2001: A Space Odyssey

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• The Godfather

  The Godfather, released in 1972, was adapted from Mario Puzo's novel and became both a massive box-office success and a critical landmark, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and establishing Francis Ford Coppola as one of the era's most significant American directors virtually overnight. Marlon Brando's performance as aging mob patriarch Vito Corleone, delivered with cotton stuffed in his cheeks to create the character's distinctive jowled appearance, won him the Academy Award for Best Actor, though he famously declined the award in protest of Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans. The film's 1974 sequel, The Godfather Part II, is one of the only sequels in film history considered by many critics to surpass the original, and the two films together are frequently cited as the high-water mark of what a multi-film crime saga can achieve both commercially and artistically. The Godfather's influence on the crime genre — its operatic pacing, its sympathetic treatment of characters engaged in genuinely violent criminal enterprise, and its meditation on family loyalty and the corruption of the American immigrant dream — has made it one of the most frequently referenced and imitated films in the subsequent five decades of American cinema.

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• Citizen Kane

  Citizen Kane, released in 1941 and co-written, directed by, and starring a 25-year-old Orson Welles, is widely regarded by film historians as one of the most technically innovative films ever made, pioneering deep-focus cinematography and unconventional narrative structure techniques that were unusual for mainstream studio filmmaking at the time. The film's thinly veiled portrait of media magnate William Randolph Hearst, whose life closely paralleled that of the fictional Charles Foster Kane, prompted Hearst to launch an aggressive campaign to suppress the film's release, pressuring theater chains and threatening to withhold coverage in his own newspapers. Welles's use of a nonlinear structure, told through multiple conflicting flashbacks from different characters attempting to understand the meaning of Kane's dying word "Rosebud," was considered a radical narrative departure from the more straightforward storytelling conventions of Hollywood films at the time. Despite Hearst's suppression campaign limiting its initial commercial success, Citizen Kane's critical reputation grew substantially over subsequent decades, and it topped the British Film Institute's influential Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made for 50 consecutive years, from 1962 until finally being displaced in 2012.

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• Casablanca

  Casablanca, released in 1942 during World War II, was filmed almost entirely on the Warner Bros. studio lot, with production ending just as the actual Allied invasion of North Africa, on which the film's setting was loosely based, was making international headlines — a coincidence of timing that boosted the film's contemporary relevance and box-office success. The film's screenplay went through extensive last-minute rewrites during production, and the film's famously ambiguous, bittersweet ending — in which Humphrey Bogart's character sends Ingrid Bergman's character away with another man for the greater wartime cause — was reportedly still being finalized even as filming was underway. Casablanca's dialogue produced some of the most quoted lines in film history, including "Here's looking at you, kid" and "We'll always have Paris," phrases that have become permanently embedded in American popular culture well beyond audiences who've actually seen the film itself. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and its combination of wartime romance, political intrigue, and a genuinely bittersweet rather than conventionally happy ending has made it one of the most enduringly beloved and frequently revisited films of Hollywood's studio era.

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• Pulp Fiction

  Pulp Fiction, released in 1994, revived Quentin Tarantino's career-defining nonlinear storytelling approach, weaving together multiple interconnected crime stories out of chronological order in a way that became one of the most widely imitated structural techniques in independent filmmaking throughout the following decade. The film's dialogue-heavy, pop-culture-referencing screenplay, blending extended casual conversation with sudden bursts of graphic violence, established a distinctive tonal template that came to be closely associated with Tarantino's broader directorial style across his subsequent films. John Travolta's performance as hitman Vincent Vega is widely credited with reviving his career after a fallow period in the late 1980s and early '90s, and the film's ensemble cast, including Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, became closely associated with some of their most iconic career roles. Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and its massive commercial success on a relatively modest budget helped cement the broader 1990s independent film movement as a genuine commercial force within the mainstream film industry.

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• The Shawshank Redemption

  The Shawshank Redemption, released in 1994 and adapted from a Stephen King novella, was a modest box-office performer on its initial theatrical release but became one of the most beloved films in American cinema through home video and television rebroadcasts in the years that followed. The film has topped IMDb's user-voted list of the greatest films of all time for years running, a distinction reflecting genuine, sustained audience affection built almost entirely through repeated cable television airings rather than the kind of major awards-season box-office push that typically drives a film's cultural staying power. Its story of wrongfully imprisoned banker Andy Dufresne's decades-long friendship with fellow inmate Red, played by Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman respectively, is built around themes of hope and perseverance under grinding institutional oppression that have resonated with audiences across a remarkably broad range of demographics and viewing contexts. The film's production at the historic Ohio State Reformatory, since converted into a museum partly because of the film's ongoing popularity, has made the filming location itself a genuine tourist attraction, reflecting the unusual, slow-building cultural staying power the film has achieved in the decades since its underwhelming initial theatrical run.

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More in Film & TV

• Hidden Figures

  "Hidden Figures" (2016), directed by Theodore Melfi, dramatizes the true story of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, three Black women mathematicians whose calculations at NASA were critical to the success of the early American space program, based on Margot Lee Shetterly's nonfiction book of the same name. The film brought significant mainstream public attention to the real contributions of Black women "computers" at NASA during the Space Race, a history that had received relatively little prior widespread recognition, and it prompted renewed public interest in and honors for the real Katherine Johnson, who was still alive at the time of the film's release. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe's central performances drew significant critical acclaim, and the film became a notable box office success, outperforming many contemporary awards-season dramas and demonstrating a substantial mainstream audience for historical stories centered on Black women. Hidden Figures's combination of its overdue mainstream spotlight on real, previously under-recognized NASA scientists and its strong central performances has made it one of the most culturally significant true-story films of its decade.

• 12 Years a Slave

  "12 Years a Slave" (2013), directed by Steve McQueen, dramatizes the true story of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the antebellum South, based on Northup's own 1853 memoir of the same name. Chiwetel Ejiofor's lead performance and Lupita Nyong'o's supporting performance, in her film debut, both drew significant critical acclaim, with Nyong'o winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and the film itself won the Academy Award for Best Picture. McQueen's unflinching, sustained visual approach to depicting the brutality of slavery, including several extended, unbroken takes of violence that the camera refuses to look away from, was widely credited with giving American slavery a more direct and confrontational cinematic treatment than most previous major studio films had attempted. 12 Years a Slave's combination of its direct grounding in Solomon Northup's own historical memoir and Steve McQueen's unflinching directorial approach has made it one of the most acclaimed and historically significant true-story films ever produced.

• Catch Me If You Can

  "Catch Me If You Can" (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, dramatizes the real early life of Frank Abagnale Jr., who successfully impersonated an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer while forging millions of dollars in checks before being caught by an FBI agent, played by Tom Hanks. The film was based on Abagnale's own memoir, and the real Abagnale, who later became a longtime security consultant working with the FBI, served as a consultant on the production, giving the filmmakers direct access to the actual details and methods behind his real-life cons. The film's stylish, buoyant tone and 1960s period production design, paired with John Williams's jazz-inflected score, gave the true story a lighter, more playful cinematic register than many other crime-based true stories, emphasizing the audacious cleverness of Abagnale's real schemes over their consequences. Catch Me If You Can's combination of its direct access to the real Frank Abagnale's own account and its stylish period filmmaking has made it one of the most purely entertaining true-story films ever produced.

• Erin Brockovich

  "Erin Brockovich" (2000), directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Julia Roberts, dramatizes the true story of the real Erin Brockovich, an unemployed single mother who, working as a legal clerk, helped build a massive lawsuit against Pacific Gas & Electric over water contamination in Hinkley, California. Roberts's performance won her the Academy Award for Best Actress, and her portrayal of the real Brockovich's brash, persistent determination in the face of both corporate stonewalling and professional condescension became one of the most acclaimed performances of her career. The real underlying case resulted in a $333 million settlement, at the time the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in U.S. history, and the real Erin Brockovich served as a consultant on the film and appeared in a small cameo role. Erin Brockovich's combination of Julia Roberts's Oscar-winning lead performance and its grounding in one of the largest environmental settlements in American legal history has made it one of the most acclaimed true-story legal dramas ever produced.

• The Social Network

  "The Social Network" (2010), directed by David Fincher from Aaron Sorkin's screenplay, dramatizes the founding of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University and the subsequent legal disputes with his co-founders and the Winklevoss twins over credit and ownership of the company. Sorkin's screenplay, built around competing depositions and conflicting accounts of the same events, embraced the genuine ambiguity of the real underlying legal disputes rather than presenting a single definitive version of what happened, a structural choice widely praised by critics as an unusually sophisticated approach to dramatizing contested recent history. Jesse Eisenberg's performance as a fictionalized version of Zuckerberg drew significant critical acclaim, and the film's release while the real Facebook was still a relatively young and rapidly growing company gave it an unusually immediate, real-time quality rare for a historical biopic. The Social Network's combination of its sophisticated multi-perspective legal-dispute structure and its unusually immediate proximity to still-unfolding real events has made it one of the most critically acclaimed true-story films of the 21st century.