What exactly does it mean when you stumble upon a movie that changes your life? One critic defined it as the ultimate in perspective shift, something that really comes along and shakes the foundations of how you view 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: 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 Figures Out Corruption 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.
A wonderful thriller that also happens to be all about falling in love, idealizing women (or men), wanting other people to conform to our expectations, and an examination of the director's role in shaping how a movie is made. No other film is so good both on its surface and in its multiple layers of meaning at the same time.
#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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