They aren’t the product of scrappy independent grit on account of their studio-sized budgets, but let’s not hold that against them. They adopt the same structure and tropes. Yes, the Creed movies are only about Rocky Balboa adjacent to Adonis Creed no, this does not disqualify them as Rocky movies. If proof is needed of Rocky’s legacy as one of the enduring franchises in American cinema, then remember that Creed III, the next entry in the Creed series that spun off of the then-39 year old Rocky franchise in 2015, releases in 2023. The movie’s title alone will, for many viewers, spark a free association recitation of various one-liners responsible for keeping the picture alive in popular consciousness almost a half century after its release: Your father was a hamster, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government, it’s just a flesh wound. As no one’s dedicated themself to this important undertaking, I’ll just have to take my best guess on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There’s a scientific trial worth conducting to prove which Monty Python movie has the most staying power among all Monty Python movies, quantified through quotability. But a movie whose critics find fault while still enjoying themselves is a special thing, and The Sting, now a ripe 50 years old, is undeniably special. Granted, favorable notices outnumbered the unfavorable ones: The Sting raked in thumbs ups alongside heaps of cash, not to mention seven wins out of 10 nominations at the 46th Academy Awards. In 1973, The Sting’s less glowing reviews, hung up on trifling details like plot complications and surface-level theatricality, still conceded the film’s entertainment value wrung from the irresistible charms of leading men Robert Redford and Paul Newman. George Roy Hill’s conman caper film is a rarity: Bulletproof popcorn. Play Misty for Me is not only one of the greatest films of the 1970s (arguably the greatest decade of American cinema) but a sharp contrast to Eastwood’s long-accepted macho persona, no matter that the persona is informed by stereotyping. The toughness is there Eastwood, directing for the first time, just keeps it in his gut until the film’s climax, where he unleashes on Jessica Walter after 90 minutes of suffering her character’s obsessive, possessive violence.

His no-nonsense tough guy image is the mold he’s cast himself for broad swaths of his career, even in movies that don’t call for him to sling guns at bad guys, a’la Gran Torino. Picturing Clint Eastwood any way other than grizzled takes work. Whatever you think of the film itself, and the film is very good, the shift in vantage makes a big difference. Here, we see a pattern of the movies showing audiences these medieval religious wars from an Arabic perspective instead of just a European POV. At the same time, the film had the misfortune of being sandwiched between those movies and movies like Ivanhoe and King Richard and the Crusaders. Saladin shouldn’t be called “revelatory,” because Saladin came well before better-known movies about the Crusades, like Robin Hood (take your pick), Kingdom of Heaven, and Lionheart.

If it’s not already clear based on Cairo Station’s presence on this list, Youssef Chahine is a pretty big deal in 1950s and 1960s world cinema. He packs a great deal of thought into an hour and 10 minutes of running time, and makes every beat count. Chahine documents Egyptian life after the 1952 fall of the Egyptian monarchy, with a focus on working class struggles and the relationship between sexual repression and sexual violence. So it goes, but it’s still a great movie, and that’s all that matters. The Academy accepted it as the Egyptian entry for 1959, but it didn’t make it through the nomination process. Youssef Chahine’s neorealist-noir bromide holds the distinction of being the first Arabic film submitted for consideration in the Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language Film category. It probably also has something to do with the fact that it features Bing Crosby singing the Irving Berlin hit “White Christmas,” which, according to Guinness, is still the best-selling single worldwide more than 60 years later. It’s the film version of a Starbucks peppermint mocha, and yet it remains a holiday classic because of the execution, the star power, and, yes, the sentiment. Nothing compares to White Christmas, though. Every year, people argue about whether or not Die Hard is the greatest Christmas movie of all time, or wax nostalgic about the time they shot themself with a BB gun after watching A Christmas Story for the millionth time.

Netflix trial movie selection