The 50 Best Movies on Max (Formerly Known As HBO Max), Updated for April 2024

DIRECTOR: James Mangold
STARS: Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin
RATING: PG-13

The cultural legacy of Walk the Line now lives in the shadows of Walk Hard, the spoof film that so expertly skewers the cliches of musician biopics from the aughts. But something can be ripe for praise as well as parody. Thanks to two committed and compassionate performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as Johnny Cash and June Carter, Walk the Line proves there’s nothing wrong with a cliché so long as it’s executed with conviction.

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DIRECTOR: Joel and Ethan Coen
STARS: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed
RATING: R

The question of an absent God looms large throughout the work of the Coen brothers, but none engage with it so openly as A Serious Man. This deeply Jewish parable restages the story of Job in the Minneapolis suburbs as Michael Stuhlbarg’s Larry Gopnik struggles to make sense of the parade of horrible things happening to him for seemingly no reason. The Coens allow us to laugh at both his grim trajectory and the absurdity of trying to assign logic to the events of our lives.

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DIRECTOR: Emma Seligman
STARS: Rachel Sennott, Molly Gordon, Polly Draper
RATING: Not Rated

If emerging from the pandemic has gotten you eager to re-engage with strangers in a crowded space again, let Shiva Baby disavow you of any idealistic notions about these events. Emma Seligman’s tight 77-minute feature debut toggles effortlessly between cringe comedy and horror as a twentysomething slacker navigates a tricky afternoon with friends, family, and ex-lovers. It’s both highly specific to an urban Jewish milieu and yet instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever felt suffocated rather than supported by their closest community.

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DIRECTOR: Darren Aronofsky
STARS: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel
RATING: R

Don’t let the fancy ballet trappings or the Oscar win fool you. Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a werewolf movie through and through, just wrapped in a high-brow setting and suffused with psychosexual thrills. Natalie Portman’s ballerina Nina Sayers seeks mastery over her craft beyond the technical precision she’s mastered. In order to embody this duality, Nina must give herself over to the darker, more impulsive side of her nature. This means surrendering control to a wolf – er, black swan – bursting out from inside of her. Aronofsky elicits screams and swoons alike as he renders his protagonist’s journey to self-actualization in all its promise and peril.

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DIRECTOR: William Friedkin
STARS: Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider, Fernando Rey
RATING: R

Fifty years later, that Best Picture win for The French Connection – a rare victory for an action-thriller – sure has aged well! William Friedkin’s story of two cops determined to bust up a French drug smuggling ring still crackles with craftsmanship in its stunning car chases. Contemporary viewers might also find that the way the film portrays the police’s dogged pursuit of a bust at all costs to contain surprising nuance and perspective as well.

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DIRECTOR: Cameron Crowe
STARS: Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon
RATING: PG-13

Yes, it’s the movie that gave us the phrase “manic pixie dream girl,” but there’s more to Elizabethtown than the cultural punchline it’s become. Filmmaker Cameron Crowe makes unabashedly sincere movies that wear their hearts on their sleeve. If you’re willing to deal with the messiness of emotions like grief and failure faced by Orlando Bloom’s protagonist, you can spot the glimmering diamond hiding in the rough here.

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DIRECTOR: Nicholas Stoller
STARS: Jason Segel, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand, Kristen Bell
RATING: R

We see all of Jason Segel in the simultaneously uproarious and unsettling opening scene of Forgetting Sarah Marshall where his titular girlfriend unceremoniously dumps him. But the moment of exposure doesn’t feel like a gimmick because Segel spends most of the movie emotionally naked as well, openly grappling with his post-breakup insecurities. A less gifted performer would have made the film an insufferable pity party, but Segel’s sincerity tinged with self-awareness makes this an essential deconstruction of the male romantic ego.

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DIRECTOR: David Cronenberg
STARS: Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl
RATING: R

Sometimes a single scene can define a movie’s legacy; for Eastern Promises, that might be Viggo Mortensen’s naked knife fight in a bathhouse. But David Cronenberg’s film is so much more than just this bloody, visceral shock of a moment. This gangster drama about the Russian mafia’s London sex trafficking operation and Naomi Watts’ humble midwife whose curiosity threatens to throw a wrench in their organization is a completely engrossing watch from start to finish.

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DIRECTOR: Nora Ephron
STARS: Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Rosie O’Donnell
RATING: PG

Movies always require a certain amount of suspension of disbelief, but few stretch those boundaries quite like Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle. This analog romance asks us to believe any number of implausible occurrences between Meg Ryan’s lovelorn (but also engaged) reporter Annie and Tom Hanks’ widowed architect Sam after she hears his story on a radio call-in show. Credit to Ephron for rooting the film in such sincerity and emotionality so we buy in and swoon anyways.

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DIRECTOR: Costa-Gavras
STARS: Yves Montand, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Irene Papas
RATING: PG

Political thrillers rarely manage to capture the raw rage of the people quite like Costa-Gavras does in Z. This fictionalization of the fallout from a Greek politician’s assassination is boiling over with a scaldingly potent fury. Expect an experience full of suspense and void of any rosy-eyed notions of false comfort.

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DIRECTOR: Craig Johnson
STARS: Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Luke Wilson
RATING: R

The end of life is just the beginning in Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins, a dramedy featuring SNL stars Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader as suicidal siblings. They both fail in their attempts on the same day, bringing the estranged brother and sister back into each other’s orbit for the first time in a decade. Their misadventures in trying to keep it all together are heartbreaking, heartwarming and – of course – hilarious. It is scientifically impossible not to break into a big grin when the stars lip sync to “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.”

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DIRECTOR: Joel Coen
STARS: Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi
RATING: R

It’s entirely debatable which of about five movies by Joel and Ethan Coen is the brothers’ best. But it’s pretty easy to identify which would serve as their calling card: Fargo. This chilly crime comedy features unforgettable characters and wild (but believable) tonal swings as it charts a tale of greed gone wrong. It’s “Minnesota nice” in a nutshell, especially as epitomized by the sweet yet steely sheriff Marge Gunderson (the inimitable Frances McDormand).

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DIRECTOR: Ellen Hovde, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Muffie Meyer
STARS: Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale, Edith Bouvier Beale
RATING: PG

And you thought your family was weird? Grey Gardens reigns as the champion of cinematic kookiness as a group of documentarians plunges us into the world of two distant cousins of Jackie O. Truth is truly stranger than fiction when it comes to dysfunction between mother and daughter Little and Big Edie, recluses on the slippery slope of isolation to outright entropy.

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DIRECTOR: Bradley Cooper
STARS: Bradley Cooper, Lady Gaga, Sam Elliott
RATING: R

At least for now, HBO Max has access to multiple versions of A Star Is Born. There’s value in seeing them all just to see the evolution of this paradigmatic narrative of fortunes rising and falling in the entertainment industry. But the most recent incarnation is particularly striking because director and star Bradley Cooper cracks one of the toughest conundrums of the story: making us care about the fall from grace of Jackson Maine. By starting him on a downward trajectory from the beginning rather than having his decline come at the decline of an ascendant starlet, this A Star Is Born sells its central tragedy to devastating effect.

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DIRECTOR: Cory Finley
STARS: Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney, Ray Romano
RATING: TV-MA

Move over, All the President’s Men, there’s a new shoe leather investigative journalism movie in town. The less you know about Bad Education before you go in, the better. Prepare yourself to be shocked by the corruption that a simple high school journalism story can reveal — and the hilarious extent to which people will go to avoid accountability for what she uncovers.

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DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman
STARS: Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Bengt Ekerot
RATING: Not Rated

A Swedish movie best known for a pale-faced Grim Reaper playing chess against a soul he hopes to take might not sound like the most pleasant viewing experience. Yet Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal does not get nearly enough credit for having a real funny bone. The humor is quite dark, of course, given that it’s a film about God and death. But just because something plumbs the depths of some of the most complex ontological questions does not mean it’s an entirely heady, enjoyable experience!

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DIRECTOR: Paul Greengrass
STARS: Matt Damon, Joan Allen, David Straithairn
RATING: PG-13

Pretty much every action movie owes a huge debt – and an apology, if we’re being honest – to Paul Greengrass for pioneering the rapid-cut action aesthetic in the Bourne franchise. The series took the style of quick, disorienting edits as a way to convey disorientation on a physiological level but still tell a coherent story within a sequence. It’s worth returning to the pinnacle of the original trilogy, 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum to see just how effective this technique can be when deployed with intention rather than as lazy shorthand for chaos.

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DIRECTOR: Alfonso Cuarón
STARS: Daniel Radcliffe, Gary Oldman, David Thewlis, Emma Thompson
RATING: PG

You can make an argument for just about any Harry Potter movie as the best, but it’s pretty hard to dispute that Prisoner of Azkaban is the most important of them all. Director Alfonso Cuarón’s infusion of dark ambiance and devilish humor helped the series graduate from kiddie literature into the stuff of serious adult drama. Rather than relegate it forever to the dustbin of fantasy, he grounded it in the realities of teenage anxieties and growing pangs. It’s got a wicked sense of style and fun that set the tone for all that was to come from the franchise on-screen.

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DIRECTOR: Hiyao Miyazaki
STARS: Rumi Hiiragi, Miyu Irino, Mari Natsuki
RATING: PG

Pixar isn’t the only animation house capable of inspiring pathos with their imagination. HBO Max bought the streaming rights for the movies of Japan’s Studio Ghibli, which had all been previously unavailable online. If you don’t know where to start taking advantage of this opportunity, try Spirited Away. The story of a young girl, Chirono, who must rescue her parents from a world of spirits recalls the childhood classics that convinced us we could do anything.

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DIRECTOR: D.A. Pennebaker
STARS: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding
RATING: Not Rated

D.A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop might be the closest thing to a time machine you can get from home. Press play to be transported back to the Summer of Love and experience the music festival that brought together Simon and Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and more. The real highlight, though, is Otis Redding’s sublime rendering of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” He’s shot in silhouette against the glare of the blinding spotlight, and the effect is nothing short of transcendent.

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DIRECTOR: Joel Zwick
STARS: Nia Vardalos, John Corbett, Michael Constantine
RATING: PG

There may never be another word-of-mouth cultural sensation like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, a film that rose from a modest limited release to a box office sensation with months of staying power. It’s the perfect movie to stop and watch anytime it plays on TV because you’re never more than a minute away from a really solid joke or gag. But it’s also great to watch straight-through on streaming to connect with the heart and soul of Nia Vardalos’ script. This is an unforgettable story about how we reconcile the people and culture who made us with the person we want to become when those two things appear to be in conflict.

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DIRECTOR: Michael McCullers
STARS: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Dax Shepard
RATING: PG-13

The comedic chemistry of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s on-screen pairing makes it so that, as the old adage goes, they could make reading the phonebook entertaining. But luckily they have much better material in Baby Mama as a single career woman desperate to have a baby (Fey) and the hapless surrogate whose womb enables her dream to become a reality (Poehler). This mom-com is packed to the brim with great one-liners, zany supporting characters, and hilarious gags.

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DIRECTOR: Alexander Payne
STARS: Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Klein
RATING: R

The best movie about the 2016 election was actually made in 1999. When smug Mr. McAllister (Matthew Broderick) just can’t stomach the ascendancy of overqualified Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) to win student body president, he throws a wrench in the democratic system by recruiting an airheaded jock (Klein) to thwart her candidacy. This vicious, delicious satire of American politics and campaigning has not lost one iota of bite or humor over two decades later.

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DIRECTOR: Yasujiro Ozu
STARS: Chishû Ryû, Chieko Higashiyama, Sô Yamamura
RATING: Not Rated

“There is only one place for the camera,” said Martin Scorsese. “That’s the right place.” It’s astonishing to watch Yasuiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story and realize the camera is in the right place for the entirety of the film, perfectly calibrating its physical and emotional distance from the characters. This wistful story of two grandparents visiting their family will both warm and break your heart.

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DIRECTOR: Michael Curtiz
STARS: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid
RATING: PG

Whether it’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship or you’re asking Sam to play it again, Casablanca always satisfies. This is the Hollywood studio apparatus working at its finest. From the iconic quotes to the passionate performances, this is pure excellence.

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DIRECTORS: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie
STARS: Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie, Jennifer Jason Leigh
RATING: R

Most people probably know the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time because of that cursed meme featuring a gnarly-looking Robert Pattinson standing awkwardly in a kitchen. Let’s change that and get people to recognize the film for its value as a gripping, propulsive thriller. The title is a bit of a misnomer – Good Time applies to the audience but certainly not for Pattinson’s Connie, a slimy criminal evading consequences by the seat of his pants. He’s on a noble mission to protect his developmentally disabled brother, but the way he’ll use anyone in his path to achieve those ends makes him quite the conundrum as a protagonist. This night from hell through the grimy corners of contemporary New York makes for quite the ride.

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DIRECTOR: Danny Boyle
STAR: James Franco
RATING: R

The survival drama 127 Hours first made headlines on the festival circuit for multiple people passing out during the film’s graphic amputation, the climactic scene where James Franco’s Aron Ralston frees himself from the boulder crushing his arm. (Fun fact: Fox Searchlight even sent out “I Kept My Eyes Open for 127 Hours” shirts to people who made it through the scene.) But there’s more to the film than shock value. Danny Boyle’s visually inventive work turns one man’s miserable misadventure into an invitation for us all to rediscover our humanity and priorities. It’s nothing short of ebullient.

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DIRECTOR: Jonah Hill
STARS: Sunny Suljic, Lucas Hedges, Katherine Waterston
RATING: R

We can’t go back to our younger years, but Jonah Hill’s mid90s gives us the next best thing by bottling up the excitement of coming-of-age in a movie. Though set in the specific milieu of 1990s skateboarding culture, the joys of watching Sunny Suljic’s thirteen-year-old Stevie find his people prove raucously resonant across a wide range of experiences. Hill captures something soaring about the magic of youthful discovery here, even as he documents the growing pains that come along with the fits and starts that accompany the winding journey to maturity.

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DIRECTOR: Spike Lee
STARS: David Byrne
RATING: TV-14

I am not ashamed to admit that I got up and danced around my room when I watched Spike Lee’s stunningly filmed version of the Broadway show David Byrne’s American Utopia. The Talking Heads music would be great all on its own, sure, but Byrne weaves into a hopeful story that does not make choosing optimism seem naive. Try to stay in your seat, I dare you.

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DIRECTOR: François Truffaut
STARS: Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, Nicole Berger
RATING: Not Rated

If you’re just trying to hit the movies you’d watch an intro film class, the Truffaut film to watch is The 400 Blows. But if you want to dig a little deeper into one of the titans of the French New Wave, the move has to be Shoot the Piano Player, his irreverent mashup of the comedy and gangster flick. This hilarious, inventive movie ought to dispel any mistaken notions that watching old foreign films is some somber chore.

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DIRECTOR: Duncan Jones
STARS: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga
RATING: PG-13

His mission is simple yet complex: Jake Gyllenhaal’s soldier Colter Stevens must keep replaying an eight-minute simulation of a train bombing until he can identify the terrorist responsible for it. Yet as Source Code barrels on toward its destination, Stevens comes to question the design of the experiment – and whether he has any willpower to change the outcome of the past. Duncan Jones’ time-travel thriller is a heady, hearty adventure that deftly deconstructs the very time loop plot gambit it so flawlessly portrays.

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DIRECTOR: Billy Wilder
STARS: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon
RATING: Not Rated

Don’t let the black & white fool you into thinking Some Like It Hot is mired in mothballs. The movie named by the American Film Institute as the country’s greatest comedy still retains all its laughter-generating capacity more than 60 years after its release. From its wild concept of two musicians disguising themselves as women in an all-girl group to escape Chicago gangster to its emphatic final line, Billy Wilder’s classic is still a laugh riot from start to finish.

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DIRECTOR: Peter Jackson
STARS: Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen
RATING: PG-13

“Epic” only scratches the surface of Peter Jackson’s work bringing The Lord of the Rings to life on screen. Cinema at this scale and scope never ceases to amaze. The Fellowship of the Ring, the series’ kickoff, achieves a remarkable balance between easing us into the world of Middle Earth, introducing the characters and providing a taste of the heavily grounded fantasy action that would follow.

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DIRECTOR: Randal Kleiser
STARS: John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Stockard Channing
RATING: PG

Do the values of this teen movie hold up? Not really. Grease basically sends the message to girls that they should erase their personality and subsume their wants into being exactly the kind of beauty and personality their male romantic interest wants. So why is it still so much fun? This nostalgic musical uses a soundtrack of show-stopping tunes for a ‘50s that had past – and perhaps never was. The film stands a reminder that it’s possible to enjoy something you disagree with, and sometimes the most interest viewing comes from wrestling with that kind of tension.

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DIRECTOR: Jason Reitman
STARS: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick
RATING: R

The passing of the Great Recession might have dulled some of the topical sting from Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, an irony-rich dramedy about a man who finds professional satisfaction in firing people he doesn’t know. But separated from the immediate context of its release, the poignancy of its emotional story really shines. Its themes about making connections and finding the humanity in unexpected places have a timeless resonance.

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DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan
STARS: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart
RATING: PG-13

There are two distinct periods in cinematic adaptations of comic books. There’s the period before The Dark Knight, when people didn’t know it was possible to scale such an imposing height, and the period after The Dark Knight, when people didn’t know it would be so hard to reach such a height again. Anchored in Heath Ledger’s harrowing incarnation of terroristic mayhem as the Joker, The Dark Knight is the definitive piece of post-9/11 cinema. In the Trojan horse or superhero IP, Christopher Nolan stages a society-wide tussle over the limitations of lawfulness on the grandest canvas he could find. We’re still feeling the reverberations today.

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DIRECTOR: Quentin Tarantino
STARS: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis
RATING: R

More than a quarter-century of cinematic imitators, college dorm room posters, and graphic tees have not knocked the shine off the classic. Tarantino’s generation-defining postmodern pastiche Pulp Fiction remains as vital and exciting as ever. The snappy dialogue still crackles; the eclectic soundtrack still slaps; the ingenious plotting still exhilarates.

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DIRECTOR: Stanley Kubrick
STARS: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood
RATING: G

Over 50 years later, the wonder and awe of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 remains intact. The movie that made all your favorite directors want to make movies is a beguiling mystery box, indescribable as it conjures the ineffable. The visuals have not aged a bit, nor has the film’s understanding of the twinned promise and peril in the vastness of outer space.

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DIRECTOR: Robert Luketic
STARS: Reese Witherspoon, Selma Blair, Luke Wilson
RATING: PG-13

A look back at turn-of-the-millennium comedies often yields cringe-worthy results, but one that has aged quite flawlessly is Legally Blonde. This female empowerment tale of Elle Woods rising from flippant fashionista to high-powered Harvard Law graduate is remarkably ahead of its time in many ways. Here is a comedy that refuses to make easy punchlines out of its protagonist’s intelligence or insist she has to change herself completely to ascend to her position; the prowess and possibility has been within Reese Witherspoon’s iconic character all along. (And the film does not pit her against other women to achieve her success, either!)

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DIRECTOR: David Lynch
STARS: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart
RATING: Not Rated

Want to get into the surrealistic stylings of David Lynch but find Twin Peaks and Mulholland Dr. too impenetrable? Try his feature debut Eraserhead, a perfect mixture of artful and accessible. You don’t need to understand every image for it’s overwhelming terror about being a new parent to permeate your soul. Lynch’s images might be abstract, but their impact is chillingly real.

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DIRECTOR: Jonathan Glazer
STARS: Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller
RATING: PG-13

This is not your average WWII or Holocaust movie. The Zone of Interest isn’t about what you see — it’s about what you don’t. Jonathan Glazer’s masterful depiction of Auschwitz as seen from the perspective of the perpetrators forces us to conjure a vision of horror from nothing but staccato bursts of sound coming from inside. Our imagination can take us to some terrifying places, revealing the depravity of humanity as it remains still in the face of suffering.

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DIRECTORS: Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen
STARS: Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds
RATING: G

No movie about the movies captures the magic of the medium quite like Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain. This Technicolor musical captures all of Hollywood’s anxieties as it transitioned from silent films to talkies right when the ascendancy of television proved an existential threat to movies. One glimpse of Kelly’s exuberant dancing is all it takes to have your faith renewed in the enduring viability of cinema.

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DIRECTOR: Peter Bodganovich
STARS: Ryan O’Neal, Tatum O’Neal, Madeline Kahn
RATING: PG

Fans of schemers and swindlers on-screen owe it to themselves to watch Paper Moon. This comedy set in Depression-era America embeds us in the grift of two-bit hustler Moze Pray and pint-sized Addie Loggins, a young girl who may or may not be his daughter. The charms of real-life father and child Ryan and Tatum O’Neal are formidable here, and their sweetness provides a powerful countercurrent to the sourness of their scamming characters.

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DIRECTOR: Greta Gerwig
STARS: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera
RATING: PG-13

Even apart from the “Barbenheimer” hype, Barbie still hits. It’s an intelligent, entertaining blockbuster that provides a sugar rush of nostalgia followed by a hearty helping of vegetables in the form of incisive cultural commentary. Filmmaker Greta Gerwig once again flips familiar narratives and figures on their head to explore what they say about our society — and, by extension, us. Margot Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie” and Ryan Gosling’s (just) Ken are ingenious vehicles to explore the traps of pre-set gender roles and the necessity of claiming one’s own identity and humanity.

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DIRECTOR: Denis Villeneuve
STARS: Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac
RATING: PG-13

Dessert POWER! It feels like a shame to watch Denis Villeneuve’s fantasy epic Dune in any environment other than a giant cinema, but the grandeur of his vision is sure to translate on a screen of any size. This is classical hero’s journey monomyth as Timothée Chalamet’s young Paul Atreides comes to realize the full weight of his messianic potential. This is the rare work of cinema that truly aspires to inspire shock, awe, and wonder – and Villeneuve’s engrossing universe commands that respect.

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DIRECTOR: David Frankel
STARS: Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt
RATING: PG-13

With a decade and change of distance, it’s safe to say The Devil Wears Prada is the millennial workplace movie. The adventures of Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs as she tries to please her demanding and mercurial boss, Meryl Streep’s sinfully savvy magazine editor Miranda Priestly, are a crash-course in how to navigate the corporate world. The lessons Andy learns as she tries to find that delicate balance between work and life are timely to the emergence of a new generation in the workforce and also timeless to mull over. That’s all.

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DIRECTORS: Lana and Lily Wachowski
STARS: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss
RATING: R

What the Wachowskis achieved with The Matrix is a feat rarely replicated in Hollywood – they changed the medium from both a visual and an intellectual standpoint. Where would we be without the heightened reality of “bullet time,” their surreal effect that slows down fast-moving objects to make their whirring motion visible? Similarly, where would we be without the film introducing ideas about simulated reality into the mainstream via the easily digestible (and just as easily misunderstood) concept of the red pill? It was a revolution and remains a revelation.

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DIRECTOR: David Fincher
STARS: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake
RATING: PG-13

The movie of a generation, nothing less. Aaron Sorkin’s airtight script for The Social Network restages the founding of Facebook as both the stuff of Greek drama and hopelessly millennial. David Fincher’s execution effectively stages these grand stakes into something that feels era-defining in all its provocative contradictions. The term “masterpiece” gets thrown around far too loosely these days, and it cheapens the label for films like this that actually deserve it.

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DIRECTOR: Wong Kar-Wai
STARS: Tony Chiu-Wai Leung, Maggie Cheung
RATING: PG

Wong Kar-Wai’s tale of doomed would-be lovers in 1960s Hong Kong may well be a perfect movie. The sumptuous In the Mood for Love drips with longing as two neighbors who realize their spouses are cheating on them struggle to sublimate their own feelings for one another. With each subsequent needle drop of the plucky violin tune “Yumeji’s Theme,” Wong dials up the passion and the devastation.

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DIRECTOR: Charlie Chaplin
STARS: Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard
RATING: G

Cinema may never produce a filmmaker who understands the connection between form and content like Charlie Chaplin. His final official outing as his iconic Little Tramp character, Modern Times, is the very definition of a classic. This silent comedy of Depression-era woes was timely for its release, but it endures because it’s a timeless satire of industrial society. This winning movie warms the heart as it places fire in the belly to strive for a world where all humans and their work have dignity.

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