The 20 Movies You'd Better Have Seen Already

"All About Eve" (written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) Fasten your seatbelts, indeed. Everybody knows this movie today as the primordial Hollywood catfight, the best "backstage" drama of all time and a signature role for Bette Davis, perhaps the greatest actress in American film history. Watch it again for the density of its dialogue and its carefully structured drama. Mankiewicz was a stage refugee who saw the film medium as "a larger theater," a vision that for better or worse was mostly abandoned by mainstream American movies in the decades to follow.

"Battleship Potemkin" (directed by Grigori Aleksandrov and Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) Enough said. If this crucial Soviet propaganda silent -- in which Eisenstein invented much of the language of modern cinema -- wasn't the first thing they showed you in that undergrad film class at Bedrock State, return your diploma and get a refund.

"The Big Sleep" (directed by Howard Hawks, 1946) The ultimate film noir -- even though, as an "A" picture, it may not technically qualify for the genre -- especially because the plot is finally too murky to be comprehensible and several scenes are lost forever. (A special-edition DVD reconstructs most of the missing soundtrack and a few images.) The ultimate Humphrey Bogart-Lauren Bacall picture, the ultimate Raymond Chandler adaptation (partly scripted by William Faulkner) and an early example of Hollywood turning its poisoned gaze upon itself. (See also "Sunset Blvd.," below.)

"Blade Runner" (directed by Ridley Scott, 1982) The movie that invented the future. Been to Times Square lately?

"Blue Velvet" (written and directed by David Lynch, 1986) I saw the best minds of my generation pining, nay, virtually (and in some cases literally) dying for a work of art that captured the perversions and contradictions beneath the surface of the "morning in America" go-go Reagan era. This was that work. Certain things about the "Blue Velvet" aesthetic may seem hackneyed today (thanks to endless and often hapless imitation), but nothing this dark, this hallucinatory or this extreme had been seen in mainstream American cinema since, well, ever.

"Casablanca" (directed by Michael Curtiz, 1942) "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." The best-loved movie romance ever made.

"Chinatown" (directed by Roman Polanski, 1974) I didn't get this creepily brilliant neo-noir -- which introduced the genre to the post-Vietnam generation -- about capitalism, water and Los Angeles when I first saw it as a teenager. I still thought America could be redeemed.

"Citizen Kane" (directed by Orson Welles, 1941) What am I supposed to say here? By international consensus, the greatest movie ever made. (And, along with "Battleship Potemkin," the foundation of the Great Director legend.)

"Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1964) Confession: I don't love "Dr. Strangelove." I've always found its political satire grating and Peter Sellers' performance(s) irritatingly over the top. (Although, as in all Kubrick, the filmmaking is terrific.) Maybe you had to be there, in a world many rational people believed was about to be blown to smithereens by dueling packs of idiots. But there's no denying it shaped the sensibility -- and sense of humor -- of generations to come.

"The 400 Blows" (directed by François Truffaut, 1959) Teen rebellion goes to art school. Frankly, Truffaut gets on my nerves, and "Rebel Without a Cause" is probably just as important: the doomed and wounded hero, the mainstreaming of Method acting. So what is this movie doing here? Oh, yeah. The French New Wave. Well, there's that.

"The Godfather" and "The Godfather: Part II" (directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1972 and 1974) Not just the gold standard of gangster cinema but also the greatest drama of American immigration and assimilation ever made. Don Corleone's grandchildren include not just Tony Soprano but also Suge Knight and Tupac Shakur. (Holiday gift suggestion dept.: The five-disc DVD set, including the muddled "Godfather: Part III" and the deleted scenes Coppola reinserted into the narrative in the mid-'70s, makes the perfect stocking-stuffer for any movie buff in your life!)

"Jaws" (directed by Steven Spielberg, 1975) The invention of the summer-event blockbuster, which has never been done better. I saw it at the mall with my mom, who grabbed hold of my arm and wouldn't let go, leaving fingernail bruises that took a week to heal. (Fortunately, I didn't see any girls I knew.) Oh, and seeing the movie in bits and pieces on TNT (which goes through phases of showing nothing else) doesn't count.

"Lawrence of Arabia" (directed by David Lean, 1962) No seeing this one on TV, either. A wide-screen entertainment like no other, and proof that an eye-popping visual spectacle doesn't have to be brainless crapola.

"Nashville" (directed by Robert Altman, 1975) Altman's sprawling, interlocking saga of Music City is the great work of American film's great improviser and became a crucial shaping force on the various independent-film rebellions of the '80s and '90s. (Hello, Paul Thomas Anderson.)

"Night of the Living Dead" (directed by George A. Romero, 1968) The ultimate zero-budget horror classic, this sent generations of geeks into the backyard armed with Super-8 cameras (or, latterly, digital video), raw meat and bottles of ketchup. Sure, "Dawn of the Dead" and "Day of the Dead," Romero's sequels, have more social commentary, but few horror flicks are this genuinely terrifying or make such a virtue of poverty. (Due to byzantine copyright problems, this film is poorly served on DVD: Caveat emptor.)

"The Seven Samurai" (directed by Akira Kurosawa, 1954) I'd actually rather sit through "Yojimbo," "Throne of Blood," "High and Low" or "The Bad Sleep Well." But every subsequent movie dealing with masculine honor and violence, from Sam Peckinpah to Coppola, Scorsese and John Woo, owes an immeasurable debt to Kurosawa's majestic, marvelously composed trademark film.

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