Still, Boyhood’s astonishing compactness catches you off guard like no other movie. Often regarded as the funniest of the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre, the film is also—sadly—timeless, as its portrayal of a war-mongering dictatorship remains relevant to this day.—Anna Smith, An unlikely pick? | Sam Neill, BAFTA Awards: 0 Bruce Bennett, Votes: BAFTA Awards: 1 For its intimacy and economy alone, the film feels like a preview of the scrappy decade to come. | And when those cameras were rolling, they captured a self-made icon with a global audience. 100%: Top Hat (1935) 42: 81. 151 min Anchored by Rodrigo Prieto’s swoonworthy cinematography and a wistful Heath Ledger (whose performance toppled societal perceptions of masculinity), Brokeback Mountain is a milestone in LGBTQ art-house cinema. | Ian McKellen, Oscar Nominations: 4 Director: Carpenter’s widescreen elegance and spooky synth minimalism (here furthered by composer Ennio Morricone) found a new counterpoint in some of the most disgusting practical special effects ever sprung on a paying audience. $364.00M, Oscars: 0 120,956 Director: If you loved last year’s Shoplifters, you’ll love this.—Ian Freer, What’s the best part of Pulp Fiction? William Wyler A canon, as we critics like to call it, updated with today's game changers, that would glance upon all tastes, all genres, all countries, all eras, balancing impact with importance, brains with heart? Déjà vu! The romance of the mob lifestyle—the food, the nightclubs, the cheating, the violence—made for a glittering surface; underneath it was jail, abandonment and living one’s life like a schnook in the witness-protection program.—Joshua Rothkopf, There’s no other thriller as elegant, light-touched and sexy as Hitchcock’s silken caper. In other words, a film's commercial success (Oscars & BAFTA Awards), and greatness in direction, screenwriting and production, is how I ranked the films on this list. Since The Sopranos aired in 1999, the history of cinema changed forever. ... Marty McFly, a 17-year-old high school student, is accidentally sent thirty years into the past in a time-traveling DeLorean invented by his close friend, the eccentric scientist Doc Brown. Viggo Mortensen, Oscar Nominations: 10 8. Stacker presents the 100 best fantasy movies of all time, as determined by a weighted index split evenly between IMDb and Metacritic scores. The director shows restraint with setting and scope; the film focuses largely on the back-and-forth between Joan and her inquisitors. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 54. The second this love story opens, you sense you are in the hands of a master. How many have you seen? It’s a surreal moment that encapsulates this strange and mighty river movie, about a man so lost in his own obsession, he can no longer process the world around him.—Phil de Semlyen, Political thrillers still owe a debt to Gillo Pontecorvo’s ever-timely tour de force. Boy chases Union forces who stole train, wins back train and fires off in the opposite direction. Bergman, recovering from a serious bout of pneumonia, wrote the script in the hospital, grappling with a crisis of purpose that he turned into art of the highest caliber.—Joshua Rothkopf, Spike Lee’s bitterly funny, ultimately tragic fresco of a Brooklyn neighborhood during one sweltering summer day was hugely controversial at the time: Critics dinged Lee for his depiction of an uprising in the wake of a police killing. With this in mind, here is a countdown of 10 of the best adventure movies for that dose of heroism that is needed to defeat evil. 121 min We only hope that audience members instinctively knew not to give away cinema’s first ever twist ending and ruin the sting of this fractured horror-fable for their pals. Humphrey Bogart, avg. From ‘Monty Python’ to ‘Don't Look Now’, British movies are have made cinematic history. Adventure, Drama, Romance. $5.01M, Oscars: 3 Director: But Alien claims masterpiece status with its subversive gender politics (this is a movie that impregnates men), its shocking chestburster centerpiece and industrial designer H.R. By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions. Gore Verbinski Menu. Some people best define an adventure movie in terms of how well the film illustrates the pursuit of luck and exaltation. Mark Hamill, Nuclear annihilation was a subject in which Kubrick immersed himself, reading virtually every unclassified text. Directors David and Jerry Zucker and their partner in extreme silliness, Jim Abrahams, truly threw the kitchen sink at this dizzying spoof of the ’70s disaster movies that were all the rage at the time. BAFTA Awards: 2 | Gross: Director: avg. Still, City Lights was something else. BAFTA Nominations: 2 Director: 94%: Iron Man (2008) 279: 52. | Of course, it’s a work of profound philosophical thought, too, so you’ll feel brainier for having seen it.—Phil de Semlyen, Worlds collide in Sofia Coppola's pitch-perfect tale of a movie star (Bill Murray) and a newlywed (Scarlett Johansson) in Tokyo. 2. Stacker presents the 100 best movies of all time, as determined by weighted IMDb ratings and Metascores. Peter Jackson The adventure movies on this list are ranked according to their success (awards & nominations), their popularity, and their cinematic greatness from a directing/writing perspective. type to search. The dialogue is snappy and delicious; the morals are as empty as Times Square at dawn—Dave Calhoun, This German Expressionist masterpiece came out in 1920, a long time before the invention of the spoiler warning. Stacker presents the 100 best movies of all time, as determined by weighted IMDb ratings and Metascores. Haya Harareet, Votes: The corruption-soaked story follows a powerful immigrant family grappling with the paradoxical values of reign and religion; those moral contradictions are crystallized in a legendary baptism sequence, superbly edited in parallel to the murdering of four rivaling dons. Peter Jackson Only English-language movies released in the U.S. were considered for the list, and each movie needed both a Metascore and at least 20,000 votes on IMDb to qualify. Orlando Bloom, Most modern horror clichés start here. It’s a seedy, intoxicating tale that unfolds in Manhattan’s backroom bar booths, and it features brain-searing performances from Tony Curtis as Sidney Falco, a bottom-feeding gossip monger, and Burt Lancaster as J.J. Hunsecker, a towering, corrupt newspaper columnist. | Toshiro Mifune is superb as the half-crazed self-styled samurai, but it’s Takashi Shimura’s Yoda-like leader who gives the film its emotional center. | Stars: All rights reserved. With the Vietnam War, inner-city rioting and Nixon on the rise, all bets were off. The ultimate cult film, Leone’s spaghetti Western is set in a civilizing America—though mostly shot in Rome and Spain—but the real location is an abstract frontier of old versus new, of larger-than-life heroes fading into memory. A grungy vision of horror captured during a palpably sweaty and stenchy Texas summer, the film has taken its rightful place as a definitive parable of Nixonian class warfare, eat-or-be-eaten social envy and the essentially unknowable nature of some unlucky parts of the world.—Joshua Rothkopf, As unsparing as cinema gets, the influence of Elem Klimov’s sui generis war movie transcends the genre in a way that not even Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan can match. The film also sports a perfect cast, with a top-of-his-game Jack Nicholson as a cynical private eye, an impossibly alluring Faye Dunaway as the femme fatale with a past so dark her final revelation still shocks, and the legendary John Huston as the monstrous millionaire at the heart of it all.—Bilge Ebiri, Not just any film gets homaged by Bill and Ted. George Lucas BAFTA Awards: 1 That’s not to say Tobe Hooper’s masterpiece doesn’t deliver. Golden Globe Nominations: 4, PG Ironically, the movie’s portrayal of this milieu as vapid and soul-corrodingly hedonistic appears to have passed many viewers by. Onscreen comedy, in turn, was modernized for what would be its most transforming decade. During its theatrical run—which stretched into a summer that also saw the white-supremacist Charlottesville rally—Get Out felt like the only movie speaking to a deepening divide.—Joshua Rothkopf, We asked actors for the best movies of all time, from comedies and classic romances to blockbusters and foreign gems. 265,883 Alec Guinness, Votes: 105 min Jack Black, Kubrick’s frighteningly clinical vision of the future—AI and all—still feels prophetic, more than 50 years on.—Phil de Semlyen, From the wise guys of Goodfellas to The Sopranos, all crime dynasties that came after The Godfather are descendants of the Corleones: Francis Ford Coppola’s magnum opus is the ultimate patriarch of the Mafia genre. Golden Globe Nominations: 2, PG-13 BAFTA Nominations: 11 Wong Kar-wai guides us through the narrow streets and stairs of ’60s Hong Kong and into the lives of two neighbors (Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung) who discover their spouses are having an affair. Carrie Fisher, Peter Bull, Votes: This quintessential New York movie turned countless viewers on to the joys of verbose dialogue (and experimentation in menswear for women), and has long been lauded for both its accessibility and its poignancy, a balance that few movies have since achieved so memorably.—Abbey Bender, A joy from start to finish, Billy Wilder’s Prohibition-era–set comedy has heart, humor, cross-dressing, Marilyn Monroe and the finest closing line in the history of cinema. BAFTA Awards: 4 As they imagine—and partly reenact—how their partners might be behaving, they fall for each other while remaining determined to respect their wedding vows. Geoffrey Rush, Oscar Nominations: 11 $402.45M, ***** It’s science fiction at its most ambitious and breathtaking—the not-so-modest beginnings of onscreen genre seriousness.—Ian Freer, The accepted wisdom is that the noir era really kicked off during the hard-bitten post-WWII years, which makes John Huston’s adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's detective novel a real trailblazer. Jack Hawkins, Votes: James Cameron Adventure, Drama, History. John Huston But his transition to Hollywood was rocky; it was a town that barely understood him. Oscar Nominations: 8 Martin Scorsese’s vision of vigilantism is filled with an uncomfortable ambience, and Paul Schrader’s screenplay probes philosophical depths that are brought to vicious life by Robert De Niro’s unforgettable performance.—Abbey Bender, The jewel in Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli’s crown, Spirited Away is a glorious bedtime story filled with soot sprites, monsters and phantasms—it’s a movie with the power to coax out the inner child in the most grown-up and jaded among us. Stars: Director: Please let us know how wrong we got it. Stars: The genius is in Denis’s technique, manifesting itself in images of shattering emotional precision: sinewy silhouettes of soldiers, abstract tests of will in the desert and, most ravishingly, the euphoria of breaking into dance, courtesy of a loose-limbed Denis Lavant and Corona’s “Rhythm of the Night.”—Joshua Rothkopf, John Ford’s searing Western casts John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, a pathological racist and, yet, the enduring template for today’s modern antihero. Orlando Bloom, Stars: There’s a reason why superhero movies are taken so seriously nowadays—even by the Oscars—and this is basically it.—Bilge Ebiri, Charlie Chaplin’s total vision remains awe-inspiring: He wrote, directed, produced, edited and starred in his own movies, which he also scored with an orchestra. Claudette Colbert’s spoiled heiress and Clark Gable’s opportunistic reporter hit the road and bicker their way toward a happily-ever-after ending, class barriers be damned. It’s a triumph of buried political commentary and purest epic cinema. Golden Globe Nominations: 4, PG Golden Globes: 4 Elijah Wood, 1,010,246 Chaplin, reticent to give up the visual techniques he’d mastered, insisted on making his new comedy a silent film even as viewers were growing thirsty for sound. Scorsese describes it as “the movie that plays in my heart.” We’ll take two seats at the back.—Phil de Semlyen, A sexy Freudian mind-bender that’s often considered Alfred Hitchcock’s finest triumph, Vertigo is pitched in a world of existential obsession and cunning doubles. | The cast was very much in on the joke: Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are having a whale of a time in drag, while Monroe offers a typically beguiling mix of innocence and mischief.—Anna Smith, Hugely expensive for its time, Metropolis is Blade Runner, The Terminator and Star Wars all rolled into one (not to mention 50 years prior). Luke Skywalker’s quest to rescue a princess instantly elevated B-movie bliss to billion-dollar-franchise sagas.—Stephen Garrett, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s classic tale of the trial of Joan of Arc is somehow both austere and maximalist. With it, Pixar took storytelling to infinity and far, far beyond.—Phil de Semlyen, Shot on 16-millimeter film in sketchy light, Charles Burnett’s UCLA graduate thesis film stitches together seemingly mundane vignettes to form a compelling mosaic of late-’70s African-American life. Oscar Nominations: 13 BAFTA Nominations: 1 We think so (and not just because we can’t turn it off whenever we catch it midstream on TV). BAFTA Awards: 0 Steve McQueen, | Lawrence (Peter O’Toole), silencing naysayers after having single-handedly crossed deadly desert terrain. | Gross: Sam Worthington, Without him, there’s no David Lynch, no Wong Kar-wai—even Alfred Hitchcock was a fan. James Garner, Made at the close of the silent era, it set new standards in screen acting.—Bilge Ebiri, The ultimate cult film, Leone’s spaghetti Western is set in a civilizing America—though mostly shot in Rome and Spain—but the real location is an abstract frontier of old versus new, of larger-than-life heroes fading into memory. En route, there’s surfing, a thrilling helicopter raid, napalm smelling, tigers and Playboy bunnies, until Sheen steps off the boat and into a different zone of madness—or is it genius? Alison Doody, 1,472,327 Even more prophetically, The Blair Witch Project is about a generation that can’t stop filming itself, even when lost in the woods—it’s ground zero for selfie horror.—Joshua Rothkopf, With the ink barely wet on Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation, director Alan J. Pakula, actor-producer Robert Redford and screenwriter William Goldman created a hot-off-the-presses docudrama about the Watergate break-in that crackles with live-wire tension. Why did this film resonate so well at the end of its decade? Charlton Heston, From peacetime to frontlines, from coming home to left behind: Rotten Tomatoes presents the 100 best-reviewed war movies of all time, ranked by Adjusted Tomatometer with at least 20 reviews each. Golden Globes: 3 212 min $377.85M, Oscars: 11 Stars: BAFTA Nominations: 1 Peter O'Toole, The 100 Very Best Animated Movies 1. Top 100 Movies of All Time Best of Rotten Tomatoes Movies with 40 or more critic reviews vie for their place in history at Rotten Tomatoes. Though the laconic Hawks would downplay his own proto-feminism throughout his life, the film is also his most liberated; strong women who had jobs and ran with newshounds were simply what he wanted to see. Golden Globes: 0 Adventure, Thriller. | Luke Skywalker joins forces with a Jedi Knight, a cocky pilot, a Wookiee and two droids to save the galaxy from the Empire's world-destroying battle station, while also attempting to rescue Princess Leia from the mysterious Darth Vader. | Best Western Movies of All Time. Oscar Nominations: 4 Golden Globes: 0 As director, producer, cowriter and star, Welles cemented his status as an innovator. Ben Kingsley, Battlegrounds abound—psychological, emotional, physical—making the bleakly entrenched soldiers of 1916, and the officers who confuse folly for fame, still feel painfully relevant.—Stephen Garrett, Actors are the lifeblood of director Mike Leigh’s famous process, a much-discussed method of workshopping, character exploration, group improvisation and collaborative writing. Steven Spielberg 1. Oscar Nominations: 5 A monumental opening line (“I believe in America”) sets the operatic Mario Puzo adaptation in motion, before Coppola’s epic morphs into a chilling dismantling of the American dream. “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.”—Phil de Semlyen, Hypnotic, bewitching, thought-provoking, disturbing, horrifying: However you react to it, you won't forget Jonathan Glazer's startling adaptation of Michel Faber's woman-who-fell-to-earth novel. 143 min Elijah Wood, The 20 Best Adventure Movies of All Time. $53.27M, PG 2019, Ridley Scott’s vision of a dystopian future is one of the most stylish sci-fi films of all time. German Expressionist director F.W. Oscar Nominations: 3 BAFTA Nominations: 6 124 min Best Western Movies of All Time. Mark Hamill, Director: Its trio of dancers—rubber-faced (and heeled) Donald O’Connor, sparkling newcomer Debbie Reynolds and co-director and headline act Gene Kelly—are a triple threat, nailing the stellar songs, intricate and physically demanding dance routines and selling all the comic beats with consummate skill. On the surface, it’s a simple story about a couple of miniature rivals sizing each other up (Woody was originally going to be a whole mess meaner), before falling into peril at the hands of next-door pyrotechnics genius Sid. Were it not for them, 2001 might have faded into obscurity, but it’s hard to imagine it would have stayed there. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), 67. Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer are comic royalty, and we can only genuflect in their presence; shortly after this film, Guest kicked off his own directorial brand of humor, directly inspired by Rob Reiner’s heavy-metal satire.—Phil de Semlyen, If only Hollywood made ’em like they used to: crackling romantic comedies that conquered the Oscars. BAFTA Nominations: 5 Movies with 40 or more critic reviews vie for their place in history at Rotten Tomatoes. Credit a revolutionary internet campaign, spooky and immersive, that’s now a tactic in every publicist’s playbook. Renoir captures his sparklingly astute ensemble cast with fluid, deep-focus camera movements, innovations that inspired directors from Orson Welles to Robert Altman.—Stephen Garrett, Rightly considered one of the most focused and suspenseful movies ever made, Steven Spielberg’s tale of a shark terrorizing a beach town remains effective more than four decades later. Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama are dignified and moving as parents who visit their children and grandchildren, only to be neglected. Undeniably one of the best sci-fi movies out there, The Matrix also totally holds it’s own as one of the best action movies of all time. Director: The movie takes us back to the 1930s during the legendary crime spree of lovers Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty), careening around Depression-era America and robbing it blind. Peter Jackson Stars: Check out the 50 best adventure films of all time, ranked by Adjusted Tomatometer score! 100 Best War Movies of All Time. The Greatest Films can't be measured scientifically because greatness is extremely subjective. As ever, the star had the last laugh: Not only was the film a huge commercial success, it also ended on the most heartbreaking close-up in cinema history—the peak of the reaction shot (since cribbed by movies from La Strada to The Purple Rose of Cairo), no dialogue required.—Joshua Rothkopf, There’s never a bad time to revisit one of Jean Renoir’s great masterpieces (along with The Rules of the Game), but this current era of populists, nationalists and shouty rabble-rousers feels like a particularly good one. Harrison Ford, | Gross: Years later, it’s considered by many to be Kubrick’s masterpiece, and its deliberate, highly aestheticized approach has influenced everybody from Ridley Scott to Yorgos Lanthimos.—Bilge Ebiri, Martin Scorsese’s hallucinogenic biography of the tenacious boxer Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) is a bold mash-up of neorealist grit and hyperstylized, gossamer beauty. Can there ever be one list to rule them all? Michelle Rodriguez, Votes: 60%. | Gross: Welcome to Rotten Tomatoes’ list of the 100 best-reviewed Western movies of all time, sorted by Adjusted Tomatometer with at least 20 reviews for each selection. Steven Spielberg Director: Eligible movies are ranked based on their Adjusted Scores. | A paraplegic Marine dispatched to the moon Pandora on a unique mission becomes torn between following his orders and protecting the world he feels is his home. Trivia time: It remains Japan’s highest-grossing film ever, just ahead of Titanic.—Anna Smith, The first no-budget horror movie to become a bona-fide calling card for its director, George A. Romero’s seminal frightfest begins with a single zombie in a graveyard and builds to an undead army attacking a secluded house. | $342.55M, Oscars: 2 A greedy film producer assembles a team of moviemakers and sets out for the infamous Skull Island, where they find more than just cannibalistic natives. Undeniably one of the best sci-fi movies out there, The Matrix also totally holds it’s own as one of the best action movies of all time. It’s a template for the swathe of noir flicks that would follow, offering up a jaded-but-noble gumshoe in Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade, a femme fatale (Mary Astor), a couple of shifty villains (Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre) and a labyrinthine plot that drags you around by the nose. | Director: To qualify, the film had to be listed as fantasy on IMDb, have a Metascore, and have at least 5,000 votes. 1. Zoe Saldana, Anyone who watched In The Mood for Love when it was released in 2000 may have said yes. Oscar Nominations: 1 Adrien Brody, | It’s an essential touchstone for every political thriller since.—Stephen Garrett, We’re cheating by including all three films (Pather Panchali, Aparajito and The World of Apu), but really, how do you separate the installments of Satyajit Ray’s magnificent coming-of-age trilogy? | Gross: These women are central to Sansho the Bailiff, a feudal tale of familial dissolution that will wreck you. | Gross: Golden Globe Nominations: 4, PG The movie’s theme is vigilance: We must protect our children, but who will protect society from itself? In short, it’s cinematic perfection.—Ian Freer, Made in the middle of Italy’s boom years, Federico Fellini’s runaway box-office hit came to define heated glamour and celebrity culture for the entire planet. Charles Bronson, Votes: Golden Globe Nominations: 4, PG-13 You're gonna need a bigger bowl of popcorn. As Max von Sydow’s medieval knight travels the land witnessing the apocalypse, loads of life-affirming moments lighten the load. The adventure movie is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. In 1938, after his father Professor Henry Jones, Sr. goes missing while pursuing the Holy Grail, Professor Henry "Indiana" Jones, Jr. finds himself up against Adolf Hitler's Nazis again to stop them from obtaining its powers. 172 min To meet audience's expectations and to keep high ratings, production companies have spent enormous amounts of money on their shows. Robert Rossellini was responsible for a few of them, including Germany Year Zero and this earlier drama of repression and resistance, which boasts not one but two of the most memorable death scenes in all of cinema.—Phil de Semlyen, Brace for the land of phantoms and the call of the Bird of Death: One of the earliest (though unauthorized) adaptations of Dracula is still the most terrifying. | Most wonderfully, this comedy best celebrates the rule of wit: He—or, more often, she—with the sharpest tongue wins. Giger’s strangely elegant double-jawed creature, a nightmarish vision of hostility—and one of cinema’s most unforgettable pieces of pure craft.—Tomris Laffly, Simply spun, Yasujiro Ozu’s domestic drama is small but perfectly formed. At its heart it’s a coming-of-age story that follows a young Belarusian boy (Aleksei Kravchenko) through unspeakable horror as Nazi death squads visit an apocalypse on his region. Written by Abbey Bender, Dave Calhoun, Phil de Semlyen, Bilge Ebiri, Ian Freer, Stephen Garrett, Tomris Laffly, Joshua Rothkopf and Anna Smith, RECOMMENDED:– The best movies on Netflix right now– The 100 best comedy movies– The best romantic movies of all time– The 101 best action movies ever made– The best documentaries on Netflix, The greatest film ever made began with the meeting of two brilliant minds: Stanley Kubrick and sci-fi seer Arthur C. Clarke.