At first glance, SBS’s collection might look like cultural homework: iconic titles, black-and-white frames, maybe a few subtitles; all stuff that’s easy to mentally file as vaguely important but not compelling enough to actually watch. Maybe absorbing the gist of these films via pop culture osmosis has made the idea of watching them feel a little redundant, but if you give these films a fair shot at your attention, instead of vague esoterica, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find a lot of them are incredibly relatable (and more fun) than you’d think.
SBS’s Film School 101 is an invitation to engage with great cinema. When you strip away the legacy talk, the Criterion-core aesthetic, the film school snobbery; what you’re left with is a collection of stories about being human.
Full Metal Jacket
It’s tempting to say Full Metal Jacket is a war film, but that’s underselling it. It’s a film about stripping away identity and about how institutions, especially violent ones, don’t really train you, they unmake you.
The infamous boot camp sequence is often treated like a standalone short film and for good reason: it’s relentless, darkly funny and emotionally harrowing. You watch as young men are broken down through degradation and petty humiliations; you see the erosion of self in them all. It’s not subtle.
When the action shifts to Vietnam, the tone changes and becomes disjointed, surreal; the emotional sense underneath is constant disorientation. That’s the point. The system did its job. What’s left are human shells wearing dog tags, drifting through chaos and violence with a kind of haunted detachment.
Kubrick doesn’t glorify war or even condemn it in the usual way. This isn’t war as honour or trauma. It’s war as theatre of the absurd.
Full Metal Jacket is streaming at SBS On Demand.
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Full Metal Jacket
Historical drama • war • 1987
Historical drama • war • 1987
Barry Lyndon
Redmond Barry starts out as a charming, directionless Irishman with nothing to lose and everything to prove. He’s not noble, but he knows how to mimic nobility. Over the course of the film, he joins armies, deserts them, weasels his way into a rank promotion to spy, apprentices under a professional gambler and eventually seduces a wealthy, miserable countess.
The film’s beauty is famous, everything is stunning. The lighting, the landscapes, the costumes; it’s all immaculate. But the emotion is deliberately starved.
Having clawed his way into the aristocracy, Redmond rebrands himself as “Barry Lyndon,” a name that sounds like it belongs in a coat of arms. The wealth comes. The title comes. But nothing underneath changes. He has riches and power beyond his wildest dreams; and his life falls slowly and dramatically into ruin.
In the end, Barry proves you really can have it all, except love, respect, happiness and any fulfilment whatsoever.
Barry Lyndon is streaming at SBS On Demand.
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Barry Lyndon
drama • 1975
drama • 1975
Bicycle Thieves
Don’t be afraid of the neorealist genre. You don’t need to pretend to like it out of obligation. You’ll actually like it.
Antonio, impoverished, gets a job putting up posters. It’s not glamorous, but it requires a bike and he’s desperate. When the bike is stolen on his first day, he takes his young son and roams the city trying to find it. He’s not hopeful, he just has no choice.
The film hits hardest in the quiet moments. A long walk through a crowded market. A meal the father can barely afford but insists on anyway, to preserve some illusion of pride in the eyes of his son. It’s not a story about poverty. It’s a story about shame and its various indignities.
What’s most interesting about this film is that so much of Antonio’s failings are a direct product of his own incompetence, but you can’t help but feel deeply for him anyway. The ending is insane and will flip your conception of the story, reminding you that desperate people don’t fit neatly into hero or villain boxes.
Bicycle Thieves is streaming at SBS On Demand.
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Bicycle Thieves
drama • 1948
drama • 1948
Casablanca
What makes Casablanca endure is that it’s not about a grand love that conquers all. It’s about restraint; about doing the right thing when every part of you wants to do the wrong thing, so very badly.
Rick Blaine is a man so emotionally shut down he practically speaks in aphorisms, but when Ilsa walks back into his life, so does his grief. Their shared past, abandoned, unfinished, hangs between them.
There’s some idea that this is a film about noble sacrifice. It isn’t. It’s about the misery of knowing better. Of choosing principle over desire and knowing that no one will applaud you for it. Does Rick rise to the occasion or does he cave inward?
Watch Casablanca, because it really is as good as everyone says.
Casablanca is streaming at SBS On Demand.
Stream free On Demand
Casablanca
drama • 1942
drama • 1942
Goodfellas
Goodfellas will win your attention within the first three seconds. It makes being a gangster seem incredible; the suits, the steaks, the side doors at clubs, who wouldn’t wanna be a wise guy? The protagonist, Henry Hill, is relentlessly charming. The pace is breakneck, the storytelling is electric.
Henry narrates his rise and fall within the seductive logic of mob life with such charisma that by the time things are dire (and they get REAL dire) you feel genuine whiplash. The wheels come off. The fun gives way to bonkers paranoia, coke binges and increasingly desperate choices. You’re watching a man sweat through his last ounce of dignity while trying to stir spaghetti sauce and dodge a helicopter; and somehow, you’re gripped.
It starts like a dream, ends like a panic attack and is never not fun to watch.
Goodfellas is streaming at SBS On Demand.
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Goodfellas
Crime drama • 1990
Crime drama • 1990
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
McMurphy is a convicted criminal and eternal shit-stirrer who fakes his way into a psych ward because he figures it’ll be an easier stint than prison. He’s extremely wrong.
At first, he disrupts everything. He teases, flirts, provokes. The other patients start to wake up under his influence. You think maybe this will be a story about resistance, that it’ll be uplifting. Nope.
Nurse Ratched is the institution made flesh. She’s soft-spoken, immovable, absolutely in control and anxiety-inducing to watch. The film’s cold, dark inevitability in its ending is something that will stay with you forever.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is streaming at SBS On Demand.
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
drama • 1975
drama • 1975
Thelma & Louise
Thelma’s giddy and naive, Louise is sharp and guarded; and they’re just trying to get away for the weekend, take a trip to escape the drudgery of their dead-end lives. But the world doesn’t let women get away with much. One bad night on the road changes everything: every mile they drive is one they can’t take back.
Watching it now, it still scorches the heart with how viscerally the film escalates. It’s funny, tense, tender, wild. They rob a store. Pick up a hitchhiker. Blow up a truck.
Thelma & Louise is what happens when two women realise the world has no place for them as they are and decide to burn it all down rather than capitulate.
The film’s ending is one of cinema’s finest examples of defiance.
Thelma & Louise is streaming at SBS On Demand.
Stream free On Demand
Thelma & Louise
