ok so here is what the queue looks like now.... thanks for all of the input:

City of God
Children of Men
There Will be Blood
Snatch
Magnolia
Blood Diamond
The Prestige
In Bruges
Frost/Nixon

and the instant queue:

The Pianist
Man on Wire
Cocaine Cowboys

and more suggestions are always welcome!

 

Originally Posted by resilient

ok so here is what the queue looks like now.... thanks for all of the input:

City of God
Children of Men
There Will be Blood
Snatch
Magnolia
Blood Diamond
The Prestige
In Bruges
Frost/Nixon

and the instant queue:

The Pianist
Man on Wire
Cocaine Cowboys

and more suggestions are always welcome!

While you're checking out P.T. Anderson films check out "Hard Eight" and if you haven't done so "Boogie Nights"...probably my fav of all time.

Frost/Nixon was a snore. I just watched a British film called Boy A, that was pretty great.

And just because

There are so many I can recommend, but here are three foreign/non-Holywood films.

Memories of Murder-- Korean movie. Imo better than the other two Korean films Oldboy and Mother both of which are heavily hyped on this board. Maybe the best police procedural I have seen in the last 10 years.

The Lives of Others-- German film; my favorite movie of the past decade.

Hunger- Highly stylized masterpiece about Bobby Sands' IRA hunger strike in the early 80s.

Don't watch Snatch w/o seeing Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels first.
LOTR trilogy is the most epic films Hollywood has ever made; it is a must watch.
I 2nd basically every movie mentioned in this thread but some of them aren't for everyone.
I am shocked by the amount of people who haven't flocked to Nolan's films...get with the program people.
Only movie I will add is Dark City which had a Director's Cut released a couple years back; great film.

Dark City isn't Nolan but it's still great. Know you're gonna enjoy every movie on your list and wish you happy viewing. I love Memento and it deserved all the praise it got. I remember watching it for the first time and while I understood the film, I immediately rewatched it because I wanted to understand the mechanic used to tell the story. It was actually surprisingly simple but still innovative. Only Nolan movie that isn't a knockout is Insomnia which is quite blah.

Salt tho

Frost Nixon was very good as was Michael Sheen as Clough in the Damned United
Slumdog was meh to me, enjoyable at the time but forgettable

If im talkign about a big film that you might not have seen then you cant go wrong with apocalypto or no country for old men

My personal favourite of recent times is 'Looking for Eric'

does anyone have dry eyes during and after Saving Private Ryan? jeeeeeeeeeezuz....

apocalypto on board, as well as sin nombre... both of those look great

Here's some really good ones I've seen recently:

The Last Days of Disco
Two Lovers
Eyes Wide Shut
Summer Hours
Dead Man
Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl
Spartan
Lone Star

dunno if I can trust you after the neg review on Slumdogs... ;) honestly tho... the slums/poverty were over-glamourized? (or whatever the term was you used)... I didn't see that at all, thought the plight was pretty horrific.

Only one of that list I've seen was Eyes Wide Shut, which I thought was decent, and wouldn't mind watching again... other ones noted (btw: Isabella Rossellini from Two Lovers, used to be quite hot, back in the day... she's the daughter of Ingrid Bergman and famous Italian director, Roberto Rossellini )

i can certainly understand that perspective... while it had the shock value of poverty to a general viewing audience (myself included), I can see how it wasn't gritty enough through the end to really drive home a point.... not what I - or most - probably wanted to see, but yeah it could have delivered a more blunt message if that was the intent. The love story was a bit cheesy, like Titanic's was... and while Titanic was certainly a commercialized film, it was definitely entertaining within its scope, while I think the love story took away from the primary depiction....

 

Originally Posted by BubbaKGB

Just a divergent opinion of course, but Children of Men is far from overrated and the ending is absolutely perfect. The ending is the payoff to what the whole film is building toward. Had it been different (as in longer and more well, you know) then it wouldn't have been nearly as good.

hmmm, just finished Children of Men. I like dystopian science fiction, and maybe I was expecting a bit more from this, but it didn't feel like it knocked it out of the park. The civil unrest scenes were very good, and the signature scene - the walk out of the building and through the stares of soldiers - was exceptional, but I felt like there was much missing..... the development of the terrorist group (why do they need the baby?)... the unrealistic scene of the soldiers going back to shooting and then Theo, Kee walking right into the woman and onto the boat... I was def saying "whatever" at that.

The film was well made though and I enjoyed it, 4 out of 5 stars, but it wasn't an all-time ranked film for me. It's not really cutting edge material, although maybe it is for this generation and level of cinematography... several good dystopian films were made in the Vietnam War era with some of the same themes. The one most like this in terms of civil despair was Soylent Green, while THX-1138 covered the infertility issue along with an Orwellian police state (I could be mistaken on infertility, the people were not allowed to have sex tho). Probably the best dystopian science fiction of that era was the 1968 Planet of the Apes, though it was much less similar to Children of Men than the two aforementioned pictures.

didn't like it, I guess there wasn't much more story to portray that point... I was just turned off by the unrealistic walk out of the building where they were the focus, then suddenly every single person turned and ignored the first baby on earth in 18 years, and then they essentially walked onto their escape boat with no one around. The last 5 minutes didn't do it for me.