Movies All Americans Need to See

These are the top ten movies I think all American adults should be required to watch at least once. They are the mirrors of our culture.

10. The Graduate - We all want a little excitement with our romance, and Benjamin graduates in 1967, back when there really was a future in plastics.

9. Road Warrior - It may have been fun back in 1981 to watch gasoline outlaws stealing fuel from a tanker truck, but the dangerous world of Mad Max doesn't look so far away now, does it?

8. All the President's Men - How could the movie about modern America's most famous political scandal not be included?

7. Rollerball - The Super Bowl was only eight years old when we saw how the corporations would soon own the world and we will have handed it to them on a roller derby rink with motorcycles.

6. Full Metal Jacket - Kubrick's boot camp Marines predated Meathead's A Few Good Men by five years, but both films show us the military in ways we might not care to recognize.

5. The Candidate - What makes this obviously plotted genre movie stand out is the attention to the details displaying the transition of our best politicians as they try to attune themselves to a fickle electorate and a less than honest political machine.

4. Network - They tried to show us back in 1976 what television news would look like now, but it seems as if only a few of us were paying attention.

3. Mississippi Burning - Many movies have been made about the Civil Rights events in the South in the '60's, but this one is the best known, and it probably packs the hardest punch.

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey - Would you like to see God without all the mumbo-jumbo of organized religion getting in the way? Religion is, and should be, a very personal experience.

1. American Beauty - No movie was better at portraying our suburbia of the '90's, with its creepy subterfuge of lust, dope, and homosexuality permeating the pleasant facade.