The 100 Best Movies of All Time: Critics’ Picks

It also has emotional weight, with Crowe in a career-best performance as a Roman general betrayed by the son of the former emperor and left for dead, only to work his way up the ranks as a gladiator in a plot to get his revenge. Even if you’ve never seen it, you’ve no doubt heard some of this good movie’s more famous quotes, like Crowe’s Maximus taunting a bloodthirsty crowd with, “Are you not entertained? The first director — and the other inspiration for Canby’s disquiet — was Jean-Luc Godard, who described Wenders’s project as an inquest on the future of films. For the next 10 minutes or so, Godard, smoking his familiar cigar, meditates on this vexing, evergreen question with his characteristic intelligence, opacity and epigrammatic wit. “The dream of Hollywood is to make one film,” Godard says, “and it’s television that makes it, but which is distributed everywhere” — which is as good a description of our NetflixDisneyMarvel world as I’ve read. Jia Zhangke investigates the ongoing transformation of China–and the inextricable relationship between the past and the present, the urban and rural–through the prism of three famed authors in Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue.

A classic film noir based on the Walter Mosley “Easy” Rawlins detective novel, this has all the moodiness and style you’d expect from something so rooted in this genre. Not only is Washington incredibly magnetic in the lead, but this was the movie that introduced the world to Don Cheadle, who steals the show as Rawlins’ loose cannon friend, Mouse. A movie about a bunch of heroin addicts in Scotland doesn’t immediately scream “good times,” which is why Trainspotting hit the cultural zeitgeist like a tornado. A fast, surreal, rollicking comedy set to an amazing soundtrack, the movie manages to be a total blast despite never glossing over (and in some scenes, unblinkingly digging right into) the darker and more tragic elements of drug addiction. It doesn’t glorify its characters or what they do, but still manages to make them all charismatic and watchable. Set in Spain during the 1940s, Pan’s Labyrinth is about a girl who escapes into an elaborate fantasy world to avoid her sadistic military stepfather.

The story of a pair of NYPD narcotics detectives (Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider) who uncover a heroin-smuggling operation headquartered in France, The French Connection is a cop thriller with smarts and boatloads of style. You feel the dirt and grime of 1970s New York in every scene, and Hackman’s Detective “Popeye” Doyle is an instant icon with his grizzled demeanor and porkpie hat. If you’re looking for more films to add to the list, check out these Irish movies you can stream now. This movie was known for a long time as “The Bicycle Thief,” a title that turned out to be a slight mistranslation.

Nick Schager is a NYC-area film critic and culture writer with twenty years of professional experience writing about all the movies you love, and countless others that you don’t. Fiery tensions are everywhere in this hypnotic film–be it between love and sex, passion and reason, sanity and madness, or modern art and reggaeton street culture–as Ema reacts to her situation by concocting a scheme to get her child back through carnally devious means. Larraín stages his material like a sweaty, pulsating fever dream-cum-dance-routine, all of it revolving around his alternately entrancing and horrifying protagonist, whose quest for motherhood takes on increasingly demented form. There’s palpable volatility to his study of Di Girolamo’s intriguing Ema, who proves to be a figurative and literal flamethrower. Panah Panahi, son of legendary filmmaker Jafar Panahi (who was sentenced to six years in prison earlier this year for “inciting unrest”), makes his directorial debut with this comedic family drama, which some have described as Iran’s answer to Little Miss Sunshine. A family of four sets off on a road trip that inspires both tears and laughter as they traverse the countryside.

• This is the movie that really cemented Robin Williams as a gargantuan talent.
• A research team based in Antarctica unearths an alien vessel frozen in the tundra for thousands of years.
• A musical tribute to classic horror and sci-fi, it’s raunchy and strange and just really has to be seen to be believed.
• Dislocation is central to their tale, with Ivan in particular caught between love for his partner and for his son and family, whom he chooses to leave behind in search of freedom, tolerance and a potential career as a chef.
• The movie is confounding, ridiculous, and absolutely heart-rending.
• Park Chan-wook is a director’s director—an auteur who is regularly lauded by the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee (who had the temerity to mount his own version of Oldboy a decade after Chan-wook’s film shook viewers).

The year has provided some incredible films, many you can stream right now. But there were some truly wonderful releases, ranging from music docs and musicals to westerns and the just plain weird. The order reflects Tomatometer scores (as of December 31, 2021) after adjustment from our ranking formula, which compensates for variation in the number of reviews when comparing movies or TV shows. Sign up for our email to enjoy your city without spending a thing (as well as some options when you’re feeling flush).

Based on the true story of Brandon Teena, Boys Don’t Cry is a dramatization of his life as a trans man in Nebraska. When Brandon (Hilary Swank) meets and falls in love with a local girl named Lana (Chloe Sevigny), he unwittingly sets off a chain of events that results is his sexual humiliation and eventual murder at the hands of Lana’s ex-convict friends. A painful but often sweetly romantic story, it nonetheless has a sense of dread at all times because you know where it’s headed. But Swank and Sevigny are incredible in the lead roles, and the movie is a tough-to-watch but vital standout. Documentarian Heidi Ewing’s first narrative feature recounts the true-life story of Ivan and Gerardo, a gay Mexican couple who fled their fraught home lives for a new start in America. Dislocation is central to their tale, with Ivan in particular caught between love for his partner and for his son and family, whom he chooses to leave behind in search of freedom, tolerance and a potential career as a chef.

Sometimes when you watch old comedies, you can appreciate their place in history but don’t find yourself laughing all that much. The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup—a mockery of politics and war—still has the power to elicit genuine laughs. It’s surprising now to look back and see the utter anarchy that was the Brothers’ comedy—they have a “mess with everyone at all times” ethos that keeps their comedy from feeling stale or corny even many decades later. And the song “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It” seems to have predicted current political discourse. ” haunts every college graduate, and it forms the heart of this late-’60s comedy starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft.

Convinced to throw a house party by her best friend Lupe (Victoria Moroles), Sunny (Kuhoo Verma) has sex not with her crush Hunter (Provost) but with religious nerd Kyle (Mason Cook)–a decision that leads to crisis when, the next morning, she comes to fear that she’s pregnant. Thus a rollicking mission to obtain a morning-after Plan B pill is born, driven by Sunny’s fear of not only teen parenthood but disappointing her demanding Indian mother (Jolly Abraham). Punctuated by a bevy of hilarious one-liners, Prathi Srinivasan and Joshua Levy’s script is raunchy and sweet in equal measure, capturing its protagonists’ anxieties and desires (for sex, for acceptance) with absurd heart. As the hesitant-to-come-out Lupe, Moroles is a consistent delight, and Verma is even better as the frazzled Sunny, in what may be the breakout performance of the year. Sure, we’ve yet to hit the quarter-century mark, when these sorts of lists tend to start landing.

This one will reward you with surprising discoveries and unforgettable moments. After you’ve seen Rocky Balboa fight pro wrestlers and single-handedly end the Cold War, it’s hard to imagine how it all started. A few animated films aside, there was a reason J.R.R. Tolkien’s sprawling epic The Lord of the Rings (made up of the books The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King) never got a big-screen adaptation—it seemed impossible. But director Peter Jackson finally cracked the code and created adaptations that both honored and improved upon the source material. Perfectly cast with stunning visual effects, you should really see the whole trilogy, but definitely start here. The books have also inspired the show Rings of Power, which found itself in the midst of heavy controversy but has been deemed one of the best TV shows of all time.

Still an impressive and awe-inspiring adventure, even almost 30 years later. War films have been a staple of cinema since its birth, so you really have to go the extra mile to do something new in that space. 1917 follows two British soldiers in World War I as they traverse war-torn France on a mission to warn an artillery battalion of an impending German ambush. What is astonishing is that the film unfurls https://bestindianews.com/ as though in one continuous take, which is mind blowing, as it moves steadily from moments of mundane ordinariness to intensely terrifying scenes of war. Like every other art, film advances through criticism, by which I don’t mean after-the-fact assessments by people like me, but the skeptical scrutiny that filmmakers bring to bear on the conditions and traditions of their own creative practice.