the ultimate ''women's picture.'' But it's really Hollywood's most tragic romance.

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Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack

The stop-motion effects retain every bit of their magic as Kong the giant gorilla awes, terrifies, and breaks your heart.

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NOT RATED

Directed by John Ford

Ford's darkest Western stars John Wayne as a Civil War veteran who becomes obsessed with finding his niece, who's been captured by Indians. This one has a closing shot for the ages.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Woody Allen

Allen's matchless autobiographical ode to New York City, neurosis, and former sweetheart Diane Keaton has some of the most quoted dialogue in movie history. The template for the perfect smart romantic comedy.

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PG

Directed by David Hand

It's gorgeous and touching. When hunters kill Bambi's mother, it's a sentimental shock that sends the young deer on a primal journey.

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G

Directed by David Lynch

Lynch's masterpiece of erotic obsession is a hallucinatory thriller that turns into a surrealist nightmare. Dennis Hopper plays the most outrageous psycho villain ever.

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R

Directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen

The greatest of all movie musicals is a glittering MGM gem set in the days when Hollywood was transitioning from silents to talkies. It boasts sublime singin' (and dancin') in glorious Technicolor.

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G

Directed by Akira Kurosawa

Unemployed samurai defend a village against bandits in Kurosawa's thrilling Japanese period Western, which towers over all action films.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Steven Spielberg

It's what we don't see that makes us scream in Spielberg's terrifying tale of what happens When Sharks Attack. Hollywood's blockbuster era began here.

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PG

Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino seemed to be reinventing the pleasures of movies with this ingeniously time-bent yarn of bad behavior, surf rock, and outlaws who talk like pop culture junkies.

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R

Directed by Marcel Ophüls

In documenting the history of the Nazi occupation of France with exhaustive patience, Ophüls' film plumbs vital questions of truth and memory.

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PG

Directed by Billy Wilder

One of the most perfect of all farcical comedies, about two musicians who dress in drag to join an all-girl band because...well, nobody's perfect.

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NOT RATED

Directed by John Lasseter

The first, and still the best, of Pixar's films, this tale of a bedroom full of quirky, quarrelsome toys is a witty miracle of plastic come to life.

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G

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock's hypnotically suspenseful saga of love and espionage, starring Cary Grant as a supersuave secret agent and Ingrid Bergman as the woman who engages him in one of the longest kisses in screen history.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Robert Wise

The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about the von Trapp family singers gets turned into a famously square movie. But it's remarkably, wholesomely impassioned, with an incandescent Julie Andrews as the would-be nun who finds herself as a choral den mother.

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Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Kubrick's science-fiction masterpiece is a cosmic jaw-dropper of unearthly beauty, whether we're watching ships glide through space to ''The Blue Danube'' or charting the showdown between two astronauts and a computer that seems to have feelings. The ending can still blow your mind.

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G

Directed by Vittorio De Sica

A workingman and his son look for the father's stolen bicycle in De Sica's gloriously simple story, the essential specimen of Italian neorealist style.

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NOT RATED

Directed by John Huston

Film-noir perfection and the stuff that dreams are made of: Humphrey Bogart is Sam Spade, a detective entangled with a valuable carved bird, unsavory types who covet it, and a divinely shady dame. It was the amazing directorial debut of Huston, who went on to form a beautiful professional friendship with Bogart.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Victor Fleming

The most powerfully odd and enchanting fairy tale to come out of Hollywood, the adventure of Dorothy in Oz has the enduring magic of a backlot daydream, with a shivery touch of nightmare in Margaret Hamilton's performance as the Wicked Witch of the West.

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G

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock's globe-trotting suspense classic, starring Cary Grant as an innocent man mistaken for a spy. It's the first true contemporary thriller, with an out-of-the-frying-pan existential wildness typified by the famous crop-dusting sequence.

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NOT RATED

Directed by F.W. Murnau

The most heart-wrenching and lyrical of all silent films, Murnau's rapturous tale uses breathtakingly advanced cinematographic techniques to tell the story of a couple who must fall apart in order to come together.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Roman Polanski

Polanski's moody, labyrinthine thriller about the dark side of 1930s Los Angeles is the richest of all of Hollywood's political-corruption mazes.

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R

Directed by Leo McCarey

The Marx Brothers hit their uproarious, looney-tunes peak in this madcap vision of a political empire gone gleefully berserk.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Mike Nichols

The story of a boy, a girl, and a Mrs. Robinson is one of the most revolutionary movies of the '60s. As Benjamin Braddock, a lad torn between respectability and dropping out (and as confused about it as Hamlet), Dustin Hoffman redefined movie stardom.

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PG

Directed by George Cukor

Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy play married lawyers arguing the opposite sides of a case — a perfect metaphor for marriage itself.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Coppola's Vietnam saga is a psychedelic meditation on the evil that men do. The ''Ride of the Valkyries'' helicopter attack may be the single most riveting sequence in any war film.

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R

Directed by Roman Polanski

More artful than The Exorcist (and just as disturbing), Polanski's chiller gives you a magnificent case of the everyday shivers. Mia Farrow is a pregnant New Yorker who never suspects that the quirky old couple down the hall are Satan worshippers.

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R

Directed by Woody Allen

Allen's finest portrait of brainy, artistic, neurotic, and deeply lovestruck New Yorkers. Gordon Willis' black-and-white cinematography and the lush Gershwin score make every moment indelible.

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R

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

In Hitchcock's romantic mystery, James Stewart is a detective whose lover (Kim Novak) dies and then comes back to life. It's the master's personal poem of longing.

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PG

Directed by Jean Renoir

Renoir's masterpiece of social satire, set among romping aristocrats at a country château, is part comedy, part tragedy, and totally sublime.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Billy Wilder

A delicious film noir, with Fred MacMurray as the ultimate tough sap and Barbara Stanwyck at the height of her powers.

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NOT RATED

Directed by George Miller

Mel Gibson rules as Mad Max in Miller's speed-demon action Western in a postapocalyptic Aussie wasteland.

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R

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Yes, he's talkin' to you. As Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro is pent-up and explosive in Scorsese's mesmerizing look at how New York City's scuzzy post-Vietnam streets tip a lonely cabbie toward violence.

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R

Directed by Peter Jackson

Jackson demonstrates the definitive way to translate a popular literary epic for the screen, with sweep and passion and grandeur. He conquers all of Middle-earth!

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PG-13

Directed by Elia Kazan

Marlon Brando's unforgettable performance as the longshoreman who ''coulda been a contender'' defines Method acting at its most powerful and influential in this brilliantly tough study of dockside politics.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Frank Capra

Anyone who thinks that Capra was a softy should see this wrenching political fable, in which James Stewart, as a novice legislator, discovers — and filibusters to save — a Washington, D.C., as dysfunctional as our own.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley

The perfect old-fashioned lighthearted adventure, with swordplay that still sparkles. As Robin the noble bandit, Errol Flynn seems to be having the time of his life, and his spirit is infectious.

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PG

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Kubrick's cathartically disturbing — and audiovisually addictive — shock classic is a cautionary tale of youthful hooligans that dares to put you in the jackboots of its punk-sociopath antihero.

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R

Directed by Frank Capra

The original romantic comedy, in which Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert demonstrate for all time why falling in love masquerades as verbal war. Capra keeps the banter bouncing along with a sublime lightness.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Guy Hamilton

The quintessential James Bond movie because it's got everything: cool gizmos and a gold-painted girl, a villain of very grand cunning, and Sean Connery at the peak of his debonair invincibility.

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PG

Directed by D.W. Griffith

The silent master Griffith did more than anyone else to invent the language of movie storytelling, and this four-part parable of intolerance through the ages is his loopiest, most colossal, and most inspired achievement. The Babylonian sequence seems to exemplify the infinite possibilities of movies.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Richard Lester

A jukebox rock fable that's really one of the great screen musicals, with the young Beatles snarking and cavorting like gods at play.

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G

Directed by James Cameron

The one disaster movie that's also a work of art, Cameron's magnificent epic moves us with a youthful love story made memorable by tragedy. The sinking of the Titanic unfolds in real time, which only heightens the film's everlasting romantic grandeur.

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PG-13

Directed by Irvin Kershner

Cloud City! The AT-AT Walkers! The sage of the Dagobah system, Yoda! The deepening relationships among darkening characters! For those reasons and so many more, this centerpiece in the first Star Wars trilogy remains the jewel in the intergalactic crown.

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PG

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Cops chase a French punk and his American girl in Godard's seismically influential cornerstone of the French New Wave, based on a story by fellow cinema poet-rebel François Truffaut.

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NOT RATED

Directed by James Whale

Whale's enduring tale of the undead is a myth of science gone mad, featuring an unforgettable Boris Karloff as the horror genre's most sympathetic monster.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Spielberg's shattering Holocaust epic, based on the real life of a gentile who saved Jews in World War II, made the darkest chapter of 20th-century history real in a way that no other dramatic reenactment has.

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R

Directed by John Schlesinger

Jon Voight, as a naive would-be gigolo, and Dustin Hoffman, as a down-and-out disabled con artist, make for filmdom's most moving buddies in this epochal portrait of life on the mean streets of late-'60s Manhattan.

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R

Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Bergman's tale of a medieval knight's journey is full of legendary symbols (like the chess game with Death), and the film itself has come to stand for the heady pleasures of foreign cinema.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Alan J. Pakula

The ultimate newspaper film, this dramatization of how Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered the Watergate scandal is a true-life testament to the fervor — and obsessive, midnight-oil dedication — that fuels the fourth estate.

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PG

Directed by Mark Sandrich

Heaven, we're in heaven — and we seem to find the happiness we seek when Fred and Ginger are dancing cheek to cheek.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Jonathan Demme

To find a serial killer, an FBI trainee (Jodie Foster) consults a genius of a psychopath (Anthony Hopkins, the chillingly urbane face of evil as Hannibal Lecter) in a horror-thriller classic that's at once disquieting, moving, and mesmerizing.

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R

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Its special effects no longer look as dazzling, but that only underscores the storytelling incandescence of Spielberg's suburban fairy tale about a family's close encounter with a scrunchy-faced munchkin from outer space.

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PG

Directed by Sidney Lumet

In the '70s, Paddy Chayefsky's biting vision of where TV and celebrity were headed seemed like an over-the-top satire. It now looks like one of the most prophetic movies ever, as Peter Finch's mad truth-teller single-handedly invents reality TV. The movie foresaw how even authentic populist anger could turn itself into entertainment.

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R

Directed by William Wyler

Three World War II veterans return home in one of the least sentimental war pictures of all time, a soldiers' story as vital and relevant today as it was then.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Bertolucci's landmark of screen eroticism has become famous for its emotionally naked sex scenes, but Marlon Brando, in one of his greatest performances, also makes the film into a searing tragedy of midlife despair.

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NC-17

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Kubrick turns Stephen King's domestic ghost story about a kid who sees visions of his father's hidden malevolence into a gothic horror movie as dislocatingly odd as it is scary. Just because Jack Nicholson's marvelously controlled nutjob performance (''Heeeere's Johnny!'') is drop-dead funny doesn't mean it's not also seriously terrifying.

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R

Directed by Nicholas Ray

James Dean's smashing star turn as an alienated young guy set the standard for the movie representation of alienated young guys (and their like-minded gals).

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PG-13

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Scorsese's crackerjack gangster drama, starring Ray Liotta as an up-and-coming mobster, is a showcase for the filmmaker's famous virtuosity, from his perfectionist craftsmanship (check out that restaurant tracking shot!) to his kid-from-city-streets feel for Italian-American blood bonds. The film's highlight performance is the one by Joe (''I amuse you?'') Pesci.

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R

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

A pitch-black comedy about the threat of nuclear annihilation that only gets funnier — and blacker — as the decades go by, Kubrick's satire is shot like a documentary and laced with an almost psychotic sense of danger. Peter Sellers plays three different roles, all brilliantly.

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PG

Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

Antonioni's immortal tale of aristocratic ennui is a kind of anti-thriller about the search for a woman who vanishes mysteriously during a day trip...and never returns.

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NOT RATED

Directed by George Lucas

Before he took us to a galaxy far, far away, Lucas more or less invented nostalgia culture with this loving tribute to the last days of greasers, drive-in diners, and cruising up and down Main Street in classic American cars. For a movie full of iconic moments, it's a breathtakingly fluid and spontaneous rock & roll comedy (with a who's who of future big stars). It's set just as the '50s youthquake was winding down, but the key to its wistful melancholy is that it's really about the changes coming around the corner that no one could see.

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PG

Directed by François Truffaut

Truffaut's first film was also his first collaboration with his onscreen alter ego, Jean-Pierre Léaud. A piercing study of a Parisian kid, adrift and on the road to nothing good.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Bob Fosse

Liza Minnelli's Sally Bowles, a ''divinely decadent'' American in pre-WWII Berlin, belts out ''Life is a cabaret,'' and we believe every word, even when the meaning turns ominously ironic. No one does Bowles like Liza.

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PG

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Bigelow's powerful portrait of bomb defusers during the Iraq war uses the hair-trigger suspense of men who could die at any moment to express the mad reality of combat in the age of modern guerrilla war.

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R