Raiders of the Lost Ark

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas set out to make the greatest adventure serial ever produced, and they succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation. Raiders of the Lost Ark is pure cinema — a relentless parade of iconic set pieces strung together by Harrison Ford’s impossibly charismatic performance as Indiana Jones. The opening sequence in the Peruvian temple is the most famous cold open in film history, and the film never lets up from there.

What makes Raiders endure is its understanding of action as character. Every stunt reveals something about Indy: his resourcefulness, his humor, his willingness to improvise. The truck chase through the desert is the greatest vehicle sequence in action cinema — Ford doing his own stunts, crawling under a moving truck, and the audience genuinely believing he might not make it.

Raiders earned five Academy Awards and proved that action-adventure could be both commercially massive and critically adored. It is the film that defined what a blockbuster action movie could be.