Some films change cinema by introducing a new technique. Others change the business around filmmaking, alter what audiences expect from a story, or bring a national cinema to the attention of the world. The nine films below are influential for those reasons—not because each invented everything associated with it, but because each made a major shift in film language or production impossible to ignore.
The list also includes a necessary warning: influence is not the same as approval. The Birth of a Nation, for example, is both a landmark in cinematic technique and a deeply racist work of propaganda. Its importance has to be discussed together with the damage its mythology caused.
1. The Birth of a Nation (1915)
D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation premiered in Los Angeles on February 8, 1915. Its historical importance comes partly from scale. At a time when feature-length films were still establishing their commercial identity, Griffith presented cinema as a vehicle for an expansive national drama, with large battle scenes, multiple storylines, elaborate sets, and sustained narrative momentum.
The film also demonstrated how techniques such as cross-cutting, parallel action, close-ups, and continuity editing could organize a long and complicated story. Griffith did not invent every one of these devices; earlier filmmakers had already used many of them. His contribution was to combine and popularize them on an unusually ambitious scale.
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But the film’s formal achievements cannot be separated from its politics. It glorifies the Ku Klux Klan, depicts Black Americans through racist stereotypes, and presents Reconstruction from a pro-Confederate perspective. The NAACP organized campaigns against screenings, while the film’s popularity showed how cinema could influence public memory and political mythology.
Why it changed cinema: It established that a movie could be mass entertainment, industrial spectacle, political propaganda, and a major national cultural event at the same time. The Library of Congress calls its contribution to filmmaking undeniable while also documenting its historical distortions.
Read the Library of Congress discussion and its account of the film’s 1915 premiere.
2. Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin dramatizes a 1905 mutiny aboard a Russian battleship and the massacre of civilians on the Odessa Steps. Its five-part structure is less interested in smooth realism than in the collision of images, rhythms, and visual contrasts.
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The Odessa Steps sequence remains the clearest example. Eisenstein varies shot length, repeats movements, cuts between different victims, and uses close-ups and graphic contrasts to build terror. The audience does not simply watch an event unfold; editing controls the way the event is understood and felt.
This approach became known as Soviet montage. Editing was no longer merely a practical method for joining one shot to the next. It could produce an idea or emotional response that was not contained in either image on its own. The principle later appeared in political films, action movies, trailers, music videos, advertisements, and experimental cinema.
Why it changed cinema: It established editing as a primary source of cinematic meaning. Potemkin did not single-handedly invent montage—filmmakers such as Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov were also central to its development—but it became one of the movement’s most influential demonstrations.
The film’s political power also made it a target for censorship and bans. Governments feared not only its revolutionary message but its ability to make that message emotionally persuasive. The Museum of Modern Art and the BFI provide useful background on its montage style and continuing influence.
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Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane expanded the creative possibilities of the American studio film. Its story is assembled from conflicting accounts of Charles Foster Kane’s life, moving backward and forward through time rather than presenting a straightforward biography.
Cinematographer Gregg Toland’s collaboration with Welles produced striking uses of deep focus, keeping foreground, middle-ground, and background action visible within the same frame. Low-angle compositions make ceilings and rooms feel unusually imposing. Long takes, elaborate sound transitions, miniatures, matte paintings, optical effects, and fluid editing give the film a dense visual and sonic texture.
These methods were not all unprecedented. Deep focus, nonlinear storytelling, low-angle photography, and sophisticated sound design had appeared in earlier films. Citizen Kane mattered because it synthesized them into a highly visible, ambitious studio production. It made form itself difficult to ignore.
Why it changed cinema: It helped legitimize the idea of the director as an author whose decisions shape cinematography, editing, sound, design, and performance—not merely the person who supervises actors on a set. It also showed that a mainstream film could demand close attention to structure and visual composition.
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Its reputation was not instantly universal. The film was critically admired on release, but its status as one of cinema’s defining achievements grew over time. The Academy’s overview details the contributions of Toland, Welles, and the film’s production team.
4. Bicycle Thieves (1948)
Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves follows an unemployed father searching Rome for the bicycle stolen from him on his first day of work. The premise is simple, but the consequences are devastating: without the bicycle, he cannot keep the job that might rescue his family from poverty.
The film became a defining work of Italian neorealism. It used actual locations, working-class characters, nonprofessional performers, and a narrative built around ordinary economic hardship rather than glamorous crime, romance, or adventure. Rome is not just a backdrop. Its streets, crowds, walls, markets, and public spaces shape the characters’ limited choices.
The film’s reputation sometimes encourages a misleading picture of neorealist production as entirely improvised and technically primitive. Bicycle Thieves was made by professional filmmakers with a substantial crew, hundreds of extras, and constructed effects, including artificial rain. Its realism was an artistic strategy, not the accidental result of having no resources.
Why it changed cinema: It demonstrated that ordinary people, real streets, unresolved social problems, and modest stories could carry the emotional and artistic weight traditionally assigned to stars and spectacle. Its influence can be seen in European art cinema, documentary-influenced drama, independent filmmaking, and later movements that favored location shooting and nonprofessional actors.
The Criterion Collection’s discussion of De Sica and its production notes explain both the film’s neorealist aims and the practical work behind its apparent simplicity.
5. Rashomon (1950)
Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon presents contradictory accounts of the same violent incident. A bandit, a woman, a murdered samurai speaking through a medium, and a woodcutter offer versions that cannot all be true. The film turns memory, self-protection, and storytelling into the central drama.
Released in Japan in 1950, Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. That international prize brought Kurosawa and Japanese cinema to a much wider audience and helped challenge Western assumptions about where major cinematic innovation was taking place.
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Why it changed cinema: It made narrative uncertainty a sustained cinematic experience. The viewer is not simply waiting for an objective answer to be revealed. Instead, every testimony has to be assessed through performance, framing, editing, motive, and omission.
Rashomon was not the first film to use flashbacks or an unreliable narrator. Its breakthrough was making contradictory perspectives the organizing principle of the entire film. The Criterion Collection’s essay on the Rashomon effect traces how that structure entered wider culture.
6. Jaws (1975)
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is often described as the first modern summer blockbuster. That description needs qualification: earlier films, including Gone with the Wind, The Ten Commandments, and The Godfather, had already been major event pictures. What Jaws provided was a particularly effective model for the modern blockbuster system.
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The film combined a high-concept premise, a memorable poster, a powerful trailer, national advertising, broad audience appeal, and a release strategy that made the movie feel like a seasonal event. Its commercial success encouraged studios to concentrate resources on a smaller number of heavily promoted releases.
Production problems shaped the film’s visual language. The mechanical shark repeatedly malfunctioned, making it difficult for Spielberg to show the creature as planned. The solution was to withhold it. Underwater perspectives, reaction shots, editing, sound, and John Williams’s two-note score let the audience imagine a threat that was often more frightening when unseen.
Why it changed cinema: It joined production design, marketing, release strategy, trailer construction, music, and audience psychology into a repeatable commercial formula. The shark’s absence was not simply a workaround; it became one of the film’s most important creative decisions.
The Academy’s collection notes on Jaws cover its advertising campaign, technical difficulties, editing, and camera work.
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7. Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope (1977)
When it was released in 1977, the film was titled Star Wars. The subtitle Episode IV—A New Hope was added later. Its influence came from more than its space-opera story. It combined effects-driven world-building, memorable sound, serialized storytelling, specialized postproduction, and a new scale of licensing.
George Lucas established Industrial Light & Magic in 1975 to create the visual effects the production required. ILM developed new approaches to miniature photography and computer-controlled camera movement. Sound designer Ben Burtt built a distinctive soundtrack from mechanical, animal, and environmental recordings, giving the film’s machines and creatures a physical identity.
The film also altered the relationship between movies and consumer products. Lucasfilm’s 1978 campaigns for toys, books, comics, and other licensed products helped redefine the commercial reach of a film property. The movie was no longer only a theatrical experience; it could become an expandable fictional universe.
Why it changed cinema: It made effects-heavy world-building, franchise storytelling, specialized effects companies, ambitious sound design, and licensed merchandise central elements of the modern film business.
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Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.8. Toy Story (1995)
Pixar’s Toy Story, released theatrically on November 22, 1995, was the first full-length computer-animated feature film. Earlier films had used computer animation in shorts, sequences, and experiments, but Toy Story demonstrated that computer-generated imagery could carry an entire feature.
The production used Pixar’s RenderMan rendering system and proprietary tools. Its Reyes rendering approach helped make feature-length computer animation possible despite the hardware and rendering limitations of the period. The technical achievement was considerable, but technology alone would not have changed the industry.
The crucial demonstration was narrative. Toy Story sustained recurring characters, visual gags, comic timing, emotional development, and a feature-length story that worked for children and adults. It showed that computer-generated characters could become performers rather than merely visual effects.
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Why it changed cinema: It moved computer animation from an experimental or supporting technique into a dominant feature-film production model. Its success accelerated investment in digital animation and changed the competitive structure of the animation industry.
Pixar’s company history, the Library of Congress entry, and the history of RenderMan explain why the film was both a storytelling milestone and a production breakthrough.
9. The Matrix (1999)
The Wachowskis’ The Matrix combined science fiction, Hong Kong action choreography, wire work, Japanese animation influences, comic-book imagery, philosophical speculation, digital compositing, and a new approach to camera movement.
Its most recognizable device was “bullet time”: the apparent motion of an action freezes or slows while the camera moves around the subject. The effect used a ring of more than 100 still cameras, computer-controlled camera placement, and digital compositing. The result made an impossible viewpoint feel like a natural part of the action.
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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsThe film’s influence extended beyond one visual effect. It treated bodies as objects moving through a digitally manipulable space. Time could stretch, freeze, or loop; the camera could occupy positions unavailable to a physical operator; and martial-arts choreography could be integrated with computer-generated environments.
Why it changed cinema: It showed that digital effects could alter not only what appeared on screen but the perceived physics of action, movement, time, and camera position. Later action films adopted its visual grammar, often without matching its narrative or philosophical ambition.
The Matrix did not invent bullet time. Earlier experiments used related multi-camera and frozen-time techniques. It made the effect globally recognizable and integrated it into a commercially successful feature. The Library of Congress film registry material and the Academy’s visual-effects guide describe the technique and its wider importance.
What These Films Changed
| Film | Major change |
|---|---|
| The Birth of a Nation | Feature-film scale and cinematic grammar |
| Battleship Potemkin | Editing as a source of meaning |
| Citizen Kane | Director-driven visual authorship |
| Bicycle Thieves | Real locations and ordinary lives |
| Rashomon | Subjective and contradictory narration |
| Jaws | The modern blockbuster system |
| Star Wars | Effects, sound, franchises, and licensing |
| Toy Story | Computer-generated feature animation |
| The Matrix | Digitally reimagined action and camera movement |
Taken together, these films show that cinema changes through more than isolated inventions. A technique matters when filmmakers, studios, audiences, and other industries adopt it. The films on this list made experimental methods, new business practices, or unfamiliar narrative structures visible at a scale that changed what followed.
FAQ
Did these films literally invent the techniques associated with them?
No. Earlier filmmakers often developed related techniques first. These films are influential because they combined, refined, popularized, or industrialized those practices in ways that had a lasting effect on cinema.
Why include The Birth of a Nation despite its racist content?
Its influence is inseparable from its racism. The film helped popularize important narrative and editing methods while also glorifying the Ku Klux Klan and spreading racist historical mythology. Studying its cinematic impact does not require celebrating its politics.
Which film changed the business of cinema most directly?
Jaws helped establish the modern summer blockbuster model, while Star Wars expanded the franchise and licensing model. Together they reshaped how studios marketed, released, and monetized major films.
Was Toy Story the first computer-animated film?
It was the first full-length computer-animated feature film. Computer animation had already appeared in shorts, experiments, and individual film sequences.
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It describes a situation in which different people provide contradictory accounts of the same event. The term comes from the structure of Kurosawa’s Rashomon and is now used beyond film, including in law, journalism, and television.
The Bottom Line
These nine films did not change cinema because they worked in isolation or invented every technique from scratch. They changed it by making new possibilities impossible to dismiss: feature-scale storytelling, expressive editing, director-led form, location realism, subjective narrative, event marketing, franchise economics, digital animation, and digitally transformed action. Their influence is clearest in the films and filmmaking systems that came after them.
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