10 Essential Films That Changed the Way We Make Movies
Some films are entertaining. Others are genuinely revolutionary — they arrive and shift the entire language of cinema, inspiring generations of filmmakers and changing audience expectations forever. This list celebrates ten such films, drawn from across eras and cultures, that every curious viewer should experience at least once.
1. Citizen Kane (1941) — Orson Welles
Still cited by critics and filmmakers as one of the most technically innovative films ever made, Welles used deep focus photography, unconventional narrative structure, and bold visual compositions in ways that had rarely been seen before. Nearly every technique it introduced has been borrowed and built upon countless times since.
2. Rashomon (1950) — Akira Kurosawa
Kurosawa's masterpiece introduced Western audiences to Japanese cinema and gave the world the "Rashomon effect" — the idea that the same event can be truthfully described in contradictory ways by different observers. Its approach to unreliable narration has been replicated in films, TV, and literature ever since.
3. Breathless (À bout de souffle) (1960) — Jean-Luc Godard
The flagship film of the French New Wave movement, Breathless broke nearly every established filmmaking rule — jump cuts, handheld cameras, improvised dialogue — and in doing so, liberated a generation of filmmakers from rigid Hollywood conventions.
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) — Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick's visionary sci-fi epic proved that cinema could be genuinely philosophical and visually transcendent. Its practical effects, minimal dialogue, and deliberately slow pacing challenged audiences to engage with film as pure experience rather than conventional narrative.
5. Jaws (1975) — Steven Spielberg
Often credited as the film that invented the "summer blockbuster," Jaws changed the entire Hollywood release and marketing model. It also demonstrated that suggestion and suspense — the shark is barely shown — are often more powerful than explicit horror.
6. Star Wars (1977) — George Lucas
Beyond launching one of the most successful franchises in history, Star Wars transformed the special effects industry, created the modern merchandising model, and proved that mythological storytelling on a grand visual scale could captivate mass audiences worldwide.
7. Do the Right Thing (1989) — Spike Lee
A landmark in American independent cinema, Lee's film brought urgent social commentary, vivid visual style, and an unflinching look at race and urban life to the mainstream. It helped reshape what independent films could tackle and who they could be made by.
8. Pulp Fiction (1994) — Quentin Tarantino
Tarantino's non-linear crime anthology revived independent cinema, proved that dialogue could be as compelling as action, and inspired a decade of imitators. Its influence on tone, structure, and cultural referencing is still felt across film, TV, and streaming today.
9. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) — Ang Lee
This Taiwanese-American co-production brought wuxia cinema to global audiences, proved that subtitled films could be massive international box office successes, and opened Hollywood's eyes to non-English-language storytelling in a new way.
10. Parasite (2019) — Bong Joon-ho
The first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, Parasite was a seismic moment for world cinema. It demonstrated definitively that global audiences are ready for, and hungry for, stories told outside the English-speaking world.
How to Use This List
- Watch them in roughly chronological order to trace how each influenced the next.
- Pair each film with a short documentary or interview about its making — streaming platforms and YouTube have rich behind-the-scenes resources for most of these.
- Don't feel you need to "study" them. Let them surprise you — many are as engaging today as when they were released.
Cinema is a living conversation between filmmakers across time. These ten films are the sentences that changed the subject.