A physical mechanism for the long-wave instability of thin liquid films is presented. We show that the many diverse systems that exhibit this instability can be classified into two large groups. Each group is studied using the model of a thin liquid film with a deformable top surface flowing down a rigid inclined plane. In the first group, the top surface has an imposed stress, while in the other, an imposed velocity. The proposed mechanism shows how the details of the energy transfer from the basic state to the disturbance are handled differently in each of these cases, and how a common growth mechanism produces the unstable motion of the disturbance.