The Karate Kid

Essential, and the only one of the four originals that is a genuinely good film rather than a fondly remembered one. John G. Avildsen had directed Rocky eight years earlier and this is built to the same blueprint: a long first act in which almost nothing happens, a training montage that is really about a relationship, and a tournament the film barely bothers to make suspenseful.

What people forget is how much of it is about being poor. Daniel and his mother have moved across the country into an apartment complex with a broken pool, she is working shifts and trying to sound optimistic about it, and the boys who target him have money, motorbikes and a dojo. The bullying is a class story before it is anything else, and the film is patient enough to let twenty minutes go by with no karate in it at all.

Pat Morita had been known as a comic performer and the studio resisted casting him, which now looks absurd. The scene on Miyagi's birthday, where a drunk old man takes out a uniform and explains what happened to his wife and child in an internment camp while he was serving overseas, is a single unbroken piece of acting that has nothing to do with the plot and is the best thing in the series. It got him an Academy Award nomination.

The crane kick is the one weak beat, and it has been argued about for forty years on the grounds that the move is illegal, which Cobra Kai eventually made into a joke of its own. Watch this first. Everything else here is downstream of it.