This is partially inspired by @UsedJavelin’s thread about Seven Samurai.
I watched a lot of the Western “film canon” when I was younger, and lately I’ve just been craving some good “artistic” movie content. But I don’t trust the :reddit-logo: crowd nor the letterboxd nerds for serious recommendations, so I turn the question to my comrades
A lot of older Hollywood movies are really good. Casablanca is a banger. Most of Hitchcock’s movies are really good. The first horror film in a given genre is usually worth watching if you’re a horror fan. Halloween for instance seems a little trite now because it’s the OG movie everyone else was copying.
Kubrick’s movies are generally really good. Dr. Strangelove is a classic about American insanity. 2001 is just beautiful.
Godfather is genuinely really good.
A lot of the old Errol Flynn adventure movies were a lot of fun. Errol was a great athlete and a lot of his stunts still look impressive today. If he’d been making movies in the '10s he would have been doing his own parkour.
The old Spartacus movie is a classic.
Citizen Kane is definitely worth seeing if you’re more than casually interested in film.
One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest. I’m not sure how it reads now but my understanding is that at the time it did a lot to bring the plight of people confined to asylums to public attention.
Bullit has hands down one of the best car chases in cinema. It was the first and few have matched it.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a classic. Probably some cringe racism but you’re going to get a lot of that in older movies.
Fantasia is just gorgeous. Pure visual porn.
Charlie Chaplin has a lot of great movies that are worth watching. Same with the Marx brothers. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator has an interesting history. From what I remember he made it more or less on his own to try to convince American’s that there was a moral duty to intervene in WWII to stop Hitler.
Tombstone is worth it just for Val Kilmer’s performance as Doc Holiday.
The 1954 Godzilla is a masterpiece, both as the first Kaiju movie, and as a cautionary tale about the horrors of nuclear war.
The Battle of Algiers is a semi-documentary about the Algerian’s final battle to through the French out of Algieria and re-take their country.
Nosferatu is a classic horror movie that really helped shape the genre.
The Seventh Seal is a gorgeous, challenging meditation on the inevitability of death.
Metropolis is one of the first and most influential science fiction movies to really go hard on grand visuals and design.
A Fistful of Dollars is arguably one of the best westerns.
The Day the Earth Stood Still is another classic cautionary tale about xenophobia and nuclear war.
Forbidden Planet is a gorgeous, thoughtful retelling of The Tempest as a science fiction tale. It’s also the origina of the saucer shaped UFO myth.
Freaks is in a very strange place. It’s a movie from 1932 that focuses on the performers in a circus freak show. It’s a horror movie, and certainly exploits then popular disgust for disabled people, but it also manages to be sympathetic and humanistic towards the freak show performers. When it was re-discovered and re-evaluated in the latter half of the 20th century it was judged to be important both as a piece of film history and an example of the humanization of marginalize people in a time where they were openly despised.
The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a great look in to early cold war US paranoia about communist infiltration.
The FBI investigated and nearly shut down It’s A Wonderful Life, which should speak in it’s favor
Battleship Potemkin is regarded as Eisenstein’s masterpiece.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is another western classic.
The Terminator, Terminator 2, Alien, Aliens, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, all classics of science fiction.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy is brilliant cinema.
The Matrix is a classic of cyberpunk.
Akira is a masterpiece that everyone should see.
Ghost in the Shell is another classic piece of science fiction.
Jurassic Park was a major innovator in the use of CGI graphics and is fun to this day.
Princess Mononoke, along with most Studio Ghibli movies
The Shaw Brother’s Hong Kong Martial Arts movies have had a huge impact on action movies.
The Raid is popularly regarded as having some of the best fight scenes in martial art movie history and invented the “hallway fight”.
Amelie is an extremely charming comedy
Heat is a heist movie with some great acting and amazing gunfights
Snatch is a classic British crime movie
Pan’s Labyrinth is a beautiful movie by Guillermo del Toro that blends fantasy and horror
The Thing is a tight sci-fi horror thriller with excellent VFX
Trainspotting is a classic movie about the ravages of heroin set in Scotland.
Fargo is an iconic comedy.
The Mad Max series is well worth watching. The first one is a crime exploitation movie, but the second too are really about mutual aid and finding human connections in a hard world. It’s a very different kind of post-apocalypse movie than hyper-indvidualistic power fantasies.
Pirates of the Carribean is notable for being a lot of fun, and for being one of the first successful pirate movies since the black and white era
The Iron Giant is a classic animated film about cold war paranoia and friendship
Stalker and Solaris are two of Tarkovsky’s best
Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are two Tarantino movies that had a huge impact on the culture of the 90s
You might check out the original Shaft. It’s a classic of the Blaxploitation genre and had a powerful effect on the culture
Rocky Horror Picture Show… Has a unique place in history. For a long time it was one of the very few portrayals of queer characters that wasn’t overtly negative. That was very powerful at a time when the culture was incredibly, unrelentingly hostile. Also has great songs and is just genuinely goofy fun.
I’m going to put in a good word for Dead Land. It’s a movie from Aoteroa set before the arrival of Europeans. It follows a young Maori boy who sets out on a grim quest for revenge with the aid of a mythical, cursed warrior. I’d classify it as a Maori martial arts revenge movie, and I don’t think there’s really anything else like it. One of the best martial arts films I’ve ever seen.
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is one of the finest Wuxia movies of all time and brought the Genre to western attention.
Y tu mama Tambien is a powerful coming of age movie with some queer themes that was very well regarded
The original Italian Job is a classic
I should get around to watching Treasure of the Sierra Madre . I torrented it after reading this tidbit in Bullshit Jobs.
In 1880 a Protestant “home missionary” who had spent some years traveling along the Western frontier reported that: “You can hardly find a group of ranchmen or miners from Colorado to the Pacific who will not have on their tongue’s end the labor slang of Denis Kearney, the infidel ribaldry of [atheist pamphleteer] Robert Ingersoll, the Socialistic theories of Karl Marx.” Certainly a detail left out of every cowboy movie I ever saw! (The notable exception being The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which does indeed begin with a scene where John Huston, as a miner, explains the labor theory of value to Humphrey Bogart.)
Ridley Scott’s The Duelists is a drama based loosely on the story of two Napoleonic officer’s whose vendetta resulted in a half dozen duels over the course of decades. Many HEMA fighters, fencers, and other swordsman regard it as both the best portrayal of realistic swordfighting, and the best artistic use of realistic swordfighting, in cinema
Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon is a must see. As an artist there really isn’t anyone comparable to Lee’s martial arts performances.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
The cartoons are stand-ins for black and immigrant communities who
spoilers
have their neighbourhoods bulldozed to make space for freeways after the destruction of public transport
and it’s frankly so much better than the other famous toon-in-real-life movies (Space Jam and Song of the South). The first 3 minutes are pretty annoying though, but otherwise is one of my favourite films.
Casablanca. The only person to die on screen is a nazi. The story itself is pretty sweet and then you can finally see how many shows and movies stole quotes from this one. :meow-popcorn:
But I don’t trust the letterboxd nerds
:theory-gary: very wise indeed. here goes the certified communistic classics list
spoiler
Its a Wonderful Life (CW Christmas) but its anti money-grubbing and charming
Thelma and Louise FUCK COPS
Bonnie and Clyde FUCK COPS
The Red Shoes ballet is pretty RED = COMMUNISM :stalin-shining:
Cool Hand Luke FUCK PRISON
Dr Strangelove :strangelove:
Rear Window is good
Do the Right Thing :anti-italian-action:
im taking ‘universally loved classic’ seriously here dont make me look like a fool
Clockwork Orange. It’s extremely edgy and dark though which includes [CW: example of said dark stuff]
spoiler
rape and assault
Battle Royale. The movie that Hunger Games and Squid Game ripped off. Addressed the psychological condition of being thrown into such a situation MUCH better than both the ripoffs while being much shorter as well
When people talk about Battle Royale, I always wonder if I watched the same movie with everyone else. None of the students wanted to kill each other in a battle royale, they just put one “student” in who wasn’t a student at all but a psychopath. He does most of the killings.
I LOL’d at the two who committed suicide though. Never change, Japanese.
