Initially released in 1932, Japanese director Yasujirô Ozu's silent film was digitally restored with retranslated subtitles in 2010. The film tells the story of a family through the perspective of two young brothers who are disappointed with their father's submissive behavior at work. After viewing their father in a different light, the boys shed some of their innocent views of the world.

Pawel Pawlikowski's black-and-white film is set in 1962 Poland. A young woman is about to take her vows to become a nun—when she discovers from her only living relative that she is Jewish.

In "Ikiru," a Tokyo bureaucrat searches for meaning after being diagnosed with terminal cancer and struggling to maintain a relationship with his son. The film was partially inspired by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy's novella "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." However, Kurosawa also uses "Ikiru" (film article link)to critique issues like contemporary Japanese bureaucracy and the decay of the traditional Japanese family structure, while remaining a poignant exploration of what it means to be alive.

Wong Kar-wai's elegiac, gorgeously rendered romance is a masterpiece of love and longing. A man and a woman who live in the same apartment complex discover that their spouses are having an affair and then fall for one another. Set in 1960s Hong Kong, costumes and set details evoke the beauty of the era while also expressing lurking emotions beneath the lush surface color.

There are many stories of struggling artists, but this one focuses on a fictional folk singer named Llewyn Davis inarticle link)1961 Greenwich Village. The film stars Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, and John Goodman. The Coen brothers, who wrote, directed, and co-produced the film, were inspired by the story of a musician named Dave Van Ronk.

Representing yet another home run from Pixar, this 2015 animated feature primarily takes place within the mind of a young girl named Riley. After Riley's family moves to a new city, she suffers a range of emotions, each personified by a specific character. As Riley seeks mental balance in her new surroundings, her emotions embark on a harrowing journey of epic proportion. Featured in the film are the voices of comedic talents like Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling, and Lewis Black. The film became the seventh highest-grossing film of 2015, raking in $858.8 million worldwide.

The silent classic starring Lillian Gish visits four historical eras—ancient Babylon, Judea, 16th-century France, and early 20th-century America—where characters suffered under stifling social and political beliefs and systems. D.W. Griffith made the movie a year after his epic (film article link)"The Birth of a Nation" was met with criticism over its racism and its sympathetic attitudes toward the institutions of slavery, white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan.

Elio Petri's critically acclaimed Italian police thriller is both a how-to on getting away with murder and a scathing critique of institutional corruption. After a detective kills his mistress, he's put in charge of the case in this taut, stylish drama that investigates a crime and Italy's systems of power.

Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert star in this romantic comedy directed and co-produced by Frank Capra. Colbert plays a spoiled heiress who has eloped against her parents' wishes. Gable plays a journalist who attempts to help Colbert's character reunite with her husband as long as he gets a story out of it. It was the first film to win all five major Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

This 1946 classic might make for ideal holiday viewing, but the truth is there's never a wrong time to watch it. Directed by Frank Capra and starring James Stewart, "It's a Wonderful Life" shows a businessman (Stewart) what life would have been like had he never existed. To think, the movie itself wouldn't exist had a frustrated writer named Philip Van Doren Stern not sent his rejected short story out as a Christmas card to all his friends and loved ones. The classic earned five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.

This black comedy-drama was written, directed, animated, and produced by Don Hertzfeldt. The film is split into three chapters that follow a stick figure named Bill who has an unknown illness that causes memory lapses and strange visions. The visuals may be simple, but emotions still come through.

After the Iranian government (film article link)banned Jafar Panahi from making films and traveling in 2010, the director side-stepped the censorship by making this funny and captivating movie addressing social issues in Iran while posing as a taxi driver. This was Panahi's third feature he filmed after the ban.

In this paradigm of slow cinema, widowed housewife and mother Jeanne Dielman finds ways to pass the time in her home in Brussels, doing menial chores and errands and occasional sex work on the side. But slight changes in Jeanne's routine domino to an irrevocable climax. Chantal Akerman's film recently (film article link)clinched the top spot in the esteemed 2022 Sight & Sound "Greatest Films of All Time" poll.

Roberto Rossellini was a master of the Italian neorealist cinema, but in this drama, he turned to an upper-crust British couple on holiday in Naples who drift apart. Critics found it a modern transformation of the director's previous style into a work that (film article link)explores the mysterious inner lives of the married couple at its center.

This prime example of French new wave cinema tells the story of an ill-fated love triangle between Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre), his Austrian friend Jules (Oskar Werner), and Jules' eventual wife Catherine (Jeanne Moreau). "Jules and Jim" is loosely based on the 1953 autobiographical novel by Henri-Pierre Roché, and Truffaut befriended the author before his eventual death. The movie was an (film article link)inspiration for Martin Scorsese when making "Goodfellas," as he admired its "punk attitude."

Primarily shot by writer/director Charles Burnett in 1972 and 1973, this compelling drama wasn't released to the public until 2007, since that was (film article link)how long it took to clear all the music rights. Brimming with both vision and relevancy, the film centers on an African American slaughterhouse worker who experiences dissatisfaction in both his professional and personal life. Told through a series of episodic events, the movie pits its protagonist against a host of obstacles and temptations, with all the action taking place in L.A.'s Watts neighborhood.

This stylish police procedural updates film noir—a genre exposing the dark underbelly of glitz and the corruption beneath law and order. The ensemble cast of Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, Kim Basinger, James Cromwell, and Danny DeVito perform in this classic noir plotline where darkness seduces, and no one's morals make it out unscathed.

French auteur Robert Bresson was 80 years old when he directed this spare, contemplative drama based on a Leo Tolstoy novella that examines the soul of criminality. The film follows a random but harrowing series of events in which an otherwise average family man gets pulled into a crime, is convicted, and then proceeds further down what seems an inevitably dark path.

Spanning nearly three hours, "La Dolce Vita" functions as an early critique of gossip and celebrity culture via mid-20th century Rome. The film follows celebrity reporter Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) as he lurks in the periphery of the spotlight, caught between his questionable professional tendencies and his own sneaking suspicion that the glamorous upper class isn't all it's cut out to be. "La Dolce Vita" was nominated for four Oscars: Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Costume Design, and Best Art Direction, winning for Costume Design.

Modernizing the traditional musical, "La La Land" takes place in the city of dreams, and tells the story of two aspiring artists, one a musician (Ryan Gosling) and the other an actress (Emma Stone). Kicking the film off on a high note is a six-minute song-and-dance number that goes down in the middle of freeway traffic. Filming the scene took two days and involved stitching (film article link)three consecutive shots together to create what appeared to be a single take. Among the movie's 14 Academy Award nominations, Stone took home the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal in the film, and Damien Chazelle for Best Director, making him the youngest winner at 32.

Writer Greta Gerwig makes her directorial debut with a film dubbed (film article link)exquisite by New Yorker critic Richard Brody. "Lady Bird," a script loosely based on Gerwig's own life, tells the story of an angsty teenager (Saoirse Ronan) at a California Catholic school and explores her relationship with her mother (Laurie Metcalf). The feature was nominated for five Academy Awards and won Golden Globes for Best Actress and Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy).

Noriko is a young, single woman living with her widowed father. She is perfectly happy with the pair's arrangement and has no plans to marry. Her father, however, begins to worry about his only child being alone for her whole life and attempts to arrange a marriage between her and a suitor. "Late Spring" is the first film in Ozu's "Noriko Trilogy," succeeded by "Early Summer" and "Tokyo Story," all of which star unique versions of the character of Noriko, played by Setsuko Hara.

Inspired by the life of iconic English officer T.E. Lawrence and his 1963 book "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," David Lean's legendary epic stars Peter O'Toole as Lawrence himself. The film tells the story of how he united Arab tribes against the Ottoman Turks during World War II. Widely recognized as one of the most influential movies ever made, it won seven Oscars, including Best Picture.

This bleak and brooding drama takes place in a coastal town near the Barents Sea, where local politics simmer with an underbelly of corruption. Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev infuses his film with poetics of the ordinary which includes whale bones on a beach and blighted properties. "Leviathan" follows one family's attempt to save their home as they tangle with the local courts amid a bureaucratic nightmare.

Set in 1973, "Licorice Pizza" chronicles a budding relationship between two young people. Between its ensemble cast (Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, and Bradley Cooper) and controversial plotline (the primary romance is between a 15-year-old boy and a 25-year-old woman), the film was popular with audiences when it hit theaters in 2021.

This British comedy directed by Mike Leigh takes a look at the lives of a lower-middle-class family in suburban London. (film article link)Los Angeles Times writer Kenneth Turan said the film "has the wild, brazen, anything-goes energy of a 2-year-old."

Greta Gerwig's 2019 take on "Little Women" is the seventh movie interpretation of the Louisa May Alcott novel, though its Oscar winCostume Design) and six total nominations (Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score), underlines its impact and universal praise. The March sisters are played by Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlen, and their performances elevated this movie from an iteration to one of the best films of the century.

The last film in the (film article link)"Lord of the Rings" trilogy won 11 Academy Awards, the third movie ever to do so, along with "Titanic" and "Ben-Hur." It is the most Oscar-nominated movie in history to win in every single one of its nomination categories.

Based on Jane Austen's epistolary novel "Lady Susan," this period comedy follows a recently widowed woman as she attempts to secure suitable husbands for her daughter and herself. Kate Beckinsale stars as the titular Lady Susan, with Chloë Sevigny as her American best friend Mrs. Johnson. Unlike other Austen titles, "Lady Susan" has only seen a handful of screen adaptations over the years, with critics widely declaring this 2016 film to be among the best of them.

A dashing French painter (Charles Boyer) and an American singer (Irene Dunne) meet and fall in love on an ocean cruise, only to learn that the other is engaged to marry someone else. The movie was remade in 1957 as "An Affair to Remember" with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr and again in 1994 as "Love Affair" with Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, and Katharine Hepburn.

Satirizing Russian literature, "Love and Death" sees Woody Allen starring as a 19th-century Russian who falls in love with his married cousin (Diane Keaton). Allen wins a duel against a cuckolded husband and is then asked to join a plot to kill Napoleon.

When tragedy strikes a young Japanese wife and new mother, she loses her husband, and her grief forces her into a reclusive solitude. That is until a widower attempts to befriend her and bring her back out into the world. "Marborosi" was the first narrative film from director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose previous work up until that point had been in documentary filmmaking.

The film that spawned thousands of Halloween costumes, "Mad Max: Fury Road" has become one of the most famous post-apocalyptic action movie franchises. Starring Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy, the story chronicles a man who teams up with a band of women fleeing a psychopathic tyrant.

Dramas don't get much more somber than this one from acclaimed writer and director Kenneth Lonergan. In the film, a brooding handyman (Casey Affleck) is given guardianship over his 16-year-old nephew and thereby forced to confront some traumatic demons from his own past. Michelle Williams co-stars and turns in one of her finest performances. The film took home two Academy Awards, including one for Affleck as Best Actor, as well as Best Original Screenplay.

The intensity of the lead performances in "Marriage Story" adds all-too-relatable anguish to this divorce drama. Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver play creatives—she's an actor, and he's a playwright—who embark on a blistering split. Laura Dern won Best Supporting Actress for her role as a stealthy attorney who goes for the jugular with ease.

Jean Pierre-Léaud stars as Paul, a young man who takes up a job as an interviewer for a market research company in Paris. He moves in with an aspiring singer and her two roommates and grows increasingly disillusioned with the commercialization of the world around him. Told through 15 disconnected vignettes, "Masculine Feminine" features the first credited acting role of French singer Chantal Goya.

This gritty 1973 movie wasn't director Martin Scorsese's first film, but it might as well have been. Made on a shoestring budget of just $500,000 ((film article link)half of which reportedly went toward the soundtrack), "Mean Streets" follows a small-time criminal named Charlie (Harvey Keitel) who struggles to reconcile his moral inclinations with his dangerous lifestyle. This film not only marked the first of many collaborations between Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro, but it furthermore cemented their respective statuses as veritable cinematic forces.

This Christmas musical stars Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien, the latter of whom was awarded a special Juvenile Oscar for her performance. Garland and Vincente Minnelli met in the making of the film and soon were married. He was nearly 20 years older than she was, and by 1949, the pair had separated.

The latest effort from award-winning director Apichatpong Weerasethakul was played exclusively in theaters witharticle link)no plan of ever arriving on video-on-demand platforms. It tells the story of a Scottish expatriate (Tilda Swinton) who experiences mysterious sensations while traveling in Colombia. General moviegoers were less receptive than critics, hence the film's current (film article link)IMDb user rating of 6.6.

One of the first feature-length sci-fi films made, "Metropolis" is as influential a genre film as they come. The German silent film takes place in a futuristic city sharply divided by class, as the city planner's son Freder (Gustav Fröhlich) becomes involved in an effort to unite its divided people. In 2001, it became the first film to be inscribed on (film article link)UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

This heartwarming Christmas standard stars Maureen O'Hara as Doris Walker, Natalie Wood at age 8 as her daughter, and Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle. Wood said in her biography that she believed Gwenn was Santa Claus until she saw him without a beard when filming had ended. The movie was originally called "The Big Heart" and was released with that name in Britain, but the title was changed for the American audience.

Charlie Chaplin reprised his role as The Tramp for this 1936 masterpiece, which stuck to silent-era traditions despite being made in the age of talkies. In the film, The Tramp struggles to make ends meet in a highly industrialized world, famously slithering his way through the gears of a machine during one of the era's most epochal scenes. Chaplin was reportedly inspired to make the film after talking about machinery and technology with Mahatma Gandhi. "Modern Times" was one of the earliest films chosen by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1989.

Filled with Monty Python's signature British humor, this feature film was a "marvelously particular kind of lunatic endeavor," according to a (film article link)New York Times review. As the name suggests, the comedy follows King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table as they search for the Holy Grail.

Moolaadé confronts the tradition of female genital mutilation, telling the fictional story of a woman who shelters a group of girls fleeing the procedure. The film, set in Burkina Faso, was made byarticle link)Senegalese writer and director Ousmane Sembène.

Divided into three segments, this prescient drama follows young Chiron (Ashton Sanders) on his path to self-discovery. Brought to life with vivid color and precision, the story grapples with themes of poverty and identity. "Moonlight" won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Mahershala Ali made history as the first Muslim to win an acting Oscar.

Proving that audiences and critics don't always see eye to eye, this 2014 biographical drama from Mike Leigh is almost universally heralded by (film article link)professional reviewers but completely hit or miss among general moviegoers. Chronicled in the film are the life and times of eccentric British painter J.M.W. Turner, played by Timothy Spall. Haunted by the death of his father and in possession of great talent, Turner engages in a range of controversial exploits, often to the disapproval of others.

The musical classic stars Sir Rex Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins whose task is to transform a Cockney working-class girl—Eliza Doolittle played by Audrey Hepburn—into a presentable member of high society. Actors James Cagney, Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, Peter O'Toole, and Sir Michael Redgrave all were considered for the male lead before Harrison, who played Higgins on Broadway, was selected. Hepburn took lessons with a vocal coach and expected to do her own singing, but in the end most of her numbers were dubbed.

Daniel Day-Lewis won his first Academy Award for his portrayal of real-life Irishman Christy Brown, a working-class man with cerebral palsy who became a well-known artist. Based on Brown's 1954 memoir of the same name, "My Left Foot" received five Oscar nominations, with Day-Lewis and co-star Brenda Fricker taking home acting trophies. A (film article link)notorious method actor, Day-Lewis refused to do anything Brown wouldn't do, living in a wheelchair and asking crew members for help eating.

Considered one of the greatest animated films of all time, "My Neighbor Totoro" takes place in the Japanese countryside during the late 1950s, following two young sisters who intermingle with fantastical spirits they meet in their home and the nearby woods. The enchanting, visionary film by Hayao Miyazaki captures the wonders and difficulties of childhood through an encounter with the forest king, Totoro, who resembles an adorable, enormous plush toy.

This film's massive ensemble cast includes the likes of Ned Beatty, Lily Tomlin, Keith Carradine, Henry Gibson, Karen Black, Geraldine Chaplin, Michael Murphy, Elliott Gould, and Julie Christie. Most of the movie was improvised, with the actors writing and performing their own songs. The movie was nominated for a record 11 Golden Globes.