Curated playlist
United States National Film Registry films
- Psycho (1960 film)Psycho, the 1960 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, opens on a specific Friday: December the Eleventh, in Phoenix, Arizona. A real estate secretary named Marion Crane has just stolen forty thousand dollars from her employer and is driving…
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937 film)Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs arrived at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles on the 21st of December, 1937, and the audience rose to its feet before the final frame had faded. Among those in that standing ovation were Judy Garland,…
- Alien (film)Alien is a 1979 science fiction horror film that begins with a single, deceptively quiet transmission. A commercial starship called the Nostromo is hauling twenty million tons of ore back to Earth when its computer, called Mother, picks up…
- The Outlaw Josey WalesThe Outlaw Josey Wales closes with these words: "I reckon so. I guess we all died a little in that damned war." The 1976 Clint Eastwood film earned $31.8 million at the box office against a production budget of $3.7 million. It arrived in…
- Vertigo (film)Vertigo, the 1958 psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock, opens with a rooftop chase gone fatally wrong. A San Francisco detective named John Ferguson slips and dangles from a gutter while a colleague falls to his death trying…
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the RingThe Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring opened on the 19th of December 2001, and within its first five days in the United States and Canada it had earned more than seventy-five million dollars. That number alone might suggest a…
- Blade RunnerBlade Runner arrived in theaters on the 25th of June, 1982, a date producer Alan Ladd Jr. chose deliberately because the 25th of the month had been his lucky day for previous releases. Ridley Scott's film dropped audiences into a Los…
- Star Wars (film)Star Wars opened on the 25th of May 1977, in just 32 theaters across the United States. The cast and crew believed it would be a failure. The film went $3 million over budget. George Lucas was so absorbed in work on opening day that he…
- 2001: A Space Odyssey2001: A Space Odyssey premiered on the 2nd of April 1968 at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., before an audience that included critics who were, in many cases, baffled. During the New York premiere the following day, 250 people…
- The TerminatorThe Terminator arrived in American cinemas on the 26th of October 1984, and it began with a nightmare. Director James Cameron had fallen ill in Rome during the troubled release of his first film, Piranha II: The Spawning, and in his fever…
- National Film RegistryThe National Film Registry holds nearly a thousand films chosen not for box office success, not for awards, but for their cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance to American life. It was born in 1988 out of a fight over colors.…
- Jaws (film)Jaws, the 1975 thriller directed by Steven Spielberg, begins with a simple and terrifying image: a young woman swimming alone at night, and then something pulling her under. In the morning, only part of her remains washes ashore. That…
- Toy StoryToy Story arrived in theaters on the 22nd of November 1995, and nothing in cinema looked quite like it. For the first time, a feature film had been built entirely inside a computer. No hand-drawn cels, no painted backgrounds, no physical…
- A Clockwork Orange (film)A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 film that opens with a young man staring directly into the camera, a glass of milk-plus raised to his lips, and the audience already unsettled before a single act of violence occurs. That young man is Alex…
- Ben-Hur (1959 film)Ben-Hur, the 1959 epic directed by William Wyler, arrived at a moment when Hollywood was fighting for its life. Television had eaten into ticket sales, and the consent decree of 1948 had forced studios to sell off their theater chains. MGM…
- Return of the JediReturn of the Jedi opened in American theaters on the 25th of May 1983. Lucas booked that date deliberately, exactly six years after the original Star Wars had premiered in 1977. Richard Marquand directed it from a screenplay by Lawrence…
- Mary Poppins (film)Mary Poppins, the 1964 film directed by Robert Stevenson and produced by Walt Disney, had its premiere on the 27th of August 1964 at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. It earned thirteen Academy Award nominations, a record for any…
- Apocalypse NowApocalypse Now arrived in theaters on the 15th of August 1979, and it carried on its back over a million feet of film, a near-fatal heart attack, a typhoon that destroyed the sets, and the private financial ruin of one of America's most…
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (film)One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest arrived in cinemas on the 19th of November 1975 and within months had become one of the highest-grossing films in American history. A single question animates the whole story: what happens when an…
- The Day the Earth Stood StillThe Day the Earth Stood Still begins with a flying saucer touching down on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The United States Army surrounds it within moments, soldiers and tanks pressing in from every side. A humanoid figure in a…
- InceptionInception begins with a question that Christopher Nolan first put to paper around 2001: what if someone could steal your secrets while you slept? The film that emerged from that question took nearly a decade to reach the screen, cost $160…
- The Empire Strikes BackThe Empire Strikes Back opens with a single haunting image: probe droids scattered across the galaxy, hunting. It was the 21st of May 1980, and audiences packing into just 126 theaters across North America had little idea that the film…
- Gone with the Wind (film)Gone with the Wind premiered on the 15th of December 1939, and on that single night, roughly 300,000 people packed the streets of Atlanta for seven miles just to watch limousines carry its stars from the airport to the Loew's Grand…
- Apollo 13 (film)Apollo 13, the 1995 film directed by Ron Howard, opens on the night of the 20th of July, 1969, with astronaut Jim Lovell watching Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the Moon. Lovell had already orbited the Moon on Apollo 8. He tells…
- City LightsCity Lights opened on the 30th of January 1931 at the Los Angeles Theater, with Albert Einstein and his wife sitting as guests of honor. The audience gave it a standing ovation. That night, a silent film was being celebrated at the height…
- Titanic (1997 film)Titanic, the 1997 film written and directed by James Cameron, began not on a Hollywood lot but at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. On the 1st of September 1995, Cameron and his crew descended to the actual wreck of the RMS Titanic,…
- Taxi DriverTaxi Driver opens on a pair of eyes in a rearview mirror, catching the city through a fog of steam. The man behind those eyes is Travis Bickle, a Marine veteran of Vietnam who cannot sleep, cannot connect, and cannot stop watching. His…
- Annie HallAnnie Hall arrives on screen in 1977 with Woody Allen staring directly into the camera, ignoring every convention of moviegoing in the process. He plays Alvy Singer, a comedian trying to understand why his relationship with Annie Hall fell…
- The GodfatherThe Godfather opened in five New York theaters on the 15th of March 1972, the morning after its premiere at the Loew's State Theatre, and ticket prices had already been raised from $3 to $3.50. By the end of that first week in the city,…
- Flash Gordon (serial)Flash Gordon arrived on American screens in 1936 as a 13-chapter science-fiction serial. It was the first film adaptation of a comic-strip character who had existed for just two years. Buster Crabbe played the title role, navigating the…
- Badlands (film)Badlands opens in Fort Dupree, a dead-end South Dakota town. A fifteen-year-old girl narrates her own story, calmly, in voice-over. She has just taken up with a garbage collector who looks like James Dean. Terrence Malick's 1973 film draws…
- Citizen KaneCitizen Kane opens on a dying man in a vast Florida mansion called Xanadu, clutching a snow globe as he whispers one word: "Rosebud." That single utterance launches a film-long investigation into the life of Charles Foster Kane, and the…
- Paths of GloryPaths of Glory opens in 1916, in the trenches of Northern France, with a snare drum playing rhythms that recall wartime newsreels. Stanley Kubrick's 1957 film follows Colonel Dax, a French officer who watches soldiers sent into an…
- The Birth of a NationThe Birth of a Nation arrived in American theaters in 1915 and immediately changed what cinema could do. D. W. Griffith directed this silent epic, and within weeks it had been screened at the White House, cheered by the entire Supreme…
- Easy RiderEasy Rider opened on the 14th of July 1969 at the Beekman theater in New York City and broke the house record in its first week. A film made for roughly $400,000 would go on to earn $60 million worldwide. But the money was almost beside…
- Groundhog Day (film)Groundhog Day, the 1993 film directed by Harold Ramis, opens on a man who is wrong about the weather. Phil Connors, a Pittsburgh weatherman, confidently tells his viewers that a blizzard will miss Western Pennsylvania. It does not. That…
- High NoonHigh Noon opens on a town marshal who has just gotten married and is minutes away from a peaceful retirement when word arrives that a killer named Frank Miller is on the noon train. The year is 1952. The film is American. The director is…
- The Shawshank RedemptionThe Shawshank Redemption opened to mostly empty theaters in September 1994. On opening night, director Frank Darabont and producer Liz Glotzer visited the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood and found no one there. They ended up selling two tickets…
- American GraffitiAmerican Graffiti premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival on the 2nd of August, 1973. It had been refused by every major Hollywood studio. The one studio that finally agreed to distribute it had planned to release it on…
- The General (1926 film)The General, released in 1926, was Buster Keaton's most ambitious film and, at the time, his most catastrophic financial disappointment. With a budget of $750,000 supplied by Metro chief Joseph Schenck, the picture earned only $474,264 in…
- Glory (1989 film)Glory, the 1989 war drama directed by Edward Zwick, was still filming in Savannah, Georgia, on the 16th of February 1989. That day, a location crew found the body of a middle-aged man who had been dead for about a day. He had a Middle…
- Harold and MaudeHarold and Maude is a 1971 American romantic black comedy-drama that opens with a young man hanging himself in the family living room. Except he is not really dead. Harold Chasen, played by Bud Cort, stages elaborate fake suicides as a…