Also the Deerhunter.

Schindlers List
The Deerhunter
Sophie's Choice

and others I don't want to think about

Here Hollywood did its milquetoast version, The Day After, which was a waste of everyone's time. Whereas everyone should see Threads. Once.

I see Raging Bull listed. I'll second that one too.

Edit to endorse Million Dollar Baby for this list, too. Here's the thing about voluntarily subjecting yourself to being repeatedly punched hard in the head. Don't do it. Leads to only bad things.

Effects on policymakers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Reception

After seeing the film, Ronald Reagan wrote that the film was very effective and left him depressed.
President Ronald Reagan watched the film more than a month before its screening, on Columbus Day, October 10, 1983.[24] He wrote in his diary that the film was "very effective and left me greatly depressed,"[25][21] and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a "nuclear war".[26] The film was also screened for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A government advisor who attended the screening, a friend of Meyer's, told him "If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone."[citation needed] Four years later, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed and in Reagan's memoirs he drew a direct line from the film to the signing.[21] Reagan supposedly later sent Meyer a telegram after the summit, saying, "Don't think your movie didn't have any part of this, because it did."[8] However, in a 2010 interview, Meyer said that this telegram was a myth, and that the sentiment stemmed from a friend's letter to Meyer; he suggested the story had origins in editing notes received from the White House during the production, which "...may have been a joke, but it wouldn't surprise me, him being an old Hollywood guy."[21]

The film also had impact outside the U.S. In 1987, during the era of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika reforms, the film was shown on Soviet television. Four years earlier, Georgia Rep. Elliott Levitas and 91 co-sponsors introduced a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives "[expressing] the sense of the Congress that the American Broadcasting Company, the Department of State, and the U.S. Information Agency should work to have the television movie The Day After aired to the Soviet public."[27]

of depicting what a major nuclear war would inflict on the world, had that big an effect on Reagan, I have two reactions.

One. His conception of and whole frame of reference for the world was more rooted in the unreality, the thin artifice of movies than we knew. And we knew at the time it was bad.

And two. Too bad Reagan didn't see Threads, then. If The Day After affected him that much, Threads would have had us living in a nuclear weapons-free world by 1988.

Last edited Wed Nov 20, 2019, 02:23 PM - Edit history (1)

The Killing Fields.
They interspersed into the drama brief segments with real Cambodian survivors telling their stories. Anybody remember the one guy's story about the potatoes and his mother?

Jude.
Based on Jude The Obscure.

Any of several films by Michael Winterbottom. But maybe the toughest one:
In This World
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/in_this_world

I've known and know survivors of horrible events -- people who survived Nazi death camps, people who survived The Bataan Death March, survivors of the Vietnam war who experienced unimaginable horrors...

My eyes are open to the evils of this world, maybe too open, and I have my own not-so-epic PTSD crap to deal with.

Before I met my wife I had a girlfriend who liked dark movies. She took me to see Das Boot, the German language version. (She also thought Eraserhead would be a good date move.) Das Boot possibly qualifies for this list.

My wife doesn't like bleak movies of any sort and I like that about her.

That's a real one-of-a-kind movie alright. You hear movies sometimes descibed as nightmarish. Eraserhead feels like a literal running nightmare. Visually and sonically... the sound design alone was unlike anything before it... genius, but twisted.

Yep I did indeed see Eraserhead... only once.


My father was a WWII veteran, a Navy Sr. Chief (but surface navy), and he had a strongly negative reaction to Das Boot. Was angered by the Uboat's captain putting his crew through what he did. Saw the captain as abusing his men.

Gave me nightmares.

Great film. Wonderful film. But after you know "the secret" of the film, you can't watch it again.

Contrast that with another film with a "great secret," Soylent Green. Even though I know what Soylent Green is made of, I could watch that movie every day for a year.

Perhaps "Mother!" by. Darren Aronosky...and I love hard to watch movies.

Number One would be "Johnny Got His Gun".

I watched about 3 hours of this but I couldn't take any more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoah_(film)