RankedMovies

The Best Canadian Films of All Time, Ranked

Ranked on how well each film holds up on a rewatch today, what it did that no other film had done, and how much it shaped what Canadian and Quebec cinema became. Recognition (Cannes, the Oscars) is noted but did not decide the order. Both official languages and Inuktitut are here. For anyone who wants a real starting canon rather than the three titles everyone already knows.

A community-ranked list on FindBest — currently in the creator's order; no member votes yet. Votes change the order: when members vote, the list is ordered by their votes. How ranking works.

YYanick Tremblay

13 entriesAdded Oct 17, 2026

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Mon oncle Antoine

Claude Jutra's 1971 NFB feature follows a teenage boy in a Quebec asbestos-mining town over one Christmas Eve, and a sleigh ride with a coffin that changes how he sees the adults around him. It has topped TIFF's all-time Canadian polls more than once. Since 2016, allegations against Jutra led Quebec to strip his name from its film awards, which is part of how the film is now discussed.

4 pros · 2 cons

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner

Zacharias Kunuk's 2001 epic retells an Inuit legend of rivalry, murder and a naked flight across the sea ice, made by an Inuit production company and performed in Inuktitut. It won the Camera d'Or for best first feature at Cannes. At close to three hours it asks for an evening, but nothing else in world cinema looks or moves like it.

4 pros · 2 cons

The Sweet Hereafter

Atom Egoyan adapted Russell Banks's novel about a small B.C. town after a school-bus crash and a big-city lawyer who arrives to turn grief into a lawsuit. The 1997 film won the Grand Prix at Cannes and earned Egoyan Oscar nominations for directing and adapted screenplay. Ian Holm and a young Sarah Polley carry a film built out of fractured time and silence.

4 pros · 2 cons

Incendies

Before Dune, Denis Villeneuve made this 2010 adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad's play: Montreal twins carry out their mother's will and are sent to an unnamed Middle Eastern country to find a father and a brother they never knew existed. It was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign-language film. The final revelation is one of the most brutal in modern cinema.

4 pros · 2 cons

Jesus of Montreal

Denys Arcand's 1989 film follows an actor hired by a Montreal church to refresh its Passion play, whose staging grows so radical that it collides with the clergy, the ad business and the culture industry around him. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes and an Oscar nomination. Funny, angry and very Montreal, it is the best way into Arcand.

4 pros · 2 cons

Dead Ringers

David Cronenberg's 1988 film casts Jeremy Irons as twin Toronto gynecologists whose shared identity collapses into addiction and dependence. It is the hinge between Cronenberg's body-horror years and his later psychological dramas, and the split-screen work on Irons still holds up. Not a horror film in the gore sense; far more unsettling than that.

4 pros · 2 cons

The Barbarian Invasions

Arcand's 2003 sequel to The Decline of the American Empire gathers old friends around a dying, unrepentant history professor while his estranged financier son games Quebec's health system to make his last weeks bearable. It won the Oscar for best foreign-language film, plus best screenplay and best actress (Marie-Josee Croze) at Cannes.

4 pros · 2 cons

Mommy

Xavier Dolan's 2014 film about a widowed mother, her volatile teenage son and the shy neighbour who steadies them is shot mostly in a narrow 1:1 frame, which opens up at two moments you will remember. It shared the Jury Prize at Cannes with Jean-Luc Godard. Loud, overwhelming and occasionally exhausting, it is the film where Dolan's style fully served the story.

4 pros · 2 cons

C.R.A.Z.Y.

Jean-Marc Vallee's 2005 film follows Zac, the fourth of five sons in a Montreal suburb, from the 1960s into the 80s as he tries to become the son his father wants and hide that he is gay. The soundtrack (Patsy Cline, Bowie, the Stones, Pink Floyd) is part of the storytelling, which is also why licensing kept it hard to find for years.

4 pros · 2 cons

Monsieur Lazhar

Philippe Falardeau's 2011 film follows an Algerian refugee who talks his way into replacing a Montreal teacher who died by suicide in her classroom, while hiding his own grief and asylum case. It was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign-language film. Gentle, never sentimental, and the child performances are among the best ever filmed in Quebec.

4 pros · 2 cons

Leolo

Jean-Claude Lauzon's 1992 fever dream is narrated by a Mile End boy who insists he was conceived by a Sicilian tomato and escapes his troubled family through fantasy. Competed at Cannes, then gained a cult reputation. Lauzon died in 1997 after only two features, which makes this one feel even more singular.

4 pros · 3 cons

Women Talking

Sarah Polley adapted Miriam Toews's novel, based on real events in a Bolivian Mennonite colony, about women deciding in a hayloft whether to stay, fight or leave after years of drugged assaults. The 2022 film won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Almost entirely one argument in one room, and it never feels small.

4 pros · 2 cons

Goin' Down the Road

Don Shebib's 1970 film follows two young men from Cape Breton who drive to Toronto expecting work and good times, and slide instead into low-wage jobs and debt. Shot cheaply in a near-documentary style, it became the template for decades of English-Canadian realism. SCTV parodied it, which tells you how deeply it entered the culture.

4 pros · 2 cons

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