Citizen Kane
1941 · Orson Welles
Welles reinvented the camera chasing a dead tycoon's last word, still the medium's Rosetta stone.
Find it on Amazon →Casablanca
1942 · Michael Curtiz
Bogart, Bergman, and a piano in wartime limbo, the most quotable romance Hollywood ever made.
Find it on Amazon →Sunset Boulevard
1950 · Billy Wilder
A faded star and a dead screenwriter narrate Hollywood's grand delusion with venomous wit.
Find it on Amazon →Seven Samurai
1954 · Akira Kurosawa
Kurosawa's rain-soaked template for every team-assembles epic remains the mightiest of them all.
Find it on Amazon →Vertigo
1958 · Alfred Hitchcock
Hitchcock's spiral of obsession and illusion, dizzying in restored Technicolor and pure dread.
Find it on Amazon →Metropolis
1927 · Fritz Lang
Lang's towering city of workers and machines still dictates how the future looks on screen.
Find it on Amazon →M
1931 · Fritz Lang
Lang's whistling child-killer thriller birthed the procedural and still crawls with unease.
Find it on Amazon →Modern Times
1936 · Charlie Chaplin
Chaplin's Tramp versus the machine age, a silent-era swan song both hilarious and humane.
Find it on Amazon →La Grande Illusion
1937 · Jean Renoir
Renoir's humane POW drama mourns a vanishing world where enemies still share dignity.
Find it on Amazon →The Rules of the Game
1939 · Jean Renoir
Renoir's country-house farce dissects a doomed class with heartbreaking grace and deep focus.
Find it on Amazon →Double Indemnity
1944 · Billy Wilder
Insurance, murder, and an anklet, the noir blueprint that drips with venom and doomed desire.
Find it on Amazon →It's a Wonderful Life
1946 · Frank Capra
Capra's dark night of the soul earns its snow-globe joy through genuine despair first.
Find it on Amazon →Bicycle Thieves
1948 · Vittorio De Sica
A father and son search postwar Rome for a stolen bike in neorealism's tender masterpiece.
Find it on Amazon →The Third Man
1949 · Carol Reed
Zither music, tilted angles, and Welles in a Vienna sewer, the most stylish noir ever shot.
Find it on Amazon →Rashomon
1950 · Akira Kurosawa
One crime, four truths, and cinema learning that the camera itself can lie beautifully.
Find it on Amazon →All About Eve
1950 · Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Bette Davis reigns over backstage betrayal in the wittiest, most quotable script of its age.
Find it on Amazon →Singin' in the Rain
1952 · Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen
The most joyous musical ever filmed, splashing through Hollywood's leap into sound.
Find it on Amazon →Ikiru
1952 · Akira Kurosawa
A dying bureaucrat finds meaning on a playground swing in Kurosawa's most quietly devastating film.
Find it on Amazon →Tokyo Story
1953 · Yasujiro Ozu
Ozu's quiet study of aging parents and distracted children breaks the heart at floor level.
Find it on Amazon →The Searchers
1956 · John Ford
Ford and Wayne ride Monument Valley in a Western haunted by racism and an unhealable wound.
Find it on Amazon →Some Like It Hot
1959 · Billy Wilder
Wilder's cross-dressing farce runs on champagne and perfect timing to its immortal last line.
Find it on Amazon →The 400 Blows
1959 · Francois Truffaut
Truffaut's autobiographical debut runs a troubled boy to the sea and the New Wave into being.
Find it on Amazon →