The 35 best movies to see before you die – from Raiders of the Lost Ark to Spirited Away
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Films can still offer an emotional hit like nothing else. Helen O’Hara and Patrick Smith pick their favourites. The legendary film critic Roger Ebert called film “the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts”. Cinema offers us complete immersion in another reality, taking us on an almost out-of-body experience into someone else’s life and experience.
But as one oft-filmed character says, with great power comes great responsibility, and the very best films use that power to help us. They might offer an escape from our own lives, the catharsis of a huge hit of action, horror or adventure that makes our own everyday problems seem small. They might reflect our lives on a more human scale, giving us the sense that we are not alone in our concerns and examining our emotion to find the common threads that bind us. Or they could play out possibilities for our own lives, letting us see the consequences of an affair or murder plot unwind before our eyes so we don’t have to flirt with disaster in reality.
Film is well over a century old now, and with competition from TV and games it may never again reach the audience numbers that it did in its 1930s golden age. But it can still offer an emotional hit like nothing else when there are hundreds of us together, in the dark, losing ourselves in a moving picture – and here are 35 of the best ever to sweep us off our feet.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). With this update and upgrade of the 1930s serial adventure, Steven Spielberg turns what could have been pastiche into a practically perfect film. Harrison Ford’s daring archaeologist is almost always out of his depth but has impeccable underdog charm, and Douglas Slocombe’s casually stunning cinematography is matched by one of John Williams’s finest scores. Indiana Jones is ultimately irrelevant to the entire plot, interestingly, but his indefatigable effort to do the right thing still inspires. HO.
![[Bygone era: Orson Welles, centre, in Citizen Kane]](https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2016/04/13/18/citizen-kane-rex.jpg)
