Items32The creator’s order
  1. 1La Strada (1954)La Strada (1954) 8.0/10 on IMDbReleased Sep 23, 1954The very first winner of the competitive category, and still one of its most moving. Giulietta Masina's Gelsomina, a dreamy young woman sold to the brutish strongman Zampanò, is a clown-faced performance that communicates almost entirely through her eyes and posture, which is exactly why it travels…0
  2. 2Nights of Cabiria (1957)Nights of Cabiria (1957) 8.1/10 on IMDbReleased Oct 3, 1957Fellini won back to back, and the second win is arguably the better film. Masina returns as Cabiria, a kind-hearted prostitute in Rome who keeps getting robbed, dumped and humiliated and keeps choosing hope anyway. She won Best Actress at Cannes for it, and her final close-up is one of the great…0
  3. 3Mon Oncle (1958)Mon Oncle (1958) 7.6/10 on IMDbReleased May 10, 1958The ideal pick for a mixed-language audience, because there is barely any dialogue to translate. What speech there is works almost like a sound effect, and the comedy lives in sight gags: Monsieur Hulot, the bumbling uncle, versus his sister's gadget-crammed Villa Arpel, a modernist house designed…0
  4. 4The Virgin Spring (1960)The Virgin Spring (1960) 8.0/10 on IMDbReleased Feb 8, 1960Bergman at his most elemental: a medieval Swedish tale, adapted from a 13th-century ballad, about a father's revenge after his daughter is raped and murdered on her way to church. Max von Sydow's Töre, wrestling a young tree to the ground with his bare hands before he acts, is an unforgettable…0
  5. 58½ (1963)8½ (1963) 8.0/10 on IMDbReleased Feb 14, 1963The film about making films that every later one borrows from. Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a famous director stuck with writer's block on a science fiction epic, while his producer, wife, mistress and memories crowd in on him at a spa resort. Fantasy and reality slide into each other…0
  6. 6Closely Watched Trains (1966)Closely Watched Trains (1966) 7.6/10 on IMDbReleased Nov 18, 1966Proof that a war film can be funny, sexy and devastating all at once. Jiří Menzel adapts Bohumil Hrabal's novella about Miloš, a shy apprentice train dispatcher at a sleepy station in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, more worried about his love life than the resistance going on around him. It is…0
  7. 7Z (1969)Z (1969) 8.1/10 on IMDbReleased Feb 26, 1969A political thriller that moves like a heist movie and still makes your blood boil. Costa-Gavras fictionalizes the 1963 murder of the Greek politician and physician Grigoris Lambrakis, with Jean-Louis Trintignant as the quietly relentless magistrate who refuses to accept the official story of an…0
  8. 8The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) 7.7/10 on IMDbReleased Sep 15, 1972Luis Buñuel's best joke, stretched to feature length and never wearing thin. A group of wealthy friends, led by Fernando Rey's smooth diplomat, keep sitting down to dinner and keep getting interrupted, by soldiers, a dead innkeeper's vigil and, increasingly, by their own dreams, one of which leaves…0
  9. 9Day for Night (1973)Day for Night (1973) 8.0/10 on IMDbReleased May 24, 1973A love letter to the chaos of making a movie, with François Truffaut himself playing Ferrand, the director trying to finish a melodrama while his cast falls apart. Jacqueline Bisset plays a fragile British star and Jean-Pierre Léaud a lovesick young actor, and the backstage romances are more…0
  10. 10Amarcord (1973)Amarcord (1973) 7.8/10 on IMDbReleased Dec 18, 1973Fellini's fourth win in the category and his warmest film. The title means "I remember" in the dialect of Romagna, and it plays like a year of half-true memories from a seaside village near Rimini in the 1930s, seen through the teenage Titta, his shouting family and a gallery of local…0