Godzilla

If you think Godzilla movies are mostly silly and puerile, well, you’re probably right. But the 1954 original is a very different monster—instead of cheeseball pro-wrestling with rubber-suited sci-fi beasts, it offered a dark meditation on the awe-inspiring power of the atomic bomb. It’s still a monster movie, to be sure, just one that actually has something important to say. And unless you’ve been to Japan, you’ve never seen it—because when the film was brought stateside, it was utterly eviscerated. Forty minutes were removed, the atomic angle (and American culpability) was downplayed, and a painfully unnecessary character played by Raymond Burr was shoehorned in, apparently for the sole purpose of getting a white guy in the cast. On the occasion of Big G’s fiftieth birthday, this restored version has been stomping through arthouse theaters across the country.