51 Best Canadian Films of All Time

Between American Graffiti and Jaws, Richard Dreyfuss was tempted north to play an ambitious hustler on Montreal’s St. Urbain Street. Director Ted Kotcheff’s adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s classic Canadian coming-of-age novel helped facilitate his journey south, where he would launch the Rambo franchise with First Blood and deliver the iconic dead-guy-in-sunglasses comedy Weekend at Bernie’s.

Zacharias Kunuk’s 2001 debut was the first full-length film to be written, directed and acted entirely in the Inuktitut language. Based on Inuit oral tradition going back centuries, the story follows a man, Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), forced, naked and barefoot, to flee for miles across the ice. Groundbreaking in every way and featuring a “how did they shoot that” showstopping chase scene across Canada’s frozen tundra, Atanarjuat won the Camera d’Or honour in Cannes for best first feature. 

Before he got Nicolas Cage to go bat-shit crazy in Mandy (2018), Italian-Canadian filmmaker  Panos Cosmatos was dropping his giallo-flavoured psychedelic horror in this sci-fi chiller about a young woman, under heavy sedation, trying to escape a futuristic cult located somewhere in the B.C. wilderness. Black Rainbow is not as high-octane as Mandy but, dripping with lo-fi neon dread, this early Cosmatos acid trip is well worth taking. 

After wowing the indie festival crowd with found-footage comedies The Dirties (2013) and Operation Avalanche (2016) — not to mention mockumentary web series Nirvana the Band the Show — Toronto underground filmmaker Matt Johnson got something like mainstream recognition with this real-life tech drama, starring Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton as founders of the Canadian smartphone pioneer that conquered the global cellphone market before being brutally knocked from their perch by Apple’s iPhone. In the age of Elon Musk, its dissection of how bro-tech culture destroyed 1990s tech-geek optimism should be required viewing. 

Four years before John Carpenter’s Halloween, this holiday-themed horror movie from transplanted American Bob Clark created the modern-day slasher. Featuring Margot Kidder and Olivia Hussey as sorority sisters facing the worst yuletide of their short lives, it paved the bloody path for Hollywood’s ’80s horror feast. 

A chance encounter between two Indigenous women from different worlds on a rainy Vancouver street inspired this memorable 2019 single-take thriller about race, motherhood and domestic abuse, co-written and co-directed by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn. Deeply empathetic and entirely nonjudgmental, it evokes the intergenerational trauma of Canada’s Indigenous peoples while remaining entirely in the fleeting moment. 

Érik Canuel’s bilingual buddy comedy is the one film to understand the linguistic and cultural boundaries that divide and unite Canada. Patrick Huard and Colm Feore star as detectives from either side of the Quebec-Ontario border forced to work together to catch a serial killer targeting hockey managers (because … Canada). Lethal Weapon with a side dish of poutine, this was the rare Canuck film to score at the box office in both the English- and French-language markets.

There were nearly three decades between Rude, Clement Virgo’s furious 1995 directorial debut about life on the rough streets of Toronto’s inner city, and this 2022 masterpiece. In the interim, Virgo did a lot of excellent TV (The Wire, Billions, The Book of Negroes), but this mystery drama, an adaptation of David Chariandy’s award-winning novel following the life of two Black Canadian brothers growing up in Toronto’s Scarborough suburb in the early 1990s, sees him at the height of his powers. In its exploration of Black masculinity, family, loyalty and love, Brother shares some DNA with Moonlight, but the film’s core (and its early ’90s Scarborough hip-hop soundtrack) make it 100 percent Canadian.

Kari Skogland picked the title for her battle-of-the-sexes hockey comedy as a wink to Paul Gross’ 2002 curling spoof Men With Brooms. Jessalyn Gilsig stars as a onetime Olympic hopeful, now struggling single mother, who decides to cross-check the chauvinistic machos in her small town, betting them she can put together a squad of ladies that can beat them on the ice. 

In a magical time before Trump tariffs and sabre rattling across the 49th Parallel, American-born, Canadian-based director Bob Clark could conjure up this holiday classic, shot on both sides of the border (in Ohio and Ontario) and uniting audiences north and south in the story of Ralphie Parker and his love for the perfect Christmas gift: the Red Ryder Range 200 Shot BB gun. 

The story of Zachary, a young gay man growing up in 1960s and’70s Quebec as the fourth of five boys — Christian, Raymond, Antoine, Zachary and Yvan, the C.R.A.Z.Y. Initials of the title — in a big, strict Catholic family, was a cultural phenomenon, outgrossing Batman Begins locally and launching Jean-Marc Vallée’s Hollywood career (Wild, Dallas Buyers Club). But C.R.A.Z.Y. remains his masterpiece, a wildly entertaining, deeply touching coming-of-age, coming-out tale that also charts Quebec’s cultural transformation. The era-specific soundtrack alone — the rights to sounds from Pink Floyd, David Bowie, The Cure and, of course, Patsy Cline, accounted for 10 percent of the film’s budget — is worth the price of admission. 

A group of strangers awaken to find themselves prisoners in a giant cube of booby-trapped cells. From this high-concept start, Vincenzo Natali delivers a master class in practical effects horror that spawned a cult following, a franchise of (lesser) sequels and even a Japanese remake. 

The real challenge in making a list like this is trying to decide what David Cronenberg films not to include. From Rabid (1977) to The Shrouds (2024), the Canadian master of body horror has produced literally dozens of groundbreaking and phenomenally influential genre classics. But no list of great Canadian films would be complete without arguably his greatest work: this dark drama of drug addiction and despair starring Jeremy Irons as twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle who spiral into depravity when a woman (the formidable Quebecois star Geneviève Bujold) calls out their codependent weirdness. There’s plenty that’s disturbing and terrifying here — think of those “instruments for operating on mutant women” — but from the first notes of Howard Shore’s mordant score (Shore and Cronenberg’s long collaboration, 17 films and counting, has to be one of the most creatively productive in cinema history) it’s clear we are in Greek tragedy territory. The decline and fall of the Mantle brothers is inevitable.

In 2004, Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions became the first Canadian film to win the best international Oscar. But we actually prefer his 1986 classic, which first introduced this crowd of loquacious left-wing academics who gather at a lakeside cottage to talk sex, politics and more sex. The charge doesn’t come from steamy sex scenes — of which there are none — but from the witty repartee. An ensemble dramedy that provides cinematic evidence that the brain is indeed the largest erotic organ.

Mina Shum gave Sandra Oh her first big-screen starring role in this under-seen coming-of-age gem about a 20-something aspiring actress trying to chase her dreams without disappointing her traditional Chinese parents. Endearing, funny and with charm to burn, it’s lost none of its appeal 30 years on. 

In 1986, David Cronenberg spliced the psychological dread and gory low-budget horror of his early movies (Shivers, Rabid, Videodrome) into the body of a 20th Century Fox blockbuster. The result was a beautiful monstrosity, a big-budget VFX spectacle that gleefully subverts studio entertainment to tell the story of a scientist (a smoking hot Jeff Goldblum) whose DNA gets crossed with a fly’s, turning him first into a superhero and then into a goo-spitting, testicle-losing creepy-crawler. Still the gold standard for practical effects work, The Fly changed the face of horror forever. 

R.T. Thorne’s timely survivalist thriller features Till star Danielle Deadwyler as a fiercely protective mother fighting to keep her Black family of farmers who settled in Canada after the American Civil War safe in a famine-decimated world. A socially conscious action movie for the age of Black Lives Matters, food insecurity and the battle for Indigenous land rights. 

John Fawcett’s coming-of-age horror tale follows two death-obsessed sisters who face the twin challenges of suburban boredom and adolescent angst until one of them is bitten by a werewolf. One of the very few great films in the werewolf subgenre, Ginger Snaps balances its gore with feminist themes of female sexuality and male aggression and a healthy dollop of dark humour. 

Charlotte Laurier stars as Manon, a ferocious child starved for the attention of her single mother (Marie Tifo) in this thick slice of Quebec gothic. Manon’s uncle is mentally challenged and the family ekes out a living cutting firewood, but the film is saved from poverty-porn cliches by director Francis Mankiewicz’s light touch, the raw realist imagery from cinematographer Michel Brault and Laurier’s daring, ferocious performance that holds our attention, and our empathy, even as the story descends into the dark. 

Yes, Slapshot, arguably the greatest hockey comedy of all time, was made in the USA. But Michael Dowse’s 2004 on-ice laffer goes a ways to restoring some northern national pride. Seann William Scott stars as a knuckle-headed enforcer on a minor-league team determined to make it to the top, especially if it means beating the crap out of every guy in his way. Jumping the boards in support are Jay Baruchel, Alison Pill, Eugene Levy and Liev Schreiber. 

Phillip Borsos proves great Westerns aren’t the sole preserve of the southern territories, with this cracking based-on-a-true-story wild West tale about stagecoach robber Bill Miner (Richard Farnsworth at his curmudgeonly best), who emerges from a 30-year jail stint and, unable to turn over a new leaf, heads to British Columbia to start robbing trains. On the way, he’ll fall for homegrown photographer Katherine Flynn (Jackie Burroughs), but this rambling man was not made for settling down. 

Washed-up Vancouver punk rockers Hard Core Logo kick off a last-gasp reunion tour across western Canada in this dark comedy from indie stalwart Bruce McDonald. Shot mockumentary-style but with less cynicism and more heart than This Is Spinal Tap, it’s a love letter to the headbanger lifestyle that isn’t afraid to go dark. Hugh Dillon, lead singer of Ontario punk legends Headstones (and co-creator, with Taylor Sheridan, of Mayor of Kingstown) is pure, raw authenticity as Hard Core Logo band leader Joe Dick.

In his first collaboration with late-career muse Viggo Mortensen, Cronenberg subverts the concept of heroic violence — one of Hollywood’s foundational texts — with a story of a small town idyll torn apart by barbarity from both inside and out. Scenes that would play to whoops and cheers in a traditional genre film — Mortensen brutally taking out mafia killers in his hometown diner, his son beating the school bully to a pulp — here draw gasps of fear and disgust. In this neo-Western, violence doesn’t cleanse or heal, it just brutalizes and destroys. 

Denis Villeneuve is another director who, with Sicario, Blade Runner 2049 and Dune, has brought a more contemplative, and distinctly Canadian, sensibility to U.S.-style genre films. Villeneuve focuses not on the action itself but on the moments before the battle and on violence’s aftermath. It’s an approach seen in his earlier Quebecois movies, including this Oscar-nominated thriller about Montreal twins who uncover a secret about their late mother, who escaped the sectarian violence and rage of the Middle East some 20 years earlier. Returning to her homeland, they have to battle with the same struggles, with the impact of hate and the possibility of forgiveness. 

Patricia Rozema began writing the screenplay to her breakout debut while working as third assistant director on Cronenberg’s The Fly. A takedown of Toronto’s elitist art establishment, it follows Polly, a perky, daydreaming temp secretary and would-be photographer (Sheila McCarthy, in a spritely performance giving off Miranda July vibes) who gets a job as the assistant to Gabrielle (Paule Baillargeon), an elegant and stylish French-Canadian gallery owner. Polly falls for Gabrielle and feels pangs of FOMO and jealousy for her life. But in the end, it is the superficially simple, supposedly ineloquent Polly who may be the one, in the lines from the T.S. Eliot poem that provides the film’s title, that can hear the mermaids singing, and Gabrielle who has measured out her life in coffee spoons. 

According to the Genies, Canada’s version of the Oscars, Juno, a film by Toronto-born Jason Reitman, starring Canadians Elliot Page and Michael Cera, and shot in Vancouver, wasn’t Canadian enough to merit recognition. (The issue was money: The film was developed and financed by L.A.-based Mandate Pictures.) The Genies got it wrong. Juno may be set in Elk River, Minnesota, but its comic sensibilities are as Canadian as the u in humour. Page is outstanding as the titular Juno, balancing the snarky and the sweet as a pregnant teen who refuses to concede the moral high ground. “I’m a legend at school,” Juno quips. “They call me the cautionary whale.” 

Arguably the most important Canadian documentary ever made, Alanis Obomsawin’s magnum opus chronicles the 78 days of the Oka Crisis, a land dispute between the Mohawk people and the town of Oka, Quebec, over plans to build a golf course on an area that included an Indigenous burial ground. The armed standoff between Mohawk warriors and the Canadian Army played out daily on Canadian TV, but what was happening behind the scenes, the real story of Canada’s ongoing colonialism, and the defense of Native land by the entire Mohawk community, was hidden until Obomsawin’s documentary brought it to light. Kanehsatake was the first documentary to win best Canadian feature at TIFF, and it changed the way a nation looked at itself.

Don McKellar’s vision for the apocalypse is tidier and far less violent than versions seen south of the border. McKellar and Sandra Oh play Torontonians seeking human connection on their last night on Earth. This Canadian doomsday tale manages to be touching, unsentimental and very, very funny and features a cameo from David Cronenberg as a gas company employee giving the citizens of his city one last comforting phone call before the end. There are worse ways to face extinction. 

Canada, with its strong public broadcasting tradition, has long been a source of big-idea documentaries questioning prevailing narratives while never descending into conspiracy nonsense. Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick’s portrait of progressive stalwart Noam Chomsky is the perfect gateway drug for young radicals, as it presents the ideas of the most persistent, and prescient, critic of the American media industry and corporate state capture. 

He would go on, with Stripes (1981) and Ghostbusters (1984), to transform Hollywood comedy and bring countercultural sex and snark to the mainstream. But all the elements were already in place in Meatballs, Ivan Reitman’s third feature, highlighting Bill Murray, in his first starring role, as a counsellor at Camp North Star, a cut-rate Ontario summer camp. At the time the highest-grossing Canadian film ever, it spawned and entire subgenre as well as a number of forgettable sequels. 

Nearly any of Xavier Dolan’s excellent melodramas, from his 2009 directorial debut I Killed My Mother, made when he was just 19, through his more genre-flavoured exercises like Heartbeats (2010) and Tom at the Farm (2013), would deserve recognition on this list. But his fifth feature is arguably his masterpiece. An update on I Killed My Mother, made with more money and five years of directing experience under his belt, the film follows a single mum (I Killed My Mother star Anne Dorval) raising her violent son (Dolan) by herself who finds hope when a mysterious neighbour inserts herself into their household. An intimate, unsettling take on mental health and parenting, it is also Dolan’s most aesthetically ambitious film, shot in a 1:1 aspect ratio that forces the audience uncomfortably close to his characters and featuring enough whirling cameras and abrasive cuts to warrant the Martin Scorsese badge of approval. 

It’s 1959, and Sandy, a 12-year-old girl living in middle of nowhere in rural B.C., is bowled over when her flashy American cousin Butch, a James Dean look-alike, hits town in his red Cadillac, all her yearnings for a wild world beyond the ranch made hunky flesh. Loud, sexy and slick, Butch seems everything her home life is not, but Sandy will find he isn’t all he appears to be. Sandy Wilson’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale can also be read as a musing on the differences between life north and south of the border. 

Often ranked as the best Canadian film of all time, the reputation of Claude Jutra’s coming-of-age epic has been tarnished following posthumous allegations that the Quebec director, who died in 1986, had been an abuser of underaged boys. The allegations were never proven, but Québec Cinéma’s Prix Jutra became the Gala Québec Cinéma award and local municipalities rushed to change streets named in his honor. The importance of My Uncle Antoine for Canadian cinema, however, is harder to dismiss. Set in the Quebec asbestos mining town of Black Hawk, the 1940s tale is a depiction a the now-lost world as sweeping as it is detailed and precise; its story, which plays over a 24-hour period leading to Christmas Day, is as rich in characters as a Dickens novel. 

Daniel Roher’s pulse-pounding, Oscar-winning documentary explored the life of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in the aftermath of an attempt on his life, and before his 2024 death in a Russian Arctic prison camp. An apt rejoinder to the current U.S. government’s Russian appeasement policy. 

The intergenerational trauma of the residential school system, which, over more than a century, attempted “cultural genocide” by forcibly separating Indigenous children from their families, is given a sci-fi spin in this sharp, low-budget thriller from Cree-Métis director Danis Goulet. Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers plays a Cree woman who joins a resistance movement against a dystopian dictatorship that has seized her daughter who has a power that could save them all. 

Michel Brault won the director’s prize in Cannes for this docudrama, a Canadian version of Zero Dark Thirty following Ottawa’s authoritarian crackdown on Quebec separatists during the 1970s October Crisis. After a series of bombing attacks, Prime Minister Pierre “Father of Justin” Trudeau imposed martial law, arresting and imprisoning suspects for weeks without trial. A sobering reminder of how fragile democratic protections can be when the state feels threatened. 

The tight visual storytelling and atmospheric sense of dread and impending doom that director Denis Villeneuve would later bring to his Hollywood thrillers is fully formed in this early French-language feature, a re-creation of the Montreal Massacre of 1989, when a gunman stormed into the École Polytechnique engineering school and started shooting women, murdering 14 young students. The first half of the film, like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, follows the killer in the lead-up to the attack, but midway, Villeneuve flips the perspective, shifting to the story of one of the survivors and the casual misogyny they endured before the violent trauma of that day. 

Jeff Barnaby’s wildly entertaining and unflinchingly brutal debut genre-mashes horror with a coming-of-age movie and a dash of a heist plot set against the very real backdrop of Canada’s residential school system, which for generations, tore Indigenous children from the families with the stated goal of “killing the Indian in the child.” Before his early death from cancer at 46, the Mi’kmaq filmmaker would go full horror with Blood Quantum (2019), imagining a zombie outbreak where Native communities are immune to the virus. 

Like the late David Lynch, Guy Maddin is one of the true originals of world cinema, a director with a vision so entirely original, yet so fully formed, it appears to come to us via an alternate timeline. This feature, his first collaboration with Isabella Rossellini (Maddin predicting her Oscar comeback two decades before the Academy), is a dark comedic sort-of musical set in a version of Depression-era Winnipeg centering around a competition to find, as it says on the tin, the saddest music in the world. “The more films you have seen, the more you may love The Saddest Music in the World,” wrote Roger Ebert in his rave review. “It plays like satirical nostalgia for a past that never existed.” Hmm, sounds like a Trump stump speech. 

Remade in English with Taylor Kitsch and Brendan Gleeson as the very serviceable The Great Seduction (2013) and recently in Spanish as the Mexican Netflix feature La Gran Seducción (2023), this Quebecois original, directed by Jean-François Pouliot from a Ken Scott script, follows the residents of a small fishing village who, in order to keep their town alive, come up with a scheme to trick a young Anglo doctor to take up full-time residency. Delightfully silly, this is a feel-good film with a heart as big as the Saint Lawrence River. 

After playing the Deer Lady on FX’s Reservation Dogs and Tanis on Hulu’s Letterkenny, Mohawk actor Kaniehtiio Horn weaves her Indigenous roots with her genre instincts in her directorial debut, a home invasion comedy about Ziggy (Horn), a Native woman forced to defend her auntie’s house from outsiders who want to steal her heirlooms. The themes of Native resistance to white colonial oppression are front and centre, but Seeds never takes itself too seriously, levelling its pulpy gore with doses of sardonic rez humour. 

Oscar nominated for her writing on Away From Her and an Oscar winner for the screenplay to Women Talking, Sarah Polley’s most powerful film, arguably, is this documentary investigation into a dark family rumour about her parents. Stripping away layers of myth and memory, of secrets and lies, Polley finds the truth at the core of a family of storytellers. 

The feature spinoff of their SCTV Bob and Doug McKenzie sketch — itself a parody of CBC TV’s Canadian content demands — sees original hosers Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas remake Hamlet through the thickest beer goggles in the world. Deeply stupid and delightfully surreal, it’s a Great White North comedy for the ages, eh? 

The Sweet Hereafter is the most Canadian film to become an Oscar darling — Atom Egoyan’s tale of tragedy and loss in a northern Ontario town picked up two Oscar noms, including for best director, which he lost out to Titanic, by fellow Canuck James Cameron — and marks the sweet spot in Egoyan’s career, between the experimental art house work of The Adjuster and Exotica and his later, less exciting mainstream efforts (Chloe, Remember). Here, the director’s talent for complex storytelling perfectly balances his instincts for tear-jerking emotions. 

François Girard gives suitable tribute to the headstrong, idiosyncratic genius of pianist Glenn Gould with this break-all-the-rules biopic that dismisses with the soup-to-nuts approach in favour of a series of short vignettes — an interview, a telephone call, one shot as an X-ray — that give us elusive, incomplete glimpses of the artist and the man. A clever, quick-witted and ultimately truthful depiction that never pretends to understand its subject, only to be eternally fascinated by him.

Some may say it’s a stretch to call a Pixar movie Canadian, but this coming-of-age tale from Toronto’s own Domee Shi is a dyed-in-the-deep-red-wooly-fur northern original. Shi based her story, about a girl for whom the transition to adolescence means mutating into a giant red panda, on her own experiences growing up in Toronto’s bustling Chinese community (minus, we assume, the fluffy transformation), giving the film cultural specificity alongside the universal appeal of its story of the hormonal roller coaster that is puberty. 

Director Matthew Rankin’s absurdist comedy, winner of the first-ever audience prize for the best film in the Directors’ Fortnight section of Cannes, is an offbeat homage to Iranian cinema, set in frozen Winnipeg. Rankin imagines an alternative Canada, where French and Farsi are the two official languages and you can get Persian specialties alongside your donuts and your double double at Tim Horton’s. A cineasts’ delight. 

Now a Berlin festival regular, New Brunswick filmmaker Denis Côté had his breakout with this story of two lesbian ex-cons who, after sharing a prison cell, try to make a new life for themselves in the deep woods. Part oddball melodrama, part grotesque revenge tale, it anticipates the genre mashup of more recent LGBTQ+ thriller Love Lies Bleeding. 

In 1983, in the early days of VHS, David Cronenberg already saw it all. Where the proliferation of home video sex and violence, served up to meet every kink and perversion in an unregulated market of ideas and desire — the medium is the message, says Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, the inspiration for Videodrome’s Dr. Brian O’Blivion, a “media prophet professor” of the “new fles”” — would lead to. You could draw a straight line from James Woods’ cable TV programmer, who adds a voyeuristic S&M and torture show — think Big Brother with whips — to the schedule to boost ratings, to the world of TikTok porn, 4chan conspiracy theories and Dark Web violence we call current-day reality. 

“What could have been a morbidly imagined exploitation film about the ‘problem’ of child soldiers is completely turned around and reinvented by Canadian director Kim Nguyen,” goes THR’s review of War Witch, a drama of the nearly unimaginable real-life horrors experienced by a 12-year-old African girl who is abducted from her village and forced to wage war. Discovery Rachel Mwanza won best actress awards at Berlin and Tribeca for her performance in a film that, despite its subject matter, is neither sensationalistic nor sentimental.