This is how it happens. You sit down, the evening is yours, the remote is in your hand, and you spend forty minutes watching a television series you don’t care about because picking something felt harder than defaulting to what was already there.

I understand this problem. I’ve had forty years of professional opinions about movies and I still spend evenings turning a choice over in my head when what I should do is just start watching. The selection being infinite doesn’t help. An infinite menu is not generosity. It’s a different kind of barrier.

So here is what I do when I can’t decide: I reach for a film I trust. Not a film I want to see, because what I want is often unclear. A film I trust is different. I know what it does. I know it earns the time I give it. I’ve been in the room with it before, or I’ve heard about it from someone whose judgment I respect, which amounts to the same thing.

These are four films I trust completely. Different eras, different genres, different countries. All of them available right now, most of them free. None of them the obvious first choice when you open a streaming app. That is exactly the point.

A Separation (2011)

Directed by Asghar Farhadi. Streaming on Hulu.

An Iranian couple, Nader and Simin, are separating. Simin wants to leave Iran with their daughter. Nader won’t go while his father, who has Alzheimer’s, still needs him. The argument is genuine on both sides. This is already unusual. Most films about a marriage in trouble assign fault. Farhadi refuses.

While Simin prepares the divorce proceedings, Nader hires a caregiver for his father. An accident occurs. A charge is filed. What begins as a domestic drama becomes a legal and moral thriller, and what Farhadi does with the next ninety minutes is something I haven’t seen done better in contemporary cinema: he constructs a situation in which every character is right from their own perspective and wrong from someone else’s, and he never tips his hand about who deserves your sympathy. The film asks you to carry that ambiguity through to the end. It doesn’t resolve it. It trusts you enough not to.

This film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and I’m telling you about it now because the award didn’t get it the audience it deserved. It’s 123 minutes. It asks for your full attention. It will give back more than you put in. Skip it if you genuinely can’t read subtitles while following a film. Stay with it if you can. The subtitles will disappear within ten minutes.

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Directed by Sydney Pollack. Free on the Roku Channel and Plex.

Robert Redford plays Joe Turner, a CIA analyst who spends his days reading books at a small New York office, looking for patterns in foreign fiction that might indicate intelligence operations. One afternoon he goes out to get lunch, comes back, and everyone in his office is dead.

What follows is a paranoid thriller of the first order, and if you’ve been reading about what film noir gave American cinema, you’ll recognize the DNA immediately. The 1970s were when Hollywood learned to make films about institutional betrayal, and “Three Days of the Condor” is one of the clearest examples of what that looked like: a reasonable man in an unreasonable world, no one to trust, the enemy unknown and official. Faye Dunaway plays the woman Turner takes as a hostage and then a partner, and the film has the good sense to give her as much interior life as him.

Pollack was one of those directors who worked consistently and well without ever getting the credit that distinctive stylists received. Some directors don’t announce themselves with every shot. They just make the film you’re watching feel inevitable, which is its own considerable skill. This one is 118 minutes. It doesn’t have a wasted scene. It also has something most contemporary thrillers don’t bother with: an ending that tells you exactly what the film was really about.

The Remains of the Day (1993)

Directed by James Ivory. Free on Tubi, also on Hulu.

Anthony Hopkins plays Stevens, the head butler of a great English estate, who has organized his entire life around professional service and emotional suppression. The film moves between two time periods: the 1930s, when the estate is at its height and its owner is hosting what turn out to be pre-war appeasement dinners, and the 1950s, when Stevens is driving across England to visit the woman who was once the housekeeper and who he chose service over, though he would not describe it that way.

Emma Thompson plays Miss Kenton, the housekeeper. The film is based on the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, and what Ivory understood is that an adaptation’s job is not to add what the novel leaves out but to find visual equivalents for what the novel keeps interior. Hopkins’s performance is built on what Stevens does not say, does not allow himself to feel, does not permit himself to acknowledge. There is one scene, in a small sitting room, in which he and Miss Kenton are standing very close and the audience understands what is available and watches him choose not to take it. The scene contains no declaration and no kiss and no speech about feelings. It contains two people standing in a room. I’ve seen this film four times and that scene still lands with the same weight.

The film is about the decisions we make by not making them. It is 134 minutes. Watch it when you don’t mind sitting quietly afterward.

Witness (1985)

Directed by Peter Weir. On Paramount+ and free on Tubi.

Start with the setup: a Philadelphia detective, John Book, is investigating a murder when a young Amish boy turns out to be the only witness. Book gets shot and goes into hiding in Lancaster County while he recovers. Harrison Ford plays him, which is the correct casting, though the role asks him to be quieter than most of his films required.

Here is what I’m actually recommending this film for: what it does with genre expectation. It’s a thriller, and the thriller elements work, but Weir is more interested in the Amish community than in the crime plot. The film takes real time to be interested in that community on its own terms. Kelly McGillis plays the boy’s widowed mother, and the relationship that develops between her and Ford is handled with a restraint that has become unusual in American films. If you’ve thought about what separates a merely competent director from one who’s genuinely in command of the medium, Weir is a useful case: he uses atmosphere as argument, not decoration. The Lancaster County countryside isn’t backdrop. It’s the point.

The barn-raising sequence runs several minutes with almost no dialogue. It’s as well-constructed as any action sequence Hollywood made in the 1980s, and it tells you that the film is working at a level above what its plot requires. Viggo Mortensen appears in a small early role, if you want something to look for. The film won Oscars for editing and original screenplay. It’s 112 minutes. Pick it on a Friday when you want to be thoroughly entertained and also surprised.

Every one of these films will give back more than you bring to it. That’s the only criterion I’ve ever consistently applied. Does this movie respect your time? Not just fill it, but use it. These four do.

When the remote is in your hand and nothing seems right, start with “A Separation.” If you want something shorter and propulsive, “Three Days of the Condor.” If you want to sit with something that will stay with you for days, “The Remains of the Day.” If you want a thriller that earns its quiet moments, “Witness.”

Pick one. Start it. The choosing is the hard part. The watching is easy.