It sucks that some of the shine has been taken off Holy Grail by its own overwhelming ubiquity. Stars: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Connie Booth It’s certainly one of a handful of quintessential American films. Jackson and John Turturro-and Ernest Dickerson’s scorching cinematography, Do The Right Thing is one of those rare achievements that manages to be equal parts hilarious and devastating. Powered by amazing performances from a great ensemble cast-from established heavy hitters like Ossie Davis, Danny Aeillo and Ruby Dee, to then-newcomers Martin Lawrence, Samuel L. Like a master manipulator of tone and tension, Lee meticulously turns up the heat until the inevitable explosion tears apart the society with which Lee’s spent the course of the movie making us fall in love. Jacksonĭo The Right Thing, Spike Lee’s brutally direct masterpiece about America’s fraught race relations, compacted within a block of Bed-Stuy during the hottest day of a 1989 summer, might be hypnotically entrenched in late ’80s aesthetic and style, but its tragic breakdown of racial conflict is timeless. Stars: Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Giancarlo Esposito, Bill Nunn, John Turturro, Samuel L.

Here are the 20 Best Classic Movies Streaming on Netflix: For a broader selection, visit our list of the 100 Best Movies on Netflix.

But there are some timeless treasures from the 1960s through the first half of the 1990s if you want to watch a bit of movie-making history. Netflix’s library of classic movies (films released more than 25 years ago, by our definition) is not nearly as deep as it once was, before the streaming service shifted its focus to newer content, particularly original series.

Classic films