What Sergei Eisenstein and other art-film pioneers said of the Walt Disney studio in the 1930s —that it was making the best movies on earth, by finding exciting new ways to perfect the art of visual story-telling —directors and reviewers say today of Pixar. John Lasseter and his team are bringing the same care and genius to computer-generated animation that Walt did with handmade drawings. Finding Nemo is, so far, the apotheosis of the Pixar style: the ultimate fish-out-of-water story, with a fretful dad (voiced by Albert Brooks) enlisting a forgetful friend (Ellen DeGeneres) to find his lost son. But all the Pixar features (Toy Story and its sequel, A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles) have the means of enthrallment. Pixar doesn’t make cute movies for kids. It tells universal stories through a graphic language so persuasive that children and adults respond with the same pleasure and awe. It’s as if the Pixar people have the first clue to the next, higher form of popular movie art.
All-TIME 100 Movies
TIME's Richard Corliss updates our All-TIME 100 list of the greatest films made since 1923 — the beginning of TIME — with 20 new entries
Finding Nemo
Full List
Behind the List
A - C
- Aguirre: The Wrath of God
- The Apu Trilogy
- The Awful Truth
- Baby Face
- Bande à part
- Barry Lyndon
- Berlin Alexanderplatz
- Blade Runner
- Bonnie and Clyde
- Brazil
- Bride of Frankenstein
- Camille
- Casablanca
- Charade
- Children of Paradise
- Chinatown
- Chungking Express
- Citizen Kane
- City Lights
- City of God
- Closely Watched Trains
- The Crime of Monsieur Lange
- The Crowd
D - F
G - J
K - M
N - P
Q - S
T - Z
Great Performances
Guilty Pleasures
- Gone With the Wind, 1939, Victor Fleming, U.S.
- Tenth Avenue Angel, 1949, Roy Rowland, U.S.
- Sailor Beware, 1951, Hal Walker, U.S.
- Diabolique (Les Diaboliques), 1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot, France
- School Girl, 1971, David Reberg, U.S
- There’s Something About Mary,1998, Bobby and Peter Farrelly, U.S.
- Anatomy of a Murder, 1959, Otto Preminger, U.S.
- Gun Crazy, 1949, Joseph H. Lewis, U.S.
- The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957, Jack Arnold, U.S.
- Joe Versus the Volcano, 1990, John Patrick Shanley, U.S.
10 Best Soundtracks
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