Films an educated person will have seen

Kids old enough and smart enough to get past the latest monster flick or buddy movie could probably use some gentle parental help in finding good and culturally important movies.

Then again, they might prefer more vampires. That's up to them, their stage of development and how you present the information on something better. Our list might help.

Brando as The Godfather

There are lots of "Ten Best" or "100 Greatest" elsewhere. This is an admittedly personal roundup of very good, sometimes-great, films an educated person will have (or should have) seen. It would not satisfy and was not written for film buffs. This is for regular people, including parents.

These movies are special. There are more-popular films, and even some “better” movies. But these have become, in large measure, part of our heritage and the language of an educated culture.

Warning: some films are violent and inappropriate for children or sensitive souls. All were produced for adults. None are trash.

Seeing them won't make you a better person. But people unfamiliar with them would miss conversational references. They wouldn't get the jokes. They wouldn't know the images. Their lives would be less rich.

Here they are:

The Godfather. 1972. See [at least] the first of the three-film series. So much flows from The Godfather.

High Noon. 1952. Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly. The quintessential American western. And it's a smashing-good movie.

Apocalypse Now Redux. 1979. Vietnam and madness via Conrad's Heart of Darkness. (See this one in a theater.)

Lawrence of Arabia. Peter O’Toole. 1962. (To feel all the desert beauty, see it in a theater; not on video)

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Casablanca. 1942. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman. Nazis, Peter Lorre, the fall of Paris, heartbreak.

The Wild Bunch. 1969. Aging outlaws and the end of the old west. Sam Peckinpah directed.

The Wizard of Oz. 1939. Judy Garland, Munchkins, the Wicked Witch.

West Side Story. 1961. Jets and Sharks. Amazing music and dance. Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.

Star Wars. 1977. The now-classic space opera. See the first film in the series.

2001: A Space Odyssey. 1968. Hal, Dave and director Stanley Kubrick.

Michael Caine and Sean Connery

The Third Man. Orson Wells, Joseph Cotton. 1948. Berlin, evil, zither music.

Grapes of Wrath. 1940. John Ford. Henry Fonda. Dust Bowl, Oakies, the Great Depression.

Annie Hall. 1977. Woody Allen, Diane Keaton. Understanding the '70s with humor.

ET: The Extraterrestrial. 1982. Director Steven Spielberg. Phone home.

The Untouchables. 1987. Prohibition Chicago; getting Al Capone.

Taxi Driver. 1976. Robert DeNiro, Jodi Foster. You talkin' to me?

Psycho. 1960. Director Alfred Hitchcock. Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh. Bates Motel and mother.

Blade Runner, Final Cut. 1982. Harrison Ford, Sean Young. Replicants and the LA of the future.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. 1937. Fantasia. 1940. Disney's art, made for adults way before computer animation.

Gone With the Wind. 1939. In glorious Technicolor. Clark Gable, Vivian Leigh, Hattie McDaniel. Atlanta's plucky planter class and its slaves at Tara in the American Civil War.

Paul Robeson in Show Boat

The Seven Samurai. In Japanese with subtitles. Influenced American films, especially westerns, for years. Kurosawa.

The Man Who Would Be King. 1975. Sean Connery, Michael Caine. Afghanistan, ambition and Kipling's India.

Mississippi Burning. 1988. Gene Hackman. The KKK, 1960s redneck racists and the FBI.

Show Boat. 1936. The Mississippi, music and the great Paul Robeson singing "Old Man River."

Yankee Doodle Dandy. 1942. James Cagney. Flag waving, vaudeville & George M. Cohan's rousing music.

On the Waterfront. 1954. Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh. A Streetcar Named Desire. 1951. Brando, Eva Marie Saint.

Alien. 1979. Sigourney Weaver. Strong woman in very threatening outer space.

Sunset Boulevard. 1950. Joseph Cotton, Gloria Swanson. Classic Hollywood.

Gary Cooper in High Noon

Citizen Kane. 1943l. Orson Wells, Joseph Cotton. (Showing 8/30/11 at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge)

Oklahoma and Guys and Dolls. Influential Broadway musicals on screen.

All the President's Men. 1976. Redford and Hoffman nail Nixon's crimes.

Platoon. Director Oliver Stone. Vietnam war from a grunt's-eye view.

The Shawshank Redemption. 1994. Morgan Freeman, Tim Robbins, prison.

Jaws and The Sound of Music. Not spectacular, but part of the culture.

The Harry Potter series. Who knows if they will last, but they're certainly part of the heritage.

Please forgive the (hopefully) few idiosyncratic choices. They were just so enjoyable that they might have slipped in by themselves.

Love, romance and romantic comedy

These are not among the culturally significant group, above, but they're about love and well worth seeing.

City of Angels. 1998. Nicholas Cage, Meg Ryan. If a boyfriend doesn't melt at this, dump him immediately.

Nicholas Cage, Meg Ryan

Sleepless in Seattle. 1993. Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan. Director Nora Ephron.

Starman. 1984. Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen. Love from the stars.

Manhattan. 1979. Woody Allen, Mariel Hemingway, Diane Keaton. Romance in and about b&w New York.

Dirty Dancing. 1987. Good girl, bad boy in the Catskills. Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey, Jerry Orbach.

Ghost. 1990. Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg.

Big. 1988. Tom Hanks. Warm and smart romantic comedy.

While You Were Sleeping. 1995. Sandra Bullock, Bill Pullman.

Notting Hill. 1999. Julia Roberts, Hugh Grant. With a Charles Aznavour theme song.