Movies that went beyond simple entertainment

In a futuristic city sharply divided between the working class and the city planners, the son of the city's mastermind falls in love with a working class prophet who predicts the coming of a savior to mediate their differences.

Fritz Lang

A married farmer falls under the spell of a slatternly woman from the city, who tries to convince him to drown his wife.

F.W. Murnau

A young soldier faces profound disillusionment in the soul-destroying horror of World War I.

Lewis Milestone

When the police in a German city are unable to catch a child-murderer, other criminals join in the manhunt.

Fritz Lang

Two drifters are passing through a Western town, when news comes in that a local farmer has been murdered and his cattle stolen. The townspeople, joined by the drifters, form a posse to catch the perpetrators. They find three men in possession of the cattle, and are determined to see justice done on the spot.

William A. Wellman

The desperate life of a chronic alcoholic is followed through a four day drinking bout.

Billy Wilder

A heinous crime and its aftermath are recalled from differing points of view.

Akira Kurosawa

An aging bureaucrat with stomach cancer decides to strip the veneer off his existence and find meaning in his final days. Considered by some to be Akira Kurosawa’s greatest achievement, Ikiru offers a multifaceted look at a life through a prism of perspectives.

Akira Kurosawa

A poor village under attack by bandits recruits seven unemployed samurai to help them defend themselves.

Akira Kurosawa

After living a life marked by coldness, an aging professor is forced to confront the emptiness of his existence.

Ingmar Bergman

A dissenting juror in a murder trial slowly manages to convince the others that the case is not as obviously clear as it seemed in court.

Sidney Lumet

When soldiers in WW1 refuse to continue with an impossible attack, their superiors decide to make an example of them.

Stanley Kubrick

The guests at an upper-class dinner party find themselves unable to leave.

Luis Buñuel

American planes are sent to deliver a nuclear attack on Moscow, but it's a mistake due to an electrical malfunction. Can all-out war be averted?

Sidney Lumet

Mankind finds a mysterious, obviously artificial, artifact buried on the moon and, with the intelligent computer HAL, sets off on a quest.

Stanley Kubrick

In future Britain, charismatic delinquent Alex DeLarge is jailed and volunteers for an experimental aversion therapy developed by the government in an effort to solve society's crime problem... but not all goes to plan.

Stanley Kubrick

Upon arrival at a mental institution, a brash rebel rallies the patients together to take on the oppressive Nurse Ratched, a woman more a dictator than a nurse.

Milus Forman

A TV network cynically exploits a deranged ex-TV anchor's ravings and revelations about the media for their own profit.

Sidney Lumet

An in-depth examination of the way that the Vietnam war affects the lives of people in a small industrial town in the USA.

Michael Cimino

During the on-going Vietnam War, Captain Willard is sent on a dangerous mission into Cambodia to assassinate a renegade Green Beret who has set himself up as a God among a local tribe.

Francis Ford Coppola

An emotionally self-destructive boxer's journey through life, as the violence and temper that leads him to the top in the ring, destroys his life outside it.

Martin Scorsese

A cellist in a small orchestra receives help from animals to help him practice his music.

Isao Takahata

A pragmatic U.S. Marine observes the dehumanizing effects the Vietnam War has on his fellow Marine recruits from their brutal basic training to the bloody street fighting set in 1968 Hue, Vietnam.

Stanley Kubrick

A tragic film covering a young boy and his little sister's struggle to survive in Japan during World War II.

Isao Takahata

An uncommonly gentle young man, who happens to have scissors for hands, falls in love with a beautiful teenage girl.

Tim Burton

A prep school student needing money agrees to "babysit" a blind man, but the job is not at all what he anticipated.

Martin Brest

In Poland during World War II, Oskar Schindler gradually becomes concerned for his Jewish workforce after witnessing their persecution by the Nazis.

Steven Spielberg

Forrest Gump, while not intelligent, has accidentally been present at many historic moments, but his true love, Jenny, eludes him.

Robert Zemeckis

Two imprisoned men bond over a number of years, finding solace and eventual redemption through acts of common decency.

Frank Darabont

A boat has been destroyed, criminals are dead, and the key to this mystery lies with the only survivor and his twisted, convoluted story beginning with five career crooks in a seemingly random police lineup.

Bryan Singer

Police drama about two cops, one new and one about to retire, after a serial killer using the seven deadly sins as his MO.

David Fincher

A female cyborg cop and her partner hunt a mysterious and powerful hacker called the Puppet Master.

Mamoru Oshii

On a journey to find the cure for a Tatarigami's curse, Ashitaka finds himself in the middle of a war between the forest and Tataraba, a mining colony. In this quest he also meets San, the Mononoke Hime.

Hayao Miyazaki

A Jewish man has a wonderful romance with the help of his humour, but must use that same quality to protect his son in a Nazi death camp.

Roberto Benigni

Following the Normandy Landings, a group of US soldiers go behind enemy lines to retrieve a paratrooper whose brothers have been killed in action.

Steven Spielberg

A former neo-nazi skinhead tries to prevent his younger brother from going down the same wrong path that he did.

Tony Kaye

A traumatized member of an elite para-military police force falls for the sister of a female terrorist courier who died in front of him on duty.

Hiroyuki Okiura

A computer hacker learns from mysterious rebels about the true nature of his reality and his role in the war against the controllers of it.

Wachowski brothers

An office employee and a soap salesman build a global organization to help vent male aggression.

David Fincher

The story about the lives of guards on death row leading up to the execution of black man accused of child murder & rape, who has the power of faith healing.

Frank Darabont

A man, suffering from short-term memory loss, uses notes and tattoos to hunt for the man he thinks killed his wife.

Cristopher Nolan

The hopes and dreams of four ambitious people are shattered when their drug addictions begin spiraling out of control.

Darren Aronofsky

A highly advanced robotic boy longs to become "real" so that he can regain the love of his human mother.

Steven Spielberg

After a brilliant but asocial mathematician accepts secret work in cryptography, his life takes a turn to the nightmarish.

Ron Howard

A movie studio is being torn down. TV interviewer Genya Tachibana has tracked down its most famous star, Chiyoko Fujiwara, who has been a recluse since she left acting some 30 years ago. Tachibana delivers a key to her, and it causes her to reflect on her career; as she's telling the story, Tachibana and his long-suffering cameraman are drawn in. The key was given to her as a teenager by a painter and revolutionary that she helped to escape the police. She becomes an actress because it will make it possible to track him down, and she spends the next several decades acting out that search in various genres and eras.

Satoshi Kon

A troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a large bunny rabbit that manipulates him to commit a series of crimes, after narrowly escaping a bizarre accident.

Richard Kelly

A Polish Jewish musician struggles to survive the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto of World War II.

Roman Polanski

A 19th-century samurai tries to protect a battered wife.

Yôji Yamada

In a Fascist future where all forms of feeling are illegal, a man in charge of enforcing the law rises to overthrow the system.

Kurt Wimmer

Two boys growing up in a violent neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro take different paths: one becomes a photographer, the other a drug dealer.

Fernando Meirelles