9 Great Movies From Nine Decades

By Richard Schickel, RICHARD CORLISS

The very first issue of TIME, in March 1923, had film reviews. It called Charlie Chaplin "gorgeously funny." Much has changed about the movies since then, but great films have always got the magazine's attention. Here, from film critics Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss, is the best film of each decade since TIME began.

METROPOLIS 1927; FRITZ LANG

Lang's epic poem of urban dystopia and class warfare set the standard for imagining the future--and how it might feel to be a part of it. Even now, in the age of CGI, his dark vision remains unsurpassed.

DODSWORTH 1936; WILLIAM WYLER

A tycoon goes to Europe and eventually sheds glum responsibility (and a ditzy wife) in favor of true love--the divine Mary Astor. In the movies' highest romantic era, no film achieved more entrancing heights than Wyler's adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' best novel.

CITIZEN KANE 1941; ORSON WELLES

Everyone's default choice for the world's greatest movie. Maybe so, maybe not. But it was (and remains) the movies' most fabulous blend of style and substance, full of beguiling camera and editing tricks as Welles traces the rise and fall of a man whose lust for power betrays his best instincts.

IKIRU 1952; AKIRA KUROSAWA

In his final days, a government functionary discovers the joy of living. Kurosawa, justly celebrated for his muscular action spectacles, achieves a delicate and totally unsentimental irony in this small, glowing gem of a movie.

PERSONA 1966; INGMAR BERGMAN

A famous actress falls silent, unable to speak of and to the world's brutalities and banalities. Her nurse fills the emptiness with chipper chatter, eventually talking herself into her patient's tragic view. Bergman has never been more bleak, austere, enigmatic or hypnotic.

CHINATOWN 1974; ROMAN POLANSKI

Dewy-fresh 1930s Los Angeles becomes the ironic avatar of this darkly shadowed tale of multiple rapes--of the land, of a tragically misused woman. Film noir was a tired genre before writer Robert Towne and director Polanski made this, the best and most profound of the breed.

DECALOGUE 1988; KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI

Kieslowski illustrates each of the Ten Commandments in an hour-long story. Originally made for Polish TV, those tales, whispering instead of thundering their morals, form, as a movie, a tender and unpretentious epic about ordinary people striving to be good in an indifferent world.

PULP FICTION 1994; QUENTIN TARANTINO

The most influential American movie of the '90s, for good and ill, this multipart crime epic is fully up to matching its cocksure ambition with its love of the medium and its mad pash for melodrama. The movie still has the impact of an Adrenalin shot to the heart.

TALK TO HER 2002; PEDRO ALMODOVAR

At its simplest level, this transgressively witty film is about how a hospital orderly's sexual obsession achieves the unlikely awakening of a comatose woman. But there's actually nothing simple about this lovely, lightly dancing film's reflections on all the big topics: life, death, dreams--and ballet.

Go to time.com to find all 100 of the critics' greatest film picks and read what TIME said about them when they came out.