Ever seen a movie that changed your life? Not just in a superficial way, like “wow, I just saw a movie that I like more than all others!” No, I mean one that really changes the way you see the world.

Sometimes people make a list of movies that aren’t all that watchable. Not these — you can see these 5 ones thousands of times, and they are really, really powerful films.

#5: Triumph of the Will.

If you want to understand war films, and films that glorify things (be it anything — war, a country, a person), this is the film to have in your repertoire when you need to think about it. Not because the subject of the film is wonderful or because Riefenstahl is a genius, but because of what this movie says about spectacle.

#4: De Sica’s Genius on Display in Bicycle Thieves.

If you want a little bit of proof that a simplistic story with the vaguest of outlines — man gets bike and job, bike is stolen, man loses job and steals another bike — can say universal things about humanity and sadness, then this is your film.

#3: Polanski’s Deconstruction of Hollywood in Chinatown.

If you’ve been put off by a few select films from the’40s because the plots are so convoluted or you don’t happen to be a huge Bogart fan, check out this one instead, which has the perfect spirit of the 70s but happens to be set way back.

#2: Hitchcock Never Got Better Than Vertigo.

There is no other film that tricks the viewer into thinking they are watching just a normal (albeit extremely brilliant) thriller, while simultaneously deconstructing everything about what an actual film director does on set. If you ever need to see a film that can have so much going on all at once without seeming overcrowded, this is it.

#1: The Godfather.

You can almost never get tired of this film, it is that good on first go — nearly every scene is legendarily filmed, acted, and executed, and then the fact that it happens to convey some grand and great things about America is almost like a bonus, until that becomes the reason you return to it 50 times.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 2:16 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.