Just name the movies you think everyone should have seen at least once in their lifetime. Go!
The Princess Bride
As you wish.
That’s inconceivable!
Because I haven’t seen it mentioned:
They Live
I grew up with Duke Nukem and later found a lot of his quotes were from that movie.
Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day
- Caddyshack
- Animal House
- Goodfellas
- The Godfather
- Shawshank Redemption
- Schindler’s List
- The Shining
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- The Thing Carpenter’s version
- Shawshank Redemption
- Yojimbo
- The Seventh Seal
- Duck Soup
- No Country For Old Men
- The Naked Gun
- Back to the Future
- The Guest
- Shrek
- The Hunt for Red October
- The Blues Brothers
- Dark City
- The rifftrax version of Jaws
- Double Indemnity
- Lord of the Rings trilogy
- Hot Fuzz
- The Dead Don’t Die
- Hunt for the Wilderpeople
- Free Solo
- In the Loop
- Evil Dead original
- Office Space
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
- The Cabin in the Woods
- Clue
- North by Northwest
- Brick
- The Sting
- Return of the Jedi
- Casablanca
- The Third Man
I fucking love In the Loop, but it took me a few viewings to understand what the hell was going on. I should watch it again.
The TV show was really good too, but the movie captures the absurdity so well.
Idiocracy. It was funny when it came out. Now it hurts.
That might explain why I didn’t like it too much. I saw it last year, it probably hits too close to home :/
Most of mine are already listed but here’s a couple more.
Army of Darkness
Dogma
The Protector
Clue
Full Metal Jacket
One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest
Howl’s Moving Castle
Four Rooms
Pulp Fiction
Big Trouble in Little China
Princess Bride
Romancing the Stone
The Shining
Full Metal Jacket
Donnie Darko
Office Space
Equilibrium
Amélie
Back to the Future
- Airplane!
- Ghostbusters
The Naked Gun(Already mentioned)- Gremlins + Gremlins 2
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom + Raiders of the Lost Ark
- The Great Dictator
- Forrest Gump
- American History X
- Grave of the Fireflies
- Rear Window
- The Silence of the Lambs
- Braveheart
- Highlander
Resevoir Dogs(Already mentioned)Children of Men(Already mentioned)My Neighbor Totoro(Already mentioned)- The Exorcist
- Rambo: First Blood
- Groundhog Day
- What’s Eating Gilbert Grape
- Scent of a Woman
- Predator
Memento
No particular order. Also, it’s movies that I watched, can’t speak on essentials that I might be missing.
It’s kinda hard to make a list on essentials tho. Because your personal taste obviously plays a big role. I can’t see my girlfriend liking more than 10 percent of those…
Schindlers List
Gladiator
No country for old men
The grand Budapest hotel
The big Lebowski
The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers
Star Wars (the original one)
Requiem for a dream
Pulp fiction
The good, the bad, the ugly
The lives of others
La vita é Bella
All quiet on the western front (1930 version)
The dark knight
The Truman Show
2001: Space odyssey
Alien
7 Samurai
Princess Mononoke
Trainspotting
Boyz N the Hood
Scarface
The Godfather 1, 2
The Matrix
Clockwork Orange
Shutter Island
Kingdom of Heaven
Wolf of Wall Street
Honorable mentions because they are popular and everybody always talks about them (I like a lot of them, too. Don’t consider them essentials tho):
Inception
Interstellar
Fight Club
Harry Potter
Return of the King
Rest of Star Wars (whatever people consider the good ones at last)
Saving Private Ryan
Django Unchained
Toy Story
The Lion King
12 Angry Men
My Neighbour Totoro
Memento
Wall-E
The Truman Show
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
I watch eternal sunshine most times i see it on, but some days I just don’t have the energy. It’s so good, but also exhausting.
My Neighbour Totoro over Princess Mononoke and Howl’s Moving Castle though?
My Neighbour Totoro is unique. In this film kids actually act and talk like kids. It is extremely imaginative and magical while not trying to be epic. It treats the audience as intelligent, curious people, giving a lot of quiet thinking space in between scenes.
It is a masterpiece of film making. The other Studio Ghibili films are good, but Totoro remains to be my favourite.
- The Thing ('82)
- Hot Fuzz
- Mad Max: Fury Road
- Spirited Away
- Taxi Driver
- The Matrix
- Unforgiven
- Nosferatu
- Suspiria ('77)
- 12 Angry Men
- Psycho
- The Wizard of Oz
“Should have seen” is strange, I’ll go with titles that, if you are into cinema probably you have heard about?
Citizen Kane
The Seventh Sigil
Apocalypse Now
Vertigo (Any Hitchcock movie really)
Seven Samurai (Any Kurosawa movie really)
Pretty much anything from Buster Keaton
Charlie Chaplin (I guess Modern Times)
The Godfather part I & II
Taxi Driver
On the Waterfront (Peak Marlon Brando stuff)
Some Truffaut stuff (I guess “Day for Night” would be the most relevant here)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind to get pretty much everything interesting from the Spielberg side of things
Man with a Camera (ok this one is not something I espect any conema lover to know, it’s a very early montage wonder from Russia, always good to get back there and get reminded progress doesn’t always go forward)
La Dolce Vita
2001: A Space Odyssey
Shining
A Clockwork Orange
Reservoir Dogs
Lost Highway (The better Mulholland Drive)
Blade Runner
The Matrix
Star Wars
There’s some good newer stuff but it’s much less “popular” so it wouldn’t make sense to expect anybody to know them. Very little new stuff looks like has the staying power to be relevant years down the line.
I guess The Lord of the Rings? But I consider it more of a great book that got a quality adaptation than a ground breaking stepping stone of cinema.
No country for old men, probably.
