The 10 Most Essential Movies You Have To See Before You Die

If you haven't seen these yet, you're not a real movie fan!

In this newsletter I tend to focus a lot of my attention toward hidden gems. That’s by design. If you’re the type of person to subscribe to a newsletter about movies, you’ve already proven that you’re a step above the average movie fan, so it does me no good to tell you that some movie you’ve probably already seen is great. Instead, I try to find the stuff you’ve never seen or even heard of, and tell you it’s worth investing your time in.

Yet out there in the “real world” (you know…that think happening behind your computer screen?) I have so many conversations with people in which they admit they don’t watch many movies, and then the next question is something like, well what do I HAVE to see? Like what is most essential? Give me the check list! The top 10!?

Of course, it’s an impossible question. How does one narrow down a hundred years of history and thousands of great choices? AFI puts out its own top 100, as does BFI, IMDB, and basically every other pop culture publication at one time or another.

When I had the idea to do this in the newsletter, off the top of my head I jotted down 25 titles, and that was before I used the internet to make sure I wasn’t missing anything (I was! A lot!).

Eventually I whittled it down based on one ultimate criteria, in the form of this short test: If I was talking with someone and they said, “oh I’ve never seen ____(insert movie here)___,” what movie would I be MOST upset about or passionate that they go watch immediately?

Spanning across decades, genres and tones, this is MY (in the words of Chuck Klosterman) “highly specific, defiantly incomplete” list of the movies you absolutely have to have seen if you call yourself a movie fan. It’s different than a list of my personal favorites (I’ve done that before), this is an attempt at some objectivity.

However, I want to acknowledge it’s MY list — I acknowledge it’s very American, very white, very male. Guess what? I’m American, white and male. And despite their importance to the overall movie landscape, I also avoided obvious franchise fare. Yes you should see Star Wars or Harry Potter or whatever but I’m not going to be that mad if you haven’t. As pretentious as it sounds in this very un-pretentious newsletter, I am trying to focus on cinema here.

Aside from that, if these selections seem obvious, well, that’s kind of the point.

Also it’s a nice way to mention some of these in the newsletter, since most of them are so obvious that they never really get mentioned in other editions.

Have you seen all 10?? Let me know!

The Godfather

Pluto TV, Paramount+