Not sure whether this is the right form or not.Pardons if it isn't.

My film appreciation class in college was pathetic; Fellini,Godard,Hitchcock,Kurosawa,Bergman were among the many greats not covered.So needless to say there are a lot of holes to fill..

Needless to say, with my youth I am aware that some of the directors/movies will be a bit over my head as far as historical references etc.

So does anyone have suggestions on maybe 15-25 movies to start with that may not be too overwhelming to get my feet wet?

Thanks for any help.

You're probably going to get well over 15-25 recommendations from people on here and I'm sure most of them will be good. There are a lot of lists out there of all-time great films and that might be a good place to start. I would recommend Roger Ebert's Great Movies series of essays. They have been published in three different volumes, but I think they are also available on his web site.

I'm not saying you should see all of them, but if you look around, you're likely to find some things that will interest you. He gives a lot of background on each film, and after that, you'll probably want to branch out and start exploring on your own.

www.criterion.com

I knew of the criterion, just a bit overwhelming to blindly leap into.Even limiting it to dvd only releases thats over 500.Would I be better served just getting a list going on my own of what perks my interest from criterion/1001 movies you must see before my own/eberts greatest movie list? Or would a starter list from people in the know, as I am asking be better?

Mulholland Dr.
Seven Samurai

What genre of movies do you like? Westerns, Film Noir, Comedy let us know and I am sure you will get more suggestions than you will ever watch.
3 of my favorite Criterions
A Face in the Crowd
The Red Shoes
Rebecca

Off the top of my head:

SCARFACE (1932) dir.: Howard Hawks
42ND STREET (1933) dir.: Lloyd Bacon
THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) dir.: James Whale

CITIZEN KANE (1941) dir.: Orson Welles
CASABLANCA (1943) dir.: Michael Curtiz
SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943) dir.: Alfred Hitchcock
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) dir.: Billy Wilder
THE BIG SLEEP (1946) dir.: Howard Hawks
THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946) dir.: William Wyler
OUT OF THE PAST (1947) dir.: Jacques Tourneur
FORT APACHE (1948) dir.: John Ford
WHITE HEAT (1949) dir.: Raoul Walsh

AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951) dir.: Vincente Minnelli
THE STEEL HELMET (1951) dir.: Sam Fuller
SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952) dir.: Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly
ON THE WATERFRONT (1954) dir.: Elia Kazan
THE SEVEN SAMURAI (1954) dir.: Akira Kurosawa
KISS ME DEADLY (1955) dir.: Robert Aldrich
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955) dir.: Nicholas Ray
THE SEARCHERS (1956) dir.: John Ford
MEN IN WAR (1957) dir.: Anthony Mann

THE APARTMENT (1960) dir.: Billy Wilder
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) dir.: John Sturges
PSYCHO (1960) dir.: Alfred Hitchcock
YOJIMBO (1961) dir.: Akira Kurosawa
THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962) dir.: John Ford
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962) dir.: John Frankenheimer
DR. STRANGELOVE (1964) dir.: Stanley Kubrick
THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967) dir.: Robert Aldrich
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) dir.: George Romero
THE WILD BUNCH (1969) dir.: Sam Peckinpah

M*A*S*H (1970) dir.: Robert Altman
DIRTY HARRY (1971) dir.: Don Siegel
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (1971) dir.: Peter Bogdanovich
MEAN STREETS (1973) dir.: Martin Scorsese
TAXI DRIVER (1976) dir.: Martin Scorsese

That should get you started...

Genres I like - Comedy,Drama,Documentary (social and cultural specifically),Foreign.

Specfic subgenres - Nothing Goes Right,Against the Odds,Unlikely Friendship,Fish out of Water,High School,Offbeat,Witty,Sentimental,Cynical

Here's a nickel's worth of free advice: watch what interests YOU. At least at first...then you'll come across actors, directors, etc., that you really enjoy and you can go off and watch their other works...then you'll run into more actors, directors.... I've always been opposed to those who say you can't be a "real" movie fan (or critic or scholar) unless you've seen X, Y, and Z.

I've always watched what I want to watch, just happens I have never really delved into the "classics" ie the Godards,Kurosawa's,Fellini's,Truffaut's etc.So my goal here is to try and fill some of that gap.Didn't intentionally avoid it, just happens I was never exposed to it.

The value of taking a good film course, though, is the fact that they'll make you watch films you might not be interested in. I don't know if I ever would have seen all the Godard, Renoir, and Eisenstein films I did if it hadn't been for film class. The importance of seeing classic films, whether you're "interested" in them or not, is that they give you the historical context to appreciate the films you DO like. I'll give you an example. In film school, the whole debate between mise-en-scene and montage led to my increased appreciation of the use of montage in THE WILD BUNCH and the use of long takes in various Japanese films.

Why do we need literature classes in school? So that we'll read Shakespeare. We'd never read him on our own at that age. But you learn to appreciate the importance of Shakespeare's use of language and how it influenced so much English-language literature and how Shakespeare's phrases resonate to this day. All the world's a stage...

Thats why I thought I would ask, my film class was lousy (Katie Holmes was on our tv screen in that class more than Hitchcock).So I was never exposed to any of the "greats".I'm also a "late bloomer" to film in general, as I wasn't much of a movie watcher in school.

Thanks for the list Ash.

Here's a few suggestions if you want to start exploring Chinese (mostly HK) cinema. These are either classics, historically important or at least representative of the director:

John Woo:
Hardboiled
The Killer

Chang Cheh:
The One-armed Swordsman
Five Venoms (Five Deadly Venoms)

King Hu:
Dragon Inn
A Touch of Zen

Wong Kar-Wai:
In The Mood For Love
2046

Tsui Hark:
Peking Opera Blues
Zu: Warrors From The Magic Mountain

Sammo Hung:
Encounter of the Spooky Kind
Winners and Sinners

Hui Brothers (not necessarily as director):
The Private Eyes
Chicken and Duck Talk

Wong Jing:
God of Gamblers
Royal Tramp

Stephen Chow:
God of Cookery
Shaolin Soccer

Chor Yuen:
Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan
The Magic Blade

Jimmy Wang Yu:
Master of the Flying Guillotine
Beach of the War Gods

Lo Wei:
The Comet Strikes
The Hurricane

Wong Fung:
Hapkido
When Taekwondo Strikes

I'd take a look at the recommendations in this thread. The OP was about high schoolers but should still have a lot of stuff that's possibly of interest.

We started a film club at my school. Suggestions for first movie?

Tried to limit it to 22 as that is around a month of watching for me on Netflix.Any subtractions/replacements?

Ali:Fear Eats the Soul
The 400 Blows
Beauty and the Beast
Walkabout
The Seventh Seal
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Nanook of the North
Lord of the Flies
Taste of Cherry
The Most Dangerous Game
42nd Street
Autumn Sonata
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Pygmalion
Black Narcissus
Ugetsu
Persona
Double Suicide
Woman in the Dunes
Rashomon
Wild Strawberries
Band of Outsiders

Good start. That's a heavy load, although you've got some "entertainments" in there to lighten things up (MOST DANGEROUS GAME, 42ND STREET, PYGMALION, and even, to some extent, 400 BLOWS and BEAUTY AND THE BEAST--Cocteau, I'm assuming, and not Disney). I'm embarrassed to say there are four on there I haven't seen.

I suggest Fiend Without a Face and/or Robinson Crusoe on Mars as ringers if you start to bog down.

I just pulled from Criterion mostly. Any "lighter" fair you recommend instead/inclusion?

Fiend Without a Face and/or Robinson Crusoe on Mars are Criterion and qualify as lighter fare.

Roots?

Chungking Express

Ditto. Very charming movie and you may just fall in love with Faye Wong. (I fell in love with Brigitte Lin, who's in the film's first half, but that's another story.)

I showed that movie to a friend and she thought that Faye Wong's character was the same as Brigitte Lin's. I was shaking my head for a while.