25 Definitively Best Movies EVER (According To Critics AND Fans)

18. North By Northwest (1959)

Score: 92

It would be fairly easy to dismiss North By Northwest as one of those perpetually adored films that always sits atop lists of critically appreciated movies but which you don't really ever need to watch. It just sort of exists, alongside Casablanca, Gone With The Wind and Citizen Kane, gathering dust. But that's a terribly reductive way to think and North By Northwest deserves the adulation, so it's good to see fans still react to it the same way critcs do.

It's probably not Hitchcock's finest, but it's almost certainly Cary Grant's and there's something fundamentally universal about the paranoid tale of mistaken identity and Cold War anxiety. It's stylish, entertaining and thoroughly gripping and that crop-dusting scene is about as iconic a film image as there's ever been or will be.

Rotten Tomatoes: 100 Audience: 94 IMDB: 84 Letterboxd: 84 Metascore: 98