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The Movies

A starter canon from silent comedy through the fading years of the studio system, connected directly to stars and years.

1925 · Comedy

The Gold Rush

A prospector, hunger, and romance collide in Chaplin’s meticulously staged Klondike comedy.

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1926 · Silent comedy

The General

Keaton turns a Civil War locomotive chase into an epic of machinery, movement, and deadpan courage.

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1927 · Musical drama

The Jazz Singer

A landmark early sound feature whose success accelerated Hollywood’s transition to synchronized dialogue and song.

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1928 · Drama

The Crowd

An unusually unsentimental studio-era portrait of ordinary urban aspiration and disappointment.

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1929 · Drama

Piccadilly

A London nightclub melodrama remembered especially for Anna May Wong’s magnetic central performance.

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1931 · Romantic comedy

City Lights

Chaplin kept the Tramp largely silent in the sound era for a tender romance built around mistaken identity.

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1932 · Drama

Grand Hotel

MGM’s all-star ensemble intertwines guests and staff inside a luxurious Berlin hotel.

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1932 · Drama

Shanghai Express

A visually extravagant train-bound drama with Wong and Dietrich as two women navigating danger and scrutiny.

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1932 · Pre-Code comedy

Red-Headed Woman

Harlow plays an unabashed social climber in one of pre-Code Hollywood’s sauciest star vehicles.

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1933 · Comedy-drama

Dinner at Eight

An ensemble of wealthy New Yorkers converges on a dinner party while private crises multiply.

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1933 · Historical drama

Queen Christina

Garbo plays Sweden’s seventeenth-century monarch in a romanticized drama of duty and private desire.

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1934 · Mystery comedy

The Thin Man

A cocktail-dry murder mystery powered by the chemistry of married detectives Nick and Nora Charles.

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1935 · Musical comedy

Top Hat

Astaire and Rogers glide through mistaken identities, Irving Berlin songs, and Art Deco fantasy.

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1936 · Comedy

Modern Times

The Tramp battles assembly lines, unemployment, and modern industrial life in Chaplin’s last mostly silent feature.

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1936 · Screwball comedy

My Man Godfrey

A forgotten man becomes butler to a wealthy family in a screwball comedy with class satire underneath.

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1936 · Drama

San Francisco

Gable headlines a romantic disaster drama culminating in MGM’s recreation of the 1906 earthquake.

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1936 · Musical comedy

Swing Time

A romantic musical built around some of the most celebrated dances in the Astaire-Rogers cycle.

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1937 · Melodrama

Stella Dallas

Stanwyck gives a fierce performance as a working-class mother navigating sacrifice and social judgment.

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1937 · Crime drama

Daughter of Shanghai

Wong leads a crime story about human trafficking and undercover investigation, rare in giving Asian American performers central roles.

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1938 · Screwball comedy

Bringing Up Baby

A paleontologist, an heiress, a leopard, and a missing bone collide in screwball comedy at full speed.

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1938 · Drama

Jezebel

Davis plays a headstrong Southern belle in the role that won her second Academy Award.

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1939 · Fantasy musical

The Wizard of Oz

Dorothy follows the Yellow Brick Road in MGM’s Technicolor fantasy, one of Hollywood’s most enduring musicals.

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1939 · Epic drama

Gone with the Wind

A technically monumental Civil War-era epic whose enduring popularity is inseparable from criticism of its romanticized portrayal of slavery and the Confederacy.

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1939 · Romantic comedy

Ninotchka

Garbo plays a stern Soviet envoy disarmed by Paris in Lubitsch’s political romantic comedy.

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1940 · Screwball comedy

His Girl Friday

A newspaper editor tries to lure his star reporter and ex-wife back into one last story.

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1940 · Romantic comedy

The Philadelphia Story

Hepburn’s heiress faces an ex-husband, a reporter, and a wedding in a sharply written comedy of class and self-knowledge.

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1941 · Screwball comedy

The Lady Eve

Stanwyck plays a con artist who turns romance into an elaborate revenge plot.

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1941 · Drama

Citizen Kane

Welles’s debut uses fractured chronology, deep-focus photography, and competing testimony to examine power and self-invention.

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1942 · Romantic drama

Casablanca

Past love and wartime duty collide in a Moroccan nightclub under Vichy rule.

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1944 · Psychological thriller

Gaslight

Bergman plays a woman methodically manipulated by her husband in a Victorian suspense drama.

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1945 · Melodrama / noir

Mildred Pierce

Crawford’s comeback role blends maternal melodrama, murder mystery, and postwar noir atmosphere.

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1946 · Spy thriller

Notorious

Romance, espionage, and distrust intertwine as Bergman infiltrates a Nazi circle in Rio.

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1946 · Film noir

Gilda

Hayworth’s entrance and musical numbers made this tale of jealousy and control a defining star vehicle.

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1946 · Film noir

The Killers

A doomed ex-boxer’s past is reconstructed after his murder in a shadowy adaptation inspired by Hemingway.

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1948 · Dance drama

The Red Shoes

A dancer is torn between art and love in a Technicolor film whose ballet sequence dissolves stage and cinema.

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1948 · Crime drama

Key Largo

A hurricane traps Bogart and Bacall in a Florida hotel with a returning gangster.

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1949 · Drama

The Heiress

Clift’s charm becomes dangerously ambiguous in Wyler’s adaptation of Washington Square.

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1949 · Musical

On the Town

Three sailors race through New York during a 24-hour shore leave in an unusually location-rich MGM musical.

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1950 · Film noir / satire

Sunset Boulevard

A struggling screenwriter enters the decaying mansion and fantasy world of silent star Norma Desmond.

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1950 · Drama

All About Eve

Theater ambition and celebrity hunger drive a razor-sharp backstage drama anchored by Davis’s Margo Channing.

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1952 · Musical comedy

Singin’ in the Rain

Hollywood’s shift from silent pictures to talkies becomes the setup for one of the studio musical’s great self-portraits.

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1952 · Western

High Noon

A marshal waits nearly alone for a returning outlaw as the clock advances toward noon.

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1954 · Suspense

Rear Window

A photographer confined to his apartment suspects a neighbor of murder while watching the courtyard.

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1954 · Musical drama

Carmen Jones

Bizet is reimagined in an all-Black American setting, with Dandridge in the role that brought her historic Oscar nomination.

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1954 · Musical drama

A Star Is Born

Garland gives one of her defining performances as a singer whose rise is paired with her husband’s decline.

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1954 · Romantic comedy

Sabrina

Hepburn returns from Paris transformed and unsettles two wealthy brothers on a Long Island estate.

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1955 · Drama

East of Eden

Dean’s first major screen role channels sibling rivalry and paternal rejection through Steinbeck’s California family saga.

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1956 · Western

The Searchers

A Civil War veteran conducts a years-long search whose obsession complicates the Western hero myth.

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1956 · Epic drama

Giant

Texas wealth, oil, family conflict, and social change unfold across decades in Dean’s final film.

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1956 · Musical

The King and I

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s stage musical becomes a widescreen spectacle set in nineteenth-century Siam.

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1958 · Drama

The Defiant Ones

Two escaped prisoners, one Black and one white, are chained together and forced into uneasy cooperation.

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1958 · Film noir

Touch of Evil

A border-town murder investigation becomes a feverish study of corruption and abuse of power.

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1959 · Comedy

Some Like It Hot

Two musicians flee gangsters by joining an all-women band in Wilder’s escalating comedy of disguise and desire.

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1959 · Musical drama

Porgy and Bess

The Gershwin opera reached the screen in a large-scale production led by Poitier and Dandridge.

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1961 · Romantic comedy-drama

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Hepburn’s Holly Golightly became an enduring style icon, even as the film’s racist caricature of Mr. Yunioshi is now widely criticized.

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1962 · Drama

To Kill a Mockingbird

Peck’s Atticus Finch defends a Black man falsely accused in Depression-era Alabama, seen partly through a child’s perspective.

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1963 · Romantic thriller

Charade

Hepburn and Grant navigate murder, stolen money, and shifting identities in a Paris-set suspense comedy.

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1964 · Musical

My Fair Lady

The stage musical becomes a lavish screen production centered on language, class, and transformation.

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1965 · Drama

A Patch of Blue

Poitier plays a compassionate man who befriends a blind young woman in a drama about racism and isolation.

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