Favorite old films?

[Viviana Santos]

 

[99nereids]

I was actually going to put Singin' in the Rain myself, because that is honestly one of my favorite movies of all time. I've seen it like 5 times, and I love it every time.


Oh, if you're interested in getting into more Akira Kurosawa films, you MUST watch Seven Samurai. It's considered one of his best. I also recommend watching Rashomon, Ikiru, Madadayo, and Throne of Blood. I enjoyed those as well.

As for some other older films, these are a few I tend to rewatch or think about a lot ever since I've watched them.
Nobuhiko Obayashi's House I actually have a tradition of watching every year on Halloween with my boyfriend.
View attachment 24282View attachment 24283View attachment 24284View attachment 24286View attachment 24287View attachment 24288View attachment 24289View attachment 24290View attachment 24291View attachment 24285View attachment 24292

thank uuu for the recs added a lot of these!

View attachment 24296

reading the wiki page for this & getting scared lmao

 

[r4id3nnn_]

Throne of Blood has gotta be my favorite. Akira Kurosawa and Shakespeare just goes so hard.

 

[Viviana Santos]

I'm KubrickPilled ?

 

[NeonKnights]

 

[Viviana Santos]

 

[99nereids]

need to watch clockwork orange! all i know about it is that its' score was done by a cool trans lady (Wendy Carlos)

 

[Viviana Santos]

Peak Fiction.

 

[Ian Naxieas]

lastly, What ever happened to Baby Jane? (1962) by Robert Aldrich is a new comfort classic for me, something about watching a lady go increasingly off the rails for an hour is so appealing to me lol

This is a great choice. My mom and grandma loved that movie, so I saw it plenty of times growing up.

 

[Viviana Santos]

Angel's Egg (1985)

 

[ATenderLad]

.....sorry in advance.

I think there came a point when I noticed I had seen or knew enough about every damn movie on Netflix that nothing seemed interesting. Flash-forward a bit and I've done everything I can to watch something new every day, for years now. Where do the movies come from? Well that's a good ques-

To keep from just listing random movies from now till Doomsday, I'll do....genre, maybe?

Comedy - Used Cars (1980)​

Here's a (not-so-old) comedy that never got appreciated, bombing at the box office when it released alongside Airplane!, and with few theaters and little marketing to boot. Kurt Russel is really shedding his old Disney child star reputation here, as a fast-talking piece of shit with dreams of being a corrupt politician. The movie is damned funny, and the massive set piece ending - with hundreds of cars speeding across Arizona - is an insane bit of stunts and mayhem for a comedy. It's a bit like Blues Brothers in that sense, and that's great company to be in.

Speaking of stunts, one of the most deceptively dangerous things put on film happens here, with actor Gerrit Graham walking backwards across the street as a speeding car misses turning him into slush by mere inches. He doesn't react, and neither him nor the director had any idea the stunt man would be coming that fast. The director commentary by Robert Zemeckis is full of the man saying "I would never do this again, oh my god", for that and...other reasons. See, according to them, most of the crew was shacked up in a hotel doing the only thing to do in Phoenix, AZ: Lines of cocaine and sex with everything that moves. The stunt drivers in particular were blitzed out of their minds, gleefully performing the more dangerous parts of the movie.

Bottom line, it's wild, it's raunchy, and if it had been starring Bill Murray they probably would have made money! (Kurt Russell's words, not mine!)

Mystery - Sleuth (1972)​

Jumping back about a decade, we have a movie with just two actors; Laurence Olivier - at the tail end of the most celebrated British film career of his day - alongside Micheal Caine, a then-rising star in the prime of his career. Olivier plays an old wealthy landowner, whose invited his wife's younger lover to speak with him. The two couldn't be further apart in terms of economic standing, or "class" in the British sense, and Caine expects a fight as he arrives. To his surprise, he finds a vibrant conversation....and an offer. Any more than that is really doing the film an injustice, but suffice to say I recommend this movie with all my heart. Sleuth is an incredibly tense ride with several twists, you won't know where the movie going. The fact that it's starring two incredible actors with absurd chemistry/friction with each other just lifts the whole thing up even higher. Please, watch this one if you're in the mood for a bit of surprise.

Action - The Train (1964)​

War movies in the wake of WWII were a dime a dozen, but here's one to stand out from the crowd a bit. Directed by John Frankenheimer - who you may know from the modern spy-action masterpiece Ronin (1998) - sets up the plot quickly: The Allied forces will soon liberate France, and the Nazi commander overseeing the Louvre attempts to spirit away the valuable art before they arrive. A small resistance cell working out of the train yard receives a desperate plea from the museum curator: Save the cultural heritage of France at any cost.

The cost of course, is human life. Not to spoil anything, but this movie takes a surprisingly hard line on the value of art. Our hero, played by broad-shouldered Burt Lancaster, simply never agrees that paintings are worth dying for. The movie largely agrees with him, but it sure makes the process of trying fun as hell. Lancaster and his comrades do everything under the noses of the Nazi's, constantly pushing their luck and risking their cover. They even have to worry about American fighter pilots, who just see the Nazi payloads they're hauling on their trains and can't intuit that the drivers are on their side.

This was probably the last big-budget black and white action movie, but it looks fantastic. There's very little fat on the movie either, pacing-wise, like the French under occupation there's rarely a safe moment to relax. It's also based on a true story? The Nazi's did in fact try to secure the art near the end of the war, and the Allies found and secured the train car holding the loot. (Details are embellished and changed, naturally.)

If you're looking for a tense action movie with real stakes, or if you've just watched Inglorious Basterds too many times and need to change it up, try this one out.

Musical - Kiss Me Kate (1954)​

I've kinda settled on rolling it back a decade for each of these, so the obvious choice here is Singin' in the Rain, but I'm willing to bet everyone's heard of that one. Here's a slightly more uncommon pick, starring the booming deep tones of Mr. Howard Keil. Kiss Me Kate is a novel premise about the lead actor of a new production of Taming of the Shrew, and his mostly terrible attempts at getting his ex-wife to be his leading lady. It's meta, like Singin' in the Rain but for the stage as opposed to movies, with most of the flick taking place in-between scenes of the play they're putting on. The play of course gives an excuse for big MGM musical numbers, and between Howard Keil's singing and Ann Miller's dancing this one's a showstopper. (Tommy Rail, who co-starred with Keil in the other movie I thought of naming, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, shares several scenes with Miller here and is a phenomenal dancer as well, athletic and energetic like Gene Kelly.)

This one's fun! It's saucier than a lot of musicals of it's day, doing everything in it's power to talk about sex without getting busted. There's a pair of gangsters who show up to collect on an IOU, and they are the most charming pair of leg-breakers ever put to film; these are the best kind of goons. They even get one of the best music numbers at the end, a song about helping losers pick up girls with prose! Also, a bit of trivia, Bob Fosse of Cabaret fame acts in this, one of Ann Miller's suitors in the play within a movie. He was given the chance to choreograph some of a sequence at the end, I think for the first time in a movie, and it's easy to see why he went on to be a success.

Visually, the movie might seem a touch odd in places, with things facing the camera and audience sometimes, seemingly throwing items at the screen. This was a 3D movie! See, that effect has come and gone in phases throughout film history, and this was one of the last big 3D movies of the 50's, after which I think it died out for a couple decades. (There's a topic I need to research, *note to self*) It's crazy, and unless you get a particular re-release and watch it on a 3D TV, you (and me, dammit!) are shit out of luck seeing it the way it was originally intended. That's a long-term goal for me, one day I'm going to make that happen.

If you're looking for a musical that's all about having a fun time, with zero interpretive ballet sequences, or if you just want to see a beautiful woman sing the phrase "I need a Dick!", look this one up.

---

I'm getting a touch short on characters for this post, and I still haven't done Westerns, Drama, Romance, or Horror...I'll be back, eventually!

 

[Viviana Santos]

 

[Strategist's iconStrategist]

old films huh?

I guess I grew up Spielberg pilled. His family movies were the best.

I watched the shit out of The Karate Kid on VHS, probably my favorite film as a kid.

Star Wars Trilogy doesn't need much explanation. Pretty much unavoidable in the late 80s-90s.

Then there's like the mindfuck sci-fi genre I was into for a while as a teenager. Started with the Matrix, then 12 Monkeys, Existenz, Dark City, La Jetee.

 

[Viviana Santos]

Post automatically merged: Feb 11, 2025

 

[Zachery2112]

If you want really good old foreign films. My favorites include M, Profondo Rosso, Seven Samurai, Tora! Tora! Tora!, the entirety of the original Mobile Suit Gundam trilogy, and Lacombe Lucien. These are some of my favorite movies of all time.

 

[Viviana Santos]

Goated Movie.

 

[Strategist's iconStrategist]

Oh I missed the non-english films recommendation request. I'll post some of the best Spanish language films I've seen.

"The Devil's Backbone" by Guillermo del Toro - Really messed up horror movie. Probably one of the best horror movies I've seen. Not that I've seen that many, but still...

"Open your eyes" by Alejandro Amenábar - Great sci fi movie coming from Spain. Was the basis for the more crappy English version called "Vanilla Sky".

"Amores Perros" by Alejandro González Iñárritu - His gimmick of three personal stories being interconnected by a sudden unexpected accident was savagely ripped off by Hollywood shlock such as "Crash", but his first movie remains the strongest version of that style.

"Mar Adentro" by Alejandro Amenábar - The first movie that clued me into the acting tour de force that is Javier Bardem. Now he's all over Hollywood and for good reason, but back then he was acting in arthouse latin american films. Anyway, if you want to cry this is the movie for you.

 

[ATenderLad]

Oh, damn. I *completely* missed the non-English part, my mistake.

Edit: Well, I did actually write a bit about a French movie on here awhile back in another thread, soooo here I go quoting myself, the height of laziness!

Today's movie was Marie-Octobre (1959)!

View attachment 6680
If you've seen 12 Angry Men, that's the simplest comparison for Marie-Octobre. A drama with one location, where eleven people gather to talk for ninety minutes. In this case, not about an official jury verdict, though it is a matter of life or death.

The cast of characters are all former members of a French Resistance cell, gathering to commemorate the death of their leader, Castille, in the closing days of the war. It's a warm scene with old friends, until Marie reveals that she's learned of a betrayal; one of the people in the room gave up their meeting place to the Nazi occupation forces. One of them was a traitor, and got Castille shot. The rest of the film then is an interrogation of one another, as they all rack their brains, recount that fateful night from their perspective, and try to decide as a group which of their former comrades deserves to die tonight.

The whole movie can feel a bit like a stage play, with people just having discussions in a handful of rooms, but the director keeps finding new angles to hold our attention and leverage one of the movies best assets, the gorgeous French mansion of the setting. It's furnished like an old palace, with one modern touch: a television that one of the characters constantly tries to watch a pro wrestling match on. It's maybe a little silly, but the fight is a visual trick to look clearer than any television of the time could, so as to better call our attention to it. The implication is a kind of a metaphor for the verbal sparring happening between our main cast, and while it's another element to break up the potential monotony of almost a dozen people standing around talking, it may be a little on the nose.

Still, the performances are a treat, the movie runs through all manner of possible twists as everyone reveals more about themselves and each other, the group dynamics change as old grudges are brought to light, and has a satisfying conclusion, if not one you might see coming a little early. (No spoilers, but the writers drop a hint of sorts early on that I jumped on mostly for a laugh, then was surprised to find it was genuine.)


At just over ninety minutes, it's a tight and tense little drama that I'd recommend to anyone.

 

[99nereids]

Oh, damn. I *completely* missed the non-English part, my mistake.

the non-english part was actually optional i just worded it weirdly now that i read it back thanks for ur recs!

 

[LiberoVulpesLiberoVulpes's icon]

Here are my favorite non-english ones.

 

[Viviana Santos]

This movie inspired Majora's Mask btw, the name of this movie is Run Lola Run.

 

[Strategist's iconStrategist]

View attachment 24396This movie inspired Majora's Mask btw, the name of this movie is Run Lola Run.

That's a really cool movie for sure. Very creative. I think it was one of the first in the real time movie style that got copied by the TV show 24.

 

[Asian girls loverAsian girls lover's icon]

 

[VampireLord1024VampireLord1024's icon]

Revenge of the Nerds, Animal House, Cheech & Chong's Up in Smoke.

 

[dropsmegamega]

I also love John Waters, often when I am making friends I have then watch a John Waters film lol!

As for my favorites, there's way too many to list, most of my top 100 are old films. One director that particularly comes to mind is Alejandro Jodorowsky. His films Fando & Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain are some of the most unique and brutal films I've seen.