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As each decade’s Sight and Sound film poll can attest, lists of favorite movies—whether classic movies, modern movies, or genre movies—will never go out of style. You may ask: Shouldn’t the very best films remain so, by definition? Well, not always. Films age uniquely, go in and out of vogue, surge and ebb in our collective memory based on the social mores and cultural obsessions of the present.
Regardless, the act of listing and debating films provides both writers and readers something undeniably delightful: a wistful nostalgia for pockets of the past that we ache to relive—or perhaps never knew—and which we are able to summon by a particular onscreen collage of faces, places, and encounters. If films are like memories, then lists are like the crumbs of tea-soaked madeleines that can easily transport us.
This is no more true than with so-called classic movies, a genre distinction that by its very name implies a burnished antiquity, a gilded bygone era of more flawless creations. In that spirit, Vogue has assembled a short list of classic films for your (re-)consideration, from mid-century melodramas to Technicolor musicals to atomic noirs and queer home movies. Focusing our efforts on the golden age of cinema—that is, roughly between the advent of talkies at the conclusion of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1960s, when filmmaking experienced a meteoric transformation in style, narrative, and production—the list purposely jettisons a few of the hoarier standard-bearers (i.e. no Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Singin’ in the Rain, or Gone With the Wind here, despite their ostensible deservedness) and instead mixes a few lesser-known, and more provocative, entries with perennial favorites that still retain their auras of timelessness.
How many of these classics have you seen?
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
Sunrise was German Expressionist director and expat F.W. Murnau’s first studio picture in America. Although technically not a talkie with audible dialogue, it was one of the first films to use a synchronized score and sound effects recorded onto the optical track of the film strip, including church bells, car horns, and crowd noises. Murnau’s film makes use of a stock narrative (a love triangle between a wandering man, his country wife, and city mistress) to create both a melodramatic fable of love versus lust and a sumptuous panorama of rural and urban life in the interwar period. The director’s trademark use of steep angles and atmospheric lighting was matched with Fox Studio’s brawny coffers and elaborate set pieces to produce a big-budget, expressionist masterpiece. Sunrise was awarded Oscars for best unique and artistic picture and best actress at the very first Academy Awards. The subsequent advancement in talkies did much to kill its legacy as an unusual artifact of the proto-sound era, but after almost a century, Sunrise is still one of the purest expressions of love on film.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, Tubi, or YouTube.
L’Atalante (1934)
French enfant terrible Jean Vigo’s final film, L’Atalante, was released shortly before the director’s premature death from tuberculosis at 29. Its initial version, heavily redacted by Vigo’s producers, proved to be an audience bomb, and the film was promptly squirreled away, not to be rediscovered until the 1940s by the nouvelle vague critics. Now considered by film scholars to be one of the masterpieces of 1930s poetic realism, L’Atalante tells the story of young newlyweds who depart on the husband’s barge for their honeymoon but split when the suffocating atmosphere of the ship’s cabin becomes unbearable. Husband Jean (Jean Dasté, who also starred in Vigo’s previous Zero for Conduct) becomes disconsolate after abandoning Juliette (the dreamy Dita Parlo) and begins searching at every port—while persistently submerging his head into water, as per an old folk legend—to relocate her. Vigo’s love of childhood fantasy and liquid imagery appears in the film’s enchanting underwater sequence, one of the director’s best. L’Atalante is the origin of any and all New Wave and indie films.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
What to say about the film that haunted all of our childhood dreams? Director Victor Fleming’s and MGM’s psychotropic fantasy of Depression-era Middle America still retains all of its Technicolor magic and mystery 85 years after its release. Reputed to be the most watched movie in cinema history, Oz has become a childhood rite of passage and a cultural experience in lifelong rewatching, with its continual rebroadcasts on television and in repertory theaters as well as through a surfeit of subsequent referents in other films, television shows, and popular idioms. The recent documentary-slash-film-essay Lynch/Oz, which explores American surrealist filmmaker David Lynch’s ongoing obsession with Oz and its influence on his own films, only confirms what many generations of moviegoers have already intuitively grasped: that one of the most revered American childhood stories of all time is also perhaps the most beautifully disturbing film ever made.
How to watch: Stream on Max, Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Day of Wrath (1943)
Part historical drama, part Gothic horror story, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Day of Wrath recounts the events surrounding a 17th-century witch burning in Denmark. No one knows how to do Protestant repression, satanism, and incest like the Scandis: When an old crone and herbalist is accused of diabolism by the townsfolk, her tortured confession brings out secrets of the local pastor and his young bride Anne’s link to witchcraft. Before the condemned woman’s burning, she curses Anne and declares to the pastor that she will eventually burn at the stake too. In the meantime, Anne seduces her stepson Martin with increasingly disturbing intensity. Day of Wrath has the look of Dreyer’s previous silent films: Its austere interiors and permanent shadows are thick with dread. The camera and characters move ponderously, and the dialogue is often spoken in monotone. Even during the scenes of torture and immolation, the witnessing clergy’s cold faces betray a dearth of humanity. Only Anne bears a light inside her, which may or may not be diabolical, and in the end it will ensure her demise. Dreyer denied Day of Wrath was a veiled parable of the Nazi regime, which had by then occupied Denmark; however, he fled to Sweden shortly after the film’s completion and remained there through the end of the war.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV or the Criterion Channel.
Children of Paradise (1945)
French filmmaker Marcel Carné was revered by some and pilloried by others for bringing cinema back to its theatrical roots in the years after the addition of sound. Children of Paradise was Carné’s epic, three-hour ode to the characters of the Boulevard du Temple, the center of Parisian theater during the early 19th century. The histrionic drama revolves around the various lovers—a mime, an aspiring stage actor, a criminal, and a wealthy dandy—of a carnival worker turned courtesan, Garance. Their lives intersect on the Parisian stages and streets over many years of the July Monarchy, yielding theatrical tales of unrequited love, ambition, avarice, and murder. Screenwriter Jacques Prévert based the film’s four central male characters on legendary 19th-century figures and modeled the story’s poetic realism on the works of Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo. Adding to the mythology of the film was its completion over the course of the Nazi occupation of France. Production was riddled with delays, set rebuilds, and reshoots. Some scenes and crew members of the film were kept secret from the occupation administrators. Members of the French Resistance were said to have contributed at points, while other cast members fled or were jailed after Liberation for collaborating with the Nazis.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, the Criterion Channel, or Prime Video.
The Red Shoes (1948)
British directorial duo Powell and Pressburger’s fairy-tale-inspired ballet film The Red Shoes exists in a continuum between The Wizard of Oz and the recent dance-horror film Black Swan. The Red Shoes was neither a movie musical by MGM standards of the day nor a romantic melodrama, instead combining both of these genres into a fantasia of ballet performance, panchromatic mise-en-scène, backstage intrigue, and star-crossed love. The centerpiece of the film is a carnivalesque, 15-minute onstage performance of The Ballet of the Red Shoes, which Powell and Pressburger captured using a barrage of moving camera techniques, superimpositions, extreme close-ups, and special effects in order to accentuate both the otherworldliness of the dance and the foreboding visions of its prima ballerina, Victoria Page (Moira Shearer). The Red Shoes puts most classic American musical films to shame, while its dark, Gothic aesthetic is much closer in tone to the works of Jean Cocteau and Joseph Cornell than Rodgers and Hammerstein.
How to watch: Stream on Max, Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
At the juncture between postwar noir and golden-age melodrama lies Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, a saturnine elegy to a lost Hollywood of the silent era, when faces and charisma were more desirable than voices or talent. Starring the then démodé Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, a washed-up silent-movie queen in search of a comeback, and William Holden as her raffish, grifter paramour Joe Gillis, the film also serves as a sly meta commentary on the movie industry’s greed, decadence, and misogyny. Roger Ebert called Sunset Boulevard “the best drama ever made about the movies because it sees through the illusions, even if Norma doesn’t.” The opening and final sequences of the film’s frame story are some of the most oft referenced in movie history, while the dark, labyrinthine interiors of Desmond’s mansion perfectly reflect the mind of the deluded diva, whose success and celebrity are completely behind her.
How to watch: Stream on Paramount+, Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Forbidden Games (1952)
Although mostly forgotten in the English-language world, René Clément’s Forbidden Games is often claimed by critics to be the greatest film ever made on the subject of childhood, with the possible exception of Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct. It does not make for easy watching, however. The story is set during the Nazi invasion of France, when young urban refugee Paulette witnesses the death of her parents and dog by German fighter planes. She meets Michel, a rural farm boy who helps her establish a graveyard for her dog and other dead animals, which they adorn with crosses pilfered from the local church. Predictably, the adults become incensed by their funerary rituals and send Paulette away. Forbidden Games is about the smallest slivers of innocence that can exist even in the most hopeless of worlds.
How to watch: Purchase on DVD or Blu-ray, or stream via the Internet Archive.
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954)
It is difficult to quantify just how visually and culturally significant Kenneth Anger’s works of queer cinema are. When Anger began experimenting with images of the occult, drug culture, eroticism, and queer bodies in the 1940s, the results were like nothing that had ever appeared on celluloid. At 38 minutes, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is one of the longest films of what remains of Anger’s slim oeuvre of experimental shorts. Its magus-like characters, incandescent color palette, and cryptic superimpositions make it look as much like a silent-era epic as a counterculture exploitation film. Anger cast his various friends (including Anaïs Nin and Marjorie Cameron) as deities, potentates, and oracles, who, clothed in ancient and medieval garb, caper through candlelit darkness performing hermetic rites with increasing frenzy. To heighten the film’s atmosphere, the original version was divided across three screens and set to the music of Czech composer Leos Janácek’s Glagolitic Mass. Is this self-serious mysticism or high camp? Baroque painting on film or the tackiest home movie ever made? Yes.
How to watch: You can track it down on Vimeo or YouTube.
Written on the Wind (1955)
In this weepy soap set in Texas oil country from the master of melodramas Douglas Sirk, wealthy playboy Kyle Hadley marries Lucy Moore, who secretly loves Kyle’s best friend Mitch Wayne, who is in turn loved by Kyle’s sister, Marylee. Lucy becomes pregnant despite Kyle’s infertility, Kyle and Marylee’s father falls to his death, Kyle is murdered, Marylee threatens blackmail. These are the antics of a small-town, Southern family corrupted by wealth and privilege. The film’s saturated Technicolor and sparkly set pieces lent Sirk’s world a sense of artifice that made every far-fetched scenario both emotionally heightened and schmaltzy. Roger Ebert called Written on the Wind the seed for ’80s prime-time soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty and compared it to the works of Ingmar Bergman and Tennessee Williams. It is also difficult to imagine Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s and Pedro Almodovar’s cinematic portraits of damaged women or Todd Haynes’s dreamy retro melodramas without Sirk.
How to watch: Buy it on DVD or Blu-ray.
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
During the popular era of film noir, from the beginning of the 1940s to the late 1950s, the Hollywood majors churned out hundreds of examples of the genre, from A-list prestige films to drive-in B movies and subgenre mash-ups. While studio directors like John Huston, Otto Preminger, and Orson Welles graced the genre with their own auteurist touches, noir still managed to retain the louche grittiness of its gangster-film provenance through B movie and Poverty Row directors like Jacques Tourneur, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Samuel Fuller. Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly is an artifact of this latter style, far from the melodramatic Bogart-Bacall pictures of the late ’40s. Even by contemporary standards, Kiss Me Deadly bears a scummy, blood-soaked veneer that continues to fascinate and repel; the subtle shades of grayness in most noirs have been supplanted here by a stygian bleakness. Young actor Ralph Meeker’s private-eye Mike Hammer is less a morally ambiguous underdog than a sleazy and violent brawler who chases not after a femme fatale or a trail of money but a glowing valise that could destroy the world. There may have been more technically astute noirs of the era, but none were as nightmarish and apocalyptic: To make a noir about nuclear annihilation during the early days of the Cold War was the ultimate exercise in pessimism.
How to watch: Available via the Internet Archive.
Mon Oncle (1958)
There was no shortage of popular American comedies throughout the 1950s with starring duos like Martin and Lewis, Lucy and Desi, or Hudson and Day. These films were both screwball and slapstick, typically with lighthearted stories of cockeyed optimists whose adventures symbolized a new decade of plentitude and possibility. French filmmaker and actor Jacques Tati was a comedian whose sensibilities were more mordant and nostalgic, nearer to the silent-era satires of Chaplin, Keaton, and Linder. His recurring character Monsieur Hulot is a mostly taciturn spectator who wanders maladroitly through the modern world, observing its eccentricities and absurdities with a polite nod and tip of his pipe. In Tati’s fourth film—and first in color—Mon Oncle, Hulot visits his relatives in the new suburbs of Paris, stumbling through their ultramodernist home and tedious social lives. Tati seems to catch the mundane foibles in every character and situation, no matter how incidental, from the distracted street sweeper to the befuddled corporate president to the vanity fish fountain only turned on for guests. In Tati’s lens, children and dogs are the true protagonists of modern life. But, despite all the visual puns and satirical jabs, Tati’s deep and abiding love for each of his characters makes Mon Oncle a profoundly humanist film.
How to watch: Stream on Max, Apple TV, or Prime Video.
Vertigo (1958)
The first of two Hitchcock films included on the list, Vertigo has proven to be the consummation of two decades’ worth of distaff Hollywood melodramas and Grand Guignol–inspired thrillers. Considered a critical and popular failure at the time of its release, the twisty Freudian psychodrama about acrophobic detective Scottie Ferguson’s (Jimmy Stewart) obsession with an emotionally haunted blonde—and her uncanny brunette lookalike (both played by Kim Novak)—has become its own pop-psychological lexicon, woven into subsequent decades of erotic thrillers, domestic whodunits, and true-crime fan fiction. The film’s sheer weightiness and tortuous narrative layers also marked an end to classic depictions of suspense onscreen and the beginning of a more frenzied, and often violent, eroticism.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
Psycho (1960)
Just as Vertigo signaled the end of a classic style of suspense filmmaking, Hitchcock’s next film, Psycho, supplied a new narrative and visual template for mainstream horror. The movie’s low-budget-motel setting, Sun Belt landscape, and glimpse into the heart of American darkness looked and felt different from any previous horror film—as did the directorial coup of killing slinky heroine Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) at the film’s halfway point in one of cinema’s most terrifying murder sequences. Hitchcock and screenwriter Joseph Stefano carefully adapted the source novel to hide the true identity of Norman Bates’s mother until the last scene, and Hitchcock famously refused to give advanced screenings to press for fear of spoiling the secret. Released in the same year as Michael Powell’s career-ending Peeping Tom and Georges Franju’s obscure Eyes Without a Face, it was Psycho’s successful mix of sensationalized kink and violence that most inspired younger generations of erotic filmmakers like Roman Polanski, Bernardo Bertolucci, Dario Argento, and Brian De Palma to explore the darkest recesses of our desires. Psycho’s prestige was such that it prompted a controversial shot-by-shot remake by Gus Van Sant in 1998, as well as a 24-hour-long video installation by artist Douglas Gordon called, appropriately, 24 Hour Psycho.
How to watch: Stream on Apple TV, Prime Video, or YouTube.
L’Avventura (1960)
At nearly the same time that Hitchcock was rewriting the rules of genre filmmaking in Hollywood, Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni was producing a radical art film that also pivoted on a female protagonist who disappears prematurely from the screen. L’avventura was shot over many months on the craggy Aeolian Islands and in Sicily by Antonioni and a small cast and crew, including his then girlfriend actress Monica Vitti. The results are something between a nouveau riche travelogue of postwar Italy and a languid tone poem of sex and alienation. The plot is a MacGuffin: Vitti’s Claudia and Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) attempt to chase down the whereabouts of Sandro’s missing fiancée, Anna, across various Sicilian villas and hotels. Anna’s sudden absence stokes the new couple’s intense attraction and a deeper, more innate realization of the idle life that they suffer. However, the film’s potency lies in its protracted silences, natural landscapes, architectural compositions, and beautiful, listless faces. Antonioni and Vitti’s collaboration in L’avventura and subsequent films throughout the 1960s created a new visual paradigm for modern art cinema.
How to watch: Stream on Max or Apple TV.