There’s no thrill in cinema quite as purely visceral as a great car chase. Tires screeching, crunching metal, imminent disaster—you know the drill.
Comedies had been staging chases for laughs since the days of the Keystone Kops, but the movies’ modern-day car chase didn’t really come about until 1968, when director Peter Yates strapped a camera to Steve McQueen’s Mustang and tore through the hills of San Francisco in Bullitt. Every picture on this list owes it a debt, whether paid in reverence or in defiance. Buckle up.
10. One Battle After Another (2025, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
9. The Matrix Reloaded (2003, dir. Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski)
8. The Driver (1978, dir. Walter Hill)
7. Duel (1971, dir. Steven Spielberg)
6. To Live and Die in L.A. (1985, dir. William Friedkin)
5. Bullitt (1968, dir. Peter Yates)
4. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, dir. James Cameron)
3. Ronin (1998, dir. John Frankenheimer)
2. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, dir. George Miller)
1. The French Connection (1971, dir. William Friedkin)
Honorable mention: Baby Driver (2017, dir. Edgar Wright), The Blues Brothers (1980, dir. John Landis), The Bourne Supremacy (2004, dir. Paul Greengrass), Death Proof (2007, dir. Quentin Tarantino), Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974, dir. John Hough), Diva (1981, dir. Jean-Jacques Beineix), Drive (2011, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn), Gone in 60 Seconds (1974, dir. H.B. Halicki), The Italian Job (1969, dir. Peter Collinson), Vanishing Point (1971, dir. Richard C. Sarafian)
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 
One response to “The 10 best car chases on film”
[…] Mainly remembered for a heart-stopping chase scene, To Live and Die in L.A. is so saturated in the look and sound of the 1980s, it’s easy to overlook how transgressive a movie it is. Miami Vice was already becoming a television phenomenon when this neo-noir hit theaters, which might have dampened some of the film’s hyper-stylized allure. William Petersen is Richard Chance, a hotshot but reckless U.S. Secret Service agent determined to avenge the shooting death of his partner by counterfeit kingpin Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe). Chance will stop at nothing to collar his target, even if it means committing armed robbery. Songs by Wang Chung (see what I mean about the ‘80s?) propel this sun-drenched thriller in a land where everyone is sexy, cool, and apparently lives in a modernist beachfront house. Oh, and that chase. William Friedkin, who had already devised one of the all-time car chases in The French Connection, tasked stunt coordinator Buddy Joe Hooker with choreographing a chase he hadn’t seen before. The result: Chance and his partner (John Pankow) barreling into oncoming traffic on the Terminal Island Freeway. Shot over six consecutive weekends and involving some 75 vehicles, it is a showstopper in a movie that doesn’t even know what first gear is like.(See more in The 10 best car chases in film.) […]
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