The 21 Best Classic Movies for Grownups (2025)

Are you a skim milk movie lover, or a whole cream movie lover? Do you treasure movies that confirm your view of the world, or ones that force you to look at life in ways you never expected? Do you insist on nodding in agreement with what the characters in a movie say and do, or do you occasionally want to feel the impulse to stand up and shake your fist at the screen?

Answer carefully, because your response reveals whether or not you are a true lover of Movies for Grownups.

Here, I’ll make it easy for you: If you really want to have your ticket punched as a bonafide grownup movie lover, you absolutely have to see the movies listed below. No excuses. Each one either pointed the direction in which movies would go, or assimilated the lessons of the past in a breathtakingly new way.

No Sound of Music here. No Gone With the Wind. No Titanic, Star Wars or Shrek. It’s time to put on your Big Boy Pants, erase your lame old Netflix queue, and rediscover what real movies are all about.

You got a problem with that? Then tell us what movies YOU think belong on the list of Required Movies for Grownups.Use the "tell us what you think" box below or join us on the message board we just started to discuss your movie favorites. I'll weigh in when I can.

Egyptian actor Omar Sharif and Irish actor Peter O'Toole on the set of 'Lawrence of Arabia,' directed by David Lean, 1962

Sunset Boulevard/Corbis

Lawrence of Arabia, 1962

The Ultimate Epic

Michael Curtiz directs Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman filming 'Casablanca,' 1942

Everett Collection

Casablanca, 1942

Romance Grows Up

In this one, the boy (Humphrey Bogart) loses the girl (Ingrid Bergman) before the movie even starts. The question is, what is he willing to do to get her back?Casablanca's enraptured audiences learned that love stories can often find an unsteady resolution somewhere in an impenetrable fog.

Gene Wilder, Kenneth Mars and Zero Mostel star in the 'The Producers,' 1968

Everett Collection

The Producers, 1968

Comedy as Catharsis

Determined to mount a flop Broadway musical for tax purposes, Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder stage the sure-fire failureSpringtime for Hitler. Every "shock" comedy since then owes a debt to writer/director Mel Brooks —but not one of them gets its laughs with such profound insight into the delicate balance between tragedy and hilarity.

Robert Mitchum with cigar among group of soldiers in a scene from the film 'The Longest Day,' 1962

20th Century-Fox/Getty Images

The Longest Day, 1962

War Remembered

Three directors tell, with documentary-like detachment, the story of D-Day from both the Allied and Axis perspectives. Accurate or not,The Longest Dayrecounts the story of Normandy the way those who were there wanted it to be remembered.

From left: Pierre Fresnay, Jean Gabin in 'Grand Illusion' (aka 'La Grande Illusion')

Everett Collection

Grand Illusion, 1937

War Reconsidered

In one of the greatest war films, barely a shot is fired. Two French soldiers are imprisoned in a World War I camp headed by an aristocratic captain (monocled Erich von Stroheim). A slave to outdated, gentlemanly rules of engagement, he clings to the grandest illusion of all: That war can ever be "civilized."

'Spirited Away,' (aka 'Sen To Chihiro No Kamikakushi'), Chihiro, No-Face

Walt Disney Pictures/Everett Collection

Spirited Away, 2001

Animation and the Dream State

Plugging directly into our cerebral cortex, Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki immerses us in the stupefying world of a bathhouse populated by grotesque river gods. The mind-boggling image of a young girl and a white-masked ghost riding across a calm sea in a trolley triggers in us a mild panic attack: "Am Idreamingthis?"