50 Greatest Movies to Watch Before You Die transcript

There are movies you watch and then there are movies that change you. [music] Films that crack something open inside you, that make you see the world differently, that stay lodged in your chest long after the screen goes dark. Today, we're counting down the 50 greatest movies [music] you absolutely must see before you die. From gut-wrenching dramas to pulse pounding [music] thrillers, from sweeping epics to intimate masterpieces, this list spans every era, every genre, and every corner of the globe.

If you're serious about cinema or even [music] just serious about living a full life, these are the films you cannot miss. Welcome back to the channel. Before we dive in, make sure you hit that subscribe button and give [music] this video a thumbs up. We put a tremendous amount of love into these countdowns, [music] and your support genuinely keeps us going. Now, a quick word about this list. This isn't just about box office numbers [music] or Academy Awards, though plenty of these films have both.

This is about the movies that matter. the [music] ones that defined generations, shattered expectations, pushed the boundaries [music] of what storytelling could be, and reminded us why we fell in love with cinema in the first place. Some of these picks will feel obvious, others might surprise you. A few might even make you angry, and we want to hear all about it in the comments below. All right, enough talk. Let's get into it. 50th place, The Truman Show, 1998.

Long before social media turned ordinary people into unwilling spectacles, Peter Weir's The Truman Show imagined a world where one [music] man's entire life was a television program broadcast to millions without his knowledge. Jim Carrey delivers the performance [music] of his career as Truman Burbank, a cheerful insurance salesman who slowly, terrifyingly begins to realize [music] that nothing around him is real. What makes this film so extraordinary is how it [music] operates on multiple levels simultaneously.

On the surface, it's a darkly comic satire of reality television and [music] consumer culture. Underneath, it's a profoundly moving meditation on free will, identity, and the courage it takes to walk toward the unknown. Carrie is magnetic, funny, heartbreaking, [music] and ultimately triumphant, often in the same scene. The film predicted so much of what our world would become [music] that watching it today feels less like nostalgia and more like prophecy.

It's [music] a mustsee for anyone who has ever questioned the reality they've been handed. 49th [music] place, Spirited Away, 2001. Hayo Miyazaki is [music] perhaps the greatest living filmmaker working in any medium, and Spirited Away is his crowning achievement. The story [music] follows 10-year-old Sheihiro, a sulky, reluctant girl who stumbles into a magical [music] spirit world. Anne must work in a vast bath house to rescue her parents and find [music] her way home.

What unfolds is one of the most dazzling, emotionally rich, and endlessly [music] imaginative films ever committed to screen. Miyazaki builds his world with such specificity and warmth that it feels genuinely alive, populated by creatures [music] so bizarre and so beautiful that you find yourself longing to visit a place that couldn't possibly exist. [music] But beyond the breathtaking animation, Spirited Away is about growing up, about finding courage you didn't know you had, about the importance of remembering who you are when the world tries to [music] strip that away.

It won the Academy Award for best animated feature in 2003 [music] and it deserved every single vote. 48th Place Network 1976. [music] If you want to understand the media landscape of the 21st [music] century, watch a film made in 1976. Sydney Lumett's Network [music] is a scorching, furious satire about a television network that turns a mentally unraveling news [music] anchor into a ratings sensation. Peter Finch delivers one of the most electrifying performances in cinema history [music] as Howard Beal, the mad prophet of the airwaves.

And the moment he screams, [music] "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore," is one of those [music] rare instances where a fictional moment captures a universal truth with startling precision. [music] The film is angry, funny, oporadic, and deeply cynical about the entertainment industry's [music] willingness to exploit human suffering for profit. The fact that it feels more relevant today than ever before is either a testament [music] to the film's brilliance or a damning indictment of how little things have changed.

Probably both. 47th place, Amadeus, 1984. Milos Foreman's [music] Amadeus is a lavish, emotionally devastating feast for the senses, [music] and it contains one of the most compelling villains in all of cinema. F. Murray Abraham won [music] a richlyd deserved Oscar for his portrayal of Antonio Salieri. A composer of middling talent who watches in tormented disbelief as Wolf Gang Amadeus [music] Mosart played with anarctic vulgar brilliance by Tom Hulceche [music] produces music of incomprehensible genius seemingly without effort.

The film asks a question that [music] cuts right to the bone. What is it like to be good at something but to be surrounded by someone who [music] is transcendent? Salary's envy is so recognizable, so human that it becomes genuinely tragic. Set against opulent period backdrops [music] and saturated with some of the greatest classical music ever written, Amadeus [music] is both a visual and an auditory masterpiece. It swept the Academy Awards and has only [music] grown richer and more rewarding with time. 46th place, Chinatown, 1974.

[music] Roman Palansky's Chinatown is the greatest detective film ever made, and it's also one of the most nihilistic and emotionally devastating. Jack Nicholson plays Jake Giddys, a private investigator caught in a web of corruption, murder, and unspeakable [music] secrets in 1930s Los Angeles. FA Dunaway is [music] magnetic and heartbreaking as the woman at the center of it all, and the film screenplay written by Robert Town is frequently cited as [music] the best original script in Hollywood history.

What sets Chinatown apart from every other noir that came before or after [music] is its ending. A gut punch of hopelessness that refuses to offer the audience any comfort whatsoever. [music] It's a film that trusts its viewers enough to leave them devastated in a landscape full of tidy resolutions and neat moral victories. That kind of honesty is almost [music] radical. 45th place, Bicycle Thieves, 1948. [music] Sometimes a film doesn't need spectacle.

It doesn't need a star-studded cast or a soaring musical score or [music] groundbreaking special effects. Sometimes all it needs is one man, his son, and a bicycle. Victoria Dea's [music] Bicycle Thieves is a masterpiece of Italian neo realalism that tells the simple, shattering story of a desperate father searching the streets [music] of postwar Rome for his stolen bicycle. The one possession he needs to keep his job and his family afloat.

Shot entirely on location with non-professional actors [music] and a budget that amounted to almost nothing, the film achieves an emotional authenticity that most Hollywood [music] productions spend millions trying and failing to replicate. By the time the final frames arrive, you will feel the weight of an entire [music] world pressing down on you. Bicycle Thieves won an honorary Oscar and [music] was voted the greatest film ever made by the American Film Institute.

That is not an accident. 44th place, Townson [music] 1, A Space Odyssey, 1968. Stanley Kubri made many great films, [music] but 2001, A Space Odyssey is his monument. Released in 1968, [music] more than a year before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, it imagines [music] space travel with a scientific rigor and a philosophical ambition that no [music] film before or since has matched. The story moves from prehistoric apes to orbiting space stations to the eerie corridors of the [music] Discovery 1 spacecraft where the ship's artificial intelligence how 9000 begins to [music] behave in deeply unsettling ways.

Kubri strips away conventional narrative and replaces it with pure overwhelming cinematic experience. The visuals, the [music] silence, the Strauss waltzes playing against the vastness of space. It's challenging, intentionally so, but the rewards for patient viewers are immense. Few films will leave you feeling as genuinely small and genuinely aruck as this one. 43rd place, The Wild Bunch, 1969. [music] Sam Peekenpaw's The Wild Bunch arrived in 1969 like a grenade thrown into the middle of classical Hollywood and cinema [music] has never fully recovered.

The story follows a gang of aging outlaws on one last job along the Texas Mexico [music] border as the era of the Wild West draws to a bloody inevitable close. Peck andpaw's direction is ferocious. [music] His editing is revolutionary and his action sequences, particularly the jaw-dropping finale, [music] remain among the most technically audacious ever filmed. But beneath all the gunfire and slow motion carnage, The Wild Bunch is a profoundly elogiic film about obsolescence, loyalty, and what it means [music] when the world you were built for no longer exists.

William Holden leads a [music] cast of tremendous depth and grit, and every frame pulses with the knowledge that something [music] is ending. It's one of the most important American films ever made. 42nd place, Mullhalland Drive, 2001. David Lynch's Moleholland Drive is not a film you watch so much as [music] a film you experience and then spend the next several weeks trying to make sense of. [music] A young aspiring actress named Betty arrives in Los Angeles with stars in her eyes and [music] discovers a mysterious amnesiac woman hiding in her apartment.

What follows is a dreamlike [music] labyrinthine descent into the dark underbelly of Hollywood that operates entirely on the logic of a nightmare. Lynch constructs [music] the film with extraordinary confidence, refusing to hold the viewer's hand, trusting that the emotional truth of the [music] story will land even when the literal narrative remains elusive. And it does. Mullholland Drive is terrifying and heartbreaking and strangely, [music] achingly beautiful.

It was voted the greatest film of the 21st century by a BBC poll of international critics. And once you've [music] surrendered to it completely, you'll understand exactly why. 41st [music] place, All About Eve, 1950. Joseph El Mani [music] Witch's All About Eve is the sharpest, most brilliantly written film about [music] ambition, fame, and the theater ever made. And it contains what may be the single greatest screenplay in Hollywood [music] history.

B. Davis is imperious and magnificent as Margot Channing, an [music] aging Broadway star who takes a seemingly adoring young fan named Eve under her wing, [music] only to discover that Eve has been systematically dismantling her life from [music] the inside. The dialogue crackles and bites with an intelligence that modern cinema rarely matches, and the performances, Davis [music] in particular, are so precise and so alive that the film feels completely fresh.

Nearly 75 years after it was made, it received 14 Academy Award nominations, a record that stood [music] for decades. If you've never seen it, you are in for an absolute treat. 40th [music] place, Metropolis, 1927. Fritz Lang's Metropolis is nearly a 100red years [music] old, and it still looks like the future. Made in Germany during the silent era, it [music] depicts a vast stratified city of the distant future where wealthy elites live in gleaming towers [music] while workers toil in underground machinery that keeps the city running.

When the son of the city's ruler falls in love [music] with a workingclass prophet named Maria, he is drawn into a world of rebellion, deception, and a terrifying robot designed [music] to seow chaos. The visual imagination Lang brings to this film is simply staggering. >> [music] >> Massive sets, extraordinary lighting, crowds of extras used with almost choreographic [music] precision. Every science fiction film that came after owes a debt to Metropolis.

It is [music] the foundation stone of an entire genre and as a piece of cinema, it remains astonishing. 39th [music] place, Cinema Paradiso, 1988. Josephe [music] Tornator's Cinema Paradiso is a love letter to the movies so tender and so deeply felt [music] that it has reduced hardened film critics to tears for more than three decades. The film follows Salvatore, [music] a celebrated film director who returns to his small Sicilian hometown [music] after the death of Alfredo, the elderly projectionist who was his greatest mentor and friend.

[music] Told largely in flashback, it recreates the magic of a small town movie theater in [music] post-war Italy, where cinema was the beating heart of an entire community. Anyo Moricone score [music] is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written for the screen. And the film's final sequence, an extraordinary montage of all the kisses censored [music] from films shown at the cinema paradiso, is one of those moments that makes you remember why you love movies in the first [music] place.

Keep the tissues nearby. 38th place, Apocalypse [music] Now, 1979. Francis Ford. Copala's Apocalypse Now [music] is one of the most ambitious, audacious, and genuinely unhinged films ever made. And somehow, against all odds, it works. Based loosely on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it follows Captain Willard as he travels deep into [music] the Cambodian jungle on a mission to assassinate Colonel Curts, a brilliant army officer who has gone rogue and established [music] himself as a god among the local population.

Marlon Brando, [music] enormous and whispering in the shadows, is terrifyingly effective as Curts, and the film [music] builds to a confrontation that feels less like a war movie climax and more like a descent into [music] a fever dream. The production itself was famously chaotic, plagued by typhoons, cast [music] crises, and Copala's own nervous breakdown. And somehow that madness seeped into the film itself. [music] It is a masterpiece of controlled derangement. 37th [music] place, Rear Window, 1954.

Alfred Hitchcock made more films [music] about voyerism than any director in history, but none with the elegant, suffocating perfection of Rear [music] Window. James Stewart plays LB Jeff, a photojournalist confined to [music] a wheelchair in his Greenwich Village apartment, who passes the time by watching his neighbors through the titular [music] window. When he becomes convinced that one of them has murdered his wife, he enlists [music] his socialite girlfriend, played with wonderful sharpness by Grace Kelly to [music] investigate.

Hitchcock confines the entire film to a single set and somehow generates more suspense [music] than a dozen lesser directors could achieve with the whole world at their disposal. It's a film about the pleasures and the dangers of [music] watching, about the moral ambiguity of curiosity taken too far. It's also, incidentally, one of the most purely entertaining movies ever made. 36th place, Ran, 1985. [music] Akira Kurasawa's Ran is a film of almost incomprehensible grandeur.

Loosely adapted from King Lear and set in feudal Japan, [music] it follows an aging warlord who divides his kingdom among his three sons, triggering a catastrophic [music] civil war that destroys everything he built. Kurasawa was 75 years old when he made Ran. [music] Legally blind and working on a budget that pushed the limits of Japanese film production. What he created is one of the [music] most visually stunning films in the history of the medium.

The battle sequences shot on the [music] slopes of Mount Fuji with hundreds of extras in immaculate period costumes are simultaneously [music] beautiful and horrifying. Ran is a film about the sins of fathers, [music] the ingratitude of children, and the irreversibility of time. It is a great artist's [music] reckoning with mortality rendered in fire and silk. 35th place, The Apartment, [music] 1960. Billy Wilders. The Apartment is the rare film that manages to be both aoriously funny and genuinely heartbreaking at the same time, often within the same [music] scene, sometimes within the same line of dialogue.

Jack Lemon plays CC [music] Baxter, a low-level insurance clerk who lends out his Manhattan apartment to his superiors for their extrammarital affairs, hoping to climb the [music] corporate ladder. Shirley Mlan is radiant and devastating as the elevator operator he falls for. A woman caught in her own impossible [music] situation. The Apartment won five Academy Awards, including best picture. But what the trophies [music] don't quite capture is how warm and how wise and how deeply humane this film is.

Wilder understood people, [music] their compromises, and their longings and their capacity for unexpected decency better than almost any filmmaker who ever lived. 34th place, Grave of the Fireflies, 1988. Fair warning, Grave of the Fireflies will break your heart in ways you may not be fully prepared for. Isao Takahada's animated masterpiece [music] produced by Studio Gibli tells the story of a teenage boy and his young sister struggling to survive in Japan in the final months of World War II.

It is one of the most devastating anti-war statements ever [music] committed to film, made all the more powerful by its animated form, which lures you into a sense of gentle beauty before systematically destroying you. Roger Eert called it one of the greatest war films ever made. And he was [music] absolutely right. The film doesn't celebrate heroism or dramatized battles. It simply shows [music] two children trying to live in a world that has forgotten them.

There is nothing quite like it in all of cinema and it will stay with you forever. 33rd place, Singing in [music] the Rain, 1952. If you believe that sheer uncontainable joy can be an artistic achievement, Singing in the Rain is your exhibit. A [music] Jean Kelly, Donald O' Conor, and Debbie Reynolds are an irresistible trio navigating the chaotic transition [music] from silent films to talkies in late 1920s Hollywood. and they do it with a level of wit, charm, and physical brilliance that has never [music] been surpassed in the musical genre.

The title number Jean Kelly dancing and splashing through a rainstorm with an expression of pure uninhibited [music] happiness is perhaps the single most joyful moment in the history of cinema. The film is also genuinely funny, [music] sharply satirical about Hollywood ego and pretention, and technically flawless. It [music] is the gold standard of the American musical and watching it is one of those experiences that makes you feel grateful to be alive. 32nd place, Taxi Driver, [music] 1976.

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is one of the most uncomfortable films on this entire [music] list, and it is also one of the most essential. Robert Dairo plays Travis Bickl, a lonely, mentally unstable Vietnam veteran who drives a taxi through the neon soaked streets of New York City at night and slowly descends into violent delusion. Bernard Herman's jazz [music] inflected score writhes beneath every scene like something sick and feverish.

And Michael Chapman's cinematography turns 1970s [music] New York into a vision of a city consuming itself. Dairo's performance is a terrifying act of total [music] commitment, and the film around him is equally uncompromising. Taxi Driver is not an [music] easy watch. It's not supposed to be, but it is a film that burns itself into your memory and [music] refuses to leave, which is exactly what great cinema is supposed to do. 31st Place, Parasite, 2019.

Bong Junho's Parasite made history when it became the first non-English language film to win the [music] Academy Award for best picture, and every frame of it justifies that honor. The film follows the Kim family, a desperately poor household living in a cramped [music] semib apartment as they gradually infiltrate the wealthy Park family's lives through an elaborate series of deceptions. [music] What begins as a darkly comic thriller pivots with breathtaking confidence into something far more violent, far more tragic, [music] and far more profound.

Bong's screenplay is a masterwork of construction, planting details in the early [music] scenes that pay off with devastating precision in the final act. Parasite is a film about class, about resentment, about the invisible architecture of inequality [music] that separates those who have from those who don't. It is one of the most exciting, most vital films of the 21st [music] century. 30th Place, The Shining, 1980. Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's novel is not the horror film [music] Stephen King wanted, and it is also one of the greatest horror films ever made.

Jack Nicholson plays Jack [music] Torrance, a struggling writer who takes a job as the offseason caretaker of the vast and isolated Overlook Hotel, [music] bringing his wife and young son along with catastrophic results. Kubri transforms the hotel into a labyrinthine nightmare of impossible geometry and [music] creeping dread. And Nicholson's escalating performance remains one of cinema's most indelible portraits of madness [music] unraveling.

But what makes The Shining so enduring is its ambiguity. What is real? What is the hotel? [music] What is Jack? The film offers no easy answers, only an atmosphere of pure sustained terror that has influenced every horror film made in the 45 [music] years since. Here's Johnny. 29th place, Some Like It Hot, 1959. [music] Some Like It Hot is widely and correctly regarded as the funniest film ever made. And the remarkable thing is that it earns that title with such apparent effortlessness.

Billy Wilder directs Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon as two musicians who [music] witness the Saint Valentine's Day massacre and go on the run disguised as women in an all female jazz band where [music] Curtis promptly falls for the dectible sugar cane played by Marilyn Monroe in the performance [music] of her life. Monroe is extraordinary here. Radiant and genuinely funny in ways that are often overlooked because [music] she is so impossibly beautiful.

Lemon is a comedic genius operating at full capacity. [music] The final line of the film, one of the most famous closing lines in cinema history, lands with the precision of a perfect punchline [music] after nearly 2 hours of sustained brilliance. Pure absolute pleasure from start to finish. 28th place, There [music] Will Be Blood, 2007. Paul Thomas [music] Anderson's There Will Be Blood is an American epic in the truest sense, a film about the nation's foundational hungers [music] for oil, for wealth, for dominance, and for God.

Daniel D. Lewis plays Daniel [music] Plain View, an oil man of ferocious intelligence and barely concealed contempt for [music] nearly every human being he encounters. and his performance is simply one of the greatest in the history of the medium. The film builds over two [music] and a half hours with the slow inexurable force of geological pressure. Contrasting [music] plain view's secular greed with the evangelical fervor of a young preacher named Eli Sunday played with extraordinary energy by Paul Dano.

Johnny Greenwood's [music] score is abrasive, dissonant, and perfect. There Will Be Blood is the kind of film that [music] Hollywood almost never makes anymore. Massive in ambition, uncompromising in execution, and impossible to shake. 27th place, Sunset Boulevard, [music] 1950. Billy Wilder appears on this list twice because Billy Wilder was that good. [music] Sunset Boulevard is a haunting, darkly magnificent portrait of Hollywood's capacity to chew people up and spit [music] them out.

William Holden narrates the story of Joe Gillis, a struggling screenwriter who stumbles [music] into the decaying mansion of Norma Desmond, a silent film star who has spent [music] decades waiting for the cameras to come back. Gloria Swanson plays Norma with ferocious, [music] magnificent excess, a performance so committed and so strange that it blurs the line between acting and something closer to confession. The film is deeply [music] cynical about fame, about nostalgia, about the entertainment industry's ruthless relationship with talent.

It is also brilliantly entertaining, full of acidic wit and genuine suspense. All right, Mr. Deil, I'm ready for [music] my closeup. One of the great closing lines in cinema. 26th place, Ikiru, 1952. Akira Kurasawa's Ikiru is not a film many casual movie goers [music] have seen and that is genuinely one of the great injustices of cinematic culture. The film follows Kangji Wadbe a mid-level Tokyo bureaucrat [music] who has spent 30 years sleepwalking through his job only to discover that he has terminal stomach cancer.

[music] Confronted with his own mortality, he searches desperately for a reason to have lived and eventually finds it in the most modest [music] of gestures, pushing through the bureaucratic machinery to build a small park for children in a poor neighborhood. Takashi Shamura's performance [music] is one of the most quietly shattering in all of cinema, and Kurasawa directs with a precision and a compassion that never tips [music] into sentimentality.

Ikiru means to live in Japanese and the film asks with devastating gentleness what that really means. 25th [music] place, Good Fellas, 1990. Martin Scorsese's Good Fellas is cinema [music] as pure kinetic energy. A film so alive and so technically dazzling that watching it feels like grabbing onto a live wire with both hands. [music] Ray Leotaa is magnetic as Henry Hill, a young man from Brooklyn who works his way into the inner circle of the New York mob, narrating his rise and fall with a mixture [music] of exhilaration and retrospective dread.

Robert Dairo is icely [music] cool, and Joe Py in an Oscar-winning performance is one of the most terrifying [music] presences ever captured on film. Scorsese uses every tool available to him. frees frames, [music] voice over, long unbroken tracking shots, era specific music cues, and deploys them with the confidence of a director at the absolute [music] peak of his powers. It is one of the most rewatchable films ever made, and it only gets better each time. 24th [music] place, Oreo Leon, 1987.

Louis Mau's Oreoir. Leon is a quiet film about a catastrophic [music] thing based on Mal's own memories of boarding school in occupied France during World War II. [music] It follows a young Catholic boy who befriends a new student, a quiet, [music] brilliant boy hiding a devastating secret. The film builds with heartbreaking patience, allowing the friendship between the two boys to [music] become completely real before the world outside intrudes with brutal finality.

Mal's restraint [music] is extraordinary. He never manipulates, never scores his emotional moments with swelling [music] music, never tells you how to feel. He simply shows you with unflinching [music] honesty what happened. The final scene and the words spoken over it will haunt you. It is one of the most honest and [music] most devastating films ever made about childhood, friendship, and the violence of history. 23rd [music] place, The Godfather Part Two, 1974.

Francis Ford Copala achieved something almost [music] miraculous with The Godfather Part Two. He made a sequel that is by almost universal critical agreement, the equal of its predecessor, and some would argue it's superior. The film runs two narratives [music] simultaneously following Michael Corleó Al Paccino as he consolidates and corrupts his empire in the present while flashing back to the early life of his father Veto [music] played by Robert Dairo in an Oscar-winning performance of extraordinary elegance and menace.

The contrast between the two stories is the film's genius. Young Veto builds something out of love and loyalty, [music] however twisted. Michael destroys everything out of the same impulses. Dairo and Pacino never share a scene, [music] and yet the film is entirely about their relationship. It is a sequel that deepens and darkens the original in ways that are genuinely Shakespearean. [music] 22nd place, Lawrence of Arabia, 1962.

David Lean's [music] Lawrence of Arabia is the grandest film ever made, a sweeping biographical epic that makes every modern blockbuster look modest by comparison. Peter Oul makes his film [music] debut as Te Lawrence, the enigmatic British officer who helped unite Arab tribes against the [music] Ottoman Empire during World War I. And his performance is a marvel of charisma, [music] intelligence, and psychological complexity.

Lean shoots the Arabian desert with a sense of wonder and scale that is genuinely overwhelming. And Maurice Jar's score is one of the most beautiful pieces of film music ever written. But Lawrence of Arabia is not simply a spectacle. It is a deeply ambiguous portrait of a man who could never quite decide who he was or [music] where he belonged. And that uncertainty gives the film its lasting power. Nearly 4 hours long and [music] worth every minute. 21st place, Schindler's List, 1993.

Steven [music] Spielberg's Schindler's List is one of those films that feels less like entertainment and more like an obligation. a moral duty to bear witness. Shot in stark black [music] and white on location in Kov and at the site of the Avitz concentration camp, it tells the [music] true story of Oscar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than a thousand Jewish lives by employing them in his factory. Liam Niss brings enormous complicated [music] humanity to Schindler.

A man whose initial motivations were purely selfish and whose transformation into a savior is all the more powerful for being reluctant. Ralph Fiennes is genuinely terrifying as the sadistic SS commonant Aean Guth. Spielberg [snorts] directs with a restraint and a reverence utterly unlike anything [music] else in his filmography. Schindler's List is not an easy film to watch. It is however a necessary one. 20th place, Seven Samurai, [music] 1954.

Akira Kurasawa's Seven Samurai is the template upon which an enormous [music] portion of all action cinema has been built, and it is still better than virtually everything built upon it. Set in 16th century Japan, the film follows a village of poor farmers who [music] hire seven ronin, masterless samurai, to defend them against the bandits who return each harvest to steal their food. What Kurasawa [music] achieves in nearly 3 and 1/2 hours is something genuinely miraculous.

He gives each of the seven samurai [music] a completely distinct personality, a completely distinct fighting style, and a completely distinct relationship with the world [music] around them. The action sequences, particularly the mud soaked final battle, remain some of the most viscerally exciting [music] ever filmed. And beneath all the action and all the spectacle, Seven Samurai is a deeply melancholy film about the distance between [music] those who serve and those who are served.

A genuine wonder. 19th place, [music] Vertigo, 1958. Alfred [music] Hitchcock's Vertigo was misunderstood on its original release, dismissed by critics [music] who found it cold and too slow and then gradually over decades reappraised [music] into its current position as one of the undisputed masterpieces of world cinema. James Stewart plays Scotty Ferguson, [music] a retired detective with a debilitating fear of heights who becomes dangerously obsessed with a mysterious woman named Meline, played by Kim Novak.

Hitchcock uses the film's San Francisco locations [music] with extraordinary purpose, and Bernard Herman's swirling, romantic, deeply [music] unsettling score is one of the greatest ever written. But the film's real subject is obsession itself. The ways we try to reshape the [music] people we love into the people we need them to be, and the damage we do in the process. It is romantic and terrifying in [music] equal measure, and it is only deepened in power with each passing year. 18th place, [music] City Lights, 1931.

Charlie Chaplan City Lights was already something of an anacronism when it was released in 1931. [music] The sound era was fully underway. And here was Chaplain releasing a silent [music] film with a synchronized musical score, but no dialogue. And it doesn't matter because City Lights [music] is simply one of the most moving films ever made. The falls hopelessly in love with a blind flower girl and sets about raising the money she needs for an operation to restore [music] her sight through a series of adventures involving a suicidal millionaire and [music] a disastrous stint as a boxer.

The final scene in which the flower girl, her sight restored, finally sees [music] the man who helped her is perhaps the single most emotionally powerful moment in cinema history. Chaplain sustains a perfect balance [music] of comedy and heartbreak across the entire film. It is irreplaceable. 17th [music] place, The Silence of the Lambs, 1991. Jonathan Demi's. The Silence of the Lambs is one of [music] only three films in history to win all five major Academy Awards.

Best picture, best director, best actor, best actress, [music] and best screenplay. and it earned every single one. Jodie Foster plays Clarice Starling, a determined FBI trainee sent to interview the brilliant [music] caged psychiatrist and cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lectar, played by Anthony Hopkins in [music] a performance of such controlled terrifying intelligence that he owns the film despite appearing in it for fewer than 20 minutes.

The film's exploration of Clarice's character, her determination, her vulnerability, her refusal to [music] be diminished is as compelling as any thriller element. Hopkins and Fosters's scenes together operate at a level of psychological intensity that is almost unbearable. The Silence of the Lambs transcended [music] its genre to become something rarer and more lasting, a genuine [music] work of art. 16th place, 12 Angry Men, 1957.

Sydney Lumit's 12 Angry Men [music] takes place almost entirely in a single jury room over the course of a single afternoon, and it is one of the most gripping, [music] most intelligent, and most morally urgent films ever made. Henry Fonda plays the [music] lone juror who, before condemning a teenage boy to death, wants to take a little time to talk [music] it over. What follows is a masterclass in screenwriting, direction, and ensemble performance as 12 very different men [music] with very different backgrounds and very different prejudices are forced to confront the assumptions they walked in with.

The film [music] is about the American justice system. Yes. But it's also about the human [music] tendency to hear what we expect to hear, to see what we want to see, and the rare courage required to stand alone when everyone else is pointing the other direction. As relevant today [music] as the day it was released. 15th place, Casablanca, [music] 1942. Here's the thing about Casablanca. It shouldn't work as well as it does.

[music] It was shot quickly. Its script was being rewritten almost daily during production. Nobody on set [music] was entirely sure how it would end. And its leading man was not exactly known for playing romantic heroes. And yet, Michael Curtis's Casablanca [music] is one of the most beloved, most perfectly realized, and most emotionally satisfying films ever made. Humphrey Bogart as [music] Rick Blaine and Ingred Bergman as Il Zaoon generate a romantic chemistry of [music] such extraordinary power that you feel the weight of their history from the first moment they see each other across a crowded room.

The film is [music] set against the backdrop of World War II, but it's really about sacrifice, about choosing something [music] larger than your own happiness. We'll always have Paris. Of all the films on all the lists in [music] all of cinema, this one walks into ours. 14th place, Citizen Canain, 1941. Orson Wells [music] was 25 years old when he made Citizen Canain, and he made it as though he'd been directing films his [music] entire life and was now ready to reinvent the entire medium.

The story investigates the life of Charles Foster Kaine, [music] a newspaper magnate of enormous wealth and extraordinary loneliness through a series of interviews [music] with the people who knew him. What Wells achieves technically is staggering. Deep focus photography, unconventional camera angles, overlapping dialogue, nonlinear structure, techniques that [music] were either invented for or popularized by this film that directors are still [music] borrowing today.

But Citizen Canain is more than a technical achievement. It is a devastating portrait of the ways ambition hollows a person out. The way the hunger for greatness can [music] consume the simple things that might actually make life worth living. Rose Bud, all these years later still gets you. 13th [music] place, The Godfather, 1972. Francis Ford, Copalas. The Godfather is the gold standard of American cinema. A film so perfectly [music] constructed that it's almost impossible to find a single scene, a single performance, a single line of dialogue [music] that is anything less than exactly right.

Marlon Brando with cotton balls in his cheeks and a voice [music] like gravel wrapped in velvet creates Veto Corleone, one of the most iconic characters in the history of storytelling. Alpaccino's transformation from reluctant outsider to ice cold patriarch over the course of the film [music] is one of cinema's great character arcs. Ninoa's score is immediately and permanently embedded in your memory from first hearing.

The film operates [music] as crime epic, family tragedy, immigration story and meditation on power all at once and it excels at all of them. It is not merely a great film. [music] It is an experience. 12th place, Breathless, 1960. [music] Jeanluke Godard's Breathless did to cinema what rock and roll did to [music] music. It blew the doors off, made for almost no money with a handheld camera [music] and a script that was still being written the morning of each shoot day.

It follows a smalltime French criminal who shoots a policeman and goes on the run with an American girl in Paris. [music] Jean Paul Belondo is impossibly cool. Jean Seabourg is radiant and between them they generate a romantic electricity [music] that sparks off every frame. But the film's true revolution is [music] formal. The jump cuts, the direct addresses to camera, the casual disregard for the rules of classical film making.

Breathless invented the visual language of modern cinema. It launched [music] the French New Wave, inspired American filmmakers from Scorsese to Tarantino to link later and it still feels more than 60 years later thrillingly impossibly alive. 11th place, Tokyo Story, 1953. Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo [music] Story is frequently voted the greatest film ever made in polls of directors and critics and its greatness is of a very particular and very [music] rare kind.

An elderly couple travel from their small coastal town to Tokyo to visit their grown children [music] and discover that their children are too busy with their own lives to spend much time with them. That is essentially [music] the entire plot. And yet, in Ozu's hands, this simple, quiet, [music] almost plotless story becomes one of the most profound meditations on family, time, and the inevitability of separation ever put on screen.

[music] Ozu's camera barely moves. His compositions are serene and perfectly [music] balanced. His characters speak in the most ordinary way imaginable. And somehow by the final scene you feel as though the whole of human experience [music] has passed through the frame. It is a film unlike any other. 10th place. The Shaw Shank [music] Redemption 1994. Frank Darabon's The Shaw Shank [music] Redemption was not a box office success on its original release.

It was not a film that dazzled anyone with technical innovation [music] or formal experimentation. It did not win the Academy Award for best picture. And yet it sits at the top of nearly every audience poll of the greatest films ever made year after year, decade after decade. And the reason is simply this. It makes people feel something real. Tim Robbins plays Andy Defrain, a banker [music] sentenced to life in Shaw Shank State Penitentiary for a murder he didn't commit.

Anne Morgan Freeman plays Red, [music] the inmate who becomes his closest friend. The film is about hope, about the stubborn, irrational, magnificent human refusal to give up. It's unfashionable to call a film life [music] affirming without a hint of irony these days. The Shaw Shank Redemption earns [music] every word of it. Ninth place, Pulp Fiction, 1994. [music] Quentyn Tarantino's Pulp Fiction didn't just arrive in 1994, it detonated.

Two hitmen [music] discuss cheeseburgers before committing murder. A gangster's wife overdoses on heroin at a dinner that was supposed to be a date. A boxer refuses to throw a fight and finds [music] himself in a nightmare. These interlocking stories are told out of chronological order with such audacity, such wit, such absolute mastery [music] of tone and dialogue that the film feels like it's operating on its own [music] private frequency. one that you either pick up immediately or you don't.

The performances, [music] John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Harvey Kaidle are all extraordinary. Jackson's biblical monologue is one of the most electrifying moments in '90s cinema. Pulp Fiction reinvented independent film, revived careers, launched others, [music] and changed the conversation about what movies could do. It remains intoxicating. Eighth place, Mullholland Drive. Wait, we covered that one.

Let's talk about Wild Strawberries, [music] 1957. Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries follows an elderly professor played by the legendary Victor Showstrom [music] who travels by car to receive an honorary doctorate and along the way confronts the full [music] weight of his life. Through dreams, memories, and encounters with various travelers who seem to reflect different aspects [music] of his own past, he is forced to reckon with the coldness, the detachment, the emotional failures that have defined him as a [music] person, even as they have coexisted with genuine achievement.

Sio's performance, quiet, [music] proud, and gradually crumbling, is one of the great screen performances. [music] Bergman directs with tremendous sensitivity and with that distinctly Swedish quality of sitting calmly in the presence of very difficult truths. Wild Strawberries asks what we owe the people we love and whether it's too late [music] to make amends. The answer it offers is both gentle and heartbreaking. Seventh place, [music] Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968.

Sergio Leone. Once upon a time in the west is the western taken to its most oporadic extreme. [music] A film of monumental ambition and monumental achievement that unfolds with the deliberate hypnotic [music] pace of a dream you can't quite wake from. Henry Fonda cast [music] brilliantly against type as a cold-blooded killer named Frank walks into the film's opening scene and does [music] something so shocking that it reframes everything that follows.

Charles Bronson is unforgettably mysterious as the harmonica player with a long score to settle [music] and anyomoricone's score is simply put the greatest music ever written for a western. Perhaps the greatest music ever written for [music] any film. Leon takes the myths of the American West and elevates them to mythology with a capital M. Nearly 3 hours long feels like a religious experience. Sixth place, Dr. Strange Love, 1964.

Stanley Kubri's Dr. Strange Love or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is the funniest film ever made about the end of the [music] world. And it is also, depending on your level of existential anxiety, the most terrifying. Peter Cers plays three completely distinct [music] roles. A mildmannered British officer, the American president, and the deranged ex-Nazi [music] scientist of the title. and he is extraordinary in all three.

Kubri's satire is as sharp as a scalpel and as cold as a nuclear winter, exposing the terrifying absurdity of the cold war logic of mutually [music] assured destruction. The war room set with its circular table and its cone of green light is one of the most iconic images in cinema [music] history. Made in 1964 at the height of the Cold War, [music] it has never stopped being relevant. The bomb is always there. The Doctor Strange Loves Never Quite Go Away.

Fifth place, Raging Bull, 1980. Martin Scorsese's [music] Raging Bull is the most brutal, most beautiful, most merciless self-portrait of a filmmaker in cinema history. Filtered through the life of middleweight boxing champion Jake Lamada. Robert Dairo's performance [music] is one for the ages. He gained 60 lbs for the film's later scenes, physically transforming [music] himself in a way that was at the time almost unprecedented.

But the weight gain is the least of it. What Dairo achieves is a portrayal of a man destroyed entirely by his own inability [music] to accept love, to trust, to allow the people closest to him to be close to him. Shot in luminous black and white by Michael Chapman [music] with fight sequences that are simultaneously the most abstract and the most viscerally effective in cinema. Raging Bull is Scorsese's masterpiece. A film about masculinity, shame, and the possibility of redemption that hits as hard as anything Lamoda ever threw.

Fourth place, [music] 8 and 1/2, 1963. Federrico Fellini's 8 and a half is a film about the impossibility of [music] making a film and it is also one of the most fully alive, most intoxicating and most purely cinematic experiences [music] you will ever have. Marello Mastroyani plays Guido Anelmi, a famous director who retreats to a spa to prepare his next film [music] and finds himself utterly paralyzed, unable to separate memory from fantasy, professional obligation [music] from personal desire.

Fellini constructs the film as a series of dreams, fantasies, memories, and reality scenes that [music] blur and bleed into each other with extraordinary fluency. And the result [music] is a film that feels less like watching someone else's story, and more like being inside [music] someone else's consciousness. It is wildly funny in places, deeply melancholy in others, and shot by Johnny Deano with a visual richness that [music] is simply extraordinary.

Eight and a half is cinema eating itself and loving every bite. Third place, Andre Rublv, [music] 1966. Andre Tarovsk's Andre Rublev is [music] the most ambitious film on this entire list and possibly the most ambitious film ever made. Running nearly 3 and 1/2 hours, it follows the life of the great Russian icon painter across a series of loosely connected episodes set in medieval Russia. [music] A world of violence, religious upheaval, and extraordinary human suffering.

Tarovsky [music] builds this world with a patience and a physical specificity that is almost overwhelming. Wintry landscapes, rain soaked mud, crumbling stone, the raw texture of a civilization [music] struggling to hold itself together. It feels less like a historical recreation and more like [music] time travel. The film's central question is one that artists across every era have wrestled with. Is it possible to create something [music] beautiful in a brutal world?

Can art survive in conditions of despair and violence? Does it even have the right to? Tarovski doesn't [music] answer these questions cheaply. He sits with them for nearly 3 and 1/2 hours, lets [music] them breathe, lets them bleed, and then comes the final sequence. After nearly 3 [music] hours of stark black and white imagery, the film suddenly erupts into color as Rublev's [music] icons fill the screen, their gold and scarlet and deep luminous blue radiating outward like something [music] sacred.

It is one of the most powerful moments in the history of cinema. A moment that doesn't just answer the [music] film's central question, but renders the answer physically, visually, undeniably. Art survives. Art [music] matters. Tarovski proves it by making a film this extraordinary about a man who proved it first. Second place, The Godfather, 1972. [music] We've talked about The Godfather already, but it deserves its second mention because it finishes this high on the list, and nothing we [music] said before quite captures what makes it irreplaceable.

Copala's film is the rare work that achieves [music] everything it attempts. It is a crime film that functions as a family tragedy. It is an immigrant story that functions as a meditation on the American dreams corruption. It is an entertainment [music] of the highest order that is simultaneously a work of genuine lasting art. Every performance is perfect. Every scene lands exactly [music] as intended. Gordon Willis's cinematography with its deep shadows and its faces emerging from darkness is the visual language of power itself.

The film did not merely influence [music] cinema. It defined a benchmark that filmmakers have been trying to reach ever since. It is by any reasonable measure the pinnacle of American popular art. And in first place, Tokyo Story 1953. We return to Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story and we give it [music] the top position. Not because it is the most thrilling or the most formally innovative [music] or the most immediately accessible film on this list, but because it is the most true, the most human.

The film that [music] more than any other looks at the ordinary texture of a life and finds within it something that feels like the whole of human experience. [music] Ozu spent decades perfecting a cinema of perfect stillness of tatami level camera placement [music] and rigid compositional geometry. and in Tokyo story. All of that formal mastery is placed entirely in the service of an [music] achingly simple story about parents and children and the distances that open up between people who love each other.

The film's final scene [music] in which the youngest daughter sits alone in the family home as the world moves on around her is as close to pure truth as cinema has ever gotten. [music] Some films entertain, some films excite. The very greatest ones remind you what it means to be alive and to know that it won't last. [music] Tokyo Story does that better than any film ever made. And there you have it, the 50 greatest movies you absolutely must see before you die.

From the breathtaking silence [music] of Tokyo Story to the oporadic thunder of Once Upon a Time in the West. From Chaplain's [music] heartbreaking to Dairo's self-destroying Jake Lamada. From the spy rooms of Casablanca [music] to the spirit world of Spirited Away, these are the films that prove over and over again [music] that cinema is not just entertainment. It is one of the great art forms of human civilization.

A way of seeing and feeling and understanding the [music] world that no other medium quite replicates. Now, we want to hear from you. Which of these [music] films have you already seen? Which ones are you adding to your watch list right now? [music] And most importantly, which film do you think should have made this list that we left off? Tell us in the comments below. [music] We read every single one. If you enjoyed this countdown, give the video a thumbs up.

It genuinely [music] helps more movie lovers discover our content and keeps us making videos like this one. And if [music] you haven't subscribed yet, what are you waiting for? Hit that subscribe button and join us for [music] more countdowns, more deep dives, and more celebrations of the greatest art form [music] the world has ever produced. Thanks for watching. Now go watch the