A handful of films I keep coming back to.
A janitor at MIT solves a problem on the hallway chalkboard that no one in the building can crack, and the rest of the movie is about why he won't let himself do anything with it. It's a film about what it costs to actually use the talent you have, and the kind of person it takes to push you past your own defenses.
I had to see about a girl.
Nolan's argument that love is a real physical force, dressed up as a black hole movie. The science is gorgeous, Zimmer's organ score is a religious experience, and the time-dilation scene where Cooper watches 23 years of his kids' video messages in one sitting is maybe the most emotional scene in cinema.
We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt.
Tarantino's love letter to every kung fu, samurai, and spaghetti western he ever watched, with Uma Thurman in a yellow tracksuit cutting through everyone who wronged her. It shouldn't work as well as it does, and the fact that it does is a master class in style being substance. I love the anime inspiration, and I count Volume 1 and 2 as the same movie. I usually watch them together.
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
Wes Anderson's stop-motion Roald Dahl adaptation about a fox who can't stop being a fox no matter how much trouble it causes his family. It's the best film I've seen about the tension between your wild instincts and the people who depend on you, and it looks like nothing else in animation. A perfect movie in my opinion, with a very high rewatch factor.
I'm a wild animal.
The Wachowskis made the most visually maximalist film of the 2000s and nobody saw it because everyone thought it was just a kids' movie and tacky. It's actually about racing for love of the sport against a corporate machine that wants to own everything, and it's aged into one of the most original-looking films of the decade. This line alone makes it worth the watch.
It doesn't matter if racing never changes. What matters is if we let racing change us. You don't climb into a T-180 to be a driver. You do it because you're driven.
Otomo's 1988 vision of Neo-Tokyo: a biker gang, a government psychic experiment gone wrong, and the most expensive animation ever made at the time, hand-drawn across 160,000+ cels. It's the film that put anime on the global map, and you can still see its fingerprints on basically every piece of cyberpunk visual culture made since.
I am... Tetsuo.