An iconic Nineties teen comedy, a mind-bending Christopher Nolan favorite, and one of Pixar’s most beloved films are set to join the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry.
The LoC revealed its annual list of 25 films marked for preservation today (Jan. 29), with Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, Nolan’s Inception, and Brad Bird’s The Incredibles among the most notable selections. Other additions include Julie Taymor’s Frida Kahlo biopic Frida; Before Sunrise, the first installment of Richard Linklater’s trilogy of films with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy; Lawrence Kasdan’s revered film The Big Chill; and two Denzel Washington classics, the 1993 legal drama Philadelphia and the 1989 Civil War epic, Glory, which earned the actor his first Oscar.
The Eighties teen marital arts favorite, The Karate Kid, also made the cut, with star Ralph Macchio calling the Film Registry’s preservation work “so important because it keeps the integrity of cinema alive for multiple generations.” He added, of seeing The Karate Kid’s inclusion, “I’m just proud to have walked in these shoes, and I try to pay that legacy forward. Film preservation is a way of taking that legacy and paying it forward to future generations.”
The Film Registry’s class of 2026 spans nearly 120 years of film history. The oldest selection is 1896’s The Tramp and the Dog, a silent film that was previously considered lost until it was rediscovered in the National Library of Norway in 2021. It boasts a classic comedy plot, in which a tramp tries to steal a pie off a windowsill, only to be chased away by “a broom-wielding housewife and her dog.” The Film Registry also noted it contains one of the first known instances of “pants humor,” which is — you guessed it — a bit where a “character loses (or almost loses) his pants during an altercation.”
There are several films from the 2010s, too, including Inception (2010) and Nancy Buirski’s celebrated 2011 documentary The Loving Story, about the couple behind the Supreme Court case that overturned laws banning interracial marriage. The most recent film on the Film Registry’s list is Wes Anderson’s celebrated 2014 film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, which was created in part with the help of materials in the Library of Congress.
As Anderson explained, he and his collaborators relied heavily on the LoC’s collection of Photochrome prints — hand-colored black-and-white photographs from the turn of the century — when conceiving the film’s historical (albeit partly fictionalized) setting.
“The views and images that we were looking for, the architecture and the landscapes that we wanted, they don’t exist anymore,” he said. “We went through the entire Photochrome collection, which is a lot of images. We made our own versions of things, but much of what is in our film comes directly from that collection from the Library of Congress.”
One of the older films in the class of 2026 is High Society, a 1956 musical considered one of the last great ones of Hollywood’s Golden era. It starred Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong and his band, and Grace Kelly, in what would be her last movie before retiring and marrying the Prince of Monaco.
John Carpenter’s seminal 1982 sci-fi horror flick, The Thing, was also included after receiving the most public support (each year the LoC invites people to nominate the films they’d like to see preserved). Stephen Daldry’s acclaimed film The Hours, about the life of Virginia Woolf and the legacy of her book Mrs. Dalloway, was also added to the list, as was Ken Burns’ debut doc The Brooklyn Bridge and the 1998 Jim Carrey comedy, The Truman Show.
A pair of famed music documentaries were also picked for preservation: George Nierenberg’s 1982 look at gospel music, Say Amen, Somebody, and Danny Tedesco’s 2008 film, The Wrecking Crew, about the titular group of studio musicians who played on an array of hit songs during the Sixties and Seventies.
To celebrate this year’s Film Registry class, Turner Classic Movies will host a TV special on March 19, during which it will broadcast some of the 25 films picked for preservation. Jacqueline Stewart, who chairs the National Film Preservation Board, will introduce the films.
