The 10 Most Important Films Ever Made According to Hideo Kojima

In his aforementioned 2004 'Favourite Films' blog post, Kojima accurately claimed that there is “no bigger tearjerker” in cinema than this 1931 Charlie Chaplin classic. In fact, if legend is to be believed, Chaplin’s guest of honour at the premiere is said to have both laughed and cried for most of the movie. His name was Albert Einstein, who apparently got relatively teary on a rare night off from explaining his theory of relativity.

City Lights is probably Chaplin’s most romantic movie—a film in which the intrepid Tramp falls in love with a blind woman selling flowers on the street. The story then follows his endearingly chaotic attempts to raise the money to help her get an operation. If you know Chaplin for movies like The Great Dictator and Modern Times, this one should be next on your list.

No surprises here: Orson Welles’ legendary debut Citizen Kane tends to be a mainstay on most cinephiles’ Best-Of lists. Case in point, it's topped Sight and Sound’s reputable Top 200 list on all but two occasions since 1952. Kojima included it in his 'Favourite Films' list as an "omitted all-time classic" so beloved, it needed no introduction or explanation from him.

The story, told in flashback, follows the financial rise and spiritual fall of a newspaper mogul named Charles Foster Kane, played by the 25-year-old director with a staggering amount of aura and confidence.

The timeless morality struggle of that movie—which has since been mimicked in everything from There Will Be Blood to The Social Network—would likely have been enough to sustain it over the years, but it’s the modernist tricks and camerawork that Welles and his DOP Gregg Toland used (and in some cases invented) that really keep it feeling fresh almost 90 years after release.

When Kojima hit the Criterion Closet in 2023, he focused solely on Japanese movies, picking classics like Ugetsu and The Woman in the Dunes. He also picked out two items from the great Yasujiro Ozu (Late Spring and a box set of deeper cuts). The director’s greatest masterpiece, Tokyo Story, wasn’t among them, though Kojima has often listed it as one of his favourite films (another "omitted all-time classic", according to his 'Favourite Films' list).

Tokyo Story follows an elderly couple as they travel to Tokyo to see their children—all four of whom treat them like a nuisance, at best—leaving only their deceased son’s widow to show them true kindness. It’s an overwhelmingly beautiful film—one that everyone, at least once in their life, should see. 

When it comes to games that inspired MGS, Kojima is usually quick to praise the infiltration mission at the heart of The Guns of Navarone—a British WWII movie (think Bridge over the River Kwai) about a group of Greek soldiers who are tasked with taking out a couple of German cannons on an island in the Aegean Sea. 

The movie stars Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn, each of whom projects their own version of old-school, rough-edged heroism—the kind that Kojima clearly drew from when creating Solid Snake.

Like Ozu, Kojima has spoken about the films of Akira Kurosawa on many occasions, but the one title that comes up more than any is High and Low. "I was shocked when I saw this," he said when selecting it as one of his Criterion Closet picks, and explaining why it's his favourite Kurosawa film.

Along with The Bad Sleep Well, High and Low signalled the end of the Japanese filmmaker’s legendary run of Samurai movies in the 1950s and the beginning of a late career re-embrace of hard-boiled noir. 

Set in the present day, High and Low tells the story of a wealthy business owner and an attempted kidnapping. As recently as last year, Spike Lee reworked it into his Denzel-starring New York movie Highest 2 Lowest, but the original is obviously the one to beat.

Kojima made his name with a series of games about spies, espionage, and nefarious government agencies. However, as Death Stranding showed, he’s just as much of a lover of all things science fiction, not to mention '60s pin-up Raquel Welch, whom he admits in his 'Favourite Films' list his adolescent mind was piqued by.

The earliest sci-fi classic in the Kojima canon is 1966’s Fantastic Voyage (which Welch starred in), a film about a group of scientists who shrink down to molecular levels to journey into their colleague’s body and save his life. As noted by The New Yorker, Isaac Asimov's novelisation helped Kojima find stability during a time in his childhood when his family were frequently moving around Japan for work. It's also been explicitly referenced in the MGS games.

The effects in Fantastic Voyage might look a little silly by today’s standards (think Ant-Man), but they’re always inventive and never less than fun.

You don’t need an MA in cinema history to guess that Kojima is a fan of Escape From New York. After all, if you name a badass character Snake, there are only a couple of people you are homaging, and they are John Carpenter and Kurt Russell.

The formidable director-actor duo made five movies together, including the sci-fi horror classic The Thing. Yet it was Russell’s performance as Snake Plissken in Carpenter’s two Escape From... films that clearly stuck with Kojima. His homage was blatant enough to motivate Escape From... co-rights holders CanalPlus to encourage Carpenter to pursue a lawsuit, which he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015 he declined. Acknowledging MGS as a "rip-off" of Escape to New York (the better of the two, if you have to choose), he cited having a personal relationship with Kojima: "He's a nice guy, or at least, he's nice to me."

The first Mad Max movie is an Ozploitation classic, but the sequel is arguably the moment when George Miller’s franchise found its groove and its post-apocalyptic swagger. It’s hard to quantify just how influential the world of “The Wasteland” has been—you can see evidence of it in everything from Waterworld to Akira to countless video games, including Fallout and Borderlands.

You can find its DNA in much of Kojima’s work, too, so it's no surprise he rates it so highly. "The production design, the characters, the action, the violence, the suspense, the direction—it's fantastic in every way," he wrote for his 2004 'Favourite Films' list. "A classic that's in my top ten!"

Another film with fingerprints all over Kojima’s work (and countless other video games) is Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Blade Runner—in which a man tasked with tracking down a replicant eventually begins to wonder if he might be one. 

Harrison Ford stars as Rick Deckard, but even the presence of Han Solo here pales in comparison to the film’s unbelievable images and design. “Its world and visuals are incredible,” Kojima again wrote in 2004, “There's nothing else I need to say about this one.” I couldn't agree more.

The last film on our list looks nothing like a Kojima computer game. For all the action and violence in MGS and Death Stranding, it's clear from his taste in movies that Kojima-san also loves a good cry—and few films are guaranteed to open the tear ducts quite like Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso. 

This is a movie about a director who returns to his small Italian town to pay respects to the projectionist who inspired his love for cinema. Now almost 40 years old, certain things about Paradiso may not have aged the best, but it’s a must-see for any cinema lover, and I can basically guarantee that the ending will make you cry, just as it did for Kojima "in a way I never expected."