100 best movies under 100 minutes

- Director: Abderrahmane Sissako
- Stacker score: 88
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 7.1
- Runtime: 96 min

Sharia law goes into effect in Timbuktu, Mali, and the local villagers must contend with a harsh new regime. Malian director Abderrahmane Sissako's acclaimed film uses a spare, direct style to examine the terrors that invade everyday life under extreme rules that don't allow music or sports. The story centers on a cattleman and his family caught up in a simple conflict that leads to a series of devastating consequences.

- Directors: Ron Clements, John Musker
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 83 min

Disney's animated mega-hit gives the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale a glamorous and cheerful revamp complete with a new plotline and requisite happy ending. Lively animation accompanies a peppy soundtrack, including the Oscar-winning original score and sing-a-long favorites such as "Under the Sea" and "Part of Your World." Pat Carroll gave voice to the throaty villainous Ursula in a memorable performance.

- Director: Danny Boyle
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 83
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 93 min

Ewan McGregor, in an early-career film role, plays a heroin addict, Renton, who narrates his drug-fueled adventures as he tries to come clean in Edinburgh, Scotland. Director Danny Boyle infuses the film with a kinetic energy and an original, vivid style that uses freeze frames, sped up footage, and colorful, arresting compositions to tell the story.

- Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 86
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 98 min

Krzysztof Kieslowski's dreamy drama follows two women, Véronique and Veronika, each played by the same actress, Irène Jacob. One woman is a music teacher in France, while the other is a singer in Poland. Their lives don't intersect overtly, but the two are connected in symbolic ways in what's considered a trance-like revelry about identity and borders.

- Director: Jacques Demy
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 86
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 91 min

Bright colors adorn the French city of Cherbourg, the boutique umbrellas of the title, and the costumes and sets in this romantic musical. Catherine Deneuve stars as a teenage shop worker entangled with a man who ships off to war in Algiers. Every word occurs in song (Deneuve and other actors are dubbed) in a bittersweet story that asks how love can survive social pressures.

- Director: Leo McCarey
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 87
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 90 min

"The Awful Truth" is a screwball comedy about a jealous couple who divorce because they're so suspicious of one another. They're each desperate to destroy the other's romantic prospects as their love-hate antics go down to the wire until their divorce decree becomes final. Cary Grant stars with Irene Dunne, who received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role as the sassy heroine.

- Director: Jafar Panahi
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 7.3
- Runtime: 82 min

Award-winning Iranian director Jafar Panahi creates a work of brilliant and audacious defiance with "Taxi." Under house arrest and banned from filmmaking for 20 years due to the dissent in his previous works, Panahi poses as a taxi driver with his dashboard-mounted camera disguised as a security device. As he films interactions with fellow Iranians, "Taxi" is both exuberant and terrifying as a brave act of resistance.

- Director: James Whale
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 87
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 71 min

Remarkably ghoulish special effects portray the missing anti-hero in Universal's classic horror hit, "The Invisible Man." Claude Rains, in his debut sound film role, stars as a crazed scientist who's developed a drug that renders him invisible—insanity is a side effect. The film is both chilling, as the man uses his power for deadly mischief, and funny with wry sight gags and the humor of the power-mad.

- Directors: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, David Hand, Graham Heid, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Norman Wright, Arthur Davis (uncredited), Clyde Geronimi (uncredited)
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 7.3
- Runtime: 70 min

The young prince, Bambi, contends with "Man" in this beautiful Disney animation classic about a young deer who learns from his father about dangers in the woods. The animated forest setting shows vibrant movement and gorgeous tableaus depicting nature and the creatures who dwell there. Highlights include the bright orange tones that rage as a forest fire, as well as the peaceful pond where Bambi first sees his reflection and future mate.

- Director: Leo McCarey
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 7.3
- Runtime: 88 min

Leo McCarey directed both "Love Affair" in 1939 and its famous remake "An Affair to Remember" in 1957. The story centers on two people who, because they're engaged to others, delay a romance for six months when they agree to meet atop the Empire State Building—but a devastating accident thwarts their rendezvous. Warren Beatty and Annette Bening play the ill-fated couple in the 1994 remake.

- Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 92 min

The second film in Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowki's "Three Colors Trilogy" is thematically based on the colors of the French flag and it's mottos: liberty, equality, and fraternity. "White" focuses on equality as it settles into the life of a divorced hairdresser who smuggles himself back to Poland after his life falls apart in Paris.

- Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 85
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 94 min

The first chapter in Krzysztof Kieslowski's thematically linked trilogy focuses on a widow (Juliette Binoche), whose husband and daughter die in a car accident. The film explores the woman's grief as she tries to push the past away, but discovers a woman her husband had loved. Slowly, she puts her fractured life back together.

- Director: Andrew Haigh
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 94
- IMDb user rating: 7.1
- Runtime: 91 min

Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay play a couple planning their 45th wedding anniversary party when news of a past lover surfaces. Writer-director Andrew Haigh's acclaimed drama offers a profound examination of marriage and its mysteries. The husband's long-ago romance becomes a source of increasing anxiety for a wife now confronted with previously unknown details about her lifelong partner.

- Director: Claire Denis
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 7.4
- Runtime: 92 min

Claire Denis loosely adapts Herman Melville's "Billy Budd," a novella about a soldier accused of mutiny at sea, in her film about soldiers with a harsh training regime. Denis' visual design is ethereal and poetic as the young men live under the oppressive structure of army life. One recruit becomes envious of another and schemes to bring him down.

- Director: Carol Reed
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 95 min

Carol Reed's tense "The Fallen Idol" is a classic of post-war British cinema set in a diplomat's mansion with its elaborate staircase and ornate furnishings. The diplomat's young son is close with his father's butler who placates him with exciting tall tales. The butler lies about the woman who is his mistress, causing the child to misinterpret events which makes things much worse for the man he admires.

- Director: John Carpenter
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 87
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 91 min

Jamie Lee Curtis made her screen debut in this influential horror film that launched a slasher franchise about the crazed killer Michael Myers. The creepy opening sequence in the first "Halloween" gives the audience the point-of-view of the murderer who wears a halloween mask. After a flash-forward, the lunatic returns to wreak more suspenseful, jump-scare havoc on a small Illinois town.

- Director: Brad Bird
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 85
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 86 min

Vin Diesel gives voice to the Iron Giant, a humongous robot who becomes friends with a young boy in this animated film about the paranoia that invades a small town during the Cold War. Stunning images show the robot's scale as it eats railroad tracks and grabs whole cars. The movie offers a sweet, humanistic portrayal of the friendship between child and giant, providing a look at what it means to be human.

- Director: Jean-Luc Godard
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 95 min

Jean-Luc Godard's French New Wave classic stars his then-wife Anna Karina as a student who joins with two men to steal money from her aunt, but the plan takes a dark turn. In one famous sequence, shot in a long take, the three do a line dance in a cafe, epitomizing Godard's fresh, cool characters and improvisational, irreverent style.

- Directors: Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 86
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 80 min

This adaptation of children's story books resembles watercolor illustrations that have come to life with a charming warmth. The story follows a mouse and bear who become unlikely friends since they come from separate communities who don't get along. The two manage to come together to teach a lesson on prejudice and acceptance in this inspiring family film.

- Director: Pawel Pawlikowski
- Stacker score: 89
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 7.4
- Runtime: 82 min

Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski's evocative drama centers on a young woman, Ida, about to take her vows to become a nun, who learns that she is Jewish and that her parents were killed during the Nazi occupation of World War II. The film follows the young woman as she visits an aunt she never knew, seeks out her parents' graves, and discovers her true history.

- Director: Bahman Ghobadi
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 85
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 98 min

This heartbreaking film takes place just before the American invasion of Iraq. Cast with nonprofessional actors, the story focuses on the tragic, harrowing lives of children who live in a refugee camp and contend with minefields and traumas well beyond their years. One child, Satellite (Soran Ebrahim), falls for the sister of another boy who has lost his arms and can predict the future.

- Directors: Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 7.5
- Runtime: 80 min

Featuring beautiful, naturalistic cinematography shot on a handheld camera with a shoestring budget, "Little Fugitive" captures the experience of a seven-year-old boy alone for a day on Coney Island after a harsh prank from his older brother. Richie Andrusco plays the youngster, in one of his only film roles. His performance captures the depth of childhood, both its stresses and joys, without the usual sentimentality.

- Director: Paul Grimault
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 87
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 83 min

French animator Paul Grimault worked with screenwriter and poet Jacques Prévert across decades to create the final version of "The King and the Mockingbird," a surrealist, subversive adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen tale about a shepherdess and chimney sweep in love. Grimault lost the rights, then bought them back, eventually releasing a restored version in 1980. The original and influential film gives lyrical, dream-like visual style to its presentation of a despotic king.

- Director: Tomm Moore
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 85
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 93 min

Stunning, hand-drawn animation brings magic to the everyday world of the family at the center of "Song of the Sea." After their mother disappears, a brother and sister are uprooted, but the two embark on a journey to return from city life with their grandmother back to their island home. Celtic myths guide this story about children who learn about their mystical selkie heritage.

- Director: Woody Allen
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 89
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 85 min

Writer-director Woody Allen lampoons all things Russian and artsy in a satire that film critic Roger Ebert called an "ambitious experiment with the comic possibilities of film" in his 1975 review. In the acclaimed comedy, Allen's comic persona transports to 19th-century Russia and becomes embroiled in a looney plot to kill Napoleon.

- Director: Pawel Pawlikowski
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 89 min

Shot in black-and-white in 4:3 aspect ratio, director Pawel Pawlikowski's romance proceeds with riveting beauty that captures the post-war time period and locales across Europe. A music conductor working for the Polish government meets a young singer in 1949. The two fall in love and arrange to escape to Western Europe, but plans go awry. Their love stays alive across years despite doomed circumstances.

- Director: Wong Kar-wai
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 85
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 98 min

In Wong Kar-wai's stylish masterpiece, two neighbors fall for each other after finding out that their spouses are having an affair in 1962 Hong Kong. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung play the star-crossed pair in this film with a beautiful visual style that captures the longing and grief of unrequited affections.

- Director: John Carney
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 86 min

This endearing, indie rom-com makes the love story about composing music instead of the usual drive toward a conventional happy ending. Set in Dublin, "Once" follows a Czech woman who meets a street musician. They connect while producing a song—even though they're each involved with other people. The song they create, "Falling Slowly," was a chart-topper that won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

- Directors: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 85
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 98 min

"Fargo" turns the empty highways of the American Midwest into a frozen wasteland where evil prevails. Frances McDormand won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance as Marge Gunderson, the pregnant police chief who investigates the tangle of mayhem and murder that springs from a car salesman's attempt to have his wife kidnapped in order to embezzle his father-in-law.

- Directors: Ron Clements, John Musker
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 86
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 90 min

Robin Williams gives a virtuoso comedic performance voicing the spirited blue Genie in Disney's animated retelling of the Aladdin folktale. Princess Jasmine must marry, and the villain Jafar wants her hand until the street urchin Aladdin enters with a magic lamp to foil his evil plans. "Aladdin" is one of the most popular animated features of all time, buoyed by beloved songs "Friend Like Me" and "A Whole New World."

- Director: Víctor Erice
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 87
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 98 min

Set in a rural village in 1940 just after the civil war that made Spain a fascist state, "The Spirit of the Beehive" shows how the horror film "Frankenstein" changes a young child's life. The girl obsesses over the film and its monster, who appears in dream-like sequences. After she finds a soldier from the losing side hiding out in a barn, she befriends him, but local forces won't allow it.

- Director: Georges Franju
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 90 min

Georges Franju's creepy, atmospheric horror film drips with stylish and expressionistic design. A mad scientist lives with his daughter in a gothic mansion where medical experiments take place in the basement. The daughter was disfigured in an accident and the father and his assistant find young women to use for a series of face transplants that don't work. Finally, the daughter, in a macabre mask, decides she's had enough.

- Director: George Seaton
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 96 min

This Hollywood Christmas classic revels in the mystery and magic of the Santa myth. Maureen O'Hara plays an exec whose department store Santa Claus refuses to admit to her daughter (Natalie Wood) that he's not actually real. The controversy ends up as a courtroom drama where miracles and belief are put on trial before logic.

- Director: Martin Scorsese
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 97 min

Martin Scorsese's underseen comedy is a madcap romp through the late hours of a surrealist underworld Manhattan. Taking place during a single evening, Griffin Dunne plays a basic corporate hack who goes out to meet a woman. Things go from bad to weird to worse in this absurd black comedy dreamscape.

- Directors: John Lasseter, Ash Brannon, Lee Unkrich
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 92 min

The "Toy Story" franchise, now with four entries, is distinct in that each new film is considered by critics to be as good or better than the original. Audiences love them all, catapulting the total box office to nearly $3 billion. "Toy Story 2" has a unanimous 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes as a sequel in which Andy leaves his toys behind when he goes off to summer camp.

- Director: Ingmar Bergman
- Stacker score: 90
- Metascore: 86
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 83 min

Ingmar Bergman's psychodrama is an arthouse classic of Swedish cinema. Symbolic visuals and lyrical detours such as images of crucifixion, a tarantula, and violent historical photos intersect with the story of two women living in an island cottage. After an actress has a breakdown, she recovers with a nurse who is her companion and caretaker.

- Director: George A. Romero
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 89
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 96 min

In George A. Romero's cult classic, the zombies emerge without explanation, but come to embody cultural fears around both the violence of the Vietnam War and of racial injustice. The innovative and influential film stars Duane Jones as a man holed up with random people in a country house as the living dead descend from all sides.

- Director: Greta Gerwig
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 94
- IMDb user rating: 7.4
- Runtime: 94 min

Greta Gerwig wrote and directed her acclaimed debut film about a teenage girl, who insists her name is Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan), embarking on her final year of high school. Laurie Metcalf and Tracy Letts play Lady Bird's parents. In sequences that are relatable, hilarious, and brimming with emotion, their exuberant and vulnerable daughter grows up and leaves home.

- Director: Alexander Mackendrick
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 91 min

This British comedy caper stars Alec Guinness as a criminal leader who uses a sweet, elderly woman's home as his gang's hideout. After they pull off a heist, the bad guys pull the woman into their corruption and plan to kill her to save themselves in a film that contrasts strong moral character with the more dishonorable and shady.

- Director: Luis Buñuel
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 7.5
- Runtime: 99 min

Catherine Denueve stars as Tristana in Luis Buñuel's surrealist portrait of a woman whose life entwines with a much older man, a don who is first her guardian and then her husband. Franco Nero is her love interest before an illness forces her to rely on the don. Buñuel infuses the tale, set in the early 1930s in Toledo, Spain, with bizarre images such as a severed head as a church bell's clapper.

- Director: Fred Zinnemann
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 89
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 85 min

"High Noon" gets going with a wedding between a retiring sheriff (Gary Cooper) and his pacifist bride (Grace Kelly). The two marry around 10:35 a.m. and then the film proceeds with a sense of real time as the clock counts down until the noon train arrives and departs. The bride threatens to leave without him, but the sheriff is caught between following her or staying in town for one last job.

- Director: Ernst Lubitsch
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 86
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 99 min

"To Be or Not to Be," actress Carole Lombard's final film, is a screwball comedy set during the Nazi takeover of Poland. Lombard plays a performer who, along with other actors in a theater troupe, become embroiled with German soldiers. The movie also stars Jack Benny and Robert Stack, as actors who foil the regime by impersonating the bad guys in order to escape.

- Director: Hayao Miyazaki
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 86
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 86 min

Hayao Miyazaki's gorgeous and ethereal animated film centers on two sisters who move with their father to a country house to be closer to their hospitalized mother. The wondrous and often painful experience of childhood comes to life as the sisters interact with fantasy spirits who live in their home and the nearby forest, including the large and adorable forest king, Totoro.

- Directors: Samuel Armstrong, Norman Ferguson, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Bill Roberts, Ben Sharpsteen, John Elliotte (uncredited)
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 7.2
- Runtime: 64 min

At just over an hour in length, Disney's animated classic "Dumbo" packs pathos and humor into its story of overcoming odds. The circus setting adds to the spectacle of shame after a baby elephant is ridiculed for large ears and his mother is punished for defending him. Happy endings prevail after a mouse helps the elephant find his wings and become brave.

- Director: Charles Burnett
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 7.3
- Runtime: 80 min

Shot in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles with a handheld camera, this highly regarded film was director Charles Burnett's final thesis at UCLA film school. Using a neorealist, documentary style and episodic interludes rather than a conventional plot, Burnett captures the experience of a family whose father works in a slaughterhouse, killing sheep.

- Director: Wes Anderson
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 99 min

Wes Anderson gives attention to period set and costumes in this madcap comedy about a famed concierge who's heir to the fortune of a murdered dowager. Ralph Fiennes leads the enormous ensemble cast in an eccentric story told in flashbacks with Anderson's signature zest for detail and emotion.

- Director: François Truffaut
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 94
- IMDb user rating: 7.5
- Runtime: 83 min

French director François Truffaut's period drama, based on a true story, centers on a young boy discovered alone in the woods in 1798. Truffaut wrote the script and stars as the doctor who removes the child from an institute that seeks to indoctrinate him. Using the earnest style of direct cinema, the film explores the nature of childhood within a social construct.

- Director: Sylvain Chomet
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 80 min

This animated gem combines a lively jazz score with a vivid and original visual style. The story follows a grandmother on the search for her grandson who has been kidnapped by mafia henchmen during the Tour de France bicycle race. She's joined by a jazz trio in this witty French caper.

- Director: Nina Paley
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 82 min

Writer-director Nina Paley also produced and animated her dazzling film which she made available to watch free on the internet. The autobiographical tale combines the epic Indian poem the Ramayana with events from Paley's own life, including the demise of her marriage. The film's style uses a college form created on her laptop.

- Director: Jean-Luc Godard
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 97
- IMDb user rating: 7.2
- Runtime: 88 min

After his debut French New Wave hit "À Bout de Souffle," Jean-Luc Godard directed "Le Petit Soldat" set during the French-Algerian War and starring Anna Karina, who would become his wife and a repeat performer in his work. This tense film that adheres to Godard's style uses themes around the image and its truth to critique the use of torture.

- Director: Alfred Hitchcock
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 86 min

"The 39 Steps" is another of Alfred Hitchcock's masterworks of style and suspense. Madeleine Carroll stars as Pamela, one of Hitchcock's signature characters—a mysterious blonde woman who intrigues and entangles the male lead. Robert Donat plays the man drawn into a spy plot who then struggles to clear his name.

- Director: Don Siegel
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 80 min

The first "pod people" movie—followed by several remakes in addition to films influenced by the theme—is a science-fiction classic from the Atomic Era. Beneath the alien invasion plot lurks a subtext about the dangers of conformity as humans get overtaken by identical, emotionless pods.

- Director: James Whale
- Stacker score: 91
- Metascore: 91
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 70 min

Universal's horror classic "Frankenstein" adapts Mary Shelley's gothic 1818 novel about the dangers of unchecked technological ambition. Colin Clive plays the iconic mad scientist who creates a monster made from pieces of various dead bodies. The monster, in a stirring performance from Boris Karloff, evokes sympathy in the audience despite his destructive tendencies.

- Director: Robert Bresson
- Stacker score: 92
- Metascore: 95
- IMDb user rating: 7.5
- Runtime: 85 min

"L'Argent," French auteur Robert Bresson's final film, presents the story of a man randomly caught up in a crime, spending money he didn't know was counterfeit, whose life then veers down a path of doom. The film is based on a novella by Leo Tolstoy and considered a haunting, poetic exploration of corruption and despair.

- Director: Ingmar Bergman
- Stacker score: 92
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 91 min

Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman's "Wild Strawberries" uses dream sequences and symbolic reveries to explore an elderly professor's past. The man goes on a road trip to receive an award and on the way meets characters from his past, which prompts him to wonder about his life and experiences. The film is known for its philosophical examination of memory.

- Directors: Pete Docter, Bob Peterson
- Stacker score: 92
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 96 min

The uplifting family film "Up," follows an elderly widower who goes on a South American adventure with a Boy Scout and his dog to fulfill a promise to his late wife. The imagery of a house traveling through the sky carried by balloons holds the theme of hope that pervades the film. An opening montage at the start of the movie tells a lifelong love story with heartbreaking warmth.

- Directors: Orson Welles, Fred Fleck (uncredited), Robert Wise (uncredited)
- Stacker score: 92
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 88 min

Orson Welles reads the credits in the closing sequence of his second feature—considered just as much of a masterpiece as "Citizen Kane." The costumes, settings, and compositions have Welles' signature complexity. The story follows a wealthy, late 19th-century family whose fortunes turn as the nation grows more modern.

- Directors: Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi
- Stacker score: 92
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 96 min

Marjane Satrapi co-directs this gorgeous animated film adapted from her bestselling graphic novel about growing up during the Iranian Revolution. A stark and arresting visual design captures intense events from a young person's perspective. Satrapi's autobiographical story explores her coming of age during violent and repressive regimes while remaining true to herself and her heritage under threat of censorship.

- Director: Richard Linklater
- Stacker score: 92
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 80 min

This talky sequel picks up nine years after the end of "Before Sunrise" when Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) meet in Vienna, fall in love, and then go their separate ways. They meet again in Paris, where Jesse is giving a book reading of the novel he's written about their experience. There's another ticking clock since Jesse needs to catch a plane as the two reconnect.

- Directors: Jean Cocteau, René Clément (uncredited)
- Stacker score: 92
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 93 min

This classic French film, based on the iconic fairy tale, is stunning and poetic as it brims with surreal and expressionistic visual design. The Beast's castle is lavish and ornate, with human arms holding candelabras mounted in dark hallways, giving the proceedings a sense of foreboding and magic. The Beast himself has a poignant humanity beneath the haunting makeup.

- Director: Terrence Malick
- Stacker score: 92
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 94 min

Terrence Malick's debut dramatizes the true-to-life tale of a killing spree across the badlands of the American Midwest. The naturalistic style gives the rural settings a strange, bleak beauty while the violence and suffering casts a bizarre deadpan gloom. Martin Sheen is a young hoodlum who wrangles a teenager, Sissy Spacek, into an affair that can only proceed with her father out of the way.

- Director: Henry King
- Stacker score: 92
- Metascore: 94
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 85 min

Gregory Peck plays the cowboy Jimmy Ringo, an infamous quickdraw so fast he's become a target of what Ringo himself calls "a big, tough, gunny." Estranged from his wife and child, Ringo tries to reconnect but his violent past makes it impossible. He's continuously harassed by those who want to take him down to claim his title.

- Director: Rob Reiner
- Stacker score: 92
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 82 min

This classic mockumentary follows a famous band in a hilarious send-up of celebrity, heavy metal artistry, and the music industry. Christopher Guest and Michael McKean shine in their roles as rock stars, best friends, and rivals on tour who clash creatively once a girlfriend takes the reins. The group attempts a "Smell the Glove" album tour that becomes beleaguered by stage mishaps such as an 18-inch Stonehenge replica and a translucent pod that traps the bassist inside.

- Directors: William Cottrell, David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, Ben Sharpsteen
- Stacker score: 92
- Metascore: 95
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 83 min

The first full-length Disney animated film persists as a classic for visual storytelling and musical score. The cel animation style provides a vivid sense of both human emotions and narrative tension. In one example of expressionism, Snow White runs through a terrifying, haunted forest where trees and branches transform into personified monsters.

- Director: Terrence Malick
- Stacker score: 92
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 94 min

Terrence Malick's moody drama is renowned for cinematography that captures the bleak mood of 1916 rural Texas. Sam Shepard plays a rich farmer caught up in a romantic scheme by workers looking to inherit his money and land. Richard Gere and Brooke Adams are the plotting lovers posing as siblings, with Linda Manz in a standout role as kid sister observer and wry narrator.

- Director: Leo McCarey
- Stacker score: 92
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 69 min

One of the funniest of the Marx Brothers' classic comedies, "Duck Soup" has period charm and gags that still work for modern audiences. Groucho Marx plays a man put in charge of a nation financed by a wealthy widow. Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo Marx are in tow for slapstick and banter as the regime drifts into mayhem and warfare.

- Director: Mel Brooks
- Stacker score: 93
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 88 min

Mel Brooks' feature debut is a popular comedy that revels in bad taste and pushes the extremes of offensiveness with glee. Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel play two producers who aim to engineer a box-office flop on Broadway, but instead wow their audience. Their show is a musical, "Springtime for Hitler," that celebrates fascism with glitzy numbers and Nazi showgirls.

- Director: Woody Allen
- Stacker score: 93
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 93 min

Diane Keaton's performance as Annie in "Annie Hall" embodies a modern rom-com heroine who is quirky, outspoken, independent, and ends up single. The acclaimed comedy is known for a style that eschews convention through uses of direct address, animated interludes, subtitles for inner thoughts, and other innovative techniques to give a sense of contemporary courtship.

- Director: Wong Kar-wai
- Stacker score: 93
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 94 min

Wong Kar-wai is a major figure of Hong Kong cinema, and his signature style emerges in this early-career atmospheric drama about a young man (Leslie Cheung) who learns the woman who raised him is not his birth mother. Stunning shot compositions drench settings and characters in light and shadow in this bruising film about heedless romances.

- Director: Charles Chaplin
- Stacker score: 93
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 72 min

Charlie Chaplin uses a traveling circus as the setting for a meditation on the lives of those who dwell outside of conventional society. Chaplin plays his classic Tramp character, a hobo on the run who links up with the circus. Scenes and setups use the broad comedy style of the silent cinema which, with Chaplin at the helm, always brings heart and charm.

- Director: John Ford
- Stacker score: 93
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 96 min

One of John Ford's most iconic Westerns launched John Wayne as a major movie star cowboy. Wayne plays the Ringo Kid who joins a motley crew of characters for a besieged stagecoach ride through dangerous territory. The Apache tribes were represented with racist tropes that contributed to the heroics of white characters.

- Director: David Lean
- Stacker score: 93
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 86 min

This affecting love story depicts the tension of romance that's forever held at bay. Celia Johnson plays a housewife in a staid marriage who meets a married doctor (Trevor Howard) during a brief, random encounter on a train. The two fall for one another, but circumstance thwarts any chance for love in this slow-burning drama about the impossibility of bucking convention.

- Director: Richard Lester
- Stacker score: 93
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Runtime: 87 min

This upbeat, madcap comedy follows a day in the life of The Beatles, playing themselves, as they prepare for a television performance and run from adoring fans. The young moptops deal with fame as well as elders, including a fictional grandpa and band manager. The documentary film style and pop-hit soundtrack make this a rousing boy-band spectacle.

- Director: Don Hertzfeldt
- Stacker score: 94
- Metascore: 90
- IMDb user rating: 8.3
- Runtime: 62 min

Three short films make up Don Hertzfeldt's striking animated film that focuses on a stick figure named Bill whose life emerges in black-and-white line drawings accompanied by a wry voiceover narration. Hertzfeldt uses some live-action footage, special effects, and innovative uses of sound and color to offer poignant stories that are both funny and philosophical.

- Director: Alfonso Cuarón
- Stacker score: 94
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 91 min

Vast, harsh space becomes the setting for a one-woman survival drama after a disaster destroys her only way home. Sandra Bullock was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her performance as an astronaut struggling to get back to Earth after an accident in space. Stunning, immersive cinematography creates nail-biting suspense as she struggles to survive in total isolation.

- Directors: Norman Ferguson, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Ben Sharpsteen
- Stacker score: 94
- Metascore: 99
- IMDb user rating: 7.4
- Runtime: 88 min

Disney's classic animated cautionary tale, adapted from a children's novel, remains beloved by critics, garnering a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The mishaps and adventures of the puppet who longs to be a real boy are conveyed through a charming and wondrous visual style. The mesmerizing blue fairy and the sage cutie Jiminy Cricket uplift this tale about trying to behave in a world filled with tempting mischief.

- Directors: Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff
- Stacker score: 94
- Metascore: 88
- IMDb user rating: 8.5
- Runtime: 88 min

Disney's animated family film "The Lion King" endures as the biggest, money-making franchise of all time, propelled by VHS and DVD sales, as well as its blockbuster soundtrack, live-action sequel, and Broadway productions. The original film draws on epic, "Hamlet"-inspired melodrama between fathers, sons, and uncles as it follows the coming-of-age story of a young lion prince accompanied by a pop-hit score from Elton John.

- Director: James Whale
- Stacker score: 94
- Metascore: 95
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 75 min

Elsa Lanchester plays both the titular bride and Mary Shelley, the novelist who originated the Frankenstein character and its myths. In this sequel to "Frankenstein," both the monster and the crazed scientist who created him remain alive. The monster longs for a mate and the doctor's mentor shows up to encourage another go. Lanchester's Bride, with her streaked hair-do and harrowing scream, persists as a horror icon.

- Director: Vittorio De Sica
- Stacker score: 94
- Metascore: 92
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 89 min

Vittorio De Sica's tale of an elderly man falling through the cracks of society is an emotionally riveting slice of life drama. The film uses the Italian neorealist style that immerses audiences in simple, everyday actions using long takes and a documentary-like camera. Set in post-war Rome, Umberto finds he has nowhere to turn, and can no longer care for his faithful dog after he's evicted from his home.

- Director: Louis Malle
- Stacker score: 94
- Metascore: 94
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 91 min

This taut, French crime thriller proceeds with an ever-worsening sense of dread after the opening crime that shows two lovers plotting to murder a man who is both boss and husband. It doesn't go as planned. Scenes in a trapped elevator convey powerless claustrophobia as events careen from bad to worse for everyone ensnared in this cinematic world where no crime escapes detection.

- Director: Roberto Rossellini
- Stacker score: 94
- Metascore: 100
- IMDb user rating: 7.4
- Runtime: 97 min

Roberto Rossellini was married to movie star Ingrid Bergman during production of this drama about a British couple who travels to Italy and find themselves drifting apart. George Sanders plays the terse, uppercrust husband, while Bergman is the wife with a suppressed inner life who drifts in her affections as she spends more and more time on her own.

- Director: Preston Sturges
- Stacker score: 94
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 7.8
- Runtime: 94 min

This madcap romance about schemers who jump in and out of love suggests the humorous doublecross that may be at the heart of all love stories. Barbara Stanwyck plays a con artist working with her father, while Henry Fonda is the wealthy mark they're out to get. When her first attempt fails, she mounts another disguise in this screwball comedy that plays with the notion that love trumps money.

- Directors: Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones
- Stacker score: 95
- Metascore: 93
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 91 min

The British comedy group Monty Python presents what's considered one of its best spoofs. In this round, it's a send-up of the Arthurian legend complete with bawdy gags and slapstick violence. Co-directors Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones star with John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Graham Chapman (all co-writers too) in excessive and irreverent silliness as knights in search of the Holy Grail.

- Directors: Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise
- Stacker score: 95
- Metascore: 95
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 84 min

"Beauty and the Beast" was the first animated film to garner a Best Picture Academy Award nomination. The popular adaptation of the classic folktale captures the classic love-hate conflict between seeming opposites. Angela Lansbury voices Mrs. Potts and sings the theme song, while Jerry Orbach performs the showstopper "Be Our Guest."

- Director: Julien Duvivier
- Stacker score: 95
- Metascore: 98
- IMDb user rating: 7.7
- Runtime: 94 min

This French crime drama follows a criminal hiding out to evade police. Set in the Casbah district of Algiers, the location emerges as a maze-like neighborhood that's a safe haven from authorities. The movie's distinct style influenced later films in visual design and theme, including the idea of certain doom for criminals who dare to fall in love.

- Directors: Pete Docter, Ronnie Del Carmen
- Stacker score: 95
- Metascore: 94
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 95 min

"Inside Out" centers on a child, Riley, and makes her emotions characters in a vast, colorful world with a command center at the helm. This Disney-Pixar animated film brings out strong feelings in its story about the friendship between Joy and Sadness and their necessary connection.

- Director: Ernst Lubitsch
- Stacker score: 96
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 99 min

Ernst Lubitsch directs this classic romantic comedy about star-crossed co-workers who have no idea they're perfect for each other. Set in Budapest, Hungary, Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart play the colleagues who get on each other's every nerve. Meanwhile, they're carrying on an enthralling, but anonymous romantic correspondence.

- Director: John Lasseter
- Stacker score: 96
- Metascore: 95
- IMDb user rating: 8.3
- Runtime: 81 min

The original "Toy Story" inaugurated both an enduring franchise and new CGI animation technology. The first entry in the story harnesses nostalgia for childhood with eye-popping scenes of brand-name toys. Sentient toys are first rivals, then pals in this buddy comedy that launched Woody (Tom Hanks) and Buzz (Tim Allen) as heroes with feel-good one-liners and hearts of gold.

- Director: Orson Welles
- Stacker score: 97
- Metascore: 99
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 95 min

The white movie star Charlton Heston was cast as a Mexican police detective (in brownface) in this Orson Welles film-noir thriller set in a U.S.-Mexico border town. While the film doesn't overcome racist Mexican stereotypes, it's been seen as subverting the "prevailing view" around border politics at the time.

- Director: Isao Takahata
- Stacker score: 97
- Metascore: 94
- IMDb user rating: 8.5
- Runtime: 89 min

Isao Takahata's haunting, elegiac animated film follows the fate of two orphaned siblings struggling in Japan in the final months and aftermath of World War II. The story combines realistic historical details with fantastical, lyrical elements. Without looking away from the horrors and devastation of war, "Grave of the Fireflies" presents the bond between the young sister and her teenage brother with heartbreaking beauty.

- Director: Charles Laughton
- Stacker score: 97
- Metascore: 99
- IMDb user rating: 8.0
- Runtime: 92 min

Robert Mitchum oozes evil as a murderous ex-con who pretends to be a preacher as he preys on a small-town widow and her two children. The family doesn't know he's the former cellmate of their executed patriarch, or that he's after stolen money that was left behind. Black-and-white cinematography drenches scenes with dark, foreboding shadows.

- Director: Robert Bresson
- Stacker score: 97
- Metascore: 100
- IMDb user rating: 7.9
- Runtime: 95 min

The Balthazar of the title is a donkey in this philosophical French masterpiece written and directed by Robert Bresson. The movie follows the life and times of a newly-born donkey throughout its years, chronicling the ways the animal is treated by humans. Bresson's direct, detached style creates intense emotions for audiences in its presentation of the animal's oscillating peace and suffering.

- Director: Andrew Stanton
- Stacker score: 97
- Metascore: 95
- IMDb user rating: 8.4
- Runtime: 98 min

Pixar's vibrant visual design makes the apocalyptic futurescape in Disney's family film the setting for a heartwarming romance between sweetly sentient robots. WALL-E is a trash compactor on cleanup duty on an uninhabitable planet who becomes smitten with EVE, a blue-eyed machine sent to evaluate whether or not there's life on Earth.

- Director: Akira Kurosawa
- Stacker score: 97
- Metascore: 98
- IMDb user rating: 8.2
- Runtime: 88 min

Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon," named after the ancient Japanese city where the events take place, remains one of the most influential films of all time for the way it foregrounds issues around power and narration. A local court contends with witnesses to a crime in which events are presented from four divergent perspectives. Audiences move through subjective details to get to the truth.

- Director: Stanley Kubrick
- Stacker score: 98
- Metascore: 97
- IMDb user rating: 8.4
- Runtime: 95 min

Stanley Kubrick's tightly drawn satire lampoons Cold War tensions as well as a military-industrial complex hellbent on bombs and bluster. As a scathing black comedy, the film diffuses communist paranoia while turning a spotlight on the irrationality of nuclear proliferation. Both Peter Sellers, in three roles including the president, and George C. Scott as a diehard general, give standout performances.

- Director: Alexander Mackendrick
- Stacker score: 98
- Metascore: 100
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 96 min

Few films are better than "The Sweet Smell of Success" at showing Manhattan's glamorous nightlife in the harsh light of day. Burt Lancaster plays a columnist with power in this sordid tale about wrecking lives and influencing people. Tony Curtis is the low-level PR man who's willing to dish dirt to get ahead.

- Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
- Stacker score: 98
- Metascore: 100
- IMDb user rating: 8.1
- Runtime: 99 min

The final film in Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colors Trilogy" pulls together themes from the first two films as it looks at the power of random events and the ways they connect people in unexpected ways. A young model and student accidentally hits the dog of a judge who slowly becomes drawn into her life. Small moments allow for positive transformation in the face of an indifferent, random world.

- Director: Charlie Chaplin
- Stacker score: 98
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 8.5
- Runtime: 87 min

Though sound era talkies were in full swing, Charlie Chaplin (who directs, writes, produces, stars, and composes the score) keeps with his signature silent format using only occasional dialogue and effects. Chaplin's familiar Tramp character is a factory worker so out of step with industry that he's actually sucked into the cogs of a machine in one famous sequence.

- Director: Charlie Chaplin
- Stacker score: 99
- Metascore: 99
- IMDb user rating: 8.5
- Runtime: 87 min

Charlie Chaplin directs and stars again as his iconic Tramp character—a sweet, but poor drifter whose comic antics reveal social cruelties. In "City Lights," he falls for a blind woman who can't judge his exterior. Meanwhile, a harsh millionaire helps him, then tosses him back to the streets of Manhattan.

- Director: Sidney Lumet
- Stacker score: 100
- Metascore: 96
- IMDb user rating: 8.9
- Runtime: 96 min

This courtroom drama keeps the tension confined to a single location—a locked, stuffy jury deliberation chamber where 12 white men decide the fate of a Puerto Rican teenager accused of murder. Most are quick to convict, until a voice of reason steps forward. Henry Fonda gives an acclaimed performance as the lone juror willing to take a closer look at the evidence.