1.
DUCK SOUP (1933)

My favourite comedy act of all time is The Marx Brothers, who made a string of feature films between 1929 and 1949. Their later films lost some quality, but their first seven films are a stunning, unbroken run of laugh-out-loud, top tier comedy entertainment ... The Cocoanuts (1929), Animal Crackers (1930), Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), Duck Soup (1933), A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937). Every one of these films is packed with classic scenes, surrealist visual humour, insane word-play, sharp moments of social insight and brutally offensive insults. There are literally hundreds of incredible one-liners between these films that still pack a punch in 2026. So I decided to give these films representation on this list as a single item and I’ve chosen Duck Soup (1933) as being probably the best of the bunch, but for me they’re all ten out of ten films.

Spanning all of these seven films there’s a relentless mockery of the class system formula. The four Marx Brothers would typically play a group of social low-lives. Their characters would infiltrate snobbish high society in one way or another then proceed to mock, insult and humiliate any pretentious person who came their way. And it didn’t matter if they were male or female. Somewhere in the mix there would be an actual plot, usually involving Zeppo Marx, the one brother who always played it straight, getting romantically involved with some young high society babe. But that stuff merely provided a superficial backbone plot. The meat on the bones was the other three Marx Brothers – Chico, Harpo and Groucho – tormenting the rich and the pretentious, as well as tormenting each other half the time.

Their Duck Soup film has an onslaught of classic scenes within a political espionage plot concerning the fate of a fictional country called Freedonia. Groucho has a marvellous opening scene where he enters a high society event and relentlessly insults everyone who speaks to him. Later shenanigans include a gut-busting moment where Harpo sneaks into a mansion to open a safe and steal some documents. He enters the code to the safe only to discover he’s just switched on a radio, which starts blasting music at high volume and wakes everyone up. In the next scene a wall mirror is smashed and Harpo has to pretend to be the reflection of Groucho, who is dressed in the exact same pyjamas … a masterpiece of visual humour.

A great thing about these Marx Brothers movies is that they’re so packed with visual and verbal gags you can rewatch them many times and still stumble across jokes you’ve previously missed. Check out Duck Soup and the other six films of their initial run if you want top tier comedy. Remarkably, Duck Soup is now a ninety-three year old film, but for me it hasn’t aged a day. There’s more wit and creativity in this one film than ten modern comedies put together.

Duck Soup - mirror scene

2.
THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

Jumping ahead by six years to 1939, we have the infamous Wizard of Oz movie. It may be an eighty-seven year old film now, but current generation kids are still charmed by it. The film had a huge, chaotic production in which multiple writers delivered various script drafts and multiple directors were hired. There was a serious studio determination to make the best film they could and it paid off big time. Director Victor Flemming took the reigns for most of what we see in the film. He already had dozens of movies under his belt.

What remains incredible about the Wizard of Oz for me is that the film works perfectly for children and adults. The big, bold, colourful sets feel like a lavish stage play. The film isn’t even pretending to be realistic. It knows it’s a childhood fantasy. It wears its playful artificiality on its sleeve with obviously painted backgrounds, obviously plastic giant flowers and obviously fake costumes. There’s so much visual creativity and expression on display that it doesn’t matter how real it looks. In fact the film looks like a cartoon made physical. And the Munchkin village is one of the greatest sets ever put on film.

We’re supposed to see and recognize the unreality of it all, but engage with it as a child engages with plastic toys that are obviously not real. And that unrealism fits with the dream logic nature of the story for adults, who are more likely to notice that Dorothy didn’t really go to the land of OZ. She just dreamt it as a way of dealing with home life issues. To that affect the opening scenes of the film are packed with foreshadows of the dream adventure to come – details that imprint on Dorothy’s mind and become part of her epic dream journey.

It’s also a really funny film, my favourite comedy moment being the Cowardly Lion’s song If I Were King of the Forest. And the film uses that humour to offset its creepier moments, which are spearheaded by Margaret Hamilton’s brilliant performance as the Wicked Witch of the West.

I’ve always found this movie rewatchable because of its unique visual style, its super talented cast, its humour and its rapid pacing, that barely allows for a moment of boredom.

If you want to know more about the incredible psychological depths of The Wizard of Oz then check out my free video What The Wizard of Oz Can Teach Us About Film Analysis and my long-form video Child Psychology in The Wizard of Oz. Both can be found on my Film Analysis page.

3.
FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)

Jumping ahead by seventeen years we have the sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet (1956). This film involves an outer space rescue mission. A human colony on an alien world has gone silent so a military team are sent to investigate. They find all the human colonists are dead except for a Dr Morbius and his young adult daughter, Alta. Morbius has been interfacing with extremely advanced technology left behind by a now-deceased alien race and he has been preparing to release great scientific discoveries for humankind to benefit from. However, things aren’t as they seem. The human rescuers start getting killed by an invisible beast that appears to manifest in relation to ... Well, I won’t tell you any more about the plot, but I will say that the film deals with multiple themes at the heart of the human condition, especially how advanced technology may get us in trouble if it is combined with our darkest unconscious urges.

The cast are very good and the lead is played by, of all people, comedy actor Leslie Nielsen in a serious role. The film featured ground-breaking special effects, some of which still hold up today. But regardless of any ancient looking effects the movie’s colossal sci-fi concepts are as epic now as they ever were. The underground exploration of miles long, miles deep alien machinery are still awe-inspiring scenes. The visual style is classic 1950’s sci-fi and looks like it’s been taken straight from the comic books of the time, but in a good way. And the film has a unique electronic score which was a milestone when the film came out and there’s still virtually no other movie score like it today.

The rewatchability of this movie for me is down to a combination of its hypnotic sound and visuals, plus its mind-blowing sci-fi ideas that always stimulate thought, especially being that there’s a lot of events in the story that are never actually shown and have to be imagined.

I’ve never put out a film analysis video on Forbidden Planet, but I have written a chapter on it for my upcoming book on film analysis. That chapter will explore a deep psychological aspect of the movie that falls entirely outside of the sci-fi plot.

Forbidden Planet clip

4.
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960)

Ahead four more years to 1960 and we have my favourite western movie of all time, The Magnificent Seven. It’s been remade multiple times, but the original is still the very best. However, the film is itself an adaptation of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954) but set in a gunslinger context. Don’t let you think that makes it the lesser film though. Kurosawa himself loved the Magnificent Seven and presented director John Sturges with a samurai sword as a gift of appreciation. That’s a hell of an endorsement.

The story is quite basic on the surface. A group of farmers on the Mexican border are being harassed by travelling bandits who return every year to steal most of their harvested crops, killing anyone who gets in their way. The farmers head into a nearby town to hire seven gunfighters who can fight off the forty-strong posse of bandits. Action ensues with all kinds of sub-plot drama along the way. Each gunfighter has their own little unique story and it’s a cast to die for … Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn and the coolest bald man ever lived, Yul Brinner, looking so unbelievably cool they ported the same actor with near enough the same costume into the movie Westworld (1973), which is also a very good movie by the way. Most of these actors weren’t even big stars at the time, but they very quickly became big stars afterward.

The film has one of the most epic scores in film history, gorgeous cinematography, perfect pacing and editing and marvellous dialogue, especially from Eli Wallach as the lead villain … “If God didn’t want them sheared he wouldn’t have made them sheep”.

This movie has everything an audience could ask for in a western. It’s now sixty-six years old, but it remains the benchmark of the genre.

The Magnificent Seven scene

5.
IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD (1963)

Onto another piece of colossal epicness we have the relentlessly insane comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). This film has the longest runtime of any movie on my list here, but it doesn’t feel long because the pacing is incredibly fast and it packs in a ton of entertaining sub-plots and unique characters.

The base plot is a perfect recipe for a great movie. A crook crashes his car off a highway and, as he lays dying, tells a group of people who stopped to help him where they can find a stashed briefcase full of stolen money. Those people then race against each other across the country to see who can get to the buried briefcase first. As they go on their travels, even more people get involved in the chase.

On surface level the film is an onslaught of crazy people getting into crazy situations – stuck in an airplane with a knocked out pilot, locked in a basement and using explosives to escape, a big guy with a temper demolishing an entire gas station, and some of the wildest, most dangerous stunt-driving and car chases ever put on film. All of this and a lot more played by an all-star cast. There’s no central character and there doesn’t need to be. The film lets the audience pick and root for whoever they take a liking to … Phil Silvers as a snarky liar, Spencer Tracy as a frustrated cop, Ethal Merman as the Mother-in-law from hell, Jonathon Winters as a burly truck driver, or my favourite Dick Shawn as an off the rails beach surfer. Everybody shines in this film and even bit part characters who are only on screen for a few seconds are played by the likes of Jerry Lewis and the Three Stooges. It’s big, bold, colourful and entertaining from start to finish.

Beneath all the hysterical madness the film is a scathing critique of the money-obsessed self-interest that bubbles beneath the surface not just in the “capitalist” West, but spanning humanity. But the film never stoops low enough to lecture us on these things. The word “capitalism” doesn’t get a single mention. No, this film shows us its truths through character behaviour, not by pretentious lectures. And it teaches us its lessons in the funnest way possible.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World garage destruction scene

6.
THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967)

Moving forward to 1967, we have The Dirty Dozen, a very unusual type of war movie, but thoroughly entertaining. This one has a fantastic plot premise. In the lead up to D-day, American visiting forces (based in the UK) pick out twelve of their own soldiers who have been imprisoned for murder and other serious crimes. They offer them a pardon for their crimes if they go on an extremely dangerous mission the night before D-day. Their mission is to attack a plush hotel in German-occupied France, where they will kill as many German high command as they can.

What’s great about this plot premise is that the soldiers being sent on the mission are not “good guys” in the overused sense. They’re various shades of “bad guy”, yet they’re being sent on a mission against the Nazis, so it’s bad guys against bad guys.
The question is whether these twelve inmates, several who are on death row, can be retrained not just in terms of basic soldiering, but can be turned into men who make it their personal responsibility to defeat the Nazis. And that question is so important that the training section takes up at least the first two thirds of the film. All the action is saved for a wild, bombastic infiltration and assault of the French Hotel. All I’ll say is, there’s lots of gunfire, lots of explosions and a lot of people get killed.

Their commanding officer, who isn’t a prison inmate, but has his own battles with authority figures, is played by Lee Marvin and for me it’s the best role he ever played. The rest of the all-star cast includes John Cassavettes in a career performance, Clint Walker, Donald Sutherland, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown and an incredible role by Telly Savalas as a religiously insane rapist. Everybody in this film turns in good performances. Most decent movies have maybe two or three genuinely interesting characters at most. This movie has loads of them.

The dialogue is sharp and, at times, hilarious. The musical score and tight editing keep everything engaging. And somehow the film got away with embedded themes showing that the evil we see in the Nazis was also present beneath the surface in our own allied forces.

I’ve only done a couple of short videos on The Dirty Dozen, Both can be found on my Film Analysis page. But I could easily produce a long one extending to a couple of hours or more.

The Dirty Dozen title sequence scene

7.
OLIVER! (1968)

Onto another kind of epicness, we have the 1968 musical version of Oliver Twist. It’s just called Oliver! This one was so good it cleared up at the Oscars. The set designs, locations, costumes and other minutia of the world are incredible. The workhouses and the back streets of lower class parts of London are presented in a manner so depressingly gothic they’d be suitable as sets for a Jack The Ripper film. Add to that the miserable fate for most of the film’s characters and you have a potentially very depressing film. So what did they do? They turned it into a musical.

Now I’m not generally a fan of musicals, but this one works perfectly because the mostly upbeat songs bring a beauty and elegance that makes the dark aspects of the film more bearable. And they’re not trashy songs either. They’re incredibly well composed with smart and memorable lyrics. The dance routines are really inventive and some of the large musical scenes are jaw-droppingly ambitious with over a hundred dancers onscreen at the same time.

Cinematography is fantastic throughout, making the most of the set pieces. The cast is amazing. Ron Moody as Fagen, Oliver Reed as Bill Sykes, Shanni Wallis as Nancy, Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger. They’re all superb.

This film is also great for children to watch because it shows just how hard some kids have it in this world. Hopefully, it can make them more appreciative of what they have today.

I have a couple of short videos on the film. See my Film Analysis page.

Oliver ! workhouse scene

8.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

Also released in 1968 we have a totally different kind of movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now you might be surprised at this one because I said in the preamble to this list that there would be very few movies here that are long and slow because they tend to be boring in places. But I don’t feel that way about 2001. I still find the entire movie mesmerizing. There’s always something interesting going on in terms of sound or visuals or both.

The plot of this film, if you could call it a plot, is unlike anything out there. Something about aliens leaving monolith artefacts on Earth and the moon that help man to evolve to the stars, apparently. But all that falls apart in the final sequence when the movie abandons all verbal explanations of plot and bombards the viewer with ten minutes of surrealist visual symbolism that can be interpreted in all kinds of ways.

The visual precision of Kubrick’s direction and encoding of hidden details was so advanced most film makers don’t know how to match it, never mind have the determination to do so. The atmospherics and depiction of the black void of space are frequently so sinister that it feels like an existential horror movie. The soundscape of the film is unique. And the film makes a ton of bold statements, usually without dialogue, about the subjects of space travel, alien contact, fake intelligence (aka artificial intelligence), corporatism, and it even makes bold statements about the audience’s own relationship with the cinema medium itself. This film goes seriously meta. Even Arthur C Clarke had little clue what Kubrick was up to.

But I won’t say any more as I’ve produced lots of studies on the film already. Check them out on my Film Analysis page.

9.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)

Another Kubrick item now and that’s his follow up movie A Clockwork Orange, released in 1971. Unlike some other Kubrick films, this one manages to be casual fun entertainment and deeply symbolic at the same time. The film can be studied at length or just … enjoyed.

It’s dark. It’s uncomfortable. It’s deeply cynical about the future. But it’s also rapidly paced and incredibly funny throughout. And it needs to be funny. Without the humour the film would be very depressing.

The film is also extremely unusual in its basic structure. There are no “good guys” in the story. Our lead character, a violent youth named Alex, is about as nasty a lead character as you’ll find in all of cinema. Everybody in the story, including Alex, has a selfish agenda or two. Hardly anyone speaks a line of truth. The truths are shown not told.

The multi-themed structure gives great rewatch value. The film can be watched as an exploration of violent youth psychology, sexual attitudes, family relationships, science-driven brainwashing and behaviour control theories, hypocritical party politics, among other things.

Check out my multiple studies of the film for more.

10.
DIRYTY HARRY (1971)

In the same year, 1971, Dirty Harry was released … Clint Eastwood’s first outing as an unhinged cop who gets the job done, but pisses everyone off around him in the way he does it. The film doesn’t break the mold artistically or aesthetically, but it has such a tight and well-crafted plot structure that it remains, for me, the greatest cop hunting a killer movie ever released.

The hero and villain are memorable, classic characters and a great strength is that the film doesn’t bother exploring their personal histories. It just gets on with the here and now story. We can take our own guesses at how or why these two men became the type of people they are, but as is often the case in life, we don’t have time to play psychoanalyst. Leave the personal history analysis for the psychiatrists to do after the killing is stopped. That’s Harry’s approach, as it should be. A psychopath is killing people, including kids, and he must be stopped. This motive relentlessly drives the story forward in nearly every scene. But the killer has a few tricks up his sleeve and he is, at times, more unpredictable and inventive than most killers.

There’s a raw honesty in judging people by what they choose to do in the present without giving them a token pass on account of whatever happened to them in the past. Personal past traumas are no excuse for victimizing innocent others in the present. And some real life killers are so nasty, so sadistic, that empathizing with them is an outright insult to their victims. I think this is a basic truth audiences feel and it makes Dirty Harry a highly relatable film.

Like with my previous choice on this list, A Clockwork Orange, Dirty Harry also uses humour to make its subject matter more palatable. The hero and villain of the story each have multiple hilarious moments. The hero even has shades of the killer in his own personality thanks to the contributions of non-nonsense writer John Milius, who penned one of the script drafts.

One last fabulous aspect to mention about Dirty Harry before we move on is its unique musical score, alternating between dirty beats, funk-infused bass lines and haunting melodies. Somehow it fits perfectly.

I have two studies on the film. Both can be found on my Film Analysis page.

Dirty Harry scene