In 2019, we shared our list of the 100 Essential Movies. We created this list not to call out what was "best", but rather as a guide for aspiring cinephiles who may feel overwhelmed and not sure where to start in their journey. It wasn't meant to be viewed in any particular order, and hopefully it would lead the reader to go down new rabbit holes where they could discover more obscure titles.

We've now returned with a new list of essential titles, this time focused solely on the action genre. We felt that action was a good place to start given its popularity and worldwide appeal with contributions to the genre from across the globe. While there are obvious inclusions here like Die Hard and Mad Max: Fury Road, we hope you'll also check-out older titles like Safety Last! and international entries like Sholay. Again, this isn't meant to be a list signifying what's "best", but rather how to get a baseline of cinematic knowledge in the action genre. And most of all, we hope you have fun with these movies. They're a blast!

For additional curated recommendations from the Collider staff, check out our lists for the best comedy films of the 21st century, best documentaries of the 21st century, and best war movies of the 21st century so far.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood
Image via Warner Bros.

Directors: Michael Curtiz and William Keighley

Writers: Norman Reilly Raine, Seton I. Miller, and Rowland Leigh

Cast: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Patric Knowles, Eugene Pallette and Alan Hale Sr.

Any list of essential action movies requires this swashbuckler from Hollywood’s Golden Age. For better or worse, this is the Robin Hood against which all other Robin Hoods are made and judged. You probably know the story without having even seen the movie, but Errol Flynn makes for a game leading man at the height of his powers, and the sword-fighting is top-notch. Looking back from today, the action in The Adventures of Robin Hood may seem quaint, but it has all the hallmarks of action cinematography designed to thrill and exhilarate the audience. And when you throw in the beautiful technicolor, you have a classic that’s still vibrant and captivating. – Matt Goldberg

Aliens (1986)

Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in Aliens
Image via 20th Century Fox

Director: James Cameron

Writer: James Cameron

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Carrie Henn, Bill Paxton, William Hope , Jenette Goldstein, Al Matthews

Ridley Scott's Alien is a masterclass in sci-fi horror, but it's the sequel which defined the Xenomorph universe as one which would become an essential part of American film — and it's entirely because James Cameron took Ridley's monsters and put them inside a whole new genre, one that revealed the full possibilities of Alien as a franchise. It's also an incredible action film that moves fluidly from one disaster to the next, as survivor Ellen Ridley (Sigourney Weaver) accompanies a pack of space Marines (as well as Paul Reiser as the deliciously evil corporate flunky who proves to be just as much a villain as the Alien Queen). Every beat of the action that follows their arrival on LV-426 is compelling, brilliantly staged, and also more often than not rooted in character — entire books could be written on how Aliens makes something so very difficult look easy. -- Liz Shannon Miller

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

avengers-endgame-ending-robert-downey-jr-social
Image via Disney

Directors: Joe and Anthony Russo

Writers: Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Paul Rudd, Jeremy Renner, Karen Gillan, and Josh Brolin

Why It’s Essential: The Marvel Cinematic Universe actually began pretty light on action thanks to budget constraints (the set pieces in Iron Man are hilariously small in hindsight), but the culminating MCU film Avengers: Endgame contains perhaps the biggest action scene of all time. The finale, of course, begins with an incredible 3 vs 1 fight pitting Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor against Thanos, only for every single hero in the entire MCU to show up and duke it out with Thanos’ army. What makes this action sequence grand isn’t the sheer number of characters (there are also a lot of characters in the Battle of Helm’s Deep), it’s the star-power of those characters. Avengers: Endgame is basically an entire movie made up of payoff, and that finale is the punchline to 21 movies’ worth of character arcs, to the point that you care deeply about every single character onscreen. It’s a truly unprecedented moment that resulted in one of the most memorable theatrical experiences in history. And while yes, most of the action was created using CG, the sheer originality of the whole final battle – and the fact that Avengers: Endgame the highest grossing movie of all time – more than qualifies it for this list. – Adam Chitwood

Bad Boys II (2003)

Will Smith in Bad Boys II
Image via Sony Pictures

Director: Michael Bay

Writers: Ron Shelton and Jerry Stahl

Cast: Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Jordi Mollà, Gabrielle Union, Peter Stormare, Theresa Randle, and Joe Pantoliano

Why It’s Essential: This is Michael Bay at the height of his power and his id. It is Michael Bay distilled down into his most dangerous form. It’s a Michael Bay movie stripped of all pretense of needing to appeal to anyone other than action junkies. The plot of cops Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) investigating the flow of ecstasy into Miami is the thinnest pretense for all kinds of wild escapades that eventually leads up to the duo and their pals invading Cuba on a rescue mission. It’s a movie that announces its third act turn with Marcus literally saying, “Shit just got real.” Yes, there are better Michael Bay movies, but as a titan of the action genre for better or worse, Bad Boys II is his masterpiece. – Matt Goldberg

A Better Tomorrow (1986)

Chow Yun-fat in A Better Tomorrow
Image via Cinema City & Films Co.

Director: John Woo

Writers: Chan Hing Kai, Leung Suk Wah, and John Woo

Cast: Ti Lung, Leslie Cheung, Chow Yun-fat, Emily Chu, Waise Lee, Kenneth Tsang, Shi Yanzi

It’s impossible to overstate how much impact Hong Kong action, and John Woo, in particular, had in inventing action movies as we know them today. Likewise, it’s impossible to overstate how formative Woo’s 1986 film A Better Tomorrow has been in the stylistic and storytelling devices that came to both define his career and dominate action cinema worldwide. Celebrated as a groundbreaking shift for action, A Better Tomorrow is credited as the film that sparked the wave of “Heroic Bloodshed” movies; operatic stories of duty and loyalty, punctuated by stylized, hyperviolent set-pieces. It also reinvigorated and reinvented Woo’s career, along with Chow Yun-fat, who stole the film with his radiant, nuanced performance, preternaturally cool every step of the way.

A Better Tomorrow is known and celebrated for all these well-deserved accolades and historical accomplishing of filmmaking, but the most striking thing about it is how damn effective it is every time you watch it. That signature Woo style, which would practically explode out of the screen in his subsequent classics The Killer and Hard Boiled (and especially in his American career), are more subdued here; the early signs of the architect of explosive grandeur that he’d become. But every element of the film is still heightened, infused with a sense of Shakespearean tragedy, as unafraid to strive for the profound in its exploration of brotherly love as it is to spray paint the walls with blood during its balletic shootouts. There’s no Reservoir Dogs without A Better Tomorrow, no The Matrix, no action cinema as we know it. But it isn’t just a remarkable film because it changed movies, it’s just a downright remarkable film. – Haleigh Foutch

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China
Image via 20th Century Fox

Director: John Carpenter

Writers: Gary Goldman, David Z. Weinstein, W. D. Richter

Cast: Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall, Dennis Dun, James Hong

John Carpenter, who never met a genre he couldn’t “make one of the best, most defining texts” of, struck again in Big Trouble in Little China, a wildly entertaining, refreshingly silly, and downright transgressive piece of campy fantasy action-comedy. Every piece of contemporary action blockbuster filmmaking can be drawn back to Big Trouble’s playbook, especially the stuff we see in the MCU. Casual integration of fantastical, mythological elements in our otherwise grounded, corporeal world? A relentless pace of comedy that tends to call out what we normally take for granted in action films? Kurt Russell showing literally every Chris “how to have fun in an action movie”? Big Trouble in Little China does it all with flair, panache, and a rollicking good time. Plus, it has the benefit of sneaky social commentary: Russell’s Jack Burton, despite being one of my all time favorite movie characters, does nothing to further the narrative, to the point where he’s literally knocked unconscious at a climactic battle. If you literally removed him from the film, it would make it more clear how much this film belongs to Dennis Dun, Jack’s friend who has a clear goal, want, and arc to go through — and is a leading Asian performer in a predominantly white-centered genre. By technically centering a white character and making it painstakingly, hilariously clear how useless he is, Carpenter’s sense of textual muckraking is matched only by his sheer, joyful skill in action-comedy crafting. - Gregory Lawrence

The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

Matt Damon in The Bourne Supremacy
Image via Universal

Director: Paul Greengrass

Writer: Tony Gilroy

Cast: Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Brian Cox, Julia Stiles, Karl Urban, Gabriel Mann, Joan Allen

Love it or hate it, Paul Greengrass’ 2004 spy sequel The Bourne Supremacy had such a resounding impact on action blockbusters that, nearly 20 years later, we’re still seeing the aftermath play out in sloppy, choppy fight scenes trying to catch Bourne’s wave. But here’s the thing. The Bourne Supremacy rules, and it's not the film’s fault that folks have spent a decade and a half trying to bootleg its swag.

Following up Doug Liman’s hit The Bourne Identity, Greengrass implemented his signature documentary stylings onto an action-thriller and wound up with some of the most kinetically invigorating, unforgettable fight scenes of the 21st Century so far. Along with fight coordinator Jeff Imada and Matt Damon’s committed physical performance, Greengrass’ frenetic framing approach imbued Bourne with a combat style that felt singular, specific, and wholly convincing as a walking weapon of mass carnage. There are, admittedly, a shit-ton of cuts, but they’re intentional and elegantly orchestrated, never to hide weak choreography or performance, but to deliver maximum impact and efficient storytelling. And on the note of storytelling, Supremacy features one of the most shocking, grim inciting incidents I can remember in recent blockbusters. That bold choice gives the film a quiet, grief-stricken melancholy closer to something like Get Carter than the many, many bombastic Bourne imitators that have followed, and the willingness to confront the human cost of killing amidst the adrenaline-pumping action gives it an emotional impact that almost hits as hard as Bourne himself. – Haleigh Foutch

Con Air (1997)

Nicolas Cage in Con Air
Image via Disney

Director: Simon West

Writer: Scott Rosenberg

Cast: Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames, Colm Meaney, Mykelti Williamson, Rachel Ticotin, Danny Trejo, M. C. Gainey, Nick Chinlund, Dave Chappelle, Monica Potter, Jose Zuniga

There is something glorious about the way Con Air just goes for it, an '90s action legend just for the fact that producer Jerry Bruckheimer looked back at his previous blockbuster successes — their penchant for blending absurd stunts with sharp comedy, the mammoth star-studded casts — and decided to just crank the knob on those qualities to 11. To be clear, with a lesser cast Con Air might have been regulated to the bargain bins of history, but just look at that list above. Only two years prior, Nicolas Cage had won an Oscar for his nuanced portrayal of a dying alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas, and here he is with a mullet, demanding that Nick Chinlund put the bunny back in the box. Plus, John Cusack stealing Colm Meaney's sports car so he can tear after a goddamn plane alone is an all-timer moment, and John Malkovich is operating at peak Malkovich energy. Really, this movie is peak everything, especially once Trisha Yearwood's cover of "How Do I Live Without You" starts to play over the wreckage of Las Vegas left over after the climatic battle. Con Air just explains so much about its place and time, and it does so at full volume. -- Liz Shannon Miller

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Zhang Ziyi in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Image via Sony Pictures Classics

Director: Ang Lee

Writers: Wang Hui-ling, James Schamus, Kuo Jung Tsai

Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen, Sihung Lung, Cheng Pei-pei

In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, the visual style and narrative tropes of Chinese and Hong Kong wuxia films broke through in the United States in a big way. You can see this big influence in big American films like The Matrix, the McG Charlie’s Angels films, and, uh, Kung Pow! Enter the Fist. But in the first year of our new millennium, we got a pure, unvarnished, unfiltered version of this time-tested genre, a piece of filmmaking both pure in its old-fashioned romanticism and contemporary in its reckoning with gender. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is an exceptionally beautiful martial arts action film, full of Michelle Yeoh being the best human being, love stories that will simply arrest your heart, and astonishing wire-fu action sequences choreographed impeccably by Yuen Woo-ping. Ang Lee combines what we primarily knew about him as a director before this film — sensitive, patient explorations of emotional repression and revelation — with the genre-exploring impulses of his last film, neo-western Ride with the Devil. As such, Crouching Tiger might be the most uncommonly interior film on the list; even its swordplay sequences, lensed in gripping long takes often literally flying in the air, are manifestations of its characters’ interior demons and desires spilling past the point of stability. For an essentially exploratory action film, and a pitch-perfect example of the wuxia genre’s beautiful past and expansive future, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon deserves your attention and then some. - Gregory Lawrence

Die Hard (1988)

Bruce Willis as John McClane in Die Hard
Image via 20th Century Fox

Director: John McTiernan

Writer: Jeb Stuart and Stuart E. de Souza

Cast: Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Bonnie Bedelia, Reginald VelJohnson, William Atherton, Alexander Godunov, Clarence Gilyard, Hart Bochner, James Shigeta, Paul Gleason, and De'voreaux White

Why It's Essential: I mean, Die Hard is the GOAT, right? It may not be your own personal favorite action movie, or even mine, but you can't argue with its significance, as it continues to loom large over the genre 32 years later. Die Hard has everything you could possibly want in an action movie, starting with a badass lead performance from Bruce Willis that changed the course of his career and introduced "yippee-ki-yay"into the cultural lexicon. We love John McClane because we are John McClane, and it's that everyman quality that makes the character so memorable. He's not a superhero, he's just a cop with a family who's a magnet for trouble. Naturally, he gets more than he bargained for when Hans Gruber (brilliantly played by Alan Rickman) and a dozen of his heavily armed goons seize control of Nakatomi Tower and take McClane's wife (Bonnie Bedelia) hostage. Cue barefoot shootouts galore, and a killer ending that will go down in history as one of the all time greats.

Die Hard is iconic for so many reasons -- its character work, its sense of humor and its practical effects, for starters -- but the reason it has stood the test of time as more than just an action masterpiece is, strangely enough, its holiday cheer. Families used to gather 'round and watch It's a Wonderful Life, and many surely still do, but I feel like Die Hard has become the new Christmas classic, at least for adults. Sure, the two most recent sequels threatened to erode the legacy of this franchise, but the original trilogy is as close to perfect as it gets, and that first film represents the gold standard of the genre. Yippee-ki-yay, indeed! - Jeff Sneider

District B13 (2004)

District 13
Image via EuropaCorp

Director: Pierre Morel

Writer: Luc Besson

Cast: David Belle, Cyril Raffaelli, Tony D'Amario, Dany Verissimo, Bibi Naceri

Just the plot description for District B13 promises something pretty special: In a dystopian future Paris, a cop teams up with a street tough to track down a missing nuclear weapon inside one of the city's most notorious slums. But really what makes the film special is its groundbreaking action sequences — remember those few years when parkour was the biggest deal on the planet? District B13 was the first major movie to incorporate the internet sensation into its action sequences, and my god they are glorious. Thanks to the jaw-dropping physical capabilities of stars David Belle and Cyril Raffaelli, director Pierre Morel is able to pack each big moment with leaps and jumps that seem superhuman — except (as the outtakes during the final credits reveal) they were very much the result of some extraordinary humans. -- Liz Shannon Miller

Enter the Dragon (1973)

bruce-lee-enter-the-dragon
Image via Criterion

Director: Robert Clouse

Writer: Michael Allin

Cast: Bruce Lee, John Saxon, Ahna Capri, Bob Wall, Shih Kien, Jim Kelly

How do you properly quantify the legacy and impact of a figure like Bruce Lee with such a short word count? An actual legendary figure of contemporary history, Lee’s life and accomplishments have filled the pages of books and hours of films, documentaries, and TV series in their own right. Because his legacy extends beyond that of a movie star, but as a philosophical thinker, a master craftsman of the martial arts, and a pioneering entertainer, who was successful in his explicit intent to carve out space for heroic Asian characters in “Western” entertainment, to an awe-inspiring degree. And of course, one of the great tragedies of his story, is that it was Enter the Dragon, released shortly after his shocking and untimely death at the age of 32, that became his biggest hit and cemented him as an icon of martial arts cinema.

Lee’s journey to American cinema was long and frustrating, first breaking out as Kato in the Batman spin-off The Green Hornet, before being snubbed by Warner Bros. on Kung Fu in favor of an American lead. That prompted him to head to Hong Kong cinema, where his films with Golden Harvest shot him to superstardom, convincing Warner Bros. to finally give him a leading role after all. That film became Enter the Dragon, an explosively kinetic Kung Fu film starring Lee as an undercover Shaolin master, with American Studio production value and nods to Blaxploitation, designed for mass appeal with a cast of diverse leads. Just when Bruce Lee was poised to become an international superstar. Most of Lee’s films could have earned a spot on this list, but Enter the Dragon has arguably become the movie most associated with his legacy, for all the talent, tragedy, dazzling physical ability, and universal reach it entails. – Haleigh Foutch

Escape from New York (1981)

Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken in Escape from New York
Image via MGM

Director: John Carpenter

Writers: John Carpenter and Nick Castle

Cast: Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasence, Isaac Hayes, Harry Dean Stanton, and Adrienne Barbeau

Why It’s Essential: This is a delightfully nasty piece of work and reminder that action movies don’t always need heroes. In one of his most memorable roles, Kurt Russell plays Snake Plissken, a former special ops soldier turned convict who’s given a chance at a pardon if he rescues the President, whose Air Force One escape pod went down over a maximum-security prison also known as the Island of Manhattan. The clever twist here is that while Escape from New York is dirty and gritty, the real ace up its sleeve is how it constantly eschews any kind of heroism. Snake is the protagonist, but there’s nothing to redeem or absolve him, nor any kind of noble sacrifice. Everyone in Escape from New York is largely in it for their own survival, and while that misanthropy could be grating in lesser hands, Carpenter and Russell make it sing. – Matt Goldberg

Fast Five (2011)

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Image via Universal Pictures

Director: Justin Lin

Writer: Chris Morgan

Cast: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Matt Schulze, Sung Kang, Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot

A lot of us here at Collider go unabashedly hard for the Fast and Furious films, but my deep and unabiding loyalty to the Fast family aside, I genuinely think the franchise earns a spot on this list because it represents such a unique space in the last 20 years of blockbuster action. Not only is it the rare non-IP franchise to hold its own against heavyweights like superheroes, Star Wars, and Jurassic Worlds, it’s a franchise that both audiences and filmmakers alike have been willing to evolve and adapt, from one absurd height to the next. Remember when the Fast and Furious movies were about street racing and stealing TVs? I assure you the characters don’t either.

From the comparatively mundane origins of the original 2001 film to the outrageous international epics they’ve become, no installment in the franchise has hit the sweet spot quite like Fast Five. Director Justin Lin already delivered one of the franchise bests with Tokyo Drift – the film that officially elevated the F&F movies to a new bombastic level – but Fast Five takes everything that was great about all the movies that came before and upsizes it into a super-sized combo meal. Bro bonding, family loyalty, big bald sweaty dudes beating the heck out of each other, fast cars doing a zoom, physics-defying mayhem, that vault heist; Fast Five brings it all together by giving all the star players from the previous films ample set-pieces and snappy lines to shine – and adds one Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to the mix for good measure. – Haleigh Foutch

The French Connection (1971)

the-french-connection
Image via 20th Century Fox

Director: William Friedkin

Writer: Ernest Tidyman

Cast: Gene Hackman, Fernando Rey, Roy Scheider, Tony Lo Bianco, Marcel Bozzuffi

A bold, striking, reckless crime-action-thriller that contains one of the greatest, most influential car chases in all of cinema. The French Connection, released in 1971, feels like it was shot and cut yesterday, so contemporary, riveting, and timeless is its construction, its attitudes, its moral ambiguity. Gene Hackman is iconic as our unstoppable detective Popeye who will do whatever it takes to take down a French heroin smuggler, even if it means bending what’s acceptable conduct past the point of breaking. This is grim, gritty, mature stuff, and this approach (coupled with its multiple Oscar wins) proved that the action genre doesn’t just mean candy-coated popcorn fare. As for that car chase? You might find yourself holding onto something subconsciously, as its terrifying low-angle first-person (first-car?) perspective shots fly you through busy city streets to find the perp and stop them. There was nothing like The French Connection before its release, and now, everything is like The French Connection. - Gregory Lawrence

The Fugitive (1993)

Harrison Ford in The Fugitive
Image via Warner Bros.

Director: Andrew Davis

Writers: Jeb Stuart and David Twohy

Cast: Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones, Sela Ward, Joe Pantoliano, Andreas Katsulas, and Jeroen Krabbé

Why It’s Essential: The 90s were a huge decade for thrillers, but nothing quite hit the heights of 1993’s The Fugitive in terms of the decade’s offerings for “action thrillers.” Nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture, this adaptation of a 1960s TV series has no right to be as good as it is, but it’s a perfect storm of casting and filmmaking that culminates in a supremely satisfying thriller that set a gold standard for the rest of the decade. Before thrillers relied on graphic violence or third act twists to keep audiences engaged, they got the job done with good old-fashioned storytelling, and that’s where The Fugitive excels. The film is compelling on a pure story perspective – a wrongfully convicted man tries to track down his wife’s killer while being hunted by U.S. Marshals – but then you add in the inherent charisma of Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones (in an Oscar-winning role) and you find yourself empathizing deeply with both opposing forces. You are invested in this story. Everything from the cinematography to James Newton Howard’s propulsive score drives this story forward, and that momentum never comes at the expense of character or plot. The story is laid out clearly and plainly, but something in the DNA of this film – all pieces working together in harmony – solidifies it as an iconic (and extremely influential) action thriller. – Adam Chitwood

The General (1926)

Buster Keaton in The General
Image via United Artists

Directors: Clyde Bruckman, Buster Keaton

Writers: Al Boasberg, Clyde Bruckman, Buster Keaton, Charles Henry Smith

Cast: Buster Keaton, Marion Mack, Glen Cavender, Jim Farley

Every time Jackie Chan tossed himself out a window, every time Tom Cruise strapped himself to the side of an airplane, every time George Miller blew up a bunch of oil tankers in the desert for real, the ghost of Buster Keaton was there, wondering if it could be just a little more dangerous. Keaton, half-clown, half-daredevil, all silent era superstar, was an innovator of putting your body on the line for your art, and nowhere is that put to more dexterous—and grandly expensive—use than the 1926 comedy, The General. Playing out as essentially a 75-minute chase scene, the Civil War-set film follows Keaton as train engineer Johnnie Gray pursuing Union soldiers who nabbed a locomotive -- and Johnnie’s girlfriend Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack) along with it. The two-way chase allows Keaton to crawl over, on top of, and—in one particularly harrowing piece of iconography—in front of the train, at one point tossing one railroad tie into another to clear the tracks. The centerpiece of the film also just happens to be the most costly silent-film stunt of all time, as co-directors Keaton and Clyde Bruckman trained six cameras on a whole-ass steam train—not a model!—as it crashed through a burning bridge and into the river below. Without hyperbole, the echo of that crash can be heard in every action movie that’s debuted since. --Vinnie Mancuso

Godzilla (1954)

godzilla-1954
Image via Toho

Director: Ishirō Honda

Writer: Takeo Murata and Ishirō Honda

Cast: Akira Takarada, Momoko Kōchi, Akihiko Hirata, Takashi Shimura

When you think of essential action movies, your mind might not immediately wander to Godzilla. And that’s entirely fair. After all, it’s a slow-moving, black-and-white monster movie about the horrors of nuclear fallout and oppressive governing. To put it lightly, it’s a huge freaking bummer. Guillermo Del Toro has already waxed poetic about the film’s shattering, existential effect than I ever could, but Godzilla didn’t just explore those horrors through its human drama, filmmaker Ishirō Honda embodied them in a creature creation so awe-inspiring and dreadful that Godzilla has endured as an icon of cinema for more than 30 films and nearly 76 years. And in doing so, Honda helped invent and popularize a cinematic language of disaster action that can still be felt, not only in the still-thriving legacy of Godzilla, but everything from war dramas to invasion epics to superhero blockbusters.

Godzilla wasn’t the first disaster movie, heck, it wasn’t even the first monster disaster movie by a long shot, but Honda and legendary effects artist Eiji Tsuburaya elevated the visual effects game with a combination of puppets, miniature sets, and costumed actors to capture the full scale of Godzilla’s destruction. That technique, called “tokusatsu”, was phenomenally influential in Japanese cinema and TV in particular, not just in the countless creature features to follow but in popular mecha and superhero stories, and its impact can still be felt in internationally beloved pop culture properties like Power Rangers and, more recently, the Ant-Man films. However, while the campier elements of Godzilla’s effects have proved most enduring in recent years, the tokusatsu legacy branches throughout genres and generations of filmmakers, from Kubrick to Spielberg to Del Toro, and Honda’s terrifying spectacle of collective trauma has left a footprint on cinema so enormous, it could only have come from the King of Monsters himself. – Haleigh Foutch

Hard Target (1993)

Jean-Claude Van Damme in Hard Target
Image via Universal Pictures

Director: John Woo

Writer: Chuck Pfarrer

Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Lance Henriksen, Yancy Butler, Wilford Brimley, Arnold Vosloo

The most frustrating part of writing a list of “essential” action films is that I have to explain why instead of smashing my fists against the exclamation point until the keyboard turns to dust, which I believe would accurately replicate the spirit and vibe of John Woo’s Hard Target. The second most frustrating part is that every entry isn’t a John Woo movie. The godfather of gun-fu made his American debut with this light remake of The Most Dangerous Game, and I say light because The Most Dangerous Game didn’t feature Wilford Brimley triumphantly riding a horse away from a massive explosion. Look upon that image for at least 30 seconds before we continue. It’ll clear your skin.

Okay: Hard Target stars Jean-Claude Van Damme—who has unfortunately been boiled down to a punchline these days but is as essential to the genre as your Stallones and Schwarzeneggers—as Chance Bourdreaux, a former Marine living on the streets of New Orleans. When Chance rescues a woman, Natasha (Yancy Butler) by round-housing her attackers into oblivion, he finds hilead mself drawn into an operation in which the wealthy pay businessman Emil Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) to organize hunts for the homeless. Woo introduced himself to American audiences in the form of pure, unfiltered excess. The set-pieces in Hard Target exist somewhere other than our reality, one where bullets are limitless, gun battles are a beautiful ballet, and a slight Autumn breeze will cause a motorcycle to explode. Hard Target is the result of a master filmmaker firmly entrenched in the capital-x Extreme Action that screams The 1990s so loudly it’ll knock your chair backward. Jean-Claude Van Damme punches a snake into unconsciousness. Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. --Vinnie Mancuso

Hero (2002)

Zhang Yimou's Hero
Image via Miramax

Director: Zhang Yimou

Writers: Feng Li, Bin Wang, Zhang Yimou

Cast: Jet Li, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, Chen Caoming, Zhang Ziyi, and Donnie Yen

Why It’s Essential: If you’re looking for a way to ease into wuxia movies after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you could do worse than Zhang Yimou’s 2002 movie, which became the first Chinese-language film to ever sit at #1 at the U.S. box office when it finally reached our shores in August 2004. The film relies on a flashback structure where a warrior (Jet Li) recounts fighting against three assassins, and while there’s a heavy autocratic propaganda bent to the story, although Zhang maintains he was attempting to make an apolitical narrative. However you look at it, Hero is undoubtedly a gorgeous martial arts movie and one that can lead you on the path towards deeper cuts like the work of Shaw Brothers and King Hu. – Matt Goldberg