The Great Dictator

This classic Charlie Chaplin movie (his first talkie) is still hilarious 71 years after it was first released into the world, but it is the bravery of the director to put it out in the first place (covered very well in this Criterion Collection’s DVD extras) that make it one of the great film achievements of all time. Watching Chaplin play the part of the mad dictator named Hynkel (a very thinly disguised caricature of Adolph Hitler) is thrilling when you consider he was doing it years before the world realized just how mad the real person was.