It can take some time passing before you know for sure, but otherwise, it’s easy to know when something is groundbreaking or ahead of its time. If you can look back on a piece of entertainment and observe that it both holds up well beyond the time it came out, and can also see other comparable pieces of entertainment that’ve been inspired by it, then you’re likely looking at something groundbreaking.
To focus on the cinema side of things, these are the most groundbreaking movies of all time, and they’re largely usual suspects you will have seen before or, at the very least, heard of. There are also a bunch of groundbreaking movies not mentioned here, because this is really just the most notable of them all being highlighted, and with a focus on movies that are at least a couple of decades old (as for more recent movies, it could take a bit more time passing to know which ones are especially worth highlighting, for present purposes).
10
‘Jaws’ (1975)
The popularity of Jaws is what makes it feel worthy of inclusion here, and it did indeed deserve to be popular, but the extent to which it dominated the box office and proved so mass-appeal remains something to behold. At its core, it doesn’t sound like it would be too bold or game-changing, since the story here involves a shark terrorizing the people of a small town, and three men setting out on a boat to kill that shark.
It’s just that it takes that basic story and tells it about as perfectly as a film can, all the while helping usher in a kind of film that’s now recognized as a blockbuster. It obviously wasn’t the first big/popular movie, but ground was broken in terms of what kind of big and popular movie it was, and what it did for mass-appeal cinema going forward.
9
‘The General’ (1926)
The General is now a century old, yet it remains thoroughly entertaining and essentially timeless with all it manages to do genre-wise. It’s most genres at once, being a comedy, a love story, an action/adventure film, a war movie, and a few other things, all done without dialogue (not just the style at the time, but what had to be done), and within a runtime of just 70-ish minutes.
It’s a chase film that goes one way, and then back the other, a bit like a black-and-white Mad Max: Fury Road, impressively nearly 90 years before that film came out.
The premise here is simple, like the one found in Jaws, though the stories otherwise aren’t comparable, obviously, since The General is about a man setting off to rescue the girl he loves and recover his stolen train. It’s a chase film that goes one way, and then back the other, a bit like a black-and-white Mad Max: Fury Road, impressively nearly 90 years before that film came out. It elevated the extent to which movies could be exciting, and The General is also easily among the most entertaining films of the entire silent era.
8
‘Psycho’ (1960)
“Is a movie allowed to do that?” was something people probably asked or thought to themselves in 1960, when they got to the point in Psycho that’s about 30 to 40 minutes into the whole thing. It happens before the halfway point, is the main thing, and it does give a middle finger to conventional cinematic storytelling in a big way, making the remaining hour or so of the film utterly unpredictable.
Of course, people probably aren’t asking that question out loud or to themselves when they watch Psycho in 2026, since the scene in question is so well-known and infamous, and plenty of movies since Psycho have sought to put surprising moments in or around the halfway point of the overall story being told. Psycho did it before it was cool, though, and it helped shake up the horror/thriller/mystery genres going forward in a major way.
7
‘Citizen Kane’ (1941)
It’s got that all-time great opening line of “Rosebud,” and then Citizen Kane is also great in so many other ways from that point onward, with the film’s plot more or less being “What did he mean when he said ‘Rosebud’?” It’s Charles Foster Kane’s final word before he dies, and Citizen Kane does eventually reveal what it means, but it’s also focused on painting a portrait of a complicated man’s life, to put it mildly.
Citizen Kane is well and truly a drama, and so it doesn’t break ground by combining a whole heap of genres in some kind of never-before-done way, yet as a drama (with a bit of mystery thrown in), it was undeniably revolutionary. That sentiment has been said before, and could well be spoken about too much at this point, but it’s Citizen Kane. It did suggest new potential for films as far as technical qualities and screenwriting were concerned, to an arguably even greater extent than other groundbreaking American movies from around the same time in history (like Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, both released a couple of years before Citizen Kane).
6
‘Jurassic Park’ (1993)
It’s easy to see Steven Spielberg as one of the all-time greats, generally speaking, for reasons that probably don’t need to be elaborated upon, but he’s especially legendary if you’re talking about monster movies, since Jaws and Jurassic Park both arguably qualify. The monster was a shark in the former, and the “monsters” in the latter are, of course, dinosaurs that have been created (or resurrected, in effect) through scientific means.
The special effects here are undeniably great, and the biggest reason why Jurassic Park ranks high for present purposes. It’s also an immense blockbuster that goes even further, in some regards, than Jaws, and any other spectacle-heavy movies Spielberg directed. Jurassic Park is perfect entertainment, a miracle of sorts on a technical front, and then also ideally crowd-pleasing with what it goes for narratively (and it is surprisingly well-written, with clear effort put into making you care about the human characters as much as you’ll care about the dinosaurs).
5
‘Metropolis’ (1927)
At minimum, all the things that can be said about The General, and what it did as a very early action/comedy film, can be said about Metropolis, in terms of what it did for cinematic science fiction. It’s more of an epic, too, so there might well be further things that can be celebrated and admired here than was the case with that other silent film.
Metropolis was way ahead of its time as a movie about the future, and with what it explored by way of class conflict and other related societal issues. Much of what it has to say holds up and remains depressingly relevant, but less depressing are the technical qualities here. The special effects here were cutting-edge and then some for their day, and lots of Metropolis, visually/technically speaking, still holds up incredibly well nearly a century on from the movie’s release.
4
‘The Lord of the Rings’ (2001–2003)
Since all the things that can be said about The Lord of the Rings have already been said… uh… hmm. That’s a roadblock. Um, here are some things that have already been said, but they’re being said again. It’s wild that The Lord of the Rings exists and works as well as it does, taking one of the most ambitious books of all time and doing it justice while shaking certain things up, where needed.
Changes are needed. The Lord of the Rings is a pretty much perfect book, but you’d need more than three movies to get all of it on screen, and then pacing-wise, there are things that work when you’re reading it that wouldn’t work if it was adapted directly. This massive film (it is pretty much the one movie, just divided into three parts after being produced as one huge thing) is the gold standard for adapting massive and beloved works of fiction, and so many large-scale movies released since have fallen short in areas The Lord of the Rings thrived in about a quarter of a century(!) ago.
3
‘Star Wars’ (1977)
Jaws didn’t walk so Star Wars could run. They both ran. They both did so much for blockbuster cinema, but maybe Star Wars ran a little faster? Or it ran a little longer. Or a bit of both. It was even “more” of a blockbuster than Jaws, and it can’t be understated just how exciting it made science fiction, all the while also making it feel probably a bit cooler than it ever had, up until that point.
Sure, some of that has to do with Star Wars (both this first film and the series overall) not really being hard science fiction, and even being more or less fantasy, but set in space, yet still, whatever you want to call it, it’s perfect. There’s also what it did for upping the prestige of having a movie series, since Star Wars ended up being long-running, and at least its first sequel (The Empire Strikes Back) was boundary-pushing in terms of being high-quality and astoundingly far from disappointing.
2
‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)
While it didn’t make space or science fiction as exciting and crowd-pleasing as Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey was instrumental in making space look convincing almost a decade earlier than the first Star Wars. You do really believe all the scenes that take place off the Earth… which is most of them. It’s really just that prologue that’s on Earth, way in the distant past.
Also, 2001: A Space Odyssey feels groundbreaking as a work of hard science fiction, in contrast to the softer science fiction of Star Wars, and it succeeds in looking at a huge period of time in a genuinely convincing and always thought-provoking manner. It’s also admirable how it’s quite slow while also being very engaging, not to mention getting more engrossing the more you think about it all, or revisit it.
1
‘Seven Samurai’ (1954)
Seven Samurai has a perfect screenplay, first and foremost, and then you look at all the other components here, and it’s basically perfect in all those regards, too. Still, it starts with the screenplay, which can be said about any movie, of course, but this particular screenplay is doing so much, juggling a fair few characters, telling a story that plays out across about three and a half hours, and building immensely well while saving most of the action until the very end.
This film just has it all, as an epic action film, proving groundbreaking because it was so foundational as that kind of epic movie. Anything that’s long and decently action-packed made post-1954 probably owes something to Seven Samurai, and if it’s the most forward-thinking and groundbreaking movie of all time for those reasons… why not? Surely those reasons are enough.
Seven Samurai
- Release Date
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April 26, 1954
- Runtime
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207 Minutes
- Director
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Akira Kurosawa
- Writers
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Akira Kurosawa
