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Career advice can come from any quarter. Sometimes it’s the guy who sells you the newspaper. Other times it’s a chance encounter with a titan of industry. But there is no guidance likely to make a deeper impression than that given by our proxies on the screen.

Welcome to the New Year and the ritualistic commitment to making positive change. January is an appropriate time to start fresh, since the year yawns before us with clean, white pages, waiting to be filled with a new life chapter.

Eventually, there comes a point in the holiday festivities when the guys need to get away from the tinsel, lights, and pastries on doilies. Sometimes, they just need to crack open a beer and crowd around a high-testosterone movie. This list of manly titles cuts to the chase.

I’ll admit it: I’m old enough to remember when the late Walter Cronkite delivered America its news every night at 7PM (if you were on the East Coast). I always loved him, and more important, I always believed him.

Technology aside, timeless films remind us that that the pressures and vicissitudes of the workplace and the vagaries of office politics have been around pretty much forever (unlike the cell phone).

Why not go outdoors for a run, you ask? Because I find that by working out on that machine in front of a great action movie, I feel the exertion less and time seems to go by quicker. It all has to do with adrenaline, I'm told.

Great drama, like life, turns on choices. Good choices usually involve a fair amount of luck. Bad choices tend to roll downhill into a ravine of consequences that can’t be seen from above. Without a very bad decision made by someone, many movies simply would not have a narrative engine.

The challenging, colorful lives of writers often make for solid drama on-screen. While the act of writing is hardly gripping, what it goes into it- the process of delving deeply and fearlessly into the mess and grit of life- can be. 

The movies can take you places you’ve never been before, but they also take you places you will never go — and we’re not just talking about outer space here. Rather, these are points on the map of the real world that are inaccessible by all but the most hardy man and/or beast.