You should come up with easier questions, Scott. This isn't my definitive answer, but off the top of my head I'll list a movie that I love that is a great screenwriting teacher, "About a Boy". It has great characters, and you get to know them right away visually in the opening montage. The dialogue is fantastic, but so are the visuals (Will walking right past the food bank, Marcus approaching the front door and Will opening it just before he rings the bell, etc.). No excess moments and everything is part of the plot (Will buys Marcus shoes, when they get stolen his mom finds out that he's been hanging out with Will; the Mystikal CD, etc.). There's a mid-point change where Will meets Rachel and repeats his mistakes from act 1. And then the hilarious/touching/clever climax pays off everything perfectly. I guess my only complaint is the denouement is a little too neat, but story wise it's still set-up and everything that comes before it is pretty freaking great.

All the movies that made me feel "I want to do that" - from Star Wars, and later Blade Runner and Amadeus, to more recent inspirations like The Bourne Supremacy, The Prestige, Serenity and Donnie Darko. The more I already know about story from other sources, the more I learn from watching movies, so I've learned a lot from recent films. About juggling complex plot lines from Inception; about scene transitions, callbacks and set-up/ pay-offs from The Avengers; about character from In Bruges...

D'oh! I meant to say "You should come up with harder questions" as a sarcastic joke. Which I guess is fine, since it wasn't very funny.

Masterful. Good call on this one dw. It's perfectly melodic, dialogue-wise. "...killing me softly with his sonnng." A line that's in my top 10 funniest of all time... "Shake Your-Ass...is he Moroccan?"

I love love love The King's Speech. I'm reading The Writer's Journey right now and can see (from my multiple viewings of the movie) how beautifully it takes to the Hero's Journey. 30 Rock taught me a lot about comedy. I also love watching movies where I don't know what's going to happen and I'm always involved -- (500) Days of Summer, the Batman movies, 2009 Star Trek, Super 8, etc. There are others, of course, but those were the ones that jumped to the forefront.

Jaws. That has and will always be my answer to that question. It taught me how to prolong revealing key character information (ie. reason for Quinn's madness). It teaches you how to create a subculture, keeping a veneer of trivial issues as a contrast to the greater issue at stake. And I loved this Hero's Journey - Brody gets closer to the water (his fear) the closer he gets to killing the shark. But above all, Jaws teaches you that the story rules. It never occurred to me until I became a writer that Jaws didn't follow a typical 3 act structure, or that it was a bold move to take 3 guys out on a boat for the last third of the film. But you can't imagine it any other way because that's how the story needs to be told.

I was going to say William Goldman's Oscar-winning adaptation of All the President's Men [1976]. It was inspirational when I was a daily newspaper journalist, and does a remarkable job of telling a complex, exposition-heavy true story. I was going to say Sylvester Stallone's Oscar-nominated original screenplay for Rocky [also 1976 - it lost to Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay for Network]. This breaks all the supposed rules about structure, devoting nearly all the first act to establishing character before any hint of inciting incident. [You can read the original screenplay here: http://sfy.ru/?script=rocky ] But I'm going to say the 1964 film Zulu, adapted by historical writer John Prebble and blacklisted American screenwriter Cy Endfield from an original article by Prebble. Zulu may take liberties with facts for dramatic purposes, but it succeeds in telling an epic story through both character and spectacle. It's a masterclass in structure, sub-plots and how to tell a base under siege story. Inciting incident - check. Turning points - check. All is lost moment - check. Stunning reversals - check. Heartily recommended!

The Empire Strikes Back. (Watched it first when I was five years old.) It taught me about the second act, the movement of symphonies, introduced me to the Hero's Journey, cliffhangers, great protagonists, powerful antagonists, clever writing, fantastic concept, well executed story... The list goes on.

Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood". I've never got so much out of a film, almost as if I was reading it. It's perfect. Character, structure, pace, theme, dialogue, subtext, relevance, global emotional impact, incredible. Besides films, Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King" mostly.

Bill Forsyth's "Local Hero" -- Starting with the ending, the hero, Mac, returned to his original world, alone in the apartment, changed forever, longing to go back, then the red phone box ringing, unanswered. Great characters, of course. (My man crush for Burt Lancaster influenced this choice and the runner up, "The Train.") Every scene, every situation, every new character introduced was a surprise. The passing across the threshold into Act 2 via the Brigadoon-like mist. Comedy coming from character-in-situation...and great running gags with the rabbit, and the motorcyclist to keep us half-a-bubble off center. So much humanity expressed, against such a timeless theme. The clincher goes back to the emotional gut-punch delivered by the ending. I was that guy, I had been changed by a story/experience I would never forget. Story as Experience. That's the job description, isn't it?

Still very new at all of this, but I'd have to say Die Hard has taught me much - especially the importance of place, and how to make every little thing matter. There's not one loose end that isn't tied up before the screen goes dark. For it to do all it does, and be so entertaining, is an amazing feat.

When I first started writing, "The Crying Game" came out and we used it as the perfect example of a three act structure because the act breaks were so blatant. "2001" is a great example of modular or sequence writing. And watching "The Bridge on the River Kwai" is like reading a script.

Serenity, for me, is a master class on how to make a movie. Structurally ideal, great characters, danger from all directions (Operative,Reavers,River) and the fantastic dialogue. But what really puts it over the top is that there are two versions of the script out there: a kitchen sink version and the final script. It's amazing how much one can glean about Whedon's decision making process by looking at the things he cut out and changed.

Any chance you have this "kitchen sink" script? krushjudgement@gmail.com

The long script: http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/8/13/2048723/Serenity-190pages.pdf The "shooting" script: www.fileden.com/files/2008/8/13/2048723/Serenity-126pages.pdf