The Top 100
Sweet Smell of Success
In a blistering tale of showbiz sucking-up and self-loathing, Tony Curtis plays an oily press agent and Burt Lancaster is a gossip columnist modeled on the infamous Walter Winchell. The script is as black as poison ink.
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All About My Mother
The great Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar is in full flower in this melodrama, a riot of color and design that deepens — in a profound leap from his earlier chaotic melodramas — into a moving meditation on motherhood, womanhood, AIDS, and the high calling of actresses acting.
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There Will Be Blood
Paul Thomas Anderson's towering American epic about ambition, commerce, self-invention, and self-destruction — all embodied in a fierce performance by Daniel Day-Lewis as oil tycoon Daniel Plainview. For a huge picture, it's also keenly intimate, and Jonny Greenwood's musical score is revolutionary.
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Diner
Barry Levinson's directorial debut brims with warmth, humor, hometown love for Baltimore, and a perceptive affection for the eternal struggles of young men who, while figuring out how to be adults, do a lot of sitting around diner tables, talking about nothing. There'd be no Seinfeld without Diner. There'd also be no stardom for Kevin Bacon, Mickey Rourke, Paul Reiser, or Ellen Barkin.
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Sullivan's Travels
The finest comedy from Hollywood's finest madcap writer-director, Preston Sturges, this tale of a famous filmmaker who goes AWOL by pretending to be an ordinary schmo is a grand salute to the glory of movies (and to Veronica Lake's platinum-hooded sultriness).
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Rushmore
Wes Anderson's second feature is the quintessence of his precise personal aesthetic and his infectious delight in creating biospheres populated by singularly eccentric characters. There's no mistaking the Andersonian universe for anyplace else on Earth. The unexpected pleasure: that the great Bill Murray feels so at home in Mr. Anderson's neighborhood.
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Brokeback Mountain
In Ang Lee's beautifully delicate romance, a couple of seasonal cowboys fall in love in Wyoming in 1963, then suffer in secret over what they can't express in public. More than just moving, it's a memorable look at how having to hide passion shifts your identity.
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The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
A drive-in classic made with a creepy, nonexploitative finesse that's almost Hitchcockian. It raises the low-budget power-tool slasher movie to the level of art.
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Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee's ferocious and supremely tasty slice of neighborhood life is set on the hottest day of the summer in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, in the late '80s. In its feel for how racial tensions can simmer just beneath the surface of encounters, turning a melting pot into a pressure cooker, it remains a timelessly complex portrait of race in America.
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The Piano
Jane Campion's mysterious and affecting drama is a haunting vision of 19th-century New Zealand as a place of external wildness that reflects the internal wildness of female will. Holly Hunter's mesmerizing performance as a mute pianist is matched by that of an astonishing 10-year-old Anna Paquin.
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The French Connection
A nail-biter about international heroin smuggling, with an indelible performance by Gene Hackman as sleazo-heroic New York cop Popeye Doyle and one of the most exciting car chases ever put on film.
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Woodstock
The single greatest film ever made about the 1960s, Michael Wadleigh's account of the legendary three-day rock festival uses long, wandering takes and split screen to capture the idealism, naiveté, and musical soul of the peace-mud-and-flower-power generation.
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The Dark Knight
With Christian Bale as an ambivalent Batman and Heath Ledger as a psychotically scarred, jack-in-the-box Joker, good and evil are sometimes just a whisper away from each other in Christopher Nolan's smashingly sophisticated comic-book movie.
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La Dolce Vita
It's here, in the fragmented story of a playboy gossip journalist (played to the marrow by Marcello Mastroianni) ambling around Rome, that Federico Fellini first broke away from neorealism and perfected the ''Felliniesque.'' Watching Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg frolic in Rome's Trevi Fountain makes for a sweet life indeed.
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All About Eve
Fasten your seat belts: You will never find a wittier, more sophisticated, more biting studio comedy than this perfect wry look at how to make it in show business.
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Dirty Harry
Clint Eastwood gives a mythic performance as a lean, mean police enforcer out to wipe the streets of San Francisco clean of ''scum'' in this furious, drum-tight urban Western.
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Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations
Leni Riefenstahl's two-part chronicle of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin is a visually transporting documentary: a poetic pageant of flying, writhing, diving, and twisting bodies that connects us to the primal seed of athletic passion. The director's use of smash cuts, tracking shots, silhouettes, and slow motion makes this an encyclopedia of all the modern film techniques that Riefenstahl helped invent.
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The Wild Bunch
In Sam Peckinpah's ultimate blood ballet, the director explodes the myth of the Old West as he tells a tale of gruffly sympathetic outlaws. The virtuosity of the violence has never been surpassed.
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Dazed and Confused
No other movie not made in the '70s has captured the loose, stoned, wistful slow-ride groove of that era better than Richard Linklater's portrait of the last day of high school in 1976. The movie has an artful this-is-how-it-was flow.
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Scenes from a Marriage
Ingmar Bergman was justly lauded for his metaphysical symbolism, but one of his greatest achievements hinged on nothing more than two superb actors, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, enacting the drama of a bourgeois marriage in all its comfort, tenderness, sterility, rage, and love.
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Blade Runner
Harrison Ford plays a 21st-century cop tracking replicants (including Rutger Hauer) in Ridley Scott's spellbinding futuristic thriller based on the cult novel by Philip K. Dick. It's the ultimate Do machines have souls? movie.
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Night of the Living Dead
The ghouls run wild in George A. Romero's low-budget landmark of zombie terror, as pure a nightmare as any put on film.
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Raiders of the Lost Ark
The era's defining blockbuster confectioners, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, teamed up for a throwback to the action-adventure serials they grew up on. Harrison Ford's whip-cracking archaeologist dodges Rube Goldberg booby traps and squares off against Nazis while hunting for biblical booty. Celluloid escapism doesn't come more rollicking than this.
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Dog Day Afternoon
Sidney Lumet, that prince of New York City-steeped moviemaking, turns this stranger-than-fiction story of a bank robbery gone crazy wrong into a marvel of urban tension and zigzaggy action. He has immeasurable help from the combustible combination of Al Pacino as a desperate man with big demands and the late, great John Cazale as his gentler sidekick.
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Lawrence of Arabia
The grandeur of David Lean's wide-screen filmmaking is its own reward in this beloved epic about the life of eccentric adventurer T.E. Lawrence, played by Peter O'Toole as a golden-haired sand god.
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Touch of Evil
Set in a squalid Mexican border town, Orson Welles' most fully realized film after Citizen Kane is a tale of kidnapping and murder that was so shockingly dark for its time (and we don't just mean the gorgeous chiaroscuro photography) that its studio cut it to ribbons. Fully restored, it now looks like the missing link between film noir and David Lynch.
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The Hurt Locker
Kathryn Bigelow's brilliant 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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Cabaret
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.
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The 400 Blows
Truffaut's first film was also his first collaboration with onscreen alter ego Jean-Pierre Léaud. The results are a piercing study of a Parisian kid, adrift and on the road to nothing good.
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American Graffiti
Before he took us to a galaxy far, far away, George Lucas more or less invented nostalgia culture with this luscious ode to the last days of greasers, drive-in diners, and cruising up and down Main Street. For a movie full of iconic moments, it's a breathtakingly fluid and spontaneous rock & roll comedy. 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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L'Avventura
Michelangelo 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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Dr. Strangelove
A pitch-black comedy about the threat of nuclear annihilation that only gets funnier — and blacker — as the decades go by. Peter Sellers plays three roles, brilliantly.
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GoodFellas
Martin Scorsese's crackerjack gangster drama, starring Ray Liotta as an up-and-coming mobster, is a showcase for all 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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Rebel Without a Cause
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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The Shining
Stanley 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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Last Tango in Paris
Bernardo Bertolucci's landmark of screen eroticism 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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The Best Years of Our Lives
Three World War II veterans return home in one of the least sentimental war pictures of all time, a soldiers' tale as vital and relevant today as it was then.
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Network
In the '70s, Paddy Chayefsky's biting vision of where television and celebrity were headed seemed a frothingly over-the-top satire. It now looks like one of the most prophetic movies ever made, as Peter Finch's mad truth-teller of the airwaves seems to single-handedly invent reality TV. What the movie foresaw was how even authentic populist anger could turn itself into entertainment.
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E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
Its special effects no longer look as dazzling, but that only underscores the storytelling incandescence of Steven Spielberg's suburban fairy tale about a family's close encounter with a scrunchy-faced munchkin from outer space.
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The Silence of the Lambs
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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Top Hat
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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All the President's Men
The quintessential 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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The Seventh Seal
Ingmar Bergman's stoically enraptured tale of a medieval knight's journey is full of legendary symbols (like the chess game with Death), and the film itself came to stand for the heady pleasures of foreign cinema.
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Midnight Cowboy
Jon Voight, as a naive would-be gigolo, and Dustin Hoffman, as a down-and-out crippled 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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Schindler's List
Steven Spielberg's shattering Holocaust epic, based on the real life of a Gentile who saved Jewish lives 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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Frankenstein
James Whale's enduring tale of the undead is a myth of science gone mad, featuring the horror genre's most sympathetic monster.
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Breathless
Cops chase a French punk and his American girl in Jean-Luc Godard's seismically influential landmark of the French New Wave, based on a story by fellow cinema poet-rebel François Truffaut.
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Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back
The Cloud City! The AT-AT Walkers! The deepening relationships among darkening characters! This centerpiece in the first Star Wars trilogy (and, helmed by Irvin Kershner, the only one of the five films not to be directed by George Lucas) is the jewel in the intergalactic crown.
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The Maltese Falcon
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 John Huston, who went on to form a beautiful professional friendship with Bogart.
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A Hard Day's Night
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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Intolerance
The silent master D.W. Griffith did more than anyone to invent the language of movie storytelling, and this four-part parable of intolerance through the ages is his loopiest, most colossal, and inspired achievement. The Babylonian sequence seems to incarnate the epic possibilities of movies.
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It Happened One Night
The original romantic comedy, in which Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert demonstrate for all time why falling in love masquerades as verbal war.
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Goldfinger
The quintessential James Bond movie because it's got everything: great 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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A Clockwork Orange
Stanley 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 hero.
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The Adventures of Robin Hood
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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Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Anyone who thinks that Frank Capra was a sap 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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The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Peter Jackson demonstrates the definitive way to translate a popular literary epic to the screen, with sweep and passion and grandeur. He conquers all of Middle-earth!
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Taxi Driver
As Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro is pent-up and explosive in Martin Scorsese's mesmerizing tale of how the scuzzy post-Vietnam New York streets tip a lonely cabbie toward violence.
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On the Waterfront
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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