The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time
The movies are now more than 100 years old. That still makes them a young medium, at least in art-form years (how old is the novel? the theater? the painting?). But they’re just old enough to make compiling Variety’s first-ever list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time a more daunting task than it once might have been. Think about it: You get an average of one film per year. A great deal of ardent discussion and debate went into the creation of this list. Our choices were winnowed from hundreds of titles submitted by more than 30 Variety critics, writers and editors. As we learned, coming up with which movies to include was the easy part. The hard part was deciding which movies to leave out.
Variety, which recently celebrated its 117th anniversary, is a publication as old as cinema. (We invented box office reporting, in addition to the words “showbiz” and “horse opera.”) And in making this list, we wanted to reflect the beautiful, head-spinning variety of the moviegoing experience. We don’t just mean different genres; we don’t just mean highbrow and lowbrow (and everything in between). The very spirit of cinema is that it has long been a landscape of spine-tingling eclecticism, and we wanted our list to reflect that — to honor the movies we love most, whatever categories they happen to fall into.
Do we want you to argue with this list? Of course we do. That’s the nature of the beast — the nature of the kind of protective passion that people feel about their favorite movies. We invited prominent filmmakers and actors to contribute essays about the movies that are significant to them, and that passion comes across in all that they wrote. No doubt you’ll say: How could that movie have been left off the list? Or this one? Or that one? Trust us: We often asked that very same question ourselves. But our hope is that in looking at the films we did choose, you’ll see a roster that reflects the impossibly wide-ranging, ever-shifting glory of what movies are.
We invite you to find out how many films from the list you’ve seen on this poll.
These film writers and critics contributed suggestions for movies: Manuel Betancourt, Clayton Davis, Peter Debruge, Matt Donnelly, William Earl, Patrick Frater, Steven Gaydos, Owen Gleiberman, Dennis Harvey, Courtney Howard, Angelique Jackson, Elsa Keslassy, Lisa Kennedy, Jessica Kiang, Richard Kuipers, Tomris Laffly, Brent Lang, Joe Leydon, Guy Lodge, Amy Nicholson, Michael Nordine, Naman Ramachandran, Manori Ravindran, Jenelle Riley, Pat Saperstein, Alissa Simon, Jazz Tangcay, Sylvia Tan, Zack Sharf, Adam B. Vary, Nick Vivarelli, Meredith Woerner.
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The Graduate (1967)
Mike Nichols’ indelible comedy of alienation is that rare thing, a movie that really does define a generation. That’s because there has never been another movie like it (and no, “Rushmore” doesn’t count). Dustin Hoffman, with the halting prickly-pear neurotic charisma that would make him a star, plays a clueless college graduate who drops out without quite rebelling, and it’s that combination of hostility and passivity that elevated Hoffman into a culture hero. His Ben has an affair with Anne Bancroft’s deliriously blasé Mrs. Robinson, then stalks her daughter (Katharine Ross) to campus and breaks up her wedding by screaming like a banshee. Now that’s an original romantic comedy. One that showcases the new spirit of antisocial passion in a socially acceptable — and divinely infectious — way.
Read Variety‘s original review of “The Graduate.” Rent or purchase the film on Prime Video.
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12 Angry Men (1957)
How elemental — and riveting — is this: an entire courtroom drama set inside the jury room, where Henry Fonda, as the only member of the jury who suspects that a teenage defendant might not be guilty of murder, questions, cajoles and gradually convinces his fellow jurors to look more closely at the evidence. Sidney Lumet’s direction makes the back-and-forth dialogue so electrifying that it’s almost like music. The greatness of “12 Angry Men” is that it finds drama in discovering what America really is: a place where one man with an open mind can change the world.
Read Variety‘s original review of “12 Angry Men,” and stream “12 Angry Men” on Prime Video.
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Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
You never forget your first. That may be how many American art-house habituésthink of Pedro Almodóvar’s riotous comedy. It wasn’t his first film to get international distribution, but with its vivid palette and lush score, the movie heralds his genius and obsessions: women; their moods, hysterical and amusing; Hollywood cinema, camp, desire and, yes, spiked gazpacho. Before Penelope Cruz, Carmen Maura was for a spell the director’s muse. Here she plays a voice-over artist whose co-worker and lover is leaving her. The director gathered artists — on camera and on the set — who became his go-to company and underlined his wholly original sensibility.
Read Variety‘s original review of “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown“. Stream the film on Prime Video.
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Alien (1979)
A smothering tentacled thingy attaches itself to an astronaut’s face. Several scenes later, an alien fetus erupts right out of his belly, and the cinema would never be the same. Director Ridley Scott, drawing on the imagery of H.R Giger, staged a kind of Skinner box sci-fi nightmare that left audiences in a state of primal shock. Scott envisioned the film’s spaceship not in clean Kubrickian whites but in shades of murk that could speak to the film’s queasy fusion of the organic and the inorganic. And once Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley starts to take on the monster all by herself, a paradigm shift is born: the female action hero, who Weaver invested with such fierce, industrious, yet tossed-off authority that it’s as if she’d always been there.
Read Variety‘s original review of “Alien” here, the film is available for streaming on Starz.
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A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
The most transportive rock ’n’ roll movie ever made. Richard Lester, drawing on cutting-edge film techniques that are still bracing, fulfilled his assignment of directing a Beatles movie at the dawn of Beatlemania by staging it all as a day in the life of the Beatles as they really were. It’s like seeing a documentary, a postmodern backstage burlesque and a joyful early-Beatles musical all wrapped up into one black-and-white vérité rock reverie. The beauty of it is that the band members, with faces as beguiling as that of any movie star, had the instinctive showbiz wit to portray themselves as gods who’d swooped down on earth and were mingling with everyone else, the happy joke being that they suffuse every encounter with magic.
Read Variety‘s original review for “A Hard Day’s Night” here, and stream “A Hard Day’s Night” on HBO Max.
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Toy Story (1995)
In the early ’80s, director John Lasseter tried to convince Disney to invest in CGI. Instead, the studio fired him, so he went to work for the Graphics Group at Lucasfilm. When the team (scooped up by Steve Jobs and renamed Pixar) released the first fully computer-animated feature, the engineers still hadn’t perfected human skin — or feathers or fur, for that matter. Practically every surface looked fake, like plastic, which made a buddy comedy starring a bunch of toys ideal for the new medium. Bugs and fish and monsters would follow, but even as the technology evolved — liberating the heretofore hand-rendered form — nothing has surpassed that first toon, thanks to great writing and voice work that, even more than the CGI, brought Woody, Buzz Lightyear and their pals to life.
Read Variety‘s original review of “Toy Story” here, the Pixar film is available for streaming on Disney+.
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Bridesmaids (2011)
A decade has passed since “Bridesmaids” launched a thousand think pieces about the future of female-driven films, but Hollywood has yet to produce a funnier movie from any corner. With most comedies, audiences are lucky to get one hall-of-fame set piece. “Bridesmaids” serves up no fewer than five, from Maya Rudolph’s food-poisoned dress-fitting to Kristen Wiig’s mile-high anti-anxiety high to the scene on an airplane that single-handedly catapulted Melissa McCarthy to superstardom. Wiig said she and Annie Mumolo set out to write “not a female comedy, just a comedy that has a lot of women in it.” That they did, collaborating with producer Judd Apatow to create an uproarious, insightful look at personal insecurity and self-delusion.
Read Variety’s original review of “Bridesmaids” here. The film is available to stream on Peacock.
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Le Samouraï (1967)
Long before Tarantino, Jean-Pierre Melville obsessed about movies, admiring American directors and absorbing their codes. In the early ’50s, when the restrictive French film industry wouldn’t let him direct, Melville opened his own film studio and did it anyway, inspiring the nascent New Wave (and later, John Woo’s “The Killer”). Melville made crime movies mostly, taking the essence of film noir from Hollywood and filtering it through his own streetwise sensibility. “Le Samouraï” is his chef d’œuvre, featuring a stone-faced Alain Delon in one of cinema’s most understated performances: a gun for hire who dedicates his life to protecting the eyewitness pianist who spares him from the slammer. Featuring meticulous attention to procedural detail and long stretches of near silence, it’s the essence of cool, with an existential twist.
Read Variety’s original review of “Le Samouraï” here. Stream the Melville film on HBO Max.
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Pink Flamingos (1972)
It was panned by Variety, which called it “one of the most vile, stupid and repulsive films ever made.” And, of course, it became famous for the scene in which Divine, its snarling drag-queen star, eats a handful of dog poop. (Eat your heart out, P.T. Barnum!) But we’re here to tell you that Variety was wrong. John Waters’ ultimate midnight movie is, in fact, one of the funniest, most audacious and scandalously compelling films ever made. That’s because every moment in it is touched with a gleeful outlaw rageaholic danger too weirdly joyous to be faked. Divine was a stupendous actor, and in “Pink Flamingos,” he’s the clown demon of the Baltimore underground taking revenge on the world.
Read Variety‘s original review of “Pink Flamingos” here.
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Scenes From a Marriage (1974)
In the ’50s and ’60s, Ingmar Bergman became the poster boy for the mystique of art-house cinema by filling his black-and-white movies with symbols, metaphors, dreams. Yet his great searing drama about the experience and meaning of divorce carries none of that literary burden. It’s a straight-up naturalistic drama about a bourgeois Swedish couple going through the five stages of marriage, and Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson bring these loving, warring characters to life in a way that makes them feel like people in your own orbit. Bergman, tearing into the very meat of middle-class experience, made what now looks like the defining cinematic statement about how modern marriages live and die. -
The Shining (1980)
No offense to Stephen King, who’s vocally dismissive of Kubrick’s adaptation of his work, but “The Shining” is a mind-bending (and wildly entertaining) horror masterwork, encapsulating the filmmaker’s signature labyrinthine fixations. Stalked by a snaky camera alongside an ear-splitting tricycle, the spine-tingling Overlook Hotel on the brink of redrum with torrents of crimson blood is its own battlefield here. So is the mind of Jack Nicholson’s superbly maniacal Jack Torrance, host to the creepiest writer’s block in history. It’s the most insidious of nightmares.
Read the original Variety review of “The Shining” here and it’s available to stream on HBO Max.
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Belle de Jour (1967)
Catherine Deneuve comes across like an alabaster doll in Luis Buñuel’s still-shocking, since-unparalleled exploration of the erotic fantasies of a bourgeois French housewife, who dabbles in prostitution by day (or does she?). Whereas the character’s seemingly impassive face betrays only a fraction of what she is really thinking, the film — from the key pioneer of surrealism on screen — reveals to us alone what’s really going on in her head: The sound of bells heralds sadomasochistic daydreams, in which she is whipped and humiliated. This isn’t just some male director’s fetish, mind you, but an empowering portrayal of forbidden sexuality, depicted almost entirely through suggestion, as with buzzing box and bloody towel, which leave so much up to the imagination.
Read Variety’s original review of “Belle de Jour” here, and stream the film on HBO Max.
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Malcolm X (1992)
The studio initially wanted Norman Jewison to direct this monumental biopic of the human rights activist, but Spike Lee lobbied hard for Warner Bros. to hire a Black filmmaker instead. Lee won that fight, with severe restrictions. Then the studio and bond company pulled the plug, so he solicited donations from the likes of Oprah Winfrey, a strategy that allowed Lee to make the film as he saw fit. Malcolm X was an undeniably controversial and widely misunderstood figure, and Lee dedicates no fewer than 201 minutes to capturing the deep introspective complexity of a man who was constantly leveling up in his pursuit of justice, from teenage criminal to Muslim convert to Black nationalist leader and beyond. Denzel Washington is there at every step, working with his director — who fuses prestige-movie gravitas with his own curveball style — through the seismic shifts of a man who had the courage of his fury, but ultimately sought a greater enlightenment. Every bit as impactful as the assassination sequence is the montage that precedes it, which evokes all that could have been as Malcolm drives to the Audubon Ballroom, haunted by the perception that martyrdom would be his final evolution.
Read the original Variety review for “Malcolm X” here, and stream the film on HBO Max or Paramount+.
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The Sound of Music (1965)
Julie Andrews is most famous for two movies, “Mary Poppins” and “The Sound of Music” (made in 1964 and ’65), and her character in the latter film — a nun-turned-governess who looks after the seven Von Trapp children, teaches them to sing and brings them to life, all under the watchful gaze of their stern military father (Christopher Plummer) — is such a goody-two-shoes that her stardom, on occasion, gets mocked and dismissed. Yet if you really watch her in “The Sound of Music,” you’ll see that Julie Andrews has her own sublime and saintly incandescence. The whole movie makes goodness into something larger-than-life. Yes, it turns the true story of the Von Trapp Family Singers into the squarest of romantic fairy tales, yet the songs lift the film into the heavens, and so does Andrews’ beaming belief in every note.
Read the original Variety review of “the Sound of Music” here. The musical is available for streaming on Disney+.
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Close-Up (1990)
Hailing from a country with some of the strictest limits on cinematic expression, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s rule-bending docufiction hybrid dissolves the line between representation and reality. The hook: In the late ’80s, a nobody was arrested for passing himself off as director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to a wealthy Tehran family. He flattered them into thinking they might appear in his next movie, borrowing money before he was busted. Intrigued by the case, Kiarostami visited the impersonator in jail, filming their conversations and the subsequent trial. He also re-creates the so-called crime, making good on the con man’s promise by casting the parties involved as themselves in a playful meta-examination of how ordinary people can be seduced by the allure of filmmaking.
Read more about “Close-Up” here. The film is available for rent or purchase on Prime Video.
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Natural Born Killers (1994)
Oliver Stone possesses a hypnotically fierce, at times reckless talent that, for 40 years, has sprawled in all directions. But his greatest period arrived in the ’90s, when he made “JFK” and fastened onto a new kaleidoscopic aesthetic — a born-again burst of filmmaking energy that culminated in his mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind head-trip psychodrama about two homicidal criminals in love. Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis play Mickey and Mallory Knox like Bonnie and Clyde on a psychosis bender, but the black magic of the film’s MTV-on-peyote imagery is that it literally becomes the experience they’re living inside. “Natural Born Killers” is about love and murder and tabloid sensationalism, but more than that it’s the cinema’s great hallucination of media-age madness, rendered haunting by the music of Leonard Cohen.
Read the original Variety review of “Natural Born Killers” here. The film is available for streaming on Netflix.
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Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
With “Pinocchio,” Guillermo del Toro has finally made a fairy tale for children. Prior to that, the Mexican fabulist wove fantasies much too dark for impressionable eyes. Although this id-tickling anti-fascist allegory stars an 11-year-old girl, the grimmer-than-Grimm inversion of “Alice in Wonderland,” set in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, would give underage audiences nightmares for life. For adults, it’s like witnessing someone else’s dreams, as young Ofelia escapes into a macabre underworld of now-iconic characters, including the Faun and the Pale Man. Together with compatriots Cuarón (“Roma”) and Iñárritu (“Birdman”), del Toro elevated Mexican cinema to international attention. All three are visionaries, but this film leaves the strongest imprint.
Read Variety’s original review of “Pan’s Labyrinth” here, and stream Guillermo del Toro’s film on Starz.
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Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
Landing the first of three Oscar wins for Meryl Streep, this dramatic study of a family reshaping itself through divorce — at a time when separations were skyrocketing — pits the chameleonic star against fellow acting titan Dustin Hoffman. Where Streep’s future roles sometimes called for elaborate accents and physical transformations, this one demands vulnerability and a willingness to be unlikable. Meanwhile, Hoffman’s performance caught mainstream American manhood at a key moment of transition, trying to balance old-fashioned “strength” with a new kind of nurturing. “Kramer vs. Kramer” benefits from having been made as popular entertainment, trading straightforwardly in big, relatable feelings and demanding suitably broad, open-hearted reactions from us in turn. It’s piercingly perceptive grown-up filmmaking, all too rare today.
Read Variety’s original review of “Kramer vs. Kramer” here. The film is available on Showtime.
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Parasite (2019)
The wealthy Park family lives high on a hill; the broke Kims wallow below in the slums of Seoul, sometimes in sewer water up to their waists. Social mobility — in this case, ascending from their city’s literal bottom to its top — is impossible unless the poorer clan is willing to lie, betray and even kill, and yet, Bong Joon Ho’s breakthrough best picture winner refuses to make the Kims the villains, when the class system itself is to blame. It’s a thriller both pointed in its intentions and universal in its appeal, which today marks a tipping point both in the global conversation about the one percent, and in the Academy Award’s sense of what kinds of films can seriously contend for the big prize.
Read Variety’s original “Parasite” review here. The film is available for streaming on Hulu.
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The Dark Knight (2008)
The greatest comic book film ever made, Christopher Nolan’s second Batman movie has the sprawling urban film noir grandiloquence, and the ripe sense of evil, to live up to its operatic ambitions. It’s at once a heady treatise on corruption and one of the most innovative action spectaculars of our time, with Christian Bale’s seething, obsessive Batman poised between two poles of moral decadence: the mangled Gotham City district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and Heath Ledger’s Joker, a scarred sick puppy who dominates the movie wearing crooked lipstick the actor slicked on himself to create a character of pure disruptive insanity. Co-star Michael Caine lauded Ledger’s as “one of the scariest performances I’ve ever seen.” He was right; it has yet to be topped.
Read the original Variety review of “The Dark Knight” here. The film is available for streaming on Hulu.
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Pixote (1980)
Brazil was still under dictatorial control when Héctor Babenco directed this shocking indictment of how terribly authorities had been treating street kids in São Paulo, testing the limits of what state censorship permitted at the time. With the film’s nonprofessional cast and stripped-down, documentary-style realism, you can draw a line from De Sica’s “Shoeshine” to Buñuel’s “Los Olvidados” to “Pixote” — and on to such eye-openers as Larry Clark’s “Kids” and Fernando Meirelles’ “City of God.” So much of the power of “Pixote” depends on the tough scowl of young Fernando Ramos da Silva, who, in a cruel turn of fate, was killed by Brazilian police at age 19. It’s both a time capsule and cutting edge, especially in its nonjudgmental depiction of Pixote’s trans friend Lilica.
Read the original Variety “Pixote” review here. The film is available for streaming on the Criterion Channel.
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Waiting for Guffman (1996)
Christopher Guest’s cracked ensemble comedies are as funny as anything by Woody Allen, Monty Python, or the “Airplane!” crew, yet they have a personal quality that sets them apart — an obsessiveness about how human ego and human cheesiness dance together. Guest’s most delectable creation is this mockumentary about a small-town theater troupe struggling to put on a musical; it’s a comedy as touching as it is hilarious. Guest’s performance as the troupe’s director, Corky St. Clair, with his beaming eyes and bowl cut, his flamboyant-but-closeted mannerisms, his flat-out passion equaled only by his lack of talent, is one for the ages. He’s a character at once so retrograde and so affectionately observed that “Guffman” became the ultimate cult film for a newly liberated generation.
Read the original Variety review of “Waiting for Guffman” here. The film is available for streaming on HBO Max.
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Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
For three minutes, middle-aged single mother Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) sits peeling potatoes. She washes the dishes. She makes the bed. Belgian director Chantal Akerman radically expanded what movies could and should be with this cornerstone entry in the slow-cinema canon — a rigorous style of filmmaking that emphasizes duration over action. Confined largely to the kitchen, dining room and hallways of a nondescript apartment, Akerman’s debut challenges what the experimental auteur called the “hierarchy of images,” concentrating on mundane domestic rituals associated with women, typically overlooked in movies. Over three-plus hours, the film re-creates tasks that Akerman observed her mother practicing for years, though in this case they’re disrupted by Jeanne’s double life as a prostitute — a feminist twist that builds to a shattering climax. Maddening at times yet never less than mesmerizing, it’s the very best film of its kind. But hardly the best film of all time.
Stream “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” on HBO Max.
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Goldfinger (1964)
The DNA of the James Bond series was forged in “North by Northwest,” and the series itself came into being with startling finesse in “Dr. No” (1962), the first Bond film. But it wasn’t until two years later, in “Goldfinger,” that the Bond films hit their quintessential pitch of pop exhilaration — a note-perfect blend of audacity and spectacle, danger and ’60s erotic cool, unforgettable theme song and iconic villain, not to mention Sean Connery at his most royally cutthroat and commanding. The Bond series is in all our DNA now, and there’s a reason: It’s one of the greatest escapes the movies have ever given us. “Goldfinger” marks the moment it becomes a popcorn epiphany.
Read the original Variety review of “Goldfinger” here. The film is available for rent or purchase on Prime Video.
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The Tree of Life (2011)
Time will tell how much higher this film can climb. Despite being one of the younger entries on the list, Terrence Malick’s metaphysical wrestling match with grace and grief — and God’s very existence — has already made an indelible imprint on other directors, most notably in its reverence for the natural world and the way DP Emmanuel Lubezki’s gravity-defying camera captures it. Malick takes the loss of his brother as subject, factoring the creation of the universe into his soul-searching exercise. He casts movie stars, but refuses to treat them as such, stripping them of their lines and the chance to “act,” while privileging impressionistic fragments from his own memory (plus empathy among dinosaurs!). It’s like “2001” turned inward, posing impossibly big questions.
Read the original Variety review of “The Tree of Life” here. The film is available for rent or purchase on Prime Video.
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Boogie Nights (1997)
Every Paul Thomas Anderson film now seems to be greeted with reviews more awestruck than those that greeted the previous one. But sorry, we’ll stick with his youthful gem about the ’70s and ’80s porn world — a drama of such empathy, virtuosity and Tarantinoid sprawl that every moment in it gives you a buzz. As Dirk Diggler, Mark Wahlberg plays a simpleton of sweetness teetering into the hedonistic outer limits. The film’s drama, more than just a ride, is driven by a visionary perception: that as measured by the ironic yardstick of porn, the rise of technology paralleled the rise of a more detached and doom-struck world.
Read the original Variety review of “Boogie Nights” here. The film is available to stream on Paramount+.
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My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
Walt Disney may have pioneered the field of hand-drawn animated features, but Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki elevated it, bringing down-to-earth storytelling and attention to everyday detail (raindrops falling in puddles, a snail inching its way up a plant) to the realm of the fantastic, where a plush orange Catbus offers lost kids a lift. Later Studio Ghibli achievements, such as “Princess Mononoke” and “Spirited Away,” may have been bigger hits in the U.S., but this bucolic trip down memory lane is by far Miyazaki’s most beloved achievement around the world. Through its title character, “Totoro” introduced a benevolent forest spirit — whose fuzzy, round, owl-eyed design rivals Mickey Mouse in its appeal — that generations have adopted as their imaginary friend of choice.
Read the original Variety review of “My Neighbor Totoro” here. The film is available for streaming on HBO Max.
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Intolerance (1916)
In the silent era, D.W. Griffith did nothing less than build the ground floor of what filmmaking became, inventing the nuts and bolts of visual storytelling and doing it with breathtaking imaginative sweep. Yet the movie in which he first codified this achievement, “The Birth of a Nation” (1915), was a scandalous and morally toxic epic — a celebration of the Ku Klux Klan that helped to construct Hollywood on a foundation of racism. It was “Intolerance,” the film Griffith made in response to the outrage triggered by “The Birth of a Nation,” where he rose to his most visionary heights. A three-and-a-half-hour parable spanning 2,000 years and told in four parts (a modern saga of poverty and crime; the story of Jesus; the St. Bartholomew Day’s Massacre; and the fall of the Babylonian empire, complete with elephants), the movie is one of the most soul-boggling spectacles ever attempted: tender, hyperbolic, spellbinding and half-mad. It seems to contain the glorious seeds of everything that movies could, and would, be.
Read the original Variety review of “Intolerance” here. The film is available to stream on Prime Video or Paramount+.
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Breaking the Waves (1996)
Lars von Trier’s greatest work was shot on film with a hand-held camera and then transferred to video, and it looks and feels like a home movie — yet it’s about a woman, a winsome Scottish newlywed named Bess (Emily Watson), who speaks directly to God, and the film’s herky-jerky naturalism makes you believe that that’s actually happening. Especially when she asks God to bring her husband (Stellan Skarsgård) back from a construction site, and sure enough the husband returns … after sustaining a paralyzing injury. Did God do that? And if so, what’s she going to do in return? Von Trier, striking a tone of solemn enchantment that begs comparison with that of Dreyer or Bergman (even the ’70s-glam-rock chapter interludes are like something out of the world’s most electric church mass), creates a drama of loss, faith and soul-scalding sacrifice that will move you to the core, as Watson’s heroine of destiny becomes the very essence of love.
Read the original Variety review for “Breaking the Waves” here. The film is available to and rent or purchase on Prime Video.
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My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)
When you think of Julia Roberts, you think of her 1,000-watt smile — and behind that, her complete and total movie-star radiance. Yet in P.J. Hogan’s splendid romantic comedy, Roberts gives a performance rooted in moodiness and anger and despair, and it’s the most transcendent acting of her career. She plays a food critic who arrives at the wedding of her lifelong friend (Dermot Mulroney) with a plan to sabotage it, all because she realizes she’s really in love with him. You may think you know where this is going, but you don’t, and that’s one reason (along with Rupert Everett’s slashing wit and the all-time perfect use of a Burt Bacharach song) why “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” with apologies to Nora Ephron, remains the most delectable and heartbreaking rom-com of its era.
Read the original Variety review of “My Best Friend’s Wedding” here. The film is available to purchase on Prime Video.
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12 Years a Slave (2013)
How do you make a film that stays true to the brutal obscenity of America’s “peculiar institution” yet is also a compelling and, at moments, even hopeful drama? British director Steve McQueen brings off that staggering balancing act in his grueling and essential adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir. Chiwetel Ejiofor, in an intensely physical yet stunningly internal performance, plays Solomon, a free man living in New York State who, in 1841, was kidnapped and trafficked to a plantation owner. This horrific scenario allows McQueen to dramatize the evils of slavery with more detail, psychological understanding and complex emotional power than we’ve ever seen in a dramatic feature. An extended image of Solomon with a noose around his neck, his tippy toes working the dirt so that he can breathe, is one of many that sear themselves into your memory.
Read Variety’s original review of “12 Years a Slave” here. Stream the film on HBO Max.
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Beau Travail (1999)
Whether in “Beau Geste” or Van Damme’s ludicrous “Legionnaire,” the French Foreign Legion tends to be treated on film with a kind of reverent machismo — one brilliantly unraveled in French auteur Claire Denis’ audacious reworking of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd.” Foregrounding the homoerotic yearnings in Melville’s moral tale of military power plays, Denis turns it into a sinuous, mesmerizing film ballet of male beauty and physicality, shot by Agnès Godard in stark, orderly formations against the African desert, in which desire becomes as competitive an exercise as everything else in the army. No other filmmaker has better captured the military’s masculine crisis.
Read Variety’s original review of “Beau Travail” here. Stream the film on HBO Max.
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King Kong (1933)
The 1930s was an astonishing decade for Hollywood monster movies. “Frankenstein,” “Dracula,” “The Mummy,” “The Invisible Man” — these divinely spooky fairy tales of humanized horror colonized our nightmares. Yet the grandest of them all was a creature feature about an island beast who was less monstrous than misunderstood. That was Kong, the giant ape who remains the most innocently awesome and poetic special-effects feat in film history. The Skull Island sequence has a primeval magic, yet the longevity of Merian C. Cooper’s landmark also hinges on scenes where the filmmaking is stripped to its spine, notably an unbroken shot of a fledgling ingenue being guided through her first screen test. Fay Wray raises her eyes toward an imaginary monster, feigns to choke on her own terror and unleashes a scream that has echoed for 90 years.
Read Variety’s original review of “King Kong” here. Stream the film on Peacock.
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Bicycle Thieves (1948)
The timeless humanist gem of Italian Neorealism. With urgent working-class concerns around financial despair at its center, Vittorio De Sica’s soul-crushing classic delicately perceives its unforgiving post-World War II Italy where the poor must own bikes for below-minimum-wage jobs. There’s no holding back tears while De Sica’s dignified yet underprivileged Antonio desperately searches for his stolen pedals and tries to set an upstanding example for his impressionable young son, a luxury heartbreakingly denied to him that De Sica affectionately showers with empathy.
Read Variety’s original review for “Bicycle Thieves” here. Stream the film on Prime Video.
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Paris Is Burning (1990)
While a list like this could include any number of documentaries, Jennie Livingston’s legendary celebration of the queer haven that Harlem drag balls provided for Black and Latino, gay and trans youth signifies a pre-reality-TV apotheosis of the form: It educates and inspires, while illuminating a vibrant demimonde all but invisible to mainstream society at the time — despite Madonna’s hit “Vogue” appropriating the scene’s strike-a-pose dance style. After immersing herself in that world, Livingston brought the culture of rival “houses” (ersatz families with names like Xtravaganza and LaBeija) into the light, letting the fierce den mothers define such concepts as reading, realness and shade. The movie paved the way for RuPaul and “Pose,” while exponentially expanding LGBT visibility at large.
Stream “Paris is Burning” on HBO Max.
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A Man Escaped (1956)
The economical style developed by French auteur Robert Bresson reached a pinnacle with his fourth film. The dispassionate prison-break procedural, based on a memoir, proved a perfect vehicle for the “pure” filmmaking now known as “Bressonian” in which nonprofessional actors (here François Leterrier plays Fontaine, the aspiring escape artist) are often shot in close-ups of hands and faces, with minimal dialogue but minute attention to offscreen sound, to create an extraordinarily absorbing cinematic experience. To watch Fontaine painstakingly shave wood from his cell door, or quietly assess the other convicts, or tap messages on his wall, is like watching a colossal mechanism being assembled piece by piece from scratch. Once it’s finally set in motion, you may have to remind yourself to breathe.
Rent or purchase “A Man Escaped” on Prime Video.
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Carrie (1976)
Brian De Palma, with his virtuosic film-freak fetishism, is one of the most celebrated directors of the past half century, and if you ask De Palma stans what his greatest movie is, a lot of them will tell you it’s “Blow Out.” Actually, it’s this delectable and terrifying gothic bloodbath “Cinderella.” Adapted from Stephen King’s first novel and starring the incomparable Sissy Spacek as a telekinetic high-school wallflower who gets invited to the prom as a prank, plus Piper Laurie as her seething fundamentalist mother (a relationship as resonant as anything in Tennessee Williams), “Carrie” is a mesmerizing emotional chiller that remains the most revered movie fairy tale of former teen geeks everywhere.
Read Variety’s original review for “Carrie” here. Stream the film on Pluto TV.
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Bambi (1942)
Animation may not strictly be a children’s medium, but one reason it’s thought of as such is the splendid way Walt Disney used the hand-drawn form to bring dreams to life. In “Snow White,” the wildlife doesn’t talk, but within five years, Disney was making it seem perfectly normal that wide-eyed forest animals might chatter among themselves (e.g., “He can call me a flower if he wants to”). There’s a purity to “Bambi” — evident in the scene where Thumper encourages the wobbly fawn to walk — unmatched by any cartoon since, though the death of the mother at the hands of man has traumatized countless kids. What makes this Disney’s best is the simple way it invites audiences to empathize with creatures.
Read Variety’s original review for “Bambi” here. Stream the film on Disney+.
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Dazed and Confused (1993)
Richard Linklater’s free-flowing comedy about the last day of high school in 1976 is the cinema’s most shaggy-dog lyrical and authentic depiction of teenage life … ever. It’s also the greatest Robert Altman film that Altman never made. Every detail (the cars, the clothes, the jocks who look like hippies, the stoners who look like nerds) makes you feel like you’ve entered a time machine, as Linklater lets his characters ramble and roam, turning every setting — a Little League game, a midnight kegger in the woods — into an opportunity to eavesdrop that leaves the audience feeling alright, alright, alright. He also captures that pivotal moment when the idea of “counterculture” first became embedded in the culture it was countering.
Read Variety‘s original review of “Dazed and Confused” here. Rent and purchase the film on Prime Video.
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The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Somehow stringently severe and ecstatic at the same time, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s imposing obelisk of silent cinema is one of the most soulful and emotionally immediate historical portraits ever made. Sticking to the record of the 15th-century French warrior’s trial and execution, Dreyer’s film offers little in the way of dramatic embellishment, relying instead on the extraordinary, transparently expressive face of star Renée Jeanne Falconetti for its steadily escalating, finally devastating power, with no words required.
Read Variety’s original review for “The Passion of Joan of Arc” here. Stream the film on Prime Video.
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Moulin Rouge! (2001)
The movie musical, already not a genre given to restraint, has never been so gloriously maximalist as it is in Baz Luhrmann’s fin de siècle jukebox romance, which throws so many contrivances, naked anachronisms and ornamental formal flourishes at the screen that they somehow balance each other out into the purest kind of old-Hollywood showmanship — one that appears to believe its naive credo (Truth! Beauty! Freedom! Love!) with such sincere intensity that you can’t help but buy into it too. It’s a neon-lit landmark that changed the way musicals could be constructed in the 21st century, did for Elton John’s “Your Song” what “Muriel’s Wedding” did for “Dancing Queen,” and relaunched Nicole Kidman as the gutsiest actress of her generation.
Read Variety’s original review for “Moulin Rouge!” here. Stream the film on Starz.
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Vagabond (1985)
In 1955, while still in her mid-20s, a young French photographer named Agnès Varda picked up a camera and made a movie, beating the likes of Godard and Truffaut to the task. For the next six decades, she continued to make films on her own terms, without asking permission or worrying about commercial prospects. Varda was as independent a filmmaker as the medium has ever seen, and that uncompromising but deeply humanist sensibility is best reflected in “Vagabond.” The intricately crafted film opens with the discovery of homeless Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) dead in a ditch, then works backward as the people whose lives she touched seek to explain this elusive free spirit. Thus, Mona serves as a mirror for them and the audience.
Read Variety’s original review for “Vagabond” here.
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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Seven films into his career, the child inside of Steven Spielberg finally shot a movie that sees the world as if the towering director were still just 4½-feet tall. This generational touchstone about an alien who befriends a home of free-range kids portrays adults as intimidating shapes shielded behind masks and impenetrable mutterings about contagions. Empathy and awe, curiosity and adventure — these emotions are for the young, and are made literal in E.T.’s beating heart. While it’s no easy task to settle on Spielberg’s masterpiece, “E.T” is his only film to bring Princess Diana to sobs, inspire the United Nations to award him a Peace Medal and, upon its Cannes premiere, move François Truffaut to send Spielberg a telegram that read, “You belong here more than me.”
Read Variety’s original review for “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” here. Stream the film on Prime Video.
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Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Taiwan-born Ang Lee had already made a Marvel superhero movie (“Hulk”) and the highest-grossing foreign-language film in American history (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) when he assumed the relatively intimate task of adapting Annie Proulx’s short story about two cowboys’ decades-spanning secret. Now considered among the most indelible Hollywood love stories, the tragic queer romance might have been a niche release, as opposed to the culture-shifting crossover phenomenon it became, were it not for a pair of peerless movie-star performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and especially Heath Ledger, who conveys so much within the character’s muffled reticence to speak. Lee has often credited his grasp of America’s aching truths to his status as an immigrant, but it’s his poetic capacity for restraint that makes “Brokeback” so powerful.
Read Variety’s original review of “Brokeback Mountain” here. Rent and purchase the film on Prime Video.
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Rosemary's Baby (1968)
Some say “The Exorcist” is the scariest movie ever made. But even the explicit way the devil reveals himself in that classic of demonic possession doesn’t get under your skin the way the devil does in Roman Polanski’s majestically creepy everyday nightmare about the Satan cult next door. It’s a thriller worthy of Hitchcock, with Mia Farrow’s Rosemary — a woeful waif, hair shorn like a prison-camp victim — going through a pregnancy from hell, which the film elevates into a feminine trauma of shuddery profundity.
Read Variety’s original review of “Rosemary’s Baby” here. Stream the film on Prime Video.
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Pather Panchali (1955)
Long before Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood,” there was Satyajit Ray’s exquisitely paced and structured Apu Trilogy, the holy peak of all chaptered coming-of-age narratives. Restrained but also universally relatable, the Bengali filmmaker’s debut is the first of those three movies, which put Indian cinema on the international art-house map. Like a regional riff on Italian Neorealism, the inherently humanist “Pather Panchali” is both a loving portrait of a mostly matriarchal upbringing and an awe-inspiring vision of rural life, as reflected through the impressionable eyes of its young protagonist. The film’s captivating images include chasing after a passing train and playing in a monsoon, which add up to a pure and soul-nourishing experience.
Read Variety’s original review of “Pather Panchali” here. Stream the film on HBO Max.
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The Road Warrior (1981)
Hollywood has given us some good action films in the past 100 years. But no one, simply put, has made an action film as great — as combustible and thrilling, as surgically shot and edited, as poetic in its close-to-the-ground nihilism — as George Miller’s “Mad Max” films. We adore all of them (well, OK, not “Beyond Thunderdome”), but this is one that lives in our dreams. It’s the movies’ most vivid and threatening dystopian fairy tale, with Mel Gibson’s Max going up against a crew of terrifying punk marauders. The vehicular chases (we’re hesitant to call a number of these contraptions cars) are such extraordinary duels of velocity and aggression that they make speed itself into the film’s main character.
Read Variety’s original review of “The Road Warrior” here. Rent and purchase the film on Prime Video.
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In the Mood for Love (2000)
Easily one of the most beautiful movies ever made, Hong Kong master Wong Kar Wai’s rapturously repressed romance unfolds between two never-more-gorgeous stars: Maggie Cheung, an elegant sliver of sadness in a high-necked silk cheongsam, and Tony Leung, the model of smoldering, yearning hesitance. Christopher Doyle’s sensuous cinematography glories in jewel tones, frames-in-frames and the smoky layers of separation between the pair, drawn together when they discover their spouses having an affair. But most of the mood flows from Wong’s feel for the tantalizing erotics of the near miss: the door left ajar, the phrase left unspoken, the burning gaze met then reluctantly broken. Wong has made more complex films, but none that lingers quite like this one, like incense and unconsummated desire.
Read Variety’s original review of “In the Mood for Love” here. Stream the film on HBO Max.
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The General (1926)
Upon its release, critics considered this tight Civil War epic to be Buster Keaton’s least funny film, missing what has since made it his most respected achievement: The vaudeville-trained silent-film comedian took the true story of the robbery and recovery of a Confederate steam engine as a creative opportunity to stage reckless stunts aboard a moving train. His comic timing and daring combine in the scene where he stands astride the General’s cow-catcher, tossing a railroad tie to dislodge another blocking the tracks ahead. To understand his genius, watch how Keaton pantomimes clumsiness in order to mask the precision required to pull off the gag. Keaton, who co-directed, was meticulous about historical detail, creating images — like the climactic collapsing-bridge crash — of an immortal quality.
Read Variety’s original review of “The General” here. Stream the film on Prime Video.
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Apocalypse Now (1979)
A war movie that’s never been surpassed for sheer cataclysmic spectacle. In 1976, Francis Ford Coppola journeyed into the jungles of the Philippines, emerging more than a year later after a shoot ravaged by a typhoon, the heart attack of 36-year-old star Martin Sheen and Coppola’s own cultivation of chaos. Yet in the movie that emerged, we see elements of all that disaster and madness onscreen. Coppola’s delirious and druggy Vietnam bad trip features one of the greatest sequences ever filmed — the “Ride of the Valkyries” helicopter attack, which channels the adrenalized rush of war that’s inseparable from its horror — and the rest of the movie works on you with a slow-burn hypnosis. The vigorous excess of Coppola’s visual language and the spiritual force of its antiwar messaging all slap you in the face every time.
Read Variety’s original review of “Apocalypse Now” here. Rent and purchase the film on Prime Video.
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Breathless (1960)
Jean-Paul Belmondo glances at a vintage movie still, traces his lips with his thumb and utters the enchanted word “Bogie.” In that simple moment, a cinematic ocean gets crossed. The baton of Old Hollywood has been passed to the French New Wave — but what that means is that it has passed into a new way of seeing. Jean-Luc Godard’s astonishing first feature is the breakneck tale of Belmondo’s small-time car thief and the American cub reporter he fancies, played by a perfectly pert Jean Seberg. Their affair still feels strikingly “modern,” as the two hang out in an apartment, together but separate. Yet the film’s most indelible gestures come from Godard, the director who revolutionized movies. In “Breathless,” he teases sound and silence, layers musical themes and casually invents the jump cut, so that what looked at first like the tale of a petty gangster turns into a tsunami of new perception.
Read Variety’s original review of “Breathless” here. Stream the film on HBO Max.
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The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
A vanful of kids snaking their way down a sunbaked highway. An old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The most terrifying psycho since “Psycho” — a human runt, hidden behind a mask of human skin, wielding his buzzing phallic chain saw not just as a weapon of death but as an instrument of sadistically surreal torture and fear. Tobe Hooper’s brilliant grindhouse landmark has been imitated so often that it has become nothing less than the paradigm of contemporary horror. Yet the film’s mastery is that it’s an existential nightmare told with lyrical cunning, right down to the legendary final shot of insanity at dawn.
Read Variety’s original review of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” here. Stream the film on Prime Video.
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The Piano (1993)
There has never been another character like Holly Hunter’s Ada, a mute Scotswoman who journeys to the bleak colonial bush of 1850s New Zealand to join in an arranged marriage, and who wills herself to silence just because. Jane Campion’s masterful drama is hypnotically torn between inchoate feminist fury