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James Brown, the "Godfather of Soul," will finally get his due in director Tate Taylor’s "Get On Up," out this week some 12 years after Brian Grazer (who co-produced it with Mick Jagger) first tried to get the project off the ground.   Early reviews champion star Chadwick Boseman’s kinetic performance as "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business." Congrats, Chadwick: those are very big (and very active) shoes to fill. This is just the latest addition to a treasure trove of music biopics that have made some serious box office noise over the decades. Below are ten that deserve a debut or encore performance on your home screen. Pick one, and give your eyes and ears a treat.  

Here’s a bold statement: Giving your children the chance to watch classic films can be just as vital as anything they learn in school. 

In 1989: the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, Mikhail Gorbachev was named Soviet leader, and George H.W. Bush assumed the Presidency. Paula Abdul, Bobby Brown and Debbie Gibson were burning up the music charts, and folks at home were tuning to “Seinfeld,” “The Simpsons” and “Baywatch” when they weren’t reading “The Joy Luck Club,” “A Time to Kill” or “7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” At the movie theater, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “it was a very good year.”  Here are ten 1989 movies that I think have aged particularly well. See if you agree.   

It’s nearly impossible to discuss a truly great movie without mentioning its musical score. Can you  honestly ponder the Spielberg classic “Jaws” (1975) without hearing those relentless, alternating two notes (played on a tuba!) that announce the killer shark’s arrival? Or think of “Rocky” (1976) without remembering how Bill Conti’s soaring trumpet theme made your heart race? 

Please don’t let a super-sized screen, nor that Best Picture Oscar (over “Pulp Fiction,” for crying out loud!), nor that $600 million-plus box office take convince you that “Gump" is anything but a treacly mediocrity. While it has moments of sweetness and charm, it is absurdly overrated.

The phenomenon known as typecasting has been practiced in Hollywood since its earliest days. Stars who excelled in certain kinds of roles were usually offered those kinds of parts repeatedly. To risk-averse studios, this simply made good business sense.

Though we live in the era of the multi-hyphenate and multi-tasker, we still get a boot out of personalities we know for one function, showing up in a totally unexpected context, and in doing so revealing an otherwise hidden side—and hidden talents.  When a non-actor appears on-screen there is a moment of held breath. Will he or she be…good? After all, acting is hard. Acting takes sweat and years of training, whether in techniques by Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, or doing improv on weeknights for decades, with no break in sight. And yet, from out of the blue, a soccer star, jazz musician, or gossip columnist will cruise onto the set and turn in the performance of a seasoned vet.

Going crazy in real life is about as glamorous as sleeping in a bowling alley, but going crazy on-screen? Plan your Oscar outfit early. There is scenery to be chewed, fits to be pitched on an epic scale, fantasies to spin, and a kind of canny brilliance to the crazy character’s lunacy.       Maybe we are drawn to movie crazies as a kind of proxy nervous breakdown, the one we’d like to have, if only we could spare the time. In the more extreme cases, such as director Alfred Hitchcock’s criminally insane killers in “Psycho” (1960) and “Frenzy” (1972), we are watching a bomb blast from a safe distance, marveling at the potential for distortion within the human mind. And then there are characters that are driven crazy, like Ophelia (Jean Simmons) in “Hamlet” (1948), or Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), the shattered widow of an unscrupulous New York financier, in “Blue Jasmine” (2013).

There’s an extra frisson of excitement to be found in what I call “launch pad” movies. This is not necessarily a movie star’s first film, but rather the one that propels him or her to that exalted status. In these special outings, you can feel a certain electricity coming off the screen; it's as if the performer is announcing in a subliminal stage whisper: “I’ve arrived!”  Here are twenty key launch pad vehicles for some of my favorite stars, spanning eighty years of movie history.