Last Updated on October 6, 2021 by
Here are the top movies everyone should have seen at least once. They are iconic classics and are widely known. These are movies in all kinds of genres.
1. Tropic Thunder (2008)
To create a Vietnam movie capable of reviving a number of demented acting careers, the ensemble travels to the jungle in the Golden Triangle between Burma, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Developments occur when recording interferes with the local opium industry. In addition to the generally high entertainment value, a very insightful and malicious operation is offered with Hollywood and its conventions. Tom Cruise’s portrait of the unscrupulous and danceable producer Les Grossman is a disguised criticism of the dignitary who got Cruise kicked after he jumped on the sofa at Oprah as a declaration of love for Katie Holmes.
The opium organization Flaming Dragon, led by a young boy named Tran, is based on a real gang from Burma, led by two ten-year-old brothers who were both fanatical fans of the Rambo franchise.
2. Blood in, blood out (1993)
Cousins Miklo, Paco and Cruz grow up together in eastern Los Angeles. Juvenile delinquency within the framework of Vatos Locos’ own gang escalates, eventually forcing each to choose a path. Paco becomes a police officer, Cruz begins to abuse heroin and Miklo, in connection with a prison sentence, is forced into professional crime. For the thousands of white middle-class kids who started to button the top button on the flannel shirt, call each other “ese” and shout “Vatos Locos forever” can’t be wrong.
The movie is known in the United States as Bound by Honor when the distributor got cold feet after accusing Boyz N The Hood (1991) of inspiring rascals. The director protested wildly and felt that the title was just the opposite of the film’s message.
3. Jerry Maguire (1996)
Dismissed sports agent Jerry (Tom Cruise) clings to his latest client Rod (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and is forced to confront a host of personal problems, not least with his inherent fear of closeness. Jerry Maguire is one of the few exceptions to the rule that sports-based movies cannot simultaneously be romantic comedies.
Large parts of American football’s foremost name appear in supporting roles as themselves, and in the role of treasurer at a shop that sells copying machines – Jerry Cantrell, guitarist at Alice in Chains.
The script was written with Tom Hanks in mind of the title role but took so long to write that Hanks was considered too old.
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
A foreign object is found buried near a lunar base. More than a year later, two astronauts travel to Jupiter in a ship controlled by artificial intelligence that begins to get its own ideas. At the end of the journey, what appears to be the next step in human evolution awaits. Great storytelling, special effects that stand the test of time and an end that gives you years of added value through its openness to interpretation.
2001 did poorly at cinemas, until a new target group was found, consisting of young adults who appreciated seeing the film’s closing special effects high on acid and/or weed.
Director Stanley Kubrick was trying to take out insurance with Lloyd’s, claiming he would be compensated for non-profit if extraterrestrial intelligence was discovered before the film premiered. The no.
5. Jaws (1975)
An overgrown white shark terrorizes a seaside resort in New England. Commercial interests are set against humanitarianism when Police Chief Brody recruits a small team to defuse the threat.
Jaws is a school example of how horror works through imagination: We can hardly see the shark before the end of the film, and grills were set in the minds of generations of bathing pots.
Popular cultural points: Jaws is widely considered to have revolutionized the film industry’s way of looking at the summer season, and also created a whole genre focused on cat-and-rat games between humans and life-threatening predators. If you play Jaws backward, it’s about a shark that fires up so many people that you have to open a beach.
6. Rocky (1976)
Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), a semi-professional boxer with no future prospects, gets the chance to play a match against the world champion as part of a public relations stunt. One of the best sports films made, and skillfully ducking under the worst cliché of the sports film genre; to take the step into unreality during the final sequences.
The film gave rise to a series of sequels that hardly describe a rising quality curve, but which nevertheless retained its charm and made Rocky a popular cultural phenomenon.
Sylvester Stallone was offered $ 350,000 for his script but declined if he was not promised to play the lead role – even though he had $ 106 in the account at the time and had put his dog up for sale because he couldn’t pay the food.
7. Casino (1995)
Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) runs a casino in Las Vegas on behalf of the Mafia. Ace’s well-managed business is made more difficult by his labile wife (Sharon Stone) and the increasingly difficult-to-control pedigree Nicky (Joe Pesci). In the competition with Mafia Brothers, Casino is the mafia film master Scorsese’s best mafia film.
Popular cultural points: The collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro became one of the most celebrated in movie history, and Casino became their eighth and last film together.
The film is a fairly faithful retelling of real events. The central characters are in reality Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and Anthony “The Ant” Spilotro. Like the film, the latter met his fate by being badly beaten with baseballs and buried alive in a corn field. Spoiler there, by the way.
8. Top Gun (1986)
Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is a talented, unpredictable fighter pilot selected for further training in America’s premier military pilot program, Top Gun. He is forced to confront a distressing family tragedy while falling in love with a female instructor.
Top Gun is a shamelessly entertaining kid movie that arouses pilot dreams even with the stoic. Also, don’t miss the fantastic scene where Val Kilmer’s Iceman is rubbed with Tom Cruise in a dressing room – the actors sheltered each other – only wearing small, small towels around the hips. So suggestive that the ensuing sex scene has to be cut.
Popular Cultural Points: Parody Hot Shots! (1991) is not only entertaining on its own merits but pokes with a sharp stick on most of Top Gun’s most iconic scenes.
9. Trainspotting (1996)
Renton (Ewan McGregor), Spud (Ewen Bremner) and Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller, the only non-Scottish ensemble who is widely praised for his credible dialect work) for an anxious but by no means eventless existence as a heroin addict in Edinburgh. The chance to get out of misery arises when you team up with your childhood friend as well as the psychic case Francis Begbie (Robert Carlyle) to complete a potentially lucrative drug deal.
Trainspotting does wonders with brilliant cinematic imagination despite limited budget, and blends with tremendous fingertip humor and night-black seriousness.
The film made Ewan McGregor a superstar, and director Danny Boyle (later The Beach, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire) became a power factor in Hollywood.
There is a dubbed version where the actors read their lines but toned down the Scottish wrestling, for the sake of the US launch.
10. Godfather (1972)
A schism within the New York Mafia reluctantly draws in the family’s white sheep, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), in the role of involuntary heir to a crime empire.
Vida considered one of the world’s best films of all time, often mentioned in the same breath as Orson Welles’s far more dated Citizen Kane (1941).
Popular Cultural Points: When Peter Griffin in a section of Family Guy believes himself to be near death, he chooses to reveal that he did not like the Godfather, on the grounds that he insists on himself. He is not completely wrong.
When Godfather first aired on television in New York, the legend claims to have problems with the drains: All toilets flushed about the same time as their owners kept the emergency shutter to the end.
11. Memento (2000)
Leonard has a peculiar memory condition that made his long-term memory unusable; he is only capable of creating memories for a few minutes at a time. This complicates his hunt for the man who murdered his wife, and the clues he collected he carried on his body.
The film’s structure is a masterpiece in which one half, filmed in black and white and in chronological order, alternates with a colored, reversed chronological course of events. Both parts radiate together in the final scene, and all this is accomplished without becoming over form and with constant maintained tension.
After the artistically widely acknowledged but financially the more modest successes with Memento, director Christopher Nolan went on to become one of the most revenue-generating dittos of modern times, with films such as The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception and Interstellar. The condition Leonard suffers from exists in real life and is called anterograde amnesia.
12. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) is convicted (innocent) of 1947 for the murder of his wife. In the kitchen, he becomes friends with the refined Red (Morgan Freeman). Andy uses his talents to create a decent life for himself and his fellow prisoners while planning his escape.
A success story with heart and pain, which went from a very modest bio success to one of history’s most rented (it was then) films.
Director Frank Darabont later made The Green Mile and is thus the director who filmed by far the most Stephen King stories that take place in a prison environment.
13. Psycho (1960)
Marion (Janet Leigh) decides to depart from her job as a broker secretary with $ 40,000 in a bag. During the flight, she spends one night at a motel run by a Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) and his mother. Bate’s family relationships turn out to hide certain peculiarities.
A masterful touch with restrained excitement leads to one of film history’s most memorable revelations.
Not many films from the fifties and sixties stand up as well as Hitchcocks, probably because so many contemporary filmmakers have had him as a house god.
When the movie studio was trimmed with budget, Alfred Hitchcock chose instead to get his $ 250,000 standard loan to get some of the movie’s recorded money. He made $ 15 million on it. Fortunately, when he spent considerable sums on buying up the entire edition of Robert Bloch’s novel, to prevent the great shock of the action from becoming widely known in advance.
14. The Big Lebowski (1998)
The Dude, an unproductive member of society whose interests are limited to bowling, marijuana and white Russians (five parts vodka, two parts coffee liqueur, three parts cream) turns out to share names with a multimillionaire and gets involved because of a confusion in a very complicated blackmail leg which his lifestyle choices made him exceptionally ill-suited to handle.
For an exceptionally well-written and fun script, for the role interpretation that revitalized Jeff Bridges’ career (the role was written directly for him) and for an ensemble full of idle stars.
Standing screenwriter and producer brothers couple Ethan and Joel Coen have since the debut of Blood Simple (1984) been based on various distinct film genres in order to borrow their particular film language and drive with the conventions. The Big Lebowski began as a pastiche on Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled cover stories and the film versions of them, characterized by an unnecessarily complicated act that ultimately plays no real role in the outcome.
John Goodman’s character Walter Sobchak, a labile Vietnam veteran, is loosely based on director and screenwriter John Milius, a choleric friend of the Coen brothers, who has written, among others, Apocalypse Now, Conan Barbarian and Captain Quint’s USS Indianapolis monologue from The Shark.
15. The Good, the Bad, the Ugly (1966)
Action: Blondie (“the good”) and the villain Tuco (“the foul”) run a scam where you cash out the price that is set on the latter’s head and then arrange an escape. Their unstable relationship degenerates into an open rivalry when they get news of a $ 200,000 gold reserve undermined by the southern state army. Another actor, the unscrupulous Angel Eyes (“the evil one”), joins the hunt.
The good, the bad, the ugly is the masterpiece of director Sergio Leone’s many western films, for budget reasons recorded in Italy and thus known as the spaghetti western: Here mix action, development, well-written characters and humor, all portrayed with fantastic camera work and ended with an iconic Mexican stalemate.
Popular cultural points: Metallica has for decades used The Ecstasy of Gold, from film music, as in-house music before its performances.
The bridge that was blown up in a sequence was accidentally blasted right before the cameras started, and rebuilt at great cost.
16. Pulp Fiction (1994)
A number of separate lives are interwoven in a unique chronological sequence when the torpedo Vincent Vega (John Travolta in the century’s comeback) is ordered to act as an apron for the gangster boss Marcellus Wallace’s wife, Mia (Uma Thurman), who needs a night out on the town. Boxer Butch (Bruce Willis) has to flee the said gangster boss’s retaliation after failing spectacularly to stage a lay match, and two British villains decide to rob a restaurant. It’s worth watching for its dazzling dialogue, its special appropriation where the focus is entirely on something other than the obvious and its unconventional chronology, all pioneering for its time.
More than any other film, Pulp Fiction brought postmodern filmmaking into the midst and made the flow impossible not to relate to. The author Quentin Tarantino managed to show a huge knowledge of the film medium and its traditions, but still tell a story in an unconventional way, without dissuading the large audience in French Indian directors. The word “fuck” occurs 265 times, giving the film a 26th place in the statistics of the phenomenon.
17. Apocalypse Now (1979)
During the furious Vietnam War, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is sent into the rainforest to solve the problem of Colonel Kurtz, who, by all accounts, has become bursting crazy and established himself as a god among Cambodian jungle tribes.
The movie has well-played and beautifully photographed depiction of the war’s contradictions and inherent absurdity.
The basic premise, some characters, and even a little dialogue have been borrowed from Joseph Conrad’s novel Dark Heart, which criticized colonialism in Congo on similar grounds.
During the opening scene where Martin Sheen smashes a mirror, he is as blatantly drunk as the scene suggests. His escalating alcohol problems led to a heart attack later during the recording, as well as the fact that the whole of Captain Willard’s narrative voice actually belongs to Martin’s brother Joe Estevez.
18. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)
In the mid-’70s, the man Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) is a local superstar thanks to his position as a news anchor. The brotherhood of his male-dominated existence is threatened by a newly hired female colleague.
After years as a reliable ensemble member in Frat Pack productions, Anchorman – a movie Ferrell pitched for DreamWorks over twenty times before giving the green light – became the perfect ramp for his special comic appropriation. Large parts of the film are improvised by the actors, whose good humor catches on. The sequel, Anchorman: The Legend Continues, lasted nine years and is considered a disappointing disappointment. The Mexican restaurant at which Veronica (Christina Applegate) and her girlfriends eat bears the name Escupimos En Su Alimento, which translates to “we spit in your food”.
19. Fight Club (1999)
Our hero, an unnamed wage slave on his way into depression over his senseless existence, meets Tyler Durden, a bizarre man with whom he starts to start underground fighting clubs that over time transforms into a socially devastating guerrilla movement.
Director David Fincher pours love over every take in the film, which is teeming with internal jokes and references. With the role of Brad Pitt, he washed his tame boy-boy status, and in the end, a revelation awaits so viciously that the grip is destroyed forever.
Brad Pitt’s well-defined sex pack became, paradoxically, given the film’s message, one of the metrosexuality’s most cherished images.
In a fight scene between Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, David Fincher forced a stuntman to roll down a flight of stairs twelve times. The footage seen in the film is the first of them. The scene where Norton cuts to Pitt on the ear is improvised and came about after Pitt insisted that Norton hit him right without announcing where. His surprise at the election is genuine.
20. Wall Street (1987)
Young stockbroker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) gets the chance to work with his idol, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), but ends up in moral hardship when he slowly becomes aware that human reality is hiding behind the profit hunt.
Michael Douglas makes his parade as a ruthless stock market mockery, and the film is a brilliant time document of the yuppie culture of the eighties.
Reality has imitated the art by elevating Gordon Gekko to an ideal in stock markets rather than the satire and cautionary example director Oliver Stone intended. Wall Street was the first movie to show a mobile phone in the picture.
21. Alien (1979)
The crew of the ship Nostromo, on his way back to earth after a mission, is unexpectedly awakened from cryosleep in response to a strange call signal. In connection with the investigation of the same, a crew member is impregnated with an unknown parasite, which after leaving its host body via shortcut causes havoc with the ship.
Groundbreaking as both visionary science fiction and claustrophobic horror.
Popular cultural points: Swiss artist HR Giger’s iconic work with the film popularized the once-baking tattoo trend Biomech, which thanks to the inherent nature of tattoos can still be seen on the skin of many 60s and 70s.
The actors received a minimum of information about what would happen during the scene where the embryonic creature breaks out of Kanes (John Hurt) ‘s stomach, including being soaked in blood. Four cameras were in place to capture the authentic reactions.