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James Cameron Wants You To Watch These 18 Movies

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Ignacio Weil

Entertainment - June 21st 2026, 19:00 GMT+2

Cropped Dune Part Two — 1. Dune: Part Two (2024)

Denis Villeneuve’s second trip to Arrakis plays like a blockbuster that swallowed an opera and somehow kept its abs. *Dune: Part Two* turns Paul Atreides’ rise into a sand-blasted collision of prophecy, politics, romance, and war, all framed with the kind of scale James Cameron clearly respects. The sandworm sequence alone feels engineered to remind modern sci-fi that spectacle still needs weight, rhythm, and danger, not just expensive pixels flexing in the sun. | © Legendary Pictures

Cropped Barbie — 2. Barbie (2023)

Greta Gerwig took a toy that could have become a plastic commercial and turned it into a bright pink identity crisis with musical numbers, existential dread, and Ryan Gosling weaponizing insecurity like an Olympic sport. *Barbie* works because it understands the absurdity of its own brand without sneering at the people who loved it. Beneath the jokes and dreamhouse colors, it is a surprisingly sharp movie about performance, gender, nostalgia, and the weird burden of being “perfect.” | © Warner Bros. Pictures

The Woman King 2022 — 3. The Woman King (2022)

Gina Prince-Bythewood directs *The Woman King* with the muscular confidence of an old-school historical epic, but the emotional charge comes from Viola Davis and the Agojie warriors around her. The film takes real inspiration from the Kingdom of Dahomey and builds a sweeping action drama around training, trauma, loyalty, and power. It is the rare modern studio epic that trusts faces, bodies, and choreography to carry the drama instead of burying everything under digital smoke. | © TriStar Pictures

Cropped Inception — 4. Inception (2010)

Christopher Nolan’s dream-heist puzzle is the kind of movie that made half the audience feel brilliant and the other half pretend they understood the rules before Googling them in the parking lot. *Inception* still moves because its big ideas are tied to clean genre pleasures: thieves, clocks, betrayals, impossible architecture, and one very stressed Leonardo DiCaprio. The collapsing dream layers could have become cold machinery, but the grief underneath gives the spectacle its pulse. | © Warner Bros. Pictures

Cropped Borat — 5. Borat (2006)

Sacha Baron Cohen’s *Borat* is chaos wearing a cheap gray suit, dragging American politeness into situations where politeness has no survival skills. The mockumentary format lets the film behave like a prank, a road movie, and a social autopsy all at once, which is why it still feels dangerous long after the catchphrases got overused. Cameron praising it makes sense: behind the stupidity is brutal precision, and every “accident” is built like a trapdoor. | © 20th Century Fox

Resident Evil 2002 — 6. Resident Evil (2002)

Paul W. S. Anderson’s *Resident Evil* may not be a sacred text for survival-horror purists, but it absolutely knows how to move through a corridor with bad intentions. The Hive, the Red Queen, the laser hallway, and Michelle Rodriguez’s feral energy turn the movie into slick early-2000s genre pulp with better spatial instincts than many prestige blockbusters. It is trashy in the best sense: glossy, mean, efficient, and completely aware that zombies love dramatic lighting. | © Constantin Film

Cropped The Lord of the Rings The Fellowship of the Ring — 7. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Peter Jackson’s first Tolkien film does something modern fantasy still struggles to copy: it makes the impossible feel lived-in rather than merely designed. *The Fellowship of the Ring* has sweeping battles and digital wizardry, but its real magic is mud, sweat, old maps, handmade armor, and characters who look genuinely tired by destiny. The Shire matters because Mordor feels far away; the quest works because every step seems to cost something. | © New Line Cinema

Cropped alien 1979 — 8. Alien (1979)

Ridley Scott’s *Alien* is basically a haunted-house movie in space, except the house is a filthy commercial ship and the ghost has teeth, acid blood, and no interest in being symbolic on your schedule. The Nostromo feels industrial, underpaid, and claustrophobic, which makes the horror land before the creature fully appears. H.R. Giger’s design is the nightmare everyone remembers, but the film’s patience is the real monster hiding in the walls. | © 20th Century Fox

Cropped Close Encounters of the Third Kind 1977 — 9. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Steven Spielberg’s *Close Encounters of the Third Kind* treats alien contact less like an invasion and more like a spiritual itch nobody can scratch. Richard Dreyfuss building Devil’s Tower out of mashed potatoes could have turned ridiculous, yet the film understands obsession as something embarrassing, frightening, and strangely holy. Its finale is pure cinematic awe: light, music, scale, and human faces staring upward like they have just remembered the universe is bigger than the suburbs. | © Columbia Pictures

Cropped Star Wars A New Hope 1977 — 10. Star Wars (1977)

George Lucas did not simply make a space adventure; he made a galaxy that looked dented, dusty, and already ancient before the story even began. *Star Wars* blends samurai films, serials, mythology, dogfights, and fairy-tale simplicity into a movie that feels both handmade and enormous. The genius is not just the lightsabers or the Force, but how quickly the film teaches you its rules, then lets you run through them like a kid with a plastic blaster. | © Lucasfilm

Cropped taxi driver — 11. Taxi Driver (1976)

Martin Scorsese’s *Taxi Driver* turns New York into a fever dream seen through a windshield smeared with loneliness, rage, and bad decisions. Travis Bickle is not written as a puzzle to solve; he is a warning light that keeps flashing while everyone walks past it. Robert De Niro’s performance gets quoted endlessly, but the film’s real power sits in its mood: sleepless streets, moral rot, Bernard Herrmann’s wounded score, and a city that never blinks. | © Columbia Pictures

Cropped Jaws — 12. Jaws (1975)

Steven Spielberg’s shark movie became a blockbuster blueprint, but *Jaws* still works because it spends so much time pretending to be a small-town drama with a monster problem. The broken mechanical shark famously forced Spielberg to show less, and cinema got one of its greatest lessons in suspense by accident. Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss make the final stretch feel like three bruised egos trapped at sea with teeth underneath them. | © Universal Pictures

Cropped The Godfather — 13. The Godfather (1972)

Francis Ford Coppola’s *The Godfather* is so often treated like homework that it is easy to forget how alive and nasty it is. The Corleone family drama moves with the patience of a funeral procession and the force of a door closing in your face. Gordon Willis’ shadowy photography gives the rooms a church-like weight, while Pacino’s slow transformation turns Michael into a man who keeps losing his soul and calling it responsibility. | © Paramount Pictures

14. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

George Roy Hill’s *Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid* is a Western with a grin, a limp, and the uneasy knowledge that the old outlaw game is almost over. Paul Newman and Robert Redford make the movie glide on charm, but William Goldman’s script keeps reminding us that charm is not a retirement plan. The Bolivia escape, the bicycle scene, and that famous final freeze-frame all turn mythmaking into something breezy, melancholy, and painfully cool. | © 20th Century Fox

Cropped 2001 A Space Odyssey — 15. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Stanley Kubrick’s *2001: A Space Odyssey* does not hurry because it knows the audience has nowhere more important to be than the edge of human evolution. The film moves from bone tools to spacecraft with one of cinema’s boldest cuts, then keeps pushing forward until language itself feels too small for the images. HAL 9000 remains terrifying because he is calm, polite, and completely wrong in the way only a perfect machine can be. | © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Wait Until Dark 1967 — 16. Wait Until Dark (1967)

*Wait Until Dark* is a masterclass in squeezing terror out of one apartment, one hidden doll, and one woman who has to outthink men who badly underestimate her. Audrey Hepburn gives the thriller its nerve, playing vulnerability without turning Susy into a helpless symbol. Alan Arkin’s villain is nasty enough to poison the room every time he enters, and the climactic blackout still feels like the movie reaching over to switch off your own lights. | © Warner Bros.-Seven Arts

Cropped Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove 1964 — 17. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear satire laughs because screaming would be too reasonable. *Dr. Strangelove* turns global annihilation into bureaucratic farce, with generals, presidents, and experts talking themselves toward disaster like men arguing over a dinner reservation. Peter Sellers’ triple performance gets the spotlight, but the War Room is the real punchline: a gorgeous monument to human intelligence being used in the dumbest possible way. It is bleak, hilarious, and still uncomfortably well-preserved. | © Hawk Films

Cropped The Wizard of Oz — 18. The Wizard of Oz (1939)

*The Wizard of Oz* is so deeply baked into pop culture that watching it can feel like recognizing a dream you never personally had. The shift from sepia Kansas to Technicolor Oz remains one of cinema’s great sensory tricks, but the film survives because Dorothy’s journey is emotionally simple without feeling small. The songs, the costumes, the witches, the yellow brick road all of it still glows with MGM craftsmanship and storybook nerve. | © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

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James Cameron is not exactly known for thinking small. This is the filmmaker who turned Titanic into a box-office earthquake, made Avatar a modern blockbuster benchmark, and still finds room to praise everything from Kubrick classics to zombie action and Sacha Baron Cohen chaos. His movie recommendations are not a neat film-school syllabus, which makes them much more interesting. They reveal a director whose taste jumps from old Hollywood magic to sci-fi landmarks, bruising crime dramas, and the occasional guilty pleasure with a grin.

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James Cameron is not exactly known for thinking small. This is the filmmaker who turned Titanic into a box-office earthquake, made Avatar a modern blockbuster benchmark, and still finds room to praise everything from Kubrick classics to zombie action and Sacha Baron Cohen chaos. His movie recommendations are not a neat film-school syllabus, which makes them much more interesting. They reveal a director whose taste jumps from old Hollywood magic to sci-fi landmarks, bruising crime dramas, and the occasional guilty pleasure with a grin.