Esquire: The 25 Most American Movies of All Time

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What are the top 25 most American movies? This is the question Esquire’s editors posed to me as the nation prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of its founding. I pondered this with questions of my own: What makes a movie … American?

I compiled an array of titles that I thought spoke to who we are, what we strive to be, and where we fall short. Every movie on this list says something about America. I felt there should be some obvious classics but didn’t want it to be only the greatest hits. I looked for big movies and small movies, famous ones and more obscure gems. I wanted comedy, some horror, a sports movie, a worker tale, some military stories, a president or two, movies set in cities, and others in different countrysides. It includes a mix of films that variously celebrate, critique, and honor America, sometimes all at once.

But I had other questions: Does it have to be only 25? The higher the number climbs, the easier it gets in terms of not having to make any hard decisions. Limiting the list guarantees that it is incomplete.

But hey … America is incomplete too. We are, now and probably forever, a work in progress.

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Rule #2: Only directors who are American citizens can be included. It’s true that an outsider can sometimes see the subject with more clarity, as with Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave or Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. In the end, I felt the “top 25 most American movies” should be directed by Americans. These are our stories about ourselves.

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1. Do the Right Thing (1989)
Dir. Spike Lee

2. Citizen Kane (1941)
Dir. Orson Welles

3. The Godfather (1972)
Dir. Francis Ford Coppola

4. Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)
Dir. Charles Reisner

5. Smoke Signals (1998)
Dir. Chris Eyre

6. The Hurt Locker (2008)
Dir. Kathryn Bigelow

7. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
Dir. Frank Capra

8. All the President’s Men (1976)
Dir. Alan J. Pakula

9. Casablanca (1942)
Dir. Michael Curtiz

10. Selma (2014)
Dir. Ava DuVernay

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