These are some of my favorites that I haven't noticed posted yet
70- 75
Paper Moon- Ryan O'Neal and his real life 10 year old daughter star as drifters conning people during the Great Depression. Super funny and sweet. Tatum is an absolute force on the screen and gives one of the best child acting performances I've ever seen.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God- Werner Herzog has spent most of his career making documentaries like Grizzly Man but before the docs, he made grueling on location historical epics. This is the precursor to Apocalypse Now as it follows Spanish Conquistadors through Peru in search of a City of Gold. It is a classic man vs nature story.
Dirty Harry- I am sure many have seen or are at least are aware of this as a cliche. The original is no cliche, it's a damn good cop movie.
60s
Hud- Paul Newman at his absolute peak playing a drunken, philandering toxic mess of a man who destroys his family. It's kind of a modern Western written by the great Larry McMurtry
The Apartment- Not exactly off the radar since it won Best Picture and a bunch of other Oscars but it's a great holiday movie and holds up quite well, it was a major inspiration for Mad Men. Jack Lemmon plays a lovable loser with a crush on the original manic pixie dream girl Shriley MacLaine. In order to get ahead at work, Lemmon begins lending out the key to his apartment to his bosses so they have somewhere to cheat on their wives. It's a comedy but also features some really dark stuff and it's all set around Christmas and New Years.
Z- An edge of your seat political thriller based on a real life political assassination in Greece
50s
Throne of Blood- Macbeth as a samurai movie.
The Big Heat- One of the all time great noirs and cop movies. When a cop's apparent suicide leads the investigator to a mob connected wife, he soon discovers that's just the beginning of the corruption involved.
From Here to Eternity- Another massive Oscar winner, one of the most awarded movies of the era based on the widely acclaimed book. It's a look at the lives of soldiers stationed at Pearl Harbor just prior to the December 7th attack. Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Borgnine, Donna Reed and Deborah Kerr might deliver the best collective acting performances in any Hollywood movie.
40s
The Philadelphia Story- Another incredible cast top to bottom but the real appeal here is the charm, wit and beauty of Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart. One of the funniest movies of the time period that pokes fun at the wealthy and puts Hepburn in a not a love triangle but a love square.
White Heat- James Cagney sizzles as a mentally unstable gangster with mother issues who unbeknownst to him has an FBI agent in his gang looking to take him down.
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp- It follows the career of an English soldier from the Boer War to WW2 using his military career as a means for understanding the development of the British Empire during that time. It's both patriotic but also highly critical. One note, Colonel Blimp is not a character in the movie but an allusion to a popular British cartoon of the time that satirized the stiff upper lip aristocratic British elite. That really confused me on my first viewing as I was wondering when the heck the Col Blimp character was going to enter the movie.
20s/30s
It Happened One Night - Basically every rom-com trope comes from this movie. A wealthy but naive heiress on the run, the rough blue collar street smart reporter who helps her. They are opposites and hate each other but of course that animosity turns to romance. It's also a pure screwball comedy that is still one of only 3 movies to have won the Big 5 Oscars (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay).
The General- The perfect gateway movie for someone apprehensive about silent movies. It's one of the purest action comedies ever made.