YAY! One of my favorites. 
The Terminator. A prime example of the best kind of 80s action movie.
I realized I only mentioned animated.
But live action, I think everyone should see Der Himmel über Berlin( AKA Wings of Desire). It is layered and beautiful and resonant.
It’s also very nice the way there is no added narration. It’s all what they get from the source material, although they do editorialize by their selection of material and how the juxtapose it. (Example: a film about the dangers of radiation, saying that alpha and beta radiation is blocked by the skin, and there’s no problem as long as you don’t ingest it is undercut by the clip that immediately follows, showing soldiers at a nuclear test being interviewed. “So you got a big mouthful of dust?” “Yeah, I got a mouthful of dust.”) There’s also one clip that has nothing to do with the atomic bomb or anything to do with it. It shows Vice President Richard Nixon “Ringing the bel for Mental Health.” “Mental Health,” intones the narrator of the original clip, “Is one of the greatest issues facing the nation.”
I suspect the Atomic Cafe editors saw this clip and just couldn’t help themselves.
Star Wars. It was great, and even better if you view it as a one-off story. Yes, there are questions about the start of the empire and the force and what happened to Vader, but if you were left to your imagination to fill in the details, knowing there are no sequels, it’s even better.
I always preferred the original Star Wars, before they added in the fancy shit like the ring around the explosion.
And Han not shooting first!
I would add The Empire Strikes back too, after that all are optional, and some are to be actively avoided.
Well, except for the final scene and the discussion between Kirk and McCoy, which is really pretty inspiring (and again, undermined by the subsequent film, which was a cromulent adventure tale but had basically no thematic depth).
Director Nicholas Meyer also managed to get what is arguably the best performance out of Shatner by basically exhausting him with take after take until he stopped chewing scenery, and the effects crew (mostly ILM but a lot of outside model makers) did some really astonishingly good work on a shoe-string budget because this was originally intended to be a direct-to-TV movie. Roddenberry, by the way, hated the story and the finished movie for not being sufficiently Star Trek in its themes to the point of threatening Paramount with a lawsuit to stop production.
Stranger
Thank you. There is just so much to this.
It is uplifting, and heart breaking at the same time. But leaves you with a good feeling.
It is not for everyone though. My wife gave it a Meh.
“That’s not how I remembered it!”
Nice Simpsons reference!
Stranger
Nuts in May
simply - The Greatest
and Saving Private Ryan and Munich.
The Spielberg tri-fecta.
King Kong has been mentioned but I think everyone should see a movie featuring Ray Harryhausen’s work such as Jason And The Argonauts or The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
Add Mysterious Island and you’ve got a great Harryhausen trifecta.
Sounds very like my high school. Although we were mostly not a college-prep school, but a uni-prep high school. Academics were the main focus. But yeah we had cheerleaders and jocks – they were very much background.
I recently re-watched it after about twenty years, and it didn’t lose a thing, If anything, I found it more impressive and moving (in between those watchings I saw the execrable City of Angels movie which was a desecration).
A good film for understanding '50s history would be People Will Talk, which does not address the particular subject directly but does hit it hard sideways while also being entertaining.
It’s funny how you misspelled Princess Mononoke.
I love Mononoke-hime. But Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi is the better movie, even if by a hair. There’s something warmer about it, is the best way I can put it. Mononoke lacks whimsy - The kodama are the only concession to whimsy. And while it has a “happy” ending, the old gods are dead, including the Forest Spirit. That’s not hopeful, the way Spirited Away is. I like hope.