100 Best Movies of All Time That You Should Watch Immediately

When an idealistic governor disobeys the reigning feudal lord, he is cast into exile, his wife and children left to fend for themselves and eventually wrenched apart by vicious slave traders. Under Kenji Mizoguchi’s dazzling direction, this classic Japanese story became one of cinema’s greatest masterpieces, a monumental, empathetic expression of human resilience in the face of evil. 12 Angry Men, by Sidney Lumet, is a behind-closed-doors look at the American legal system. This iconic adaptation of Reginald Rose’s teleplay stars Henry Fonda as the dissenting member on a jury of white men ready to pass judgment on a Puerto Rican teenager charged with murdering his father. The result is a saga of epic proportions that plays out over a tense afternoon in one sweltering room.

A woman (Mélanie Laurent) wakes up in a cryonics cell after a few weeks in suspended animation. She doesn’t remember her name, age, or anything about her past except for a few disturbing flashbacks that keep running through her head. The one thing she does top movies know—thanks to a persistent, and annoying, AI—is that she will run out of oxygen in just over an hour. Oxygen is as claustrophobic a thriller as it gets, and manages to find that rare sweet spot of being simultaneously static and deeply unnerving.

Most imperative of all, Play Time is a wondrous film that compels you to observe the world in a way you never have before. Riffing on the classic couple-on-the run movie, enfant terrible Jean-Luc Godard took the narrative innovations of the French New Wave close to breaking point. The conflict of a woman between her husband, her lover and the lover of her youth, and her failure to find happiness with any of them. The first part of Satyajit Ray’s acclaimed Apu Trilogy is a lyrical, closely observed story of a peasant family in 1920s rural India. Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders play a middle-aged English couple whose marriage falls apart during a journey through Italy. A pioneering work of modernism that links Italian neo-realism with the French new wave.

Ravenous (originally titled Les Affamés) begins after a mysterious plague has annihilated much of Quebec, turning its victims into shrieking, flesh-eating monsters. The story follows various survivors who eventually band together to fight back the horde, but despite the familiar plot, this isn’t a typical zombie movie; it is a deliberately paced, eerily beautiful horror movie. The protagonist is a man named Bonin (Marc-Andre Grondin) who wanders the countryside, finding other survivors and slaying zombies. As the group grows, the film gives each character proper development, so they feel fully fleshed out, unlike the stock survivors of many a zombie film.

In David Lynch’s idiosyncratic drama, a young man’s curiosity draws him into the twisted criminal sub-culture operating beneath the placid surface of his cosy hometown. Loosely adapted from a novel by Phillip K. Dick, Ridley Scott’s dark, saturated vision of 2019 Los Angeles is a classic of popular science-fiction cinema. Orson Welles’s return to Hollywood after ten years working in Europe is a sleazy border tale in which he takes centre stage as gargantuan detective Hank Quinlan. Starring Robert De Niro as the middleweight boxer Jake La Motta, Scorsese’s biopic is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest films of the 1980s.