Ten Films You Gotta See

June 4, 2021, 7:17 pm , by Newsroom

Will Mapplebeck puts down his gallon of popcorn to give us his best movie choices

As a lockdown challenge my friend Hilary and I set ourselves the target of watching films that we’d either not seen before or not seen for a long time. The only rule is that the movies had to be acknowledged classics. The kind of films you feel you really ‘ought’ to have seen. We watched one a week for months and then discussed over phone or on a socially distanced walk. We even took notes.

We’ve all been there. Someone says, ‘It’s like that scene in (insert famous movie title here)’ and you just stare back blankly and, slightly shamed, admit to never having seen this classic piece of cinema. 

“On The Waterfront is just incredible…”

For film fans we both had some surprising ‘gaps’. Between us On the Waterfront, The Seventh Seal, The Searchers and King Kong had never been watched in full, although these films are so widely parodied and referenced you ‘feel’ like you’ve seen them when watching them for the first time. 

The biggest revelation I had was Citizen Kane, which I’d only seen once before in my late teenage years. I had the fortune to watch it again as it approached its 80th anniversary and its Trumpian, parallels are striking (bizarrely, it is also the Orange Menace’s favourite film). 

Then came Pather Panchali which didn’t sound promising – a two hour long memoir about grinding rural poverty in post colonial India – but turned out to be the masterpiece everyone says it is.

And On the Waterfront, which is, well, just incredible.

There weren’t many disappointments, in fact I couldn’t describe any of the films watched so far as ‘over-rated’. Even if they weren’t exactly my ‘cup of tea’ (Black Narcissus and L’Atalante for example) I could still appreciate the technical expertise and innovation behind them. 

The full list (roughly in the order watched) is below. So far there isn’t a film later than 1959’s North by NorthWest, so the next lot will likely be slightly more modern and we’ll continue to step out of our Western Cinema comfort zone.

Finally, a salute to the technology that allows us to see these brilliant works of art on demand. Some of the films were available for free, others for a relatively small amount on streaming services. YouTube often has breakdowns of key scenes that you watch anywhere you choose. TV, phone and laptop will never match the experience of sitting in a darkened auditorium with others, but there has never been a better time to be a film buff. 

Watched so far: 

North By North West 1959 US

Citizen Kane 1941 US

On the Waterfront 1956 US

King Kong 1933 US

Pather Panchali 1955 IND

Paths of Glory 1957 US

L’Atalante 1934 FRA

Bicycle Thieves 1948 ITA

Black Narcissus 1947 UK

Seventh Seal 1957 SWE