The car chase is a time-honored, frequently practiced piece of the language of action cinema, and the rise in digital wizardry in filmmaking has only helped to bolster its place on the big screen. For many moviegoers there’s nothing more thrilling than watching two or more cars pushed to their absolute limit, whether on the open road or while weaving through crowded city streets. Many movies try to get it right, and lots do, but there are a select few who nail it on a masterpiece level. These are some of the greatest movie car chases ever staged.
1. Bullitt (1968)
For many film fans, Peter Yates’s Bullitt is still the gold standard by which all other movie car chases are measured. The legendary showdown between Steve McQueen’s Ford Mustang and the Dodge Charger occupied by a pair of men trying to kill him still holds up as a beautiful display of 1960s automotive muscle, in part because it doesn’t adhere to a predictable structure. Yes, the chase begins in the iconic hilly streets of San Francisco, but it ends out on a more open road, where the cars get to really show off some speed and, finally, some spectacular crashing. It’s that contrast between cramped and open, hilly and flat, that really puts the chase over the top.
2. The Italian Job (1969)
A lot of car chases rely on speed above all else to sell the action, whether it’s the speed of the cars or the speed of the editing or both. The Italian Job, a lighthearted heist film about a crew of British thieves (including Michael Caine) trying to get a big pile of gold bars into the Swiss Alps, certainly has speed going for it, but what makes its car chase particularly memorable is its palpable sense of humor. The idea of a trio of Mini Coopers zipping down stairs is funny enough, but then throw in things like a marriage ceremony, a stalled police car on a roof, and guys calmly steering through a pitch black tunnel like they’re on a Sunday drive, and you’ve got something unforgettable. The Italian Job doesn’t have the fastest car chase ever, but it certainly has one of the wittiest.
3. The French Connection (1971)
When producer Philip D’Antoni and director William Friedkin were gearing up to make The French Connection, D’Antoni had one particular demand: The film’s car chase had to top the one from Bullitt, which he had also produced. The two filmmakers brainstormed and eventually hit upon the idea of a car chasing an elevated train. After a few weeks of permit-free shooting on the streets of New York City, Friedkin had all the footage he needed to produce an all-time great action sequence. From the first-person camera perspectives to the obstacles under the train tracks to Gene Hackman’s screaming face, it packs just as much adrenaline today as it did in 1971.
4. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
James Bond films were tailor-made for car chases featuring the sexiest vehicles of any given era, and nearly every film in the franchise has a chase scene worth remembering. We could do a whole list composed of nothing but great Bond car chases, but if pressed to pick just one we have to talk about the merry procession of pursuers in The Spy Who Loved Me’s centerpiece chase. In a sleek Lotus Esprit, Roger Moore’s Bond and Russian Agent Amasova (Barbara Bach) are chased first by a motorcycle with a killer sidecar, then by a car carrying new villain Jaws, then by a helicopter. It’s this last obstacle that proves particularly tricky, but Bond’s always got one more trick than the bad guys, and this time the trick turned out to be that his Lotus was amphibious. Yes, this is the movie where the car turns into a submarine, and that’s something no one who saw The Spy Who Loved Me will ever forget.
5. Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
No discussion of great movie car chases is complete without Smokey and the Bandit, the film that made the Pontiac Trans Am an essential part of American pop culture forever. Hal Needham’s classic road movie is packed with wonderful car moments and great stunts, so much so that it’s difficult to pin down just one as the best part of the film. The task is made more difficult by the sheer amount of swagger that exists in the film between Burt Reynolds’s performance and Needham’s direction. Even when the danger is dialed up to 11, the film is so breezy and light that you almost forgot someone could die doing this kind of driving. The jump across Mulberry Bridge feels like a perfect encapsulation of these seemingly opposing ideas, as Bandit quips “that’s not good” upon seeing the roadblock and then “That’s worse” upon seeing troopers speeding up from the other direction. It’s a brilliant blend of comedy and great stunt work.
6. The Blues Brothers (1980)
The Blues Brothers, the John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd vehicle that remains one of the most successful Saturday Night Live sketch adaptations of all time, leans heavily on a sense of outsized action that runs through the whole film. The story is ostensibly about a pair of well-meaning guys who just want to earn some extra money to save the orphanage they grew up in, but along the way they run into explosions and car chases that they have to somewhat calmly steer through on their way to fulfill a relatively simple “Mission from God.” The film has not one, but two great chases that lean into the lunacy of this, and while the early chase through the mall is a masterpiece, the sheer cartoonish absurdity of the final pursuit through the streets of Chicago is the one most people remember. It’s just too zany to forget.
7. To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)
Only one director has the honor of being on this list twice: William Friedkin, who masterminded the car chase in The French Connection and then somehow produced another all-timer more than a decade later. To Live and Die in L.A. is not a masterpiece in the same way that The French Connection is, but its centerpiece chase scene—in which a pair of Secret Service agents flee two gunmen after an operation gone wrong—is a masterpiece for the 1980s in the same way the train versus car chase was for the 1970s. What begins with weaving through trucks in an industrial area soon explodes out onto L.A.’s freeways, and culminates in some of the most daring driving ever captured on film.
8. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
While it’s always fun to see two classic muscle cars zipping around each other on the road, The French Connection taught us early that contrast is often the key to a thrilling chase. James Cameron took that lesson to heart and poured it into this thrilling sequence in T2, in which the T-1000 hijacks a tow truck to chase John Connor and his weak little motorcycle through a puddle-filled channel. The sound design impeccably plays up the contrast through the engine noise alone, until the truck becomes a full-blown monster raging through the concrete path, throwing sparks as it goes. The climactic moments, featuring the T-800 on yet another motorcycle, only serve to further play up the juxtapositions of the scene in a very fun way.
