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

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    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

    • wwiehtnioj [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.)

      • MerryChristmas [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        This was the other movie I was going to recommend in this thread! I love that film.

      • Gosplan14_the_Third [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I've just seen it. The plot was good and so were the characters, but my god the colonialist attitude towards Mexicans in the film 🥴

        7/10, 8/10 if it didn't have the racism

    • Mardoniush [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Great list but calling these classic films is aging me like the Nazi in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • chair [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Really nice list

      Do you mean the 2011 raid though? Didn't that come out like 10 years after oldboy's hallway fight