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 http://moviesnreviews.com/ 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.

• 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.
• His style and substance comes to the fore with In the Mood For Love, a slow-burn romance about two people who connect over their spouses’ affairs.
• In Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson doesn’t just restore never-before-seen footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival; he expertly cuts it together to create a lively and passionate tapestry of Black America at a turning point.
• This quartet splits up into couples to achieve their covert aim, only to be immediately and constantly beset by encounters with comrades who may be double (or triple?) agents.
• In some cases — Scorsese, Spike, Godard — we felt their best work was pre-21st century.

—and its central detective, Benoit Blanc, played by an unrestrained and over-the-top Daniel Craig, whose exaggerated Southern drawl is both ridiculous and strangely endearing. Ben Affleck gives arguably one of his best performances in Gone Girl, the adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s thriller about Nick Dunne (Affleck), a man who finds himself as suspect number 1 after his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike) disappears. Streaming services continued their dominant ascension with The Power of the Dog, Coda, and The Mitchells vs. the Machines all placing in the top 10 Best Movies overall of 2021.

A murder mystery where the mystery is beside the point, The Thin Man is all about watching William Powell and Myra Loy play off each other like expert tennis players—his Nick Charles lobs up some snark, her Nora Charles returns with a witticism. Nick is a semi-retired private detective, and Nora is his wealthy, restless wife. This is a classic that feels more modern and progressive than its 1930s birthdate would initially suggest. A young boy named Elliot from a nondescript California suburb befriends a squat—but friendly—alien left behind on Earth, and together the two try to reunite the straggler with his people. Flying a bike across the moon, to the uplifting score, to the repeated phrase “E.T. Just have tissues handy, because this sad movie goes straight for the heartstrings.

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.

Duke takes what could have been a standard villain and makes him something truly memorable. This is one of director Spike Lee’s greatest and most iconic movies, with an incredible cast (including a then-unknown Samuel L. Jackson). Though it was made just two years after Star Wars, Alien couldn’t be any more different. A dark and paranoid horror thriller set in space, it’s about a small crew on a merchant vessel that accidentally picks up a parasitic alien organism which proceeds to stalk and kill them one by one. It’s infamous for the “chest burster” scene (which still makes you jump, even when you know it’s coming), and for introducing Sigourney Weaver’s iconic Ellen Ripley. There have been sequels and spin-offs, but the original remains a tight and terrifying classic.

Everything that comes to mind when you hear the words “Martin Scorsese movie” is encapsulated in Goodfellas. Based on the true life story of former mobster turned informant Henry Hill, Goodfellas is bolstered by a trifecta of lead performances from Ray Liotta, Robert DeNiro, and of course, Joe Pesci, whose “I’m funny how? Gripping, expansive, even hilariously (but darkly) funny at times, it’s Scorsese at his finest.

However, the correct translation is also a bit of a spoiler—knowing there’s going to be more than one thief sets you up (even unwittingly) for the film’s incredibly moving and disheartening ending. A classic of post-war Italian neo-realism, Bicycle Thieves is about a down-on-his-luck man raising a son who needs a bicycle to eke out his meager living. When it’s stolen, he goes on an increasingly frantic search to track it down. It is really hard to sum up Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but at its core it’s about a man named Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and a woman named Clementine Krucynski (Kate Winslet) who, after breaking up, have medical procedures to remove their memories of each other. The depiction of memory and memory loss is expressed through mind-blowing visual tricks and suggestion. Carrey and Winslet seemingly swap personas—this time, Carrey is the dramatic heavyweight and Winslet is the flippant wildcard.

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.

The “O Captain, My Captain” closing moment is an all-time reach-for-the-Kleenex scene. It’s rare to have no idea where a movie is going or what’s going to happen, but to still understand that you’re watching pieces being set up to collapse spectacularly. That’s what it’s like watching Korean director Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite, a social satire that is simultaneously funny and sad and genuinely surprising. The less you know going in, the better, so you can fully appreciate the inevitable roll towards tragedy, and the completely head-spinning twists and turns along the way. It’s almost a cliché in and of itself to include Citizen Kane on a list of best movies, but…there’s a reason why it’s always there.

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.

What’s amazing (and startling) about this satirical movie from the ’70s is not just that it’s still relevant, but that it may be even more so now. Set out to memorialize the glories of an embattled art form, and you may end up contributing to its obituary. Not that I think the movies are dying, any more than they have been dying for the past 90 years or so, as they were fatally menaced by sound, television, corporate greed and audience philistinism. The movies are always turning into something else, even as they drag their history along with them. Old styles persist alongside new possibilities, and originality finds a way to assert itself amid the thunderous conformity of the franchises and the howling wilderness of the algorithms. Neither does the proliferation of movies that evoke the wonder and glory of the movie past.