Basically movies that have had some sort of impact for a change in your life and or effected the way you perceive things for the better. In other words made you think about life differently or generally directed you to becoming a better person overall or just blew your mind in general. Here is a handful on my list: The Matrix Groundhog Day I Origins K-PAX Cloud Atlas Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Spirited Away Princess Mononoke Coherence Knowing Death Note Revolver Ex Machina Samsara Avatar Baraka The Fountain The Man from Earth Waking Life My Neighbor Totoro Butterfly Effect Sin City The Pursuit of Happiness Number 23 Hunger Games Deja Vu Don't Say a Word (2001) Django Vanilla Sky Apocalypto Mr Nobody Snatch V for Vendetta Blow Snowpiercer The Beach Cast Away Inception Paprika(The original Inception) Limitless Lucy Cowspiracy Interstellar 1408 Fight Club Contact The Doors Inglorious Bastards Wolf of Wall Street Amelie The Prestige City of God That's all i can think of at the top of my head at the moment but you get the picture Share Away!
The Royal Tennenbaums Babette's Feast Amadeus The Big Lebowski Fargo Being Human The Last Unicorn Being There Excalibur Inside Llewyn Davis The Seventh Seal The Mission Pulp Fiction Lies My Father Told Me Paths of Glory I Served the King of England Broke (2009 documentary by Rosie Dransfield)
When I was a teenager the movie "Altered States" was somewhat profound...until the end then it was cheesy. The whole thing probably is pretty cheesy now a days. The movie "Baraka" was pretty profound/moving when I was a young adult.
Arrival (teaches you about the way you think) Inception (simply just mindfucked me) Sully (taught me the importance of perspectives) Get Out (also about perspectives) Don't think twice (don't hesitate)
check out the last man - Will Smith by little whitehead on Youtube. It's a trippy re-edit of I Am Legend. Pretty awesome. Less of a post apocalyptic film and more like a portrait of psychological paranoia
Disclaimer: this response is less about movies that have impacted my life in ways beyond my cinematic preferences, and more about movies I felt were profound and/or "mind-blowing," which to me generally means psychedelic. ~~~ Over the past few years he's become more active again as a director, and a documentary about a work of his which was never completed has been made, so more and more people are watching his films lately even though most of them are fairly old by now, but most of Alejandro Jodorowsky's work is great. Most notable would be El Topo, widely credited with starting the "midnight movie" sensation, and The Holy Mountain. The Holy Mountain is great, visually far more vibrant and stimulating than El Topo, but I feel like El Topo is the better film in terms of story. I'd dare to propose that The Holy Mountain is more psychedelic than Yellow Submarine, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Shining all wrapped up together. More unsettling, too. In fact, the director openly admits that the idea of the film was to be able to generate in a sober audience an experience uncannily similar to that of a strong psychedelic trip. This is readily apparent in the visual content, but also reflected in the bizarre, surreal nature of the plot. It does in fact have a coherent plot to it, despite its dazzling weirdness, though teasing out the nuances of the story line can be a daunting task, and it's easier to do after repeated viewings. In this sense, it is much like Yellow Submarine; but the actual content, apart from being really psychedelic, could hardly be more different. Experimental psychedelic jazz musician Don Cherry (not the hockey guy) did the score, so the soundtrack is pretty wild, too. Highly recommended. Also recommend El Topo, obviously, which is an "acid western." Theatrical trailer for The Holy Mountain: I'd also recommend the French director Chris Marker's documentary Sans Soleil ("Sunless") which juxtaposes footage of mundane life in Japan with similar footage from a small African nation called Guinea-Bissau. The "documentary" is narrated by a voice to whom you are not introduced, telling you about letters received from abroad, presumably from the filmmaker to a friend, describing life which is somewhat reflected in the images on the screen. Marker's experimental sci-fi short, La Jetee is also excellent, and the two can be found together on a disc put out by the Criterion Collection. the opening scene, more or less divorced from the rest of the film: Decasia is a great film, seemingly a meditation on impermanence and the ephemeral nature of...everything, really. Of film at the very least. It entirely comprises spliced together clips of film discovered in archives in various states of decay. From what I understand, many of the clips remain unidentified, as we have little more than a few highly decayed scenes from which to glean the information. No attempt seems to be made to restore the film; rather the decay is embraced and taken up as the focal point of the work. It's slightly shorter than your average feature length item, and totally lacking in dialogue. I find it relaxing, but haunting, subtly eerie. Sort of like being alone, coming down from a rough trip at 3am in the dark, with everything just slightly off...but still calming. The largely discordant soundtrack is intentionally unnerving and slightly out of sync, yet masterfully executed. Probably one of the more "mainstream" films I'll include (in this post, and due to the nature of the question more than due to my taste in movies) would be Kon Ichikawa's 1967 film adaptation of the Japanese novel, The Burmese Harp. Rashamon, directed by Akira Kurosawa, is far more widely credited with introducing Americans to "serious" Japanese cinema, but while it's a fine movie (with a compelling and thought-provoking story line), I vastly prefer The Burmese Harp. It is about a Japanese soldier fighting in Burma (then a British colony) at the end of WWII. When Japan surrenders to the Allies, this soldier flees capture by disguising himself as a Theravadin monk. Along the way, he witnesses the tragic human toll of the war, the evils done to fellow human beings. His time as a monk began as a ruse, but his experiences in war and fleeing the victors eventually move him to such depths of despair for the world that he undergoes his own personal transformations. This film paints the regular Japanese military men in a sympathetic light, as ordinary people who got caught up in the fervor of war just like the fighting people on the other sides, as both victims and perpetrators of wicked deeds. It at no point makes excuses, rationalizes, or attempts to justify any act by any person throughout the war, though. In fact, it is the horrible realization of the true depth of suffering that leads the protagonist to make choices which are difficult for his comrades to understand, but which are part of his own quest for redemption. It's also released through the Criterion Collection. You can also watch it in parts on YouTube, though the quality is lower than the dvd/bluray, of course. Life in a Day was an interesting experimental documentary. A crowd-sourced film, you could say, it was made by providing video recording equipment to volunteers around the world in many different countries, who were instructed to record their lives all on one particular day, all together. The raw footage was then edited together into a series of snapshots of real life from all around the world - alternately inspiring, despicable, beautiful, lamentable, wonderful, loving, criminal, disturbing, sad, funny, and joyful. It ultimately leaves me feeling optimistic, though. Looks like the whole thing is on YouTube, but so is a trailer. Everything in the trailer ends up in the film, though, and the trailer only serves really to tell you what the deal is with the movie and what it is...and I just told you, so here's the movie instead of the trailer: Life In A Day