And 2001, all the Indiana jones movies, Raising Arizona, Month Python, Vacation, old Disney, Jaws. Chick flicks like While You Were Sleeping, Working Girl. Then there’s the old stuff like Singing In the Rain, bringing Up Baby.
Not sure if Forrest Gump has been mentioned? I saw it in my sophomore year, but it’s loaded with pop culture references and is a pretty darn good movie to boot.
Real Genius, Animal House (watched the highlights on You Tube), Breaking Away, and the Monty Python movies.
Doctor Strangelove !!!
Dunno, D was seeing over two dozen movies a week IN college as part of her cinema major, and having to analyze them. She likely saw more movies in a semester than S, H and I have seen in our combined lifetimes. College was a fun time to see movies inexpensively.
What’s Up Doc? - since we don’t make good slapstick anymore and it’s Madelaine Kahn’s first movie.
The Princess Bride - because all college students love it.
Wings of Desire - because of Peter Falk, see it after Princess Bride
The Hidden Fortress - inspiration for Star Wars
Sanjuro - because it’s even better than the Hidden Fortress
Ran - on the big screen please!
West Side Story
Roman Holiday
Wait Until Dark
Brian’s Song
Princess Bride
12 Angry Men
Goldfinger
The Untouchables
The Pride of the Yankees (and I am so not a Yankee fan)
The Quiet Man
History of the World Part I
All Quiet on the Western Front
Jaws
I was sure someone else would have said The Matrix by now.
@hebegebe I may be the only one, but I have never seen it.
Funny Girl
Funny Lady
The Way We Were
Lawrence of Arabia
She Cried No
Bladerunner
Alien (but during the day, not at night)
Brazil
Logan’s Run
Total Recall
Time Bandits
War Games
Some, but not all of the Star Trek movies
All of the Lord of the Rings movies, but not all of the Hobbit movies
Already mentioned, but I can’t resist seconding them:
Princess Bride !!
Monty Python
Star Wars (episodes 4-6)
Schindler’s List
Dead Poet’s Society
Chariots of Fire
Doctor Strangelove
Movies DS17 saw recently at school (during AP testing weeks, since so many kids are taking various other tests):
Forrest Gump (in APUSH)
To Kill a Mockingbird (in AP English Lang)
Gattica (in AP Bio)
McFarland, USA (in AP Spanish)
Movies that are good but would be too awkward to watch with my kid:
The Graduate
Harold and Maude
Gladiator
The Philadelphia Story
Titanic
Reservoir Dogs
See No Evil, Hear No Evil
Trading Places
The Princess Bride
Heat
Rocky
Happy to see Gallipoli, Gattaca and John Huston’s The Dead mentioned among the many great recommendations above. I second so many of them and add a few more:
Argo
Cinema Paradiso
Spirited Away
The Last Picture Show
The Right Stuff
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Pan’s Labyrinth
Hopefully, students have also seen Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968) at some point.
The Paper Chase
My daughter did this one summer (don’t remember how old she was but it was not after senior year). After a family trip to Universal Studios Florida (way back before they did Harry Potter) we all realized she had not seen the movies most of the rides were based on - those pop culture hits of the 70-80s - so she spent the summer watching Men in Black, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Terminator, ET, Rocky, & Alien. So many of these franchise movies started with a really good first movie!
We had as a family watched many of the classic 40-50s movies - lots of nights watching Turner Classics - and so she had seen all of those!
@UWfromCA :Ooh, two of my favorite movies, Cinema Paradiso and the Right Stuff, And Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon shares something with them, great scores:).
I think that it also depends on the college, going to NYU where there a lot of film students, you kind of had to get to know the classics
Maltese Falcon
Casablanca
The Petrified Forest (all happen to be Bogart movies)
A foreign Affair (Billy Wilder at his best)
The Thin Man
Yankee Doodle Dandy
MASH
Singing in the Rain
Some Like it Hot
The Odd Couple
Patton (George C Scott eating up the scenery)
Doctor Strangelove (one of the movies that seemed to show up on TV in the pre cable days at 2am, my parents would wake me up to see it, even on a school night)
Best Years of Our Lives (my mom also claimed the scene where Frederic March gets drunk at the bar was how my father was, before he got older and bitter)
Any number of the film noir pictures
Saving Private Ryan (if for anything, one of the few war movies made up until its time that tried to capture the reality of war)
1960s WWII movies that used to show up on the 4;30 movie (Battle of the Bulge, Longest day), in many ways complete horse manure as history, but all star casts and a lot of chewing the scenery up
The Producers (the original, I love the musical, but the original movie was a total gem)
Blazing Saddles
The Martian
The Sandlot
My favorites have been mentioned but for something fun and timely, Accepted (stars Justin Long). More timely for summer after junior year, but still a funny take on getting into college.
If I were going to pick one movie to watch with my kids before college – and, by the way, I did watch this with my kids when they were in high school – it would be Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. It’s both the most romantic movie ever, and a movie that is fairly realistic about romance and sex. It makes growing up seem like a really positive thing, but not necessarily an easy or uncomplicated thing. (In case you don’t know about it : Two 20 year-olds, one American, the other French, meet on a train heading from Istanbul to Paris. They wind up getting off together in Vienna, where the boy has to get a plane to go back to college in the US. They spend all night walking around Vienna, getting to know one another, deciding whether to have sex, deciding whether to try to see one another again, and deciding to what extent those two questions are linked.)
The cultural reference canon is a hard question, because I’m not certain anymore that there is a general-purpose canon. But with that caveat, I would include:
The Big Sleep
Gone With The Wind
The Wizard of Oz
It’s A Wonderful Life
Hollywood Boulevard
The Philadelphia Story
A Night At The Opera
Rear Window
Some Like It Hot
Lawrence of Arabia
2001
Chinatown
The Wild Bunch
Taxi Driver
The Shining
Carrie
An Officer and a Gentleman
The Godfather (I and II)
Goodfellas
Annie Hall
MASH
Animal House
Pulp Fiction
ET
Star Wars
Star Trek
Clueless
Jerry Maguire
Now, obviously, that’s a super-white, super-male, super-American list… Which no list today would be.
Graveyard of the Fireflies
Wings of Desire (Wenders)
Harold and Maude
Edward Scissorshands
Thelma and Louise
Eraserhead
Clockwork Orange
Various directors: Bunuel, Fassbender, Antonioni (argh), Myazaki, et al
Three Colors Trilogy: Red, White, Blue
The Garden of Finzi-Continis
Casablanca
The Matrix
Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau)
West Side Story
Into the Woods
Metropolis
Jason and the Argonauts
Sparticus
Mahogany
Golden Door
Stroszek
Winter’s Bone
The Bicycle Thief
Once
Hiroshima, Mon Amor
The Last Picture Show
Tuck Everlasting
Boyhood
Shampoo
Full Metal Jacket
…Maybe just work one’s way through the 100 Best American Films list from the AFI. And some best “foreign-language”, best documentaries, and best films from women directors lists. But, it would probably take a lifetime rather than a summer. Pace: two films a day. 