The 40 Most American Movies of All Time: Your 4th of July Watchlist—Part 2

It's the week of America's 250th birthday and almost the Fourth of July, so what better time to look back on some of cinema's most iconic films about our country and talk about what makes them part of our cultural quilt?

We worked to pick 40 films that we think shaped not just the country but also shape our perception of what this country looks like and how it came to be. And we tried to only pick one movie from each director, so it was a challenge.

It wasn't an easy task, but these are movies we believe in. They're pieces of art and also mirrors where we see ourselves. They show us our highs and lows and offer a promise of what the next 250 years could hold.

Check out Part 1 of the series if you haven't yet!

Okay, let's dive in.

Boyz n the Hood (1991)

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It's kind of hard to believe, but John Singleton was only 23 when he directed this debut feature. This was a deeply personal film that pulled from his own upbringing in South Central Los Angeles to craft a groundbreaking coming-of-age movie.

He created something astounding, a movie that forced people to pay attention and forced Hollywood to acknowledge a story they were never going to tell without him.

Singleton became the youngest person and the first Black filmmaker ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director.

He reflected on his approach to the Golden Globes:

“The beautiful thing about the universality of this film is that it deals with a specific culture, time and place, but there are a lot of things that can be applied to what’s going on in different parts of the world. When I was going through high school, I really thought it was hip to go to different types of films with different types of visions. That’s when I saw a Brazilian film by Hector Babenco called Pixote (1981), about the problems that are happening in Rio, where most of the people that are homeless are children. It’s like the human condition becomes that much more powerful in films like Boyz n the Hood or Pixote or Cinema Paradiso (1988) by Giuseppe Tornatore. And it’s all a part of cinema. Cinema was created in the first place to record life, and life is not just one set of people, it is all-encompassing, and there are different forms of life.”

Dazed and Confused (1993)

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Richard Linklater is the king of hangout movies. He has a way of creating characters you just want to be around. This movie is a time machine to the last day of school in May 1976. Even if you weren't alive, there's enough universal themes to get you lean in. The movie has this magic that it can connect with anyone who has ever gone to high school in America.

It was not an easy film to make. Linklater wrote in The Guardian, "I still have PTSD when I think of how difficult the shoot was. About a month before we started filming, Tom Pollock, the head of Universal, watched [my previous movie] Slacker, at which point he realised who he was doing business with and he thought, ‘Oh no, it’s going to be one of those arty, jerk-offski movies.’ Everyone was on high alert for me after that."

The soundtrack in this film is an all-timer, and we get the unforgettable breakout performance by Matthew McConaughey.

American Graffiti (1973)

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It would have been easy to pick Star Wars for Lucas, but I dont think that movie has a lot to say about America. And I think this one is another foundational look at high school right before the Vietnam War, at a time when innocence was on the verge of being lost.

We're in 1962 Modesto, California. The radio is tuned to the Wolfman, and rock and roll is playing loud and clear.

Universal Pictures initially hated the title and doubted the film would be one anyone was interested in watching. Lucas said of the production, "American Graffiti was unpleasant because of the fact that there was no money, no time, and I was compromising myself to death."

But when it became a massive hit, it proved Lucas could tell a story and paved the way for him to go to another galaxy.

The Last Picture Show (1971)

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Some will tell you this is a high school movie, too, but I think this is the story of a baton being passed. The Last Picture Show is about a town dying out. Its only hope for survival is the youth who live in it, but all of them are desperately trying to get away.

Peter Bogdanovich shot this adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s novel in stark black-and-white. It sort of allows the morality in it to be grey and gives the landscape a bleakness you cannot ignore.

Turns out he got the idea from Orson Welles. As he tells it, “I said to Orson, I want to get that depth of field you had in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. He said, ‘You’ll never get it in colour’. I said what do I do? He said, ‘Shoot it in black and white. It’s an actor’s picture. You know what they say about black and white, don’t you? Black and white is the actor’s friend’. I said why? Orson said, (Bogdanovich imitates Welles) ‘BECAUSE EVERY PERFORMANCE LOOKS BETTER IN BLACK AND WHITE. Name me a great performance in colour, I dare you.'”

There's a Western heart in this story, a sort of townsman with no name passing in the night, as cinema opens up to the 70s and those kinds of movies leave, too.

Jaws (1975)

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There's nothing I can say about Steven Spielberg's movie that has not been written about by everyone else. I can just tell you that, like many, when I saw this movie, I was afraid to go back into the water and remain vigilant on the beach to this day.

Spielberg accidentally invented the modern summer blockbuster with a movie that relied on a mechanical shark that barely worked. Thank god it didn't, because not seeing the shark was terrifying.

As Spielberg told journalists, “My hubris was that we could take a Hollywood crew, go out 12 miles into the Atlantic Ocean, and shoot an entire movie with a mechanical shark. I thought that was going to go swimmingly,” he continued, “I thought my career was virtually over halfway through production on Jaws, because everybody was saying to me, ‘You are never going to get hired again.”

The movie takes place over the 4th of July weekend, and crams in characters with so much death and naunce, it's crazy they're all able to fit on the screen together.

It changed how Hollywood made movies and ensured that generations of Americans would look at the ocean with a lingering sense of dread.

Field of Dreams (1989)

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There is nothing more American than baseball, which is why you'll find a few of these kinds of movies on this list. It's our pastime, after. all. Phil Alden Robinson adapted W.P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe into a fable about faith and family and kept baseball at its center. It added an aura ot the game that the MLB would capitalize on later with the Field of Dreams games they play in Iowa.

The line, "If you build it, he will come," has transcended the movie to be one of the greatest lines of all time, and this film sort of centered Kevin Costner as a great American actor, one who could be a stand-in for all our thoughts and values.

One of the legends around this film is that he was almost not even in it. He thought it sounded too soft for him.

“I told them I wasn’t available,” Costner said. “But they told me just to take a look at this, that they knew I really liked great writing, that maybe I might appreciate it, that maybe I might want to work with the writer sometime.’

They got him to read, he fell in love, and the rest is history.

Top Gun (1986)

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Man, we miss Tony Scott. He had this frenetic energy that just made movies better and more daring. This film defined the cultural zeitgeist of the mid-1980s. It was kind of about American exceptionalism and also masculinity, and changed a generation of hearts and minds who were bitter about the military post-Vietnam.

As legend has it, Scott was fired from this movie three times. And he ignored producers and keeps making it.

People remember the Top Gun lines and the dogfights and the iconic volleyball scene, but the real gem is just how much fun it seemed like the cast had playing off one another.

The Shining (1980)

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I am a massive fan of Stanley Kubrick, an American director who fled to England to make movies, but came back here for this landmark hit. Kubrick took Stephen King’s bestseller and stripped away the tropes of the haunted-house genre to instead give us a story about a family that's falling apart.

There are so many iconic shots and lines in the movie. We just have to hold on tight as the mystery unravels and Jack becomes possessed. The performances might be the best ever put on film.

King famously disliked the deviations from his book, but this movie is incredible.

Taxi Driver (1976)

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Martin Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader took the post-Vietnam disillusionment of the mid-1970s and distilled it all down into a thriller about a guy who doesn't feel like he belongs in this country anymore.

It's a poignant takedown of a man who winds up representing New York City, a place that feels lost and needs a violent force to come back from the brink. Robert De Niro’s improvised "You talkin' to me?" scene became an iconic piece of American culture that still permeates our lexicon today.

This is a movie that stays relevant. In fact, Scorsese was mourning the fact that it feels timeless. He said, “We kept thinking in terms of the character and his loneliness and his acting out, not condoning the acting out, but he does act out and yet an empathy with him, which is really tricky.” Scorsese went on to say, “Ultimately, what stayed with us was the psychological and emotional state of that character. As we know now, tragically, it’s a norm that every other person is like Travis Bickle.”

There Will Be Blood (2007)

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Why does the greed in this movie seem so quintessentially American? Paul Thomas Anderson’s very loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s Oil! is a sweeping epic about the twin forces that built America: capitalism and religion. One wants your money, and the other wants your soul.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview is in a category unto himself. It should be right up there with Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront.On the Waterfront.

You also get Jonny Greenwood’s unsettling score that gives this eerie feeling the deeper you get into this saga. We see a lot of American progress, but end on the question of whether it took our humanity wth it.

When people started calling it the best movie of the century, PTA took a very humble attitude toward it. He told the Guardian: "I haven’t seen it in a number of years, but last I saw it I was very proud and satisfied. It was the first time I’d seen it where I had forgotten exactly what was going to happen next – and that was a wonderful experience."

Mulholland Drive (2001)

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How can you not include a little David Lynch? I was going to pick Blue Velvet, but this is a movie I keep thinking about. One that I have seen a few times, and I am still wondering if I really understand its surrealist sensibilities.

David Lynch’s psychological thriller about the Hollywood dream factory and the people it chews up and spits out has a poignant place in all filmmakers' hearts.

It stands as a haunting reminder that the stories America tells about itself are often just beautiful illusions designed to mask a much darker reality.

Lynch told Criterion about his process of writing the film, saying, "Sometimes an idea presents itself to you, and you’re just as surprised as anyone else. I remember when I was writing Mulholland Dr., the character of the Cowboy just came walking in one night. I just started talking about this cowboy. That’s what happens—something starts occurring, but it wasn’t there a moment ago."