Spoiler-free!
Let’s not limit a role that movies play in our lives!
It’s not only about having fun and enjoying time with a bucket of popcorn.
It’s about learning too. So here you can see out Top 10 movies that will give you substantial lessons.
1. 12 Angry Men.
Lesson number one – justice always wins.
Movie 12 Angry Men fairly considered one of the greatest movies of all time. Shot mainly in one room, with 12 characters, contains not much action but a lot of dialogs. However, this masterpiece courtroom-drama about finding the truth behind the murder won’t bore you.
This movie gives us a good lesson about the importance of fighting for justice to be complete even if seems like no one if fighting for that cause except you.
Lesson number two – friendship erases differences.
This tender and bittersweet tragicomedy animation tells us a story about an unlikely friendship, divided by thousands of miles, between a little girl and a grown-up man. She is eager to know the world and her life is full of misunderstandings and unfortunate events. He is a mentally unstable Jewish atheist who has troubles connecting people and has frequent anxiety attacks.
Animation `Mery and Max` teaches us both to be open to new people entering our lives and to be faithful friends no matter what differences we have with each other.
3. Harakiri.
Lesson number three – truth and integrity win over hypocrisy.
Nothing is so irritating as hypocrites that are playing the roles of saints meanwhile hiding behind their back the whole specter of sins and amoral deeds.
After witnessing a young man committing a ritual `harakiri` with a not sharp bamboo sword and without being beheaded (this part is to shorten suffers of a samurai) we are about to begin a long trip through lies, false claims and cowardness of those who pretend to be the rightness itself.
While the castle of hypocrisy tumbles and falls we see from beneath of its ruins the truth rising.
Lesson number four – physical difficulties are not a sentence.
We all are somehow physically corrupted, someone more someone less. There are people that meat daily challenges because of physical issues they have. So in this movie, we are offered to follow the path of struggles and glories of King George VI. He was a stammerer that has obligations to make public speeches quite often. Such a perspective obviously not a trit. In this magnifying historical drama, we see not only a man that heirs a crown and becomes a king, but also a man who fights with inner conditions of his personality.
Lesson number five – optimism is a way out of the most difficult situations.
Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini shows us hot to laugh through tears.
This is a story about a rather naive woman, a prostitute that longs for love and change.
Once she does meet a prince. But this is not a fairy tale and things look quite more difficult in this movie, than in typical Hollywood films, therefore more real and more related to us.
And the main heroine, though it may sound odd, somehow resonates with us, mostly in her anguish and pains that seem to lead her nowhere, in her search for the meaning and happiness.
She does teach us to laugh and have a small dance no matter what.
6. Awakenings.
Lesson number six – appreciate the time you have.
The first thing to keep in mind about this movie is that it’s based on real events.
We are coming into the world having one thing in common – we all are dramatically limited by a short journey through life. Only once.
Now imagine to wake up one day with an understanding that mostly your life is nothing but a long dream and be doomed to go to sleep soon again.
Horrifying picture, isn’t it? Though watching this movie will leave you somehow comfortably devastated and will for sure make you rethink the way you daily waste your time.
7. Modern times.
Lesson number seven – be an individual, do not let the system to turn you into a screw in a mechanism.
In his work `Modern times’ great director and actor Charles Chaplin was reacting to rapidly happening changes in society and the way people lived. Laughing at Ford’s greatest invention – conveyer – Chaplin shows with a well-known type of humor, how dangerous it can be to become a part of a grand mechanism and to lose your mental stability and willingness to live with monotonous, mindless tasks that make each working day ridiculous and absurd-like nightmare.
Lesson number eight – acceptance of new conditions.
A drastic change in conditions in which we exist may be very stressful and painful.
This japanize movie shows us a man, that leads a life with a typical pro-western philosophy that encourages people to change the environment in a way to make it comfortable, trapt in a big pit of sand with a woman and with no way out. He now must try to accept new conditions and change himself to be comfortable with his surroundings.
So will he manage to reestablish his mind towards pro-eastern philosophy?
The border between the personal drama of one man and a drama of the entire far East that tries to balance on the edge of two worlds is very feeble.
9. Into the wild.
Lesson number nine – don’t be what society expects you to be.
Society dictates to us the manner of our behavior and values that we have since we were born and never actually stops to have major influence over individuals. Starting from clothing colour that our parents chose for us, blue for a boy or pink for a girl, out of a globally accepted idea that it can’t be otherwise. Of course, this example one of the most known and spread, at the same time being a bit of an overstatement.
But aside from that, we all can agree that society influence is forming us daily, makes us hide our sicknesses, pains, true wishes.
It makes us forget our dreams, give up on them, give up on us!
This movie is a true story of a man that saw in society nothing but an awful beast so he decided to ran away from it and became real self.
10. The Great Dictator.
Lesson number ten – mocking awful things helps to overcome them.
When World War II was thundering over the globe, millions of lives were lost and yet great losses were still ahead, Charlie Chaplin created a movie that strangely was not accepted that well by American public. It was not one of his typical works showing cute little tramp-fellow with a stick, a hat and a mustache. It was very different. It was a film that was mocking Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, nazism, fascism and people that blindly follow political idols.
Back then in USA Hitler was seen as savior of the western world from communism.
People didn’t know much yet about camps of death, massive repressions, inhuman ideology.
So Chaplin was considered a communist and back at that time it was not a title you would like to have.
Nevertheless, he did the right thing and finally, after some time, the movie ‘The great dictator’ priced as it deserves.
Though the movie teaches us to fight our enemies with mocking and laughter, it brings up important issues as well. The speech that the main character gives in the last scene is considered one of the greatest moments in filmmaking history.