The 25 Greatest Films of All Time

City Lights (1931)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Genre: Comedy

The most beautiful closing scene ever filmed: “You can see now?” asks Charlie Chaplin’s iconic Tramp. “Yes,” says the formerly blind flower girl played by Virginia Cherrill, “I can see now.”

It Happened One Night (1934)

Director: Frank Capra
Genre: Comedy

The first of only three movies to win the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay — the other two are One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs — and still the most deserving, Frank Capra’s pre-Code classic is the greatest romantic comedy ever made.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Director: James Whale
Genre: Horror

“We belong dead!” The original is a stone-cold classic in its own right, but, for once, the sequel is even better. Adding depth and dimension to Frankenstein’s Monster while also introducing a new character to the mythos, James Whale’s sequel to his own 1931 film is as tragic as it is terrifying.

The Rules of the Game (1939)

Director: Jean Renoir 
Genre: Comedy

The first time you watch The Rules of the Game you’ll think of it as a comedy that slowly turns into a tragedy. The second time you watch it you’ll realize it was a tragedy all along.

Shoeshine (1946)

Director: Vittorio De Sica
Genre: Drama

Even more than Bicycle Thieves, Shoeshine evinces a heartbreakingly empathetic worldview that’s since become synonymous with Italian neorealism in general and Vittorio De Sica in particular. "What De Sica can do, that I can’t do,” Orson Welles once said. “I ran his Shoeshine again recently and the camera disappeared, the screen disappeared; it was just life.”

Seven Samurai (1954)

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Genre: Action

No list of the greatest films ever made is complete without several Akira Kurosawa pictures, but Seven Samurai deserves pride of place not only for how endlessly influential it is but also for how purely entertaining it is on a minute-to-minute level — all 207 of them, which pass by so quickly you’re somehow left wanting even more.

Psycho (1960)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Genre: Horror

Alfred Hitchcock was the master of suspense, but he was also so much more than that. You could pick one of his movies out of a hat and be more likely than not to come up with an all-time classic, but Psycho is still the purest distillation of his thrilling sensibility.

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Director: Agnès Varda
Genre: Drama

Give Agnès Varda 90 minutes and she’ll give you the world.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Director: Roman Polanski
Genre: Horror

You know something is off about poor Rosemary’s neighbors from the outset, even if you’re reluctant to believe, as she does, that they might be satanists who have it out for her and her unborn child. From the moment Farrow herself sings over those haunting opening credits, Rosemary’s Baby immerses you in its world and dares you to find a way out.

The Color of Pomegranates (1969)

Director: Sergei Parajanov 
Genre: Drama

Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s lush biography of poet and musician Sayat-Nova is powerful enough to expand your entire conception of cinema. Few films have had the same effect in the half-century since the release of this visual feast, though not for lack of trying.

Solaris (1972)

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Genre: Sci-Fi

Seeking to bring more emotional depth to science fiction, a genre he feared was becoming cold and lifeless in the wake of 2001: A  Space Odyssey, Tarkovsky put his convictions to the test using Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris as the basis for a mind-altering exploration of a semi-sentient planet that creates hallucinations and/or physical manifestations of our deepest desires and fears.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

Director: John Cassavetes
Genre: Drama

John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, the husband-and-wife team who essentially created independent film as we know it today, made 10 movies together. The best, most moving of them all is A Woman Under the Influence, in which Rowlands delivers one of the most devastating performances in cinema history. Watching this movie changed how I think about not only acting but movies themselves.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

Director: Chantal Akerman
Genre: Drama

Recently named the greatest film of all time by Sight and Sound. Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman serves as a before-and-after moment in the history of film. With much of its 201-minute running time consisting of its title character (a phenomenal Delphine Seyrig) performing her daily domestic tasks in real time, its tensions come to a boil just as surely as the water she cooks her potatoes in

3 Women (1977)

Director: Robert Altman
Genre: Romance

Robert Altman once said that his most enigmatic film came to him in a dream, and it shows. A cinematic dyad despite its title, 3 Women immerses us in the world of two women named Mildred (Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek, both luminous) who enter each other’s lives in the California desert. As their personalities refract through a shared lens, they merge into something darker than the sum of its parts.

Alien (1979)

Director: Ridley Scott
Genre: Horror

Ridley Scott’s first masterpiece remains the measuring stick for sci-fi horror nearly half a century later, its tagline both a warning and a promise: In space no one can hear you scream. As the cosmic entity comes aboard a spaceship and picks off its inhabitants one by one, you’ll feel a bit like Jonesy the cat: unable to do anything but look on in fascinated terror.

The Thing (1982)

Director: John Carpenter
Genre: Horror

The Thing could be anyone, which is what makes it so insidious. It’s also what makes The Thing so terrifying — just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean your fellow scientists at a remote research base in Antarctica haven’t been possessed by a malevolent extraterrestrial.

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Genre: Crime

The defining movie of the ‘90s, one that launched a thousand imitative ships — none of which came close to replicating the effortless cool of Tarantino’s nonlinear lulu.

The Thin Red Line (1998)

Director: Terrence Malick
Genre: Drama

Who lit this flame in us? Terrence Malick’s World War II film is hardly a war film at all, marked as it is by lyrical narration from reluctant soldiers and extended nature shots. All things shine in this vision of a battle that, while not exactly tide-turning, has the gentle rhythm of waves crashing to shore.

In the Mood for Love (2000)

Director: Wong Kar-wai
Genre: Romance

If unrequited love is heartbreaking, what is unconsummated love? The answer can be found in one of this achingly beautiful romance, a star-crossed drama about two would-be lovers whose refusal (or, perhaps, inability) to give in to temptation just makes their dynamic even sexier.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Director: David Lynch 
Genre: Drama

There is no band — no hay banda — but there’s so much else in David Lynch’s dreamscape that there are entire websites devoted to interpreting every supposed clue. That may be something of a fool’s errand, as feeling a Lynch film is more important (and, frankly, feasible) than fully understanding it, but it’s also part of the fun.

The Lord of the Rings (2001-03)

Director: Peter Jackson
Genre: Fantasy

One trilogy to rule them all. We’ll never see another big-screen spectacle quite like Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic, coming as it did just before Hollywood’s overreliance on CGI. The good news is that Lord of the Rings is infinitely rewatchable, with the extended editions also being the definitive ones.

No Country for Old Men (2007)

Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Genre: Crime

Few literary adaptations have been truer to their source material than the Coen Brothers’ take on No Country for Old Men, and even fewer have been better.