These aren’t movies that are going to make you cry, or make you say “man, that was amazing!” to your friends. No — here are five movies that will literally change your life, because they will change the way you look at art, at people, at power — at everything.
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: A Template for Spectacle — Triumph of the Will.
Leni Riefenstahl’s chilling tribute to Hitler and the Nazi party will change the way you think about art that glorifies war and violence. When you realize that great film spectacle can be put into the service of something so terrible as Nazism, it changes the way you look at all heavily aestheticized works.
#4: Neo-Realism At Its Best — Bicycle Thieves.
Ultra-simple — a man gets a bike, and a job, when Rome is very poor after the second world war. He then loses the bike, and tries to steal another one so he can keep the job. There isn’t much else to the plot, but it contains a whole world.
#3: Polanski’s Deconstruction of Hollywood in Chinatown.
Polanski, despite the mess he created for himself before leaving America, made what is undoubtedly one of the best American films of all time. This might just be one of those movies that says more about Hollywood than any other, which is important if you ever think about what the movies ‘mean’ to us.
#2: Hitchcock Never Got Better Than Vertigo.
When people talk about deep novels with layers of meaning that you can return to again and again, this is the film equivalent of those. You can watch this for fun, for James Stewart, for San Francisco, or for Hitchcock’s complete dismantling of how he directs films, treats women, and sees the world.
#1: Coppola’s Godfather Hits Heights Most Films Dream About.
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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