If you’ve heard of the excellent streaming service Kanopy before, it’s likely been from someone praising A) its deep catalog of international and arthouse films, B) the fact that, as a streaming service, it’s free to access through your participating public library or university, or C) all of the above. There’s an incredible amount of access to be had here, rivaling that of the most prestigious streamers. In part, that’s because some of the most prestigious streamers are helping Kanopy: The Criterion Collection provides an ample amount of films to its library.
Hard to beat free, and setting up an account is painless—they don’t even email you about anything! Add in the helpful Kanopy Kids offerings for younger viewers (and a smattering of TV shows to boot), and you’ve got a streamer that’s punching way above its weight. In fact, you probably don’t know just how many great movies you currently have access to just by paying your taxes. So we broke down the best films on Kanopy, just a few clicks away—and without adding a cent to your overtaxed streaming budget. If your library isn’t serviced by Kanopy, there’s a good chance it falls under Hoopla’s jurisdiction. But on Kanopy, there’s something for everyone, from modern classics to established giants of the canon.
Here are the 40 best movies streaming on Kanopy right now:
1. Lady BirdYear: 2017
Director: Greta Gerwig
Stars: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges, Beanie Feldstein, Timothee Chalamet
Rating: R
Before Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan)—Lady Bird is her given name, as in “[she] gave it to [her]self”—auditions for the school musical, she watches a young man belting the final notes to “Being Alive” from Stephen Sondheim’s Company. A few moments before, while in a car with her mother, she lays her head on the window wistfully and says with a sigh, “I wish I could just live through something.” Stuck in Sacramento, where she thinks there’s nothing to be offered her while paying acute attention to everything her home does have to offer, Lady Bird—and the film, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, that shares her name—has ambivalence running through her veins. What a perfect match: Stephen Sondheim and Greta Gerwig. Few filmmakers are able to capture the same kind of ambiguity and mixed feelings that involve the refusal to make up one’s mind: look to 35-year-old Bobby impulsively wanting to marry a friend, but never committing to any of his girlfriends, in Company; the “hemming and hawing” of Cinderella on the, ahem, steps of the palace; or Mrs. Lovett’s cause for pause in telling Sweeney her real motives. Lady Bird isn’t as high-concept as many of Sondheim’s works, but there’s a piercing truthfulness to the film, and arguably Gerwig’s work in general, that makes its anxieties and tenderness reverberate in the viewer’s heart with equal frequency. —Kyle Turner
2. A Love SongRelease Date: July 29, 2022
Director: Max Walker-Silverman
Stars: Dale Dickey, Wes Studi, Michelle Wilson, Benja K. Thomas, John Way, Marty Grace Dennis
Rating: PG
Runtime: 81 minutes
One of my grandpas died right before the pandemic. My grandma met someone in the middle of it. Her new relationship wasn’t well-liked in my family, but it made her giddy as a schoolgirl—finding another cowboy to look at livestock with, play cards with, to make dinner with. When I was little, she used to live in a trailer, driven out into the woods and bricked into the earth. I see a lot of her in writer/director Max Walker-Silverman’s sublime debut, A Love Song, where a widow and widower find a teenage verve for each other—weathered but not beaten in the sun of the American west. Faye (Dale Dickey) lingers at one of several campsites surrounding a crawfish-filled lake, waiting for Lito (Wes Studi). She’s not sure he’ll arrive, but as we observe her daily routine—listening to birds, making coffee and catchin’ crawdads as she spins the radio dial in search of another country tune—her uneasiness is couched in a kind of contentment. Walker-Silverman situates us the same way, with ogling environmental photography that takes pleasure in a rare flowery purple on dried brown dirt and Faye’s tininess in relation to the lake, the mountains and the overwhelming dark (or starry splendor) of night. The location is spectacular but, conspicuously, never as enthralling as the actors. When they eventually meet up, top-level turns from Studi and Dickey combine for a contained masterclass, a relationship that’s been nursing a low flame for decades. They’re shy, affectionate and oh-so awkward—spurred by nervous attraction and lingering guilt surrounding their lost loved ones—with an honesty that makes the most of a sparse and quiet script. A Love Song’s a brief and pretty little thing—less than 90 minutes—with the warm melancholy of revisiting a memory or, yes, an old jukebox love song. Walker-Silverman displays a keen eye, a deep heart and a sense of humor just silly enough to sour the saccharine. Dickey takes advantage of one of the best roles she’s ever had to tap into something essential about loss, lonesomeness and resilience. Her performance is a gift, one given by someone who knows about simple pleasures and those that last—how both are important, and how they might not always be separate.–Jacob Oller
3. MoonlightYear: 2016
Director: Barry Jenkins
Stars: Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, Trevante Rhodes, Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris, Janelle Monáe
Rating: R
Runtime: 110 minutes
What’s remarkable about Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is that it’s hardly remarkable at all. It’s actually mundane, though its mundanity can be mitigated—or, really, delineated—via qualifiers: buoyant, bitter, graceful, beautiful, harsh, coltish, doleful, vibrant. More to the point: Moonlight is familiar. If you strip away its exterior particulars, you’ll be left with the bones of a coming-of-age story. Every film has a skeleton to support its musculature. Moonlight’s just happens to look like Boyhood’s and The 400 Blows’. Moonlight is painted with brushstrokes of silence: of Jenkins’ unobtrusive direction, of Chiron’s mute trepidation, of his friends and caregivers, who speak to him in the knowledge that he’ll say little and less to them in return (if he says anything at all). But rather than make Moonlight inaccessible, silence opens it up. In film, silence is neither mortal nor venial sin—it’s actually a virtue. Jenkins is fluent in silence and possesses an innate understanding of how silent moments can communicate more than heaps of dialogue. It’s in glances that pass between Little and his surrogate custodians, Juan (Mahershala Ali, damn near ubiquitous in 2016 and at his best here) and Teresa (Janelle Monáe), the stillness Chiron responds with when in conversation with his chum-then-crush, Kevin. Moonlight is nothing if not empathetic. But describing the film solely in terms of empathy is a misguided oversimplification: All movies seek out empathy to degrees, after all, and so Moonlight does what any human story on celluloid has to do. Jenkins opts for sensation in favor of the sensational, eschewing flash and bluster while making old hat feel new again. Most of all, he invites our empathy at the cost of our vanity. He leads us away from navel-gazing to see the stunningly constructed drama he and his troupe have laid before us on screen. The film encourages self-reflection, but not at the expense of either its narrative or the viewing experience. That’s the surest sign of a deft cinematic hand. —Andy Crump
4. The Worst Person in the WorldRelease Date: February 4, 2022
Director: Joachim Trier
Stars: Tanya Chowdary, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum
Rating: R
Runtime: 128 minutes
Millennials were born into a world that no longer demands much of young people, yet somehow expects even more of us. Not as long ago as we might think, it was the norm for adults in their 20s and 30s to have it all figured out. A spouse, a career, a gaggle of children–at least one of these things and even better if all three. Young people now are caught in this strange purgatory between child and adult. We are afforded more time to become who we want to be and there is more pressure than ever to do so. Enter Julie (Renate Reinsve, Dakota Johnson’s long-lost twin), a fickle Norwegian who has never stayed committed to one thing in her entire life. A teenaged overachiever, she dabbled in medicine before she discovered that she was more interested in matters of the soul than the body. So, she cuts and dyes her hair, dumps her med school lover and pivots to psychology pursuits before burning that all down too, shifting once again–this time to photography. But unsurprisingly, photography manages to bore Julie as well, and soon enough she’s off to the next new thing, next new hairstyle, next new guy in the adult coming-of-age film that is Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, the director’s follow-up to the 2017 supernatural thriller Thelma and his fifth film overall. Prior to this breakneck, whimsically-scored narrated montage of Julie’s life so far (edited with precision by Olivier Bugge Coutté and scored by Ola Fløttum), the narrator explains what’s going to happen: This is a film in twelve chapters, complete with a prologue and an epilogue. Thus, The Worst Person in the World functions like a fractured collection of moments in one person’s life as they strive for self-actualization. The chapters are never consistently timed, some lasting only a few minutes and others lasting the length of a television episode, creating an atmosphere in which we never know how much time has passed, and yet time is passing all the same–and quickly–for Julie. When we’ve finally caught up to her present, she’s entered into a long-term relationship with a successful, 44-year-old graphic novelist named Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), whose prosperous career has given her the stability to work a day job at a bookstore while she decides what she wants to set her sights on next. Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World is as indecisive as its endlessly curious heroine, but it is an invigorating, exceedingly kind portrait conveying that the journey is just as–if not more–crucial as the place we end up.–Brianna Zigler
5. The Bicycle ThiefYear: 1948
Director: Vittorio De Sica
Stars: Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell
Rating: NR
Runtime: 89 minutes
This neo-realist film is has been considered by many to be “the greatest film of all time.” It received a special Academy Award for Most Outstanding Foreign Film several years before the category officially existed. The story’s simple enough: a poor man and his son search postwar Rome for the man’s stolen bicycle, without which he cannot work. Vittorio de Sica’s vision hits all the notes of the Italian Neorealist style pioneered by Roberto Rossellini—the story is simple, the characters are relatively simple (some aren’t actors at all; Enzo Staiola, who plays the man’s son and cohort, was plucked off the sidewalk), and there is a focus on the quotidian lives of working class people and the unemployment and poverty that plagued Italy in the postwar years. The Bicycle Thief is both a sentimental portrait of a father and son, and a dramatization of the social issues of its era. —A.G.
6. MetropolisYear: 1927
Director: Fritz Lang
Stars: Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Brigitte Helm
Rating: NR
Runtime: 114 minutes
Metropolis never slows as it delivers a constant stream of iconic images. Fritz Lang filled his parable with all the sci-fi/adventure tropes he could: the mad scientist, the robot, the rooftop chase, the catacombs and, as it turns out, a devious henchman. Metropolis, too, is a great reminder of just how difficult it is to judge an incomplete film. In fact, many silent films are missing material, even when it isn’t made clear in screenings or on home video. While Lang’s film has always been known for its spectacular special effects—it’s legally required that I use the phrase “visionary” while discussing it—not until a few years ago did modern audiences see a film anywhere close to the one that first premiered. It turned out that Metropolis’s best performance, Fritz Rasp as a ruthless spy for the corporate state, was part of that missing material, and it gives the film a greater sense of urgency, increasing the feeling of class-based antagonism. With that unknown excellence lurking in one of the most famous films of all time, it leaves us to wonder what else was lost in nitrate flames. —Jeremy Mathews
7. RashomonYear: 1950
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Stars: Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyo, Masayuki Mori
Rating: NR
Runtime: 88 minutes
What you get out of Rashomon likely reflects what you bring into it, but it might help to bring a basic grasp of cubism into it. You hear the word “cubist,” your brain probably goes right to Picasso and Braque, but in cinema it ought to head straight to Kurosawa, who in essence gave birth to the movie version of cubism with Rashomon by performing a feat as deceptively simple as filtering a single narrative through multiple character perspectives; the more Kurosawa filters that narrative, the more the narrative changes, until we can no longer determine which to trust and which to write off. In the trial that comprises the bulk of the film’s plot, who is telling the truth? The bandit, the man accused of murdering a samurai and raping his wife? The wife? The samurai himself, summoned to the trial via spirit medium? Even when Kurosawa generously reveals what actually happened when the bandit crossed paths with the samurai and his wife via the post-trial testimony of a humble woodcutter, we’re still left to wrestle with the question of who, and what, we should believe. Kurosawa’s technical mastery is always awesome to behold, but in Rashomon, it’s his gift for utterly blurring reality that dazzles most. —Andy Crump
8. Modern TimesYear: 1936
Director: Charles Chaplin
Stars: Paulette Goddard, Charlie Chaplin, Henry Bergman
Rating: NR
Runtime: 87 minutes
If time is a flat circle, then Modern Times is like a flat sprocket—the travails of the Little Tramp navigating a mechanical world being so incessant and repetitive that elements like luck and hope only serve to spur along Chaplin’s farce even though they hold little grip on his characters’ futures. Not much changes for the Little Tramp throughout: He tries to survive, and yet the institutional system craps him back out to where he started, desperately hungry and penniless, left with nothing to do but try again. This was also Chaplin’s last go as the Tramp, and it’s easy to imagine that, throughout the film’s many misadventures—joined by equally good-natured partner in crime, the gamin (Paulette Goddard)—as he gets sucked up and sublimated into the modern industrial machine, this “disappearance” was kind of by design. It’s a weird way for Chaplin’s beloved character to go out, but so is the many ways in which Chaplin shows how the modern industrial machine becomes part of the Tramp, too. He may get squeezed through a giant, sprocket-speckled apparatus, becoming one with its schematics, but so too does the assembly line—with all that twisting, wrenching, and spinning—impress itself onto the Tramp, leaving him unable after a long shift to do anything but waggle his arms about as if he’s still on the assembly line. It’s no wonder, then, that the President of Modern Times’ factory setting bears a striking resemblance to Henry Ford: Chaplin, who toured the world following the success of City Lights, witnessed the conditions of automobile lines in Detroit, how the drudgery of our modern times weighed on young workers. The Great Depression, Chaplin seems to be saying, was the first sign of just how thoroughly technology can kill our spirits, not so much discarding us as absorbing our individuality. Modern Times, then, is a film with a conscious far beyond its time, a kind of seamless blending of special effects, sanguine silent film methods, and radical fury.—Dom Sinacola
9. ParasiteYear: 2019
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Stars: Song Kang Ho, Lee Sun Kyun, Yeo-Jeong Jo, Choi Woo-sik, Park So Dam, Lee Jung Eun
Rating: R
Runtime: 132 minutes
“That’s so metaphorical,” exclaims the son of the Kim family, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), holding with childlike reverie a large rock sculpture, a wooden base solidifying its aesthetic and cultural value. The pointedly nice object stands apart from the basic keepsakes in the Kims’ fairly dingy and cramped home, inhabited by unemployed driver father, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), unemployed mother, Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin), and not-in-art-school daughter, Ki-jeong (Park So-dam). Brought to them by Ki-woo’s wealthy friend, the rock is supposed to foretell great financial wealth to whatever family keeps it in their home. Irritated at their own situation, at the lack of space, at the lack of immediate value the rock has, Chung-sook mutters, “Could’ve brought us food.” In Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, those that live with a stark awareness of inequality operate with a sense of cognitive dissonance. It’s this paradox of thought that allows Ki-woo to be both naively worshipful towards what a rock sculpture could bring them, but also understand, at other times, that wandering around isn’t how one ascends into power. At the behest of said wealthy friend, he becomes the English tutor for the daughter, Da-hye (Jung Ji-so), of the grotesquely affluent Park family: astute patriarch (Lee Sun-kyun), dim matriarch (Cho Yeo-jeong), manic artsy son, Da-song (Jung Hyun-joon), and severely loyal housekeeper, Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun). But as the Kim and Park families grow increasingly closer, both the differences and similarities between them blur beyond discernment. Bong’s interest in income inequality and class has spanned the majority of his career, examining the ways it impacts the justice system (Memories of Murder, Mother), the environment (Okja) and the institutions responsible for both the exacerbation of wealth inequality and failing to protect those most marginalized by that inequality (Snowpiercer, The Host). For Parasite, Bong takes a slightly different angle—he’s no less interested in inequality’s consequences, but here he sees how class as performance manifests, particularly when people are plucked from one echelon of society and put in another. As we watch both families act in different, but intersecting, pieces of social/anthropological theatre, Bong cuts through their mutual hunger, and what ultimately and tragically separates them, with a jaundiced eye and an acidic sense of humor. Laughing during Parasite feels like choking on rust. (Cho, especially, finds the perfect amount of absurdity as the somewhat doltish mother, truly a testament to rich ladies being easily knocked over by a feather.) But Bong is not interested in metaphor, and not the kind written on rocks. Even through its absurdist, bleakly satirical lens, Bong understands that social inequity is not just theatre, but lived experience. Sometimes the rock is just a shit-stained rock. —Kyle Turner
10. The Battle of AlgiersYear: 1966
Director: Gillo Pontecorvo
Stars: Brahim Haggiag, Jean Martin, Saadi Yacef
Rating: R
Runtime: 121 minutes
A perfect meeting of story and style, Gillo Pontecorvo’s guerrilla warfare drama The Battle of Algiers reflects in its grainy docu-style the scrappy tactics of the combatants: the revolutionary Algerian National Liberation Front, executing police and civilians in cafes and in the streets, and the French governors and counter-insurgents, struggling to combat a threat to their existence in a land they rule but don’t fully understand. Like a great documentary would, The Battle of Algiers takes a coolly balanced and non-judgmental view of its subjects, coming down neither on the side of the radicals nor the colonialists, but in another way Pontecorvo’s raw newsreel design is deceptive: what appears improvisational is actually meticulously arranged. The director’s great achievement is that not a second of his film is without purpose, yet it unfolds as a constant surprise, almost as though the footage was not shot but discovered. —Brogan Morris
11. Cléo from 5 to 7Year: 1962
Director: Agnès Varda
Stars: Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dominique Davray
Runtime: 89 minutes
Halfway through Agnès Varda’s sophomore film, the titular Cléo (Corinne Marchand), a pop singer awaiting the potentially devastating results of some sort of medical test, looks directly into the camera, weeping as she sings a song during an otherwise typical practice session. It’s a revelatory moment: Varda addresses her audience directly through her character addressing her audience directly, all while on the precipice of total dissolution. Cléo, a beautiful, burgeoning celebrity, seems to understand that she may be empty without her looks, just as she rails against the forces that put her in such an untenable position. In other words, realizing in that moment of melodrama, of the heightened emotion she knows all too well is the stuff of pop music at its most marketably patronizing, that her attractiveness may be soon over, she’s driven to tears, unable to reconcile her talent with her face, or her fragility with her livelihood, leaving it to the audience to decide whether she deserves our sympathy or not. If not, Varda wonders, then why not? Shot practically in real time, Cléo from 5 to 7 waits along with our character as she waits for life-changing news, floating from coffee shop to home to park to wherever, not doing much of anything with the life she has, the life she may find out she’s losing soon enough. She watches a silent film featuring cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, meets a soldier on leave from the Algerian front (Antoine Bourseiller) who confesses he believes people are dying for nothing, drives past a murder scene and senses that the universe maybe has misdirected her bad luck towards another soul. One of the defining films of the Left Bank branch of the French New Wave (as opposed to those of the “Right Bank,” the more famous films of Truffaut and Godard, the movement’s more commercial, cosmopolitan cinephiles), Cléo from 5 to 7 is a fever dream of the ordinary, a meditation on the nothingness of everyday living, as existential as it is blissfully bereft of purpose. —Dom Sinacola
12. BreathlessYear: 1960
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Stars: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger
Runtime: 90 minutes
Godard is arguably the most prolific, impactful French director of all time, and Breathless is his first New Wave film: To some, it spawned a revolution, and even if you object to that narrative, its influence on his home country and the New Hollywood period in 1970s America is undeniable. Breathless stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as an incompetent criminal in love with an American student named Patricia (Jean Seberg) in Paris. When he murders a cop, the film turns from a light Parisian affair to a tense love story, and the question that hangs in the balance is whether Patricia will betray her criminal beau. —Shane Ryan
13. MYear: 1931
Director: Fritz Lang
Stars: Peter Lorre, Otto Wernicke, Gustaf Gründgens
Runtime: 109 minutes
It’s rather amazing to consider that M was the first sound film from German director Fritz Lang, who had already brought audiences one of the seminal silent epics in the form of Metropolis. Lang, a quick learner, immediately took advantage of the new technology by making sound core to M, and to the character of child serial killer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), whose distinctive whistling of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” is both an effectively ghoulish motif and a major plot point. It was the film that brought Peter Lorre to Hollywood’s attention, where he would eventually become a classic character actor: the big-eyed, soft-voiced heavy with an air of anxiety and menace. Lang cited M years later as his favorite film thanks to its open-minded social commentary, particularly in the classic scene in which Beckert is captured and brought before a kangaroo court of criminals. Rather than throwing in behind the accusers, Lang actually makes us feel for the child killer, who astutely reasons that his own inability to control his actions should garner more sympathy than those who have actively chosen a life of crime. “Who knows what it is like to be me?” he asks the viewer, and we are forced to concede our unfitness to truly judge. —Jim Vorel
14. The 400 BlowsYear: 1959
Director: François Truffaut
Stars: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy
Runtime: 100 minutes
Sometimes a movie can be boiled down to its final shot. The Long Goodbye has Philip Marlowe, unhurriedly strolling down a road in Mexico, playing his harmonica after killing his best friend. 8 1/2 has young Guido, bringing down the lights as he marches along with his flute, sending the audience out of the theater wondering whether his presence affirms life or nods to death. The 400 Blows has Antoine Doinel gamboling about on the coast before François Truffaut’s camera zooms in on the boy’s face, freezing the frame just as his eyes meet with the lens. For anyone who saw Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, that description probably sounds familiar, but this shot has been long-copied since The 400 Blows became a part of the cinematic canon after its 1959 release. (For example: Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl, or even George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which both use a similar effect to achieve altogether different ends.) In Truffaut’s film, the shot is meant as a capstone, or, if you prefer, the closing of a book: It’s the climax of one chapter in Doinel’s life, though Truffaut probably didn’t have any thought of making sequels to the film to begin with. Questions linger as the credits roll, and of course they should. When one comes of age, their next age begins, and so The 400 Blows leaves itself open at the last, leaving us to consider what fate may befall Antoine from here. —Andy Crump
15. Tokyo StoryYear: 1953
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Stars: Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara
Runtime: 137 minutes
Tokyo Story could be described as a film about regrets. It could also be described as a film about disappointment, or the speed at which families drift apart, or modernity’s absolute indifference to custom and tradition and the old ways. But maybe just save yourself some time and some word count and describe it as a film about life, orchestrated by one of cinema’s most revered masters, Yasujiro Ozu, a director who spent his career making exquisitely calibrated but deceptively simple films. You don’t need to be an insufferable cinephile to enjoy an Ozu movie, especially Tokyo Story, undoubtedly his most accessible, though it does help; this makes him a great gateway filmmaker for anyone looking to increase their appreciation of cinema, and Tokyo Story his gateway film. Its aesthetics are pristine, its performances poignant and powerful, but the most impactful quality Ozu brings to his narrative of intergenerational divide is the passage of time, hours, days, weeks, months, years, all neatly articulated in two plus hours of running time. By the time it all ends, you’ll feel like you’ve lived a life with the Hirayama clan, too. —Andy Crump
16. In the Heat of the NightYear: 1967
Director: Norman Jewison
Stars: Rod Steiger, Lee Grant, Larry Gates, Warren Oates, Sidney Poitier, James Patterson
Runtime: 110 minutes
The racial animosity depicted in director’s Norman Jewison’s Best Picture Oscar winner, about Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), an African-American homicide detective from Philadelphia who stumbles upon a murder mystery in a podunk Mississippi town, tips over into a poignant commentary on art imitating life. Poitier refused to shoot on location, fearing retaliation from southern racists, and even a quick pickup shoot in Tennessee was cut short after Poitier began receiving threats. The genius in Sterling Silliphant’s adaptation of John Ball’s novel, then, is in the borderline anal manner in which he balances social commentary and plot progression. Pretty much every scene contains a new piece of information towards solving the murder case, as well as a damning portrait of racial animosity. The contentious working relationship between Virgil and the local chief of police, Gillespie (Rod Steiger), never resolves cleanly; In the Heat of the Night is smart enough to know that prejudices entrenched within multiple generations will not disappear overnight, if at all. Even moments of bonding between colleagues never steer clear of the racial divide between them. There’s a glimmer of hope in the very final moments, but Jewison always has a handle on his uncompromising tone.—Oktay Ege Kozak
17. 8 1/2Year: 1963
Director: Federico Fellini
Stars: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee
Runtime: 140 minutes
With Fellini we wander through a shadow of his psyche, wondering where his memories begin and where Guido’s (Marcello Mastroiani) psychoses end. Perhaps Fellini’s most impressive blending of dreams and fantasies, of moral truth and oneiric fallacy, of space and time, 8 1/2 tells its story in Möbius strips, wrapping realities into realities in order to leave audiences helplessly buried within its main character’s self-absorption. Guido’s obsession is so inward-looking he can’t help but destroy every single close relationship in his life, and yet, in hanging the film’s narrative on the struggle of one filmmaker to make his latest film—the title refers to the fact that this was Fellini’s eighth-and-a-half feature—the iconic Italian director seems to claim that artistic genius practically demands such solipsism. It’s a brazen statement for a film to make, but Fellini does so with such grace and vision, with such seamless intent, 8 1/2 becomes a bittersweet masterpiece: Clear, aching and steeped in nostalgia, it celebrates the kind of glorious life only cinema can offer. —Dom Sinacola
18. The Rules of the GameYear: 1939
Director: Jean Renoir
Stars: Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Mila Parély
Runtime: 106 minutes
When Rules of the Game—Jean Renoir’s angry satire against the contempt the bourgeoisie displays for the working class—was first shown to an audience, a man who heard of the film’s supposed communist message tried to start a fire. In an interview that can be found on the film’s Criterion release, Renoir tells this story, adding that if someone is willing to burn down a theater to destroy your work, you must have done something right. Rules of the Game operates as an ensemble melodrama about the various secret and not-so-secret love affairs between a group of upper-crust stereotypes, but underneath this straight genre veneer lies a brutally honest takedown of ruling class apathy. Renoir meticulously and gradually exposes his characters’ narcissism, until the film’s climax presents us with a sociopathic choice made between supposed best friends. Yet, as much as he obviously sympathizes with the plight of the working class serving the rich, Renoir doesn’t let them off the hook either, portraying their impulsive and brutish behavior as potentially one of the reasons behind their station in life. Despite all of that, Rules of the Game is not a joyless experience, but a refreshingly honest take on romance between classes—as well as an early cinematic exploration and exposing of the intractable human nature behind income inequality and class warfare. —Oktay Ege Kozak
19. Black OrpheusYear: 1959
Director: Marcel Camus
Stars: Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn, Lourdes de Oliveira
Runtime: 107 minutes
The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has been the source of countless works of art over the centuries. Marcel Camus’ adaptation is set in a Rio de Janeiro favela and features a brilliant soundtrack by Tom Jobim and Luiz Bonfa. Brenno Melo plays Orfeu, a talented guitarist in a somewhat reluctant engagement to Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira) who falls in love with Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn). Eurydice is taken from him by Death. Orfeu tries to get her back, fails, and is killed by the jilted Mira. It’s an ancient story and Camus does a marvelous job of making it new and fresh in its recontextualization. The samba and bossa nova music are befitting of mythology’s greatest singer-songwriter, and the production is stylish and colorful and full of heart. Visually lush and ebullient, this is a film to roll around in, not to be overly cerebral about. Lavishly sensuous, with stunning cinematography and a soundtrack to die for (and come back from Hades to hear all over again). —Amy Glynn
20. The Seventh SealYear: 1957
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Stars: Max von Sydow, Inga Landgré, Gunnar Björnstrand
Runtime: 96 minutes
Like any cultural touchstone, any ubiquitous landmark of the arts more mitotically absorbed than actually experienced, The Seventh Seal is bound to be misremembered. We know well the chess game with Death (Bengt Ekerot), as well as Death’s get-up—a sort of gothic mix between Musketeer and monk—etched into the firmament of our pop obsessions (for most my age, it was in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey that the bone-white face and cape were first encountered), even if we’ve never actually seen the film. We know well the name of director Ingmar Bergman or that of star Max von Sydow (recently in Force Awakens), even if we aren’t familiar with their work, so ingrained into any working conception of “international cinema” are they, much of which is due to The Seventh Seal. We know well the dour chiaroscuro of Swedish cinema, the arch-symbolic pretension of art house stuff that squeezes all mirth from every orifice of the viewer. But do we forget how little of this movie is the chess game—how dimwitted Death can be? How funny The Seventh Seal actually is? “Is it so cruelly inconceivable to grasp God with the senses?” asks knight Antonius Block (von Sydow). “What is going to happen to those of us who want to believe but aren’t able to?” With The Seventh Seal, a simple story about a jaded knight returning from the Crusades to find that the world he fought for has seemingly been abandoned by God, Bergman sought clarity in the problem of faith—he wanted to map the vast spiritual terrain between experiencing and knowing, between feeling and believing. The reason why today the film still resonates, why we know the movie without having to experience it, is because of that clarity in Bergman’s vision: The Seventh Seal is all symbol, metaphor, allusion—but what it’s symbolic of, a metaphor for or alluding to isn’t too hard for any of us to figure. When the knight asks a question, God answers with silence—and there’s little humans understand better than how that feels. —Dom Sinacola
21. L’AvventuraYear: 1960
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Stars: Gabriele Ferzetti, Monica Vitti
Runtime: 143 minutes
After honing his craft as a filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni arrived on the international scene in 1960 with a loose trilogy: L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse, three films about privileged people so bored with their lives that they have little to do but wander the city and lament their failing relationships. But Antonioni—counter to expectations—watched those people with extreme precision. His camera moved as if it were choreographed down to the millimeter because, while the characters in the films may have been bored, the man watching them was not. He was riveted. And he transferred his fascination to the audience, not telling them tales or teaching them lessons, but raising questions, big ones about existence–why we move around the earth, why we interact with other people, and who we are.–Robert Davis
22. The Great DictatorYear: 1940
Director: Charles Chaplin
Stars: Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie, Reginald Gardiner
Rating: G
Runtime: 126 minutes
Charlie Chaplin’s first “talkie” was a biting satire that he wrote, directed, produced, scored, and starred in-as both of the lead roles, a fascist despot who bears a rather marked resemblance to Adolf Hitler and a persecuted Jewish barber. Good satire can be powerful, and this film was: Released while the United States was still formally at peace with Germany, it stirred greater public attention and condemnation of the Nazis and Mussolini, anti-Semitism and fascism. (That said, Chaplin later recounted that he could never have made the satirical film even a year or two later, as the extent of the horrors in German concentration camps became clearer.) The choice to play both the tyrant and the oppressed man was an inspired one, underscoring the frightening but inescapable truth that we all contain a little bit of both characters. This is a strikingly pertinent film for our particular moment in history, and well worth dusting off and queueing up not only for its incredible craft but for its resonance as a study in projection. —Amy Glynn
23. Some Like it Hot Year: 1959
Director: Billy Wilder
Stars: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon
Runtime: 121 minutes
Is Some Like it Hot one of Marilyn Monroe’s best films, or one of her most antithetical? Sugar Kane is, in a nutshell, the kind of character Marilyn struggled so hard to avoid playing for the bulk of her career: a ditzy blonde, a pure sex symbol, someone who exists in the context of the movie just to tickle the male gaze, whether within the story or without. She’s given nothing to work with, as the bulk of the film’s heavy lifting is accorded to Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon instead. Watching the film in 2017, you may wonder why Billy Wilder slacked on investing Sugar with any level of empathy, why he wrote the character as a one-dimensional object, a trophy for Lemmon and Curtis to compete over. You may also not wonder at all. Some Like it Hot works, even if Marilyn has little to work with other than her persona and her co-star; it’s funny, it’s quick on its feet, and it sells its central joke—that nobody, save for the audience, can see that Curtis and Lemmon are obviously dudes in drag—perfectly, layering just enough self-awareness of its own ridiculousness to keep the gag from going sour. —Andy Crump
24. PlaytimeYear: 1967
Director: Jacques Tati
Stars: Jacques Tati, Barbara Dennek, Georges Montant
Runtime: 106 minutes
Excepting people with rural dispositions, we’ve all visited unfamiliar cities at one time or another, puttering about their streets in discombobulated states. That experience is the core of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, his fourth venture as his most famous character, the bumbling Monsieur Hulot, here taking a jaunt to Paris and finding it unrecognizable on his arrival. He understands Paris as an abstract idea and as a place in his memories, but he can’t get his head around the Paris of the film’s present tense. In Playtime, any metropolitan city in Europe could stand in for Paris. Only fleeting glimpses of La Ville-Lumière reminds us of Tati’s chosen backdrop, and in those instances we feel, as Hulot does, a deep melancholy, a wistfulness for a locus of culture and romanticism long sentimentalized by the movies, and utter despondency at the implications of its cold modernization in Playtime’s frames. If this can happen to Paris, it can happen to any city we hold dear in our hearts. Make no mistake, this is an uproarious comedy and a towering work of cinema, but it’s Tati’s embedded sense of loss that echoes the loudest. —Andy Crump
25. Sunset BoulevardYear: 1950
Director: Billy Wilder
Stars: William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim
Rating: G
Runtime:111 minutes
Billy Wilder’s meta noir is a doozy, an unfailingly cynical critique of showbiz and a portrait of postwar alienation projected on the microcosm of Hollywood. It’s also wickedly funny in Sahara dry fashion, from the opening words of our dead narrator—floating facedown in his killer’s swimming pool—to Norma Desmond’s concluding descent down her staircase, and the rabbit hole. Gloria Swanson is magnificent and sad as Ms. Desmond, a fading beauty of the silent screen who manipulates broke, hackish screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) into becoming her boy toy. Theirs is a fated relationship from the get-go, she of the wordless era, he dependent on them for his very livelihood. They’re on the outs with their industry, and each other, yet coexist out of desperation. Wilder, who co-wrote with Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman Jr., layered the script with in-joke upon self-referential wink, perhaps the least of which is Desmond’s passion project, about that OG of femme fatales, Salome. There’s a parade of Hollywood cameos, namechecks, and behind-the-scenes instances of “art imitating life” (and vice versa); for example, Erich von Stroheim, who portrays Desmond’s former director/first husband-turned-still lovestruck butler Max, directed Swanson in 1929’s Queen Kelly (excerpted here) before she as the film’s producer fired him, much like her Sunset Blvd. character discards his. Many of these nods were in less-than-good fun, so it’s no shock that Sunset Boulevard met with local disdain, yet Wilder doesn’t flinch. Norma, Joe, Max … they’re all unwanted souls who, try as they might to live in the past, have succumbed to the present—in Joe’s case, most finally. The smoke and mirrors of Tinseltown, of life, don’t do the job anymore (though cinematographer John Seitz, who also lensed Double Indemnity, most certainly did, sprinkling dust into the air for the lights to catch). Desmond may be a seductress past her sell-by date, but Hollywood is the ultimate femme fatale, who chews suckers up and spits them out. Sunset Boulevard gives L.A. its close-up, alright. —Amanda Schurr
26. ChinatownYear: 1974
Director: Roman Polanski
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston
Rating: R
Runtime: 130 minutes
When you look at Jack Nicholson’s run of films in what I’ll call the “New Hollywood” era, starting with Easy Rider in 1969 and ending with The Shining in 1980, it’s truly astounding. There’s barely a dud on the list, so it’s really saying something that Chinatown, Roman Polanski’s crime classic, stands out among the best. The central mystery is bold for its complexity, revolving around water rights in 1930s Southern California—a plot that remains relevant today—and was undoubtedly an influence for the second season of True Detective. Like much of Polanski’s work, an ominous atmosphere works alongside the plot, shadowing every character in doubt and undermining the possibility of a clean conclusion. In Polanski’s world, the mere fact that a mystery is solved doesn’t mean there’s a happy ending, and his incredible powers of ambiguity have never been so strong as in Chinatown. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, it won the Oscar for Robert Towne’s original screenplay. Add Nicholson at his most essential, along with a young Faye Dunaway and an aging John Huston, and this is truly one of the classics of American cinema. —S.R.
27. Pather PanchaliYear: 1955
Director: Satyajit Ray
Stars: Subir Banerjee, Kanu Banerjee, Karuna Banerjee
Runtime: 125 minutes
Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali is, depending on who you ask, either the saddest movie ever made or one of the saddest, and if you don’t believe the former then you likely believe the latter (unless you are made of stone, but aside from rock golems and Republicans, people tend to be made of flesh and blood). But whether the film makes you weep more or less is, perhaps, besides the point. When we talk about the classics of cinema, we talk about influence, and one note worth making about influence is that it comes in all shapes and sizes: Some movies have impact on a micro scale, others on a macro scale. Pather Panchali’s influence may be best evinced on a micro scale, in specific relation to Indian cinema, presenting a watershed moment that sparked the Parallel Cinema movement and altered the texture of the country’s films forevermore. This, again, isn’t proof of Pather Panchali’s actual substance, though let’s be realistic here: Ray’s masterpiece doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone. It’s extraordinary on its authentic artistic merits, an aching, vital movie crafted to transmute the harshest rigors of a childhood lived in rural India into narrative. Maybe it’s presumptuous for an American critic with no frame of reference for Pather Panchali’s cultural context to describe the film as “true to life,” but Ray is so good at capturing life with his camera that we come to know, to understand, the life of young Apu, regardless of who we are or where we come from, and isn’t that just the absolute definition of cinema’s transporting power? —Andy Crump
28. Le SamouraiYear: 1967
Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Stars: Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon
Runtime: 105 minutes
Flip a coin to decide whether Le Samourai or Le Doulos is the coolest Melville film of them all; odds are, it’ll land upright, because that’s an impossible distinction to make. Melville films pulse with ineffable cool. In the case of Le Samourai, proof of Melville’s dedication to brewing substance from style lies in the film’s enormous influence: Everybody from Jim Jarmusch to Madonna recognizes Melville’s flair, and they’ve been imitating it, or mixing it with their own trademarks, for years. There are hitmen movies, and there are hitmen movies, and standing head and shoulders above most of them there’s Le Samourai, a movie that makes the lethal discipline of knocking people off into fine art. It’s as much a study of human isolation as it is a paean to the magnetic pull of a sleek aesthetic. —A.C.
29. The ApartmentYear: 1960
Director: Billy Wilder
Stars: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray
Rating: NR
Runtime: 125 minutes
Filmmaker Billy Wilder had perhaps one of the greatest, most diverse track records in film history from 1944 to 1960. In this period, he tackled an Oscar-winning drama about alcoholism (The Lost Weekend), two well-regarded film noirs (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard), a war drama (Stalag 17), two light-hearted rom-coms (Sabrina, Seven Year Itch) a gripping murder-mystery (Witness for the Prosecution) and perhaps the funniest American movie of all time (Some Like It Hot). Yet, of all these golden credits, one Wilder’s most beloved and memorable achievements was 1960’s The Apartment. Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, an ambitious office worker who, desperate to climb the corporate ladder, allows his bosses to use his apartment to carry on discreet affairs with their mistresses. Things get complicated, however, when he discovers that his office crush, quirky elevator operator Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), is one of his bosses’ mistresses. While it actually gets quite dark at times, The Apartment strikes a perfect balance between laugh-out-loud comedy and emotionally honest drama. Following the career highlight that was his drag-heavy performance in Some Like It Hot, Lemmon here proves that he can play the low-key, straight man with equal dexterity. Likewise, MacLaine’s charming portrayal as the damaged, yet lovable Kubelik would provide the model for manic pixie dream girls for years to come. —Mark Rozeman
30. Romeo and JulietYear: 1968
Director: Franco Zeffirelli
Stars: Robert Stephens, Olivia Hussey, John McEnery, Leonard Whiting, Milo O’Shea, Michael York, Pat Heywood, Natasha Parry, Keith Skinner, Richard Warwick
Rating: NR
Runtime: 138 minutes
Good Shakespeare adaptations always balance two (sometimes antithetical) priorities: The language and the tone. You can easily replicate the twisty, turny plots of the plays in whatever setting you like, but without the delicate, emotional, hilarious turns of phrase, they’re defanged—a little like hearing someone whistle Beethoven. But using the theatrical, unwieldy words of the 1500s doesn’t make for an easy job, especially when the subject in question is necessarily designed for the harshest critics in the world: Teens. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet brilliantly recalibrates the play for a maximally modern setting, but it was Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet that proved that a faithful adaptation still spoke volumes to its intended demographic. Zeffirelli’s two-hour retelling of two idiots in love is lush and raucous, busy and blustery—and massive in scope. There’s a reason Romeo and Juliet has been trusted to capture the attention of high school English students in the decades since its release. Olivia Hussey’s Juliet and Leonard Whiting’s Romeo exude a guileless horniness and a genuine youthfulness that makes their rash decisions all the more believable. (Sadly their immaturity was allegedly taken advantage of by an unscrupulous Zeffirelli to obtain the film’s classroom-scandalizing nudity.) By leaning into the perpetuating affectations of young adulthood—the first-resort violence, the disproportionate gravity to everything, the constant motion and restlessness—Zeffirelli’s adaptation would be winning even if his characters were speaking gibberish. To some of those high school viewers, they might as well be. But the hormone-fueled vitality permeates everything, transcending even Shakespeare’s words. A handheld-shot duel rattles along like a boxing match; Juliet and Romeo’s hands touch like the only hands left in the world. Few Shakespeare adaptations have the confidence to stick close to the source. Even fewer make the source more accessible to its audience. Romeo and Juliet’s bravado respects teens everywhere, which allows teens (and former teens) to love it.—Jacob Oller
31. The Umbrellas of CherbourgYear: 1964
Director: Jacques Demy
Stars: Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon
Rating: NR
Runtime: 92 minutes
Jacques Demy’s masterpiece is a soaring, vibrant, innately bittersweet story of love lost, found and forever disbanded, another wartime casualty in a country scarred by military conflict. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is lived-in, a story derived from Demy’s life experience, and that keyword—“experience”—is essential to making the film click. Take away its musical cues, and you’re left with a narrative about a young man (Nino Castelnuovo) and a young woman (Catherine Deneuve) who fall deeply in love with one another, only to be torn apart when he’s drafted to fight overseas. The story remains rooted in Demy’s pathos, and pathos gives Umbrellas’ gravity. The music, of course, is a critical part of its character, a dose of magic Demy uses to buttress the rigors of life in wartime with grandeur and meaning. It’s a film about people in love falling out of love, and then falling in love all over again with new partners and altered sentiments, a beautiful picture as likely to make you swoon as to crush your heart. —Andy Crump
32. The StrangerYear: 1946
Director: Orson Welles
Stars: Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, Orson Welles
Rating: NR
Runtime: 95 minutes
Orson Welles’ third feature film was the first to feature documentary footage of the Holocaust. This film noir follows a UN War Crimes Commission agent, Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) who’s hunting down fugitive Nazi Franz Kindler (Orson Welles). Wilson releases a repentant former associate of Kindler’s, hoping the man will lead him to the fugitive. Kindler has has moved to a small New England town and married the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice, teaches at a prep school—essentially has erased every possible trace of his former identity, save one: a longtime obsession with clocks. The former associate does find him, but Kindler’s a little reluctant to confess, opting to strangle his former friend, instead. Wilson continues to prove Kindler’s identity, and Kindler goes to greater and greater lengths to conceal it. Ultimately, of course, his undoing is a clock—literally. The producer was originally planning to hire John Huston to direct The Stranger; Welles got the job because of an ill-timed military tour that took Huston (literally and figuratively) out of the picture. Welles hadn’t directed a film in four years and was so eager for the work that he took a contract stipulating that if he went over-budget he’d be paying the studio out of pocket. It’s possible that Welles’ inventiveness was partially forged by the constraints under which he found himself working on all of his early films. He was dogged by cut-happy producers (it’s not even clear how much footage was removed but Welles was relieved of the first 16 pages of his script before principal photography even started) and contrarian casting and locations choices (Welles wanted Agnes Moorehead to play the investigator; the studio cast Robinson; likewise he got a budget-driven “no” on filming the prep school scenes at The Todd School in Illinois, his own alma mater). The desire to personalize this film despite so many interventions were probably fundamental to the development of its nightmare-like tone and the use of reflective surfaces to provide depth and dimension in his constructed set. (Check out the drugstore scene where Wilson plays checkers with Billy House.) But perhaps most striking is the use of actual footage from concentration camps, which are still shocking to look at today but were exceedingly potent in the 1940s when large numbers of Americans still did not understand that the camps really existed. In typical Welles-versus-studio fashion, the producers backed out at the last minute on the promise of a four-picture deal to follow this film—-they had become convinced it would run at a loss and Welles was incapable of directing a mainstream hit movie. As it turned out, it was Welles’ only significant box office success on release, and remains a canonized film noir. —A.G.
33. Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et Le Bête)Year: 1946
Director: Jean Cocteau
Stars: Jean Marais, Josette Day, Mila Parély
Rating: NR
Runtime: 93 minutes
Before there were Jerry Orbach and Angela Lansbury voicing animated, animate household items, there was Jean Cocteau. This story’s been with us since the 18th century and rendered in countless iterations, so I’ll forego the plot summary and just say that from the fourth-wall-breaking preamble in which the director entreats the audience to approach the film with inner-child-forward faith in the magic of fairy tales, to the end, this film remains a treasure of subtle imagery and mesmerizing music, baroque opulence, sexual intensity and total indulgence in fantasy. Jean Marais (Beast) and Josette Day (Belle) deliver enchanting performances. The themes explored here are classics of fairy-tale literature: Innocence and greed, the transformative power of love, the fear of the unknown, and magic. Cocteau was a poet as well as a filmmaker, and this is a strong example of how the two crafts inform one another, in the way it harnesses imagery to create metaphorical connections. Weird and wonderful and powerful filmmaking. —A.G.
34. Mikey and NickyYear: 1976
Director: Elaine May
Stars: Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Ned Beatty, William Hickey
Rating: R
Runtime: 107 minutes
Everyone’s got a friend like Nicky (John Cassavetes), though the Nickys of the world exist on a sliding scale. Not every Nicky works for the mob, or womanizes, or betrays the mob, or generally acts like a large diameter asshole at any provocation or under any amount of strain. But strip Mikey and Nicky of its genre particulars, its gangster trappings, and what remains is a recognizable story of two friends at loggerheads, joined by the history of their lifetimes, inseparable, and yet chemically volatile when standing in arm’s reach of each other. Mikey (Peter Falk) and Nicky go way back. They’ve been pals since always, since before they became small time crooks, since before their parents shuffled their mortal coils. Mikey’s the equanimous one, Nicky the hothead, though Mikey’s only cool and composed when stood next to Nicky. “You give me that in 30 seconds or I’ll kill you, you hear me?” he roars at a diner counterman, desperate for a cup of cream to help soothe Nicky’s ailing stomach. Neither is especially good to women, and both are in boiling water, though Mikey’s only up to his toes and Nicky’s waist-deep, having ripped off his boss and earned a hit on his forehead. The most honest move Mikey can make is to leave Nicky to the mob’s mercies, but he’s not an honest man and honestly, male relationships aren’t all that honest. Elaine May understands how quickly men oscillate between emotion and violence, rancor and play. One minute Mikey’s fretting over Nicky catching a cold. The next, they’re scrapping in the street, as if their friendship never mattered in the first place. Amazing how easily men can transgress from adults to boys, whether they’re trading blows or just gleefully racing one another down the sidewalk. Even when they’re all grown up, they’re still children at heart. Over 40 years later, Mikey and Nicky has aged better than both of them. —Andy Crump
35. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 BruxellesYear: 1975
Director: Chantal Akerman
Stars: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte
Runtime: 201 minutes
Belgian director Chantal Akerman built a formidable edifice of domesticity in order to pull it down piece by piece, habit by habit, hourly ritual by daily routine. The title of her second film, a name and a location, reflects a submission to a time and to a place, and over the course of nearly three and a half hours, Akerman defines that name, Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig), through the ways in which Dielman—mother, single homemaker, occasional prostitute—fills that location, a small Brussels apartment of modest means, with the cooking and cleaning and mothering and fornication of a person trapped within the order and regiment of a society that doesn’t so much care for her as expect her to continue to uphold that order, all for the benefit of the men in her life, who make no attempt to understand the intricacies of what she’s accomplished. On the first day, Akerman establishes Jeanne Dielman’s quotidian, an architecture of perfectly calibrated chores, meals, joyless sex, vigorous bathing and thankless evenings spent with her aloof wad of a son (Jan Decorte), all of which she assembles seamlessly seemingly for him, and for no one else. On the second day, a few items go awry, Jeanne overcooks the potatoes and remainders begin to appear in the facade of her daily algorithm. On the third day, chasms open in the midst of her everyday pattern, Jeanne unable to fill that space with anything at all, because she has nothing save for that structure, no passion or personality besides the ways in which she coddles her progeny and basely satisfies her clients. In the midst of literal minutes’ worth of Jeanne sitting, staring, silent, Akerman introduces tension by default: When Jeanne Dielman can no longer be manifest through her methodical fulfilling of the mundane, does she even exist anymore? Akerman responds with violence, pointless and fatal—followed by more sitting, more staring and the bleak notion that the life lived within the walls of this film may not be anything more than a name, a place and a single act of humanity. —Dom Sinacola
36. StagecoachYear: 1939
Director: John Ford
Stars: John Wayne, Claire Trevor, Andy Devine
Runtime: 96 minutes
And just like that, with one swift zoom shot, John Ford gave John Wayne his breakthrough role and reintroduced American audiences to the man who would become one of their most lasting movie icons. Two Johns, making it happen. Stagecoach isn’t exactly a John Wayne movie despite the fact that John Wayne is in it; this was before the days of The Searchers, of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, of The Quiet Man, even of Hondo, movies that each helped shape Wayne’s persona and forge his screen legend bit by bit. In Stagecoach, he’s just a man with a rifle, a mission of vengeance and a soft spot for a prostitute named Dallas. Rather than the tradition of Wayne, the film belongs to the tradition of strangers on a journey; it’s about an unlikely and incongruous grouping of humans banding together to make it to a common destination. They ride a dangerous road, but Ford’s great gift as a filmmaker is his knack for making peril buoyant and entertaining, and in Stagecoach he does both effortlessly. —Andy Crump
37. Belladonna of SadnessYear: 1973
Director: Eiichi Yamamoto
Stars: Aiko Nagayama, Tatsuya Nakadai, Katsuyuki Ito
Runtime: 87 minutes
Inspired by Jules Michelet’s book Satanism and Witchcraft, the third and final film in Osamu Tezuka’s “Animerama” trilogy was so expensive and avant-garde, its failure bankrupted its production company, Mushi Pro. The only film in the trilogy not directed by Tezuka (he left the project in its conceptual stages), Eiichi Yamamoto’s Belladonna of Sadness is amongst the most unusual animated films ever put to celluloid. This is not a huge surprise from a talent as legendary as Yamamoto, among whose mighty credits are titles like Kimba the White Lion and Space Battleship Yamato. Belladonna of Sadness is the tale of a village woman named Jeanne who is raped by her liege lord and his men on her wedding night, then makes a literal deal with the devil to gain magical powers and lead a rebellion against her rapists. Belladonna is extreme in every sense of the word: Start with the look—the film consists almost entirely of pans across still watercolor paintings, with occasional expressive bursts of color and movement scattered throughout. The designs owe virtually nothing to traditional anime character construction, or even Tezuka’s own, more cartoonish style. Instead, the film’s great debt is to European painters like Gustav Klimt, Degas and Kandinsky, among others. Filled with haunting music, lots of disembodied voice-over and vibrantly rendered yet horrifying scenes of rape, nudity, murder and madness, it’s no surprise Belladonna of Sadness was banned in many countries for decades. The feminist subtext of the film is very much foregrounded—clearly Jeanne is an avatar for Jeanne D’Arc (Joan of Arc), and there are also direct links in one scene between Jeanne and Marianne, the female personification of the French Republic—and despite the darkness Jeanne wallows in and the horrors she is subjected to, this is a film worth experiencing, mostly because there has really been nothing like it either before or since. The tale is brutal, but the beauty in which it’s told means we can’t look away. —Jason DeMarco
38. Black GirlYear: 1966
Director: Ousmane Sembène
Stars: Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Anne-Marie Jelinek, Momar Nar Sene
Runtime: 60 minutes
Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène grew up a French citizen in the final throes of his country’s centuries-long period of colonialism, almost 40 when Senegal joined French Sudan to gain independence. Made six years after France transferred power, Black Girl, Sembène’s first feature-length film as writer and director (based off of his own short story), aches with wounds still lifetimes away from healing, worsened by the shallowness of a people (French) who just want to move on and with the humiliation and resentment of a lot more people (Africans) who physically live everyday–in their language and social structures and economic lots–surrounded by the reminders that they for so long were not their own. Sembène makes this divide dreadfully clear, telling the story of quiet Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), hired by a French family to serve as their nanny in Dakar, until they move back to the Riviera and encourage (expect) Diouana to go and live with them. Of course, once she arrives, the bitter, malicious Madame (Anne-Marie Jelinek) expects her to cook and clean, callously stretching the bounds of Diouana’s duties as nanny into a kind of indentured servitude, exacerbated by Diouana’s inability to read and lack of money. She is, literally, stuck in France. Meanwhile, Sembène cuts to memories of Diouana’s life before she left Senegal, in which she lived in relative poverty but had family and boyfriend (Momar Nar Sene) to support her, telling her not to leave but still needing the money she could potentially earn. Juxtaposing these two realities, Sembène slowly crafts a vision of post-colonial slavery in a post-war world, building a tension that gives Diouana no choice but to tragically get out the only way she knows how. Despite whatever the Madame and her family had in mind, Diouana’s story could have ended no other way. —Dom Sinacola
39. StalkerYear: 1979
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Stars: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee
Rating: NR
Runtime: 140 minutes
“Once, the future was only a continuation of the present. All its changes loomed somewhere beyond the horizon. But now the future’s a part of the present.” So says the Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, somewhere deep in the Zone, contemplating the deeper trenches of his subconscious, of his fears and life and whatever “filth” exists within him. “Are they prepared for this?” he asks. In Tarkovsky’s last Soviet film, the director seems to be admitting that what he’s feared most has come to pass. What that means is of course nebulous for a viewer not steeped in the director’s life or in the history of the country that was both home and hostile to him and his work throughout most of his life. Based very loosely on Roadside Picnic, a novel by brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (who also wrote the screenplay), Stalker imagines a dystopic future not far from our present—or Tarkovsky’s present, before the fall of the Berlin Wall or the devastation of Chernobyl—in which some sort of otherworldly force has deposited a place humans have called “the Zone” onto Earth. There, the laws of Nature don’t apply, time and space thwarted by the hidden desires and wills of all those who enter it. Of course, the government has set up cordons around the Zone, and entry is strictly prohibited. Guides/liaisons called “stalkers” head illegal expeditions into the Zone, taking clients (often intellectual elites who can afford the trip) into the heart of the restricted, alien area—in search of, as we learn as the film slowly moves on, the so-called “Room,” where a person’s deepest desires become reality. One such Stalker (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky) is hired by the aforementioned Writer and a physicist (or something) known only as the Professor (Nikolai Grinko) to lead them into the Zone, spurred by vague ideas of what they’ll find when they reach the Room. The audience is as much in the dark, and through Tarkovsky’s (near-intolerably) patient shots, the three men come to discover, as do those watching their journey, what has really brought them to such an awful extreme as hiring a spiritual criminal to guide them into the almost certain doom of whatever the Zone has waiting for them. And yet, no context properly prepares a viewer for the harrowing, hypnotic experience of watching Stalker. Between the sepia wasteland outside the Zone (so detailed in its grime and suspended misery you may need to take a shower afterwards) and the oversaturated greens and blues of the wreckage inside, Tarkovsky moves almost imperceptibly, taking the rhythms of industry and the empty lulls of post-industrial life to the point of making the barely mystical overwhelmingly manifest. Throughout that push and pull, there is the mounting sense of escape—of Tarkovsky escaping the Soviet Union and its restrictions on his films, maybe—as equally as there is the sense that escape should never be attempted. Because some freedom, some knowledge, isn’t meant for us. —Dom Sinacola
40. BoyYear: 2010
Director: Taika Waititi
Stars: Taika Waititi, James Rolleston, Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu
Rating: R
Runtime: 88 minutes
At one point the highest-grossing New Zealand film at the country’s box office, Taika Waititi’s sophomore feature (after making his wobbly indie debut with Eagle vs Shark) gives us the writer/director’s skills at sweet oddball comedy and wrenching pathos at their peak. Boy‘s search for identity and meaning gives star James Rolleston every available weapon to win us over, and the filmmaking’s blend of tight comedy, realism in depicting a Maori community, and charmingly janky animation dress up its somber heart in flashy colors. A coming-of-age movie about papering over the hardships of life, only to find solace in those using the same techniques and styles, you’ll probably love Boy as much as Boy loves Michael Jackson. —Jacob Oller
