I've been watching a lot of old, classic movies over the last few years, largely through collecting laserdiscs, and I've found it really rewarding. So like with the 1940s and 1950s, I'm going to give my top 10 film recommendations for this decade. My knowledge of this decade's films is far from exhaustive, and I don't have any kind of film studies background or anything, but hopefully I can convince you that at least 1 or 2 of these films is worth watching.

A romantic drama film that uses pool as a metaphor for finding oneself. Iconic performances, a solid script, and a 40 hour session of pool against a guy named Minnesota Fats. What more could you want?

Anthony Perkins plays an office worker who finds himself "under arrest" one morning for a crime that no one will explain to him. What follows is a dream logic plot about bureaucracy, corruption, and legal malpractice with an explosive ending. This was the first time Orson Welles had full control of a production in a long time, and he gives us some of the best visuals he ever put on screen. There was a time when I was baffled that Welles was approached to direct Altered States, but after seeing this, I can see why they thought he'd be perfect for something that trippy.

A mysterious stranger comes to a town run by two groups of evil doers and decides to make it his business to stop them. If that sounds like a Western, there's two reasons for that:

1. Akira Kurosawa was a big fan of John Ford and liked Westerns. He used techniques from them plenty of times, but this film feels the most like a Western overall to me.

2. I'm not the only person who saw that, as Sergio Leone turned it into the Clint Eastwood breakout film A Fistful of Dollars, a surprisingly good remake that only narrowly avoided being on this list.

I love Toshiro Mifune in this film, particularly when he just looks so delighted to be fucking with these assholes. If you ever wondered why he's so iconic, this is a good place to start. One of best samurai films ever made.

Charles Aznavour¹ plays a man who used to be a famous concert pianist, but who now lives under an assumed identity playing piano for a bar. Things all falls apart when he meets a girl, gangsters get involved, and we get our hard to classify sort of noir sort of comedy sort of drama. French New Wave is an important movement in film, and this is one of the more accessible entry points (there's a reason I'm recommending this over Breathless).

1. If you anime fans are thinking "Gee, that sounds kind of like Char Aznable," this guy is who Tomino stole the name from.

One of the great Hollywood epics and the film that made Steven Spielberg want to get into filmmaking. Pretty much everything you could want in a movie like this. Beautifully shot? Check. Great action? Check. Well acted? Check. A great script? Check. Historical accuracy? ....well you can't have everything. This is still a British film made by white people over 60 years ago loosely based on memoirs that already had a few exaggerations, but if you can deal with that for some great film making, this is well worth a watch.

Toshiro Mifune is an executive and a shoe company, and he's just gotten enough money together to buy it out before the other executives can kick him out of the company. But then he gets a phone call telling him that his son was kidnapped. This will cost him pretty much all that money, but he doesn't hesitate to save his son's life. But then the unexpected happens: his son just casually walks into the house. It turns out that the kidnappers accidentally took his driver's son, and all of a sudden, he's much more reluctant to part with this money.

I feel like most people only really talk about Akira Kurosawa's samurai films, but he made some damn good contemporary dramas as well, and this is often considered one of his best. The first half is a bit better than the second half, which is mostly a police procedural, but it's still a solid film throughout.

Corinne Marchand plays a spoiled pop star who recently had a biopsy, and in an hour and a half or so, she's going to find out whether she has cancer. The film follows her in real time as she goes shopping, tries to work, goes for a walk in the park, and finally to the hospital, dealing with themes of mortality, narcissism, and figuring out what actually matters, and it does this without the tone ever getting too grim somehow. I'm new with French New Wave films, but this is the first one I've seen that I'd call a masterpiece.

Toshiro Mifune is a man whose father was driven to suicide by a corrupt corporation, so he took on a fake identity and married the daughter of one of the executives and uses his new position to try to take them all down. A dark as hell noir inspired by Hamlet. If you've been reading my lists, you already know that I'm a sucker for noir, and this is Kurosawa embracing all of those tropes and just hitting it out of the park for most of the movie. If this had nailed the landing, it might have been number 1 here. But still, despite my issues with the ending, the film overall is great.

Theoretically a film about a director trying to make a sci fi film, but it plays with the line between reality and dreams, between the film he's making and the film you're watching, and between the protagonist and the actual director of this film, Federico Fellini. If this really is Fellini we're watching, you rarely see someone present themselves that raw in a film. You see this listed in "greatest films of all time" lists a lot, and there's a good reason.

I can't believe your dad was right about this movie.

This is one of those films I picked up because I heard it was a pretty good western, and I'd been meaning to watch more westerns. I was absolutely not expecting to see what might be the best directing I've ever seen in a film, nor a character relationship as compelling as the one between Blondie (Clint Eastwood) and Tuco (Eli Wallach). Their weird on-again, off-again...friendship? Rivalry? Relationship? Whatever it is, you never quite know where they stand with each other, and it's just fascinating to watch. It's kind of a western, kind of a war movie, and the best epic I've ever seen. It might seem a little weird to put this above so many films that were aiming higher, but this was executed perfectly, and it's stuck with me more than anything else on this list.