What should you watch over the holiday weekend? Whatever you want, of course. But if you’re like me—with too many enticing choices on too many platforms crowding too many queues—holidays are a chance to impose arbitrary thematic limits on the glut of options. Christmas movies on Christmas: great. Romances on Valentine’s, war movies on Veterans Day—all the better.

So it is with Labor Day. The following list isn’t ranked and doesn’t claim to be comprehensive. The goal is to appeal to a wide range of tastes, with a selection of 50 movies released as long ago as 1924 and as recently as last week, spanning from the hard work of laborers and their unions to the unsung heroism of teachers and phone operators, the emotional labor of loved ones, the movie-romance professionalism of crooks and office jockeys, motherhood, and even the very work of making movies in the first place.

All the films listed below are currently rentable from iTunes and/or Amazon Video, unless an alternative (or additional) subscription service is specified—Netflix, FilmStruck, Hulu, Fandor, Amazon Prime, HBONow, Starz, or Kanopy (which is free).

Union!

Norma Rae (Starz)
You already know the best line, which is also a convenient shorthand for what the movie is about. Starring Sally Field, who won best actress for her impassioned turn in the title role: a textile worker and mighty agitator with heart.

Blue Collar
Paul Schrader’s blazing 1978 directorial debut, starring Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel as two auto plant workers who steal from their union and then—realizing it’s corrupt—blackmail it, is an all-too-rare account of the way racial discord can be weaponized in times of class warfare.

Harlan County, U.S.A. (FilmStruck)
Four people were murdered during the 13-month miners’ strike depicted in Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning documentary—still one of the very best accounts of a labor strike committed to film. Kopple gives rare access to the fallout, and then some: black-lung woes, the struggles of women organizers, and every searingly personal aspect of this bitter fight.

Roger & Me
Revisit Michael Moore’s ode to his hometown of Flint, Michigan, as it suffers the rapid closure of its automobile factories and the inevitable crises that followed—including impotent attempts to make Flint great again, so to speak. As charged and politically enraging as it was in 1989, the film documents better than almost any other the intractable ties between an industry and its surrounding community.

Salt of the Earth (Amazon Prime)
Based on a 1951 mining strike, this film from 1954—which stars real miners, many of them Mexican, alongside professional actors—was blacklisted in its time for the filmmakers' ties to labor unions and other groups; and the film remains urgent today, albeit under-seen, for the same reasons.

Strike (Kanopy)
Sergei Eisenstein is foundational to the history of cinema about class conflict—to say nothing of his importance to movies generally. This 1925 silent film, about the suppression of a workers’ strike in pre-revolutionary Russia, is his first full-length movie. Watch it to witness the beginning of a tradition.

The Unsung

Alambrista! (FilmStruck)
A vastly under-seen gem: one of the first movie depictions of U.S.-Mexico border crossing and migrant work, and still one of the most informed. Director Robert M. Young started out as a documentarian—and that training shows.

The Class
An absorbingly realistic French drama about a struggling teacher (François Bégaudeau, whose memoir also inspired the film) facing the challenges of a diversifying, socioeconomically challenged Paris. Winner of the Palme d’Or in 2008—and one of the better depictions of France as, increasingly, a nation of immigrants.

The Hurt Locker (Hulu)
War heroes aren’t lacking for bang-up, blow-up, well-budgeted movie treatments. But the expert technicians of war certainly are—and despite being a broad Iraq War saga on its surface, Kathryn Bigelow’s instant-classic best-picture winner is an essential study of one of warfare’s most thankless, harrowing jobs: bomb detonation.

Inside Llewyn Davis
Joel and Ethan Coen’s bluesy, grumpy, freewheeling tribute to the Greenwich Village scene of the early 60s, and to the musicians whose efforts were bound—despite their struggles for recognition, radio plays, and steady work—to be forgotten by history.

The Phantom of the Operator (Fandor)
Caroline Martel’s oddball, inventive look at the hidden history of female telephone operators—which is largely a history we've been telling through movies.

Salesman (FilmStruck)
Albert and David Maysles’s urgent, on-the-ground look, from 1969, at a profession that seemingly dies before our eyes: the traveling Bible salesman. One of the best documentaries ever made.

Support the Girls
Andrew Bujalski’s wonderfully low-key comedy (which is also currently in theaters) stars Regina Hall as the general manager and den mother of a Hooters-esque sports bar that’s staffed by hard-working, underpaid young women. An ode to the under-appreciated—and to the rare manager who gives a damn.

Jeanne Dielman 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (FilmStruck)
Womanhood in real time. Late French master Chantal Akerman’s arthouse domestic epic from 1975 painstakingly depicts seemingly every minute of a single mother’s life as she cooks, cleans, and turns tricks for subsistence over the course of three days. Variations arise—and with them ricochet unsettling truths. A groundbreaking movie, not least for being a fine-tuned, unheralded examination of one woman’s life.

Magic Mike (Netflix)
Popularly (and rightfully) known as an entertaining jaunt about male erotic dancers (chief among them a titanium-muscled Channing Tatum), this smooth number from Steven Soderbergh also, notably, depicts the travails of working-class men trying to build futures for themselves in a post-downturn U.S.A. The economic anxiety is real—even if the bulges aren’t.

Labors of Love

Amour
Michael Haneke’s startling account of an octogenarian couple whose devotion is tested when the woman, Anne (played by Emmanuelle Riva), has a stroke and her husband (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who has aches of his own, becomes her caretaker. It’s as much about the boundaries of love as it is about the social habits of class.

A Woman Under the Influence (FilmStruck)
A wise, shattering heartbreaker, directed by John Cassavetes, about the mistakes we make in caring for those we love. Starring Gena Rowlands as an emotionally broken-down housewife and Peter Falk as her loving but tragically miscomprehending husband.

The Babadook (Netflix)
Here, the stress of single motherhood manifests as a bedtime-story monster that huffs, puffs, and screeches its way through a woman’s life. In other words: Jennifer Kent’s viscerally exhausting debut is a nightmare.

Imitation of Life
Motherhood is a full-time job—especially if it entails pretending to be your fair-skinned daughter’s black maid to spare her the social consequences of her racial identity. Compassionate, tragic, and utterly canonical, Douglas Sirk’s 1959 film—with its heart-stopping turns from Lana Turner and Juanita Moore—is one of the very best melodramas ever made.

Set It Off
Why do the women of F. Gary Gray’s bank-robbing classic turn to a life of crime? For their sons, brothers, girlfriends, husbands—and finally, for themselves. Starring Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah, Kimberly Elise, and Vivica A. Fox as a quartet of underpaid, exploited women at the end of their collective rope.

Professional Crooks

Le Samouraï (FilmStruck; Kanopy)
Quiet, deadly, and crisp as a razor’s edge, a disconcertingly handsome Alain Delon stars in this 1967 Jean-Pierre Melville study of a contract killer whose instincts are as well-honed and cleanly articulated as that of a samurai warrior.

Logan Lucky (Amazon Prime)
Steven Soderbergh’s richly satisfying, star-studded 2017 tale of a West Virginia heist gone right reimagines the white working class as the savviest people in the room—contrary to a harmful cultural stereotype, and owing in no small part to homegrown, practical know-how and an army of color-coded roaches.

Thief (Amazon Prime)
A timeless, Tangerine Dream–scored Michael Mann crime romance about an expert safe-cracker (James Caan) who, having had a rich career evading the law, is now thinking of settling down for retirement—and a woman (Tuesday Weld).

Pickpocket (FilmStruck)
Few things in movie history are as beautiful as Martin LaSalle’s compulsive thief slipping his hand, with balletic elegance, into the pockets of the unsuspecting. A tale of crime and redemption in which the crime couldn’t be more aesthetically beautiful—one of French legend Robert Bresson’s very best.

A Day at the Office

9 to 5 (HBONow)
Notable not only for the wild, sunny, comical antics of Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton—who turn the tables on their egotistical, stupid boss—but also for the son who leaves a surprise joint in his mom’s purse in case she ever needs a comedown after a long day at work. The boy is a true ally.

The Apartment
Billy Wilder’s near-perfect 1960 comedy about a Jack Lemmon nebbish who, in addition to falling for an elevator girl (Shirley MacLaine), allows his higher-ups to string him along with promises of a promotion in exchange for getting to use his apartment like a no-tell motel every night. The movie’s only flaw? Lemmon never seems to change his sheets.

His Girl Friday (Amazon Prime)
First of all: Rosalind Russell’s pinstripes. Second of all, Russell herself—and the fast-talking, quick-on-her-feet ace reporter she plays in this Howard Hawks classic. Hildy not only has to outgun everyone else in the newsroom; she also has to outsmart her wiley ex-husband (Cary Grant), who’s got his mind set on sabotaging her upcoming marriage.

Office Space
No introduction needed (I hope).

The Wolf of Wall Street
Debaucherous and unprofessional as it is, the world of Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese’s 2013 banger is still very much a place of business—one overrun by riotous, money-hungry rituals, such as an exhausting dependence on sex and drugs and regular sermons from the boss that render money into a religion. Which, for these people, it is.

Working Girl
Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford, Sigourney Weaver, Mike Nichols: powered by a perfect cast in the hands of a smart director, this 1988 jaunt is a classic story of workplace politics, sex, and the satisfaction of comeuppance.

We Shall Not Be Moved!

Dancer in the Dark
The heartbreaking movie musical that occasioned Björk’s red-carpet swan dress, in which Björk plays a daydreaming factory worker with a degenerative eye disease who, caught up in a fatal crime, persistently sings away her woes—even as the rope tightens around her neck.

The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley
A one-two knockout punch from the great American director John Ford, whose heartbreaking 1940s depictions of a Depression-era Okie family and a Welsh mining family’s fading way of life, respectively, still constitute two of the most passionate testaments to the working underclass ever made.

Hidden Figures
A moving historical corrective: Janelle Monáe, Octavia Spencer, and Taraji P. Henson star as the real-life trio of black women whose mathematical, engineering, and computer smarts were essential to sending the likes of John Glenn into outer space. A wise depiction, too, of racial segregation circa the early years of the U.S. space program.

The Last Laugh (Kanopy)
In this all-time-great F. W. Murnau silent from 1925, an elderly doorman (Emil Jannings) gets demoted, socially outcast, and driven into shame. But in a surprisingly wry, twist ending, the movie imagines a rapid reversal in fortune—and, with a smirk, challenges the meaning of his fate.

The Measure of a Man (Netflix)
Vincent Lindon stars in this realistic French drama from 2015 about a man struggling to find work after being laid off from a well-paying white-collar job. A portrait of France’s crumbling infrastructure—and a maddening investigation of people getting lost in the system.

Two Days, One Night (Hulu)
Jean and Luc Dardenne’s queasily suspenseful portrait of a depressive factory worker (Marion Cotillard) whose colleagues receive raises after she’s laid off—and who has only two days to convince them to relinquish that money, despite their own financial woes, in order for her to get her job back. A ground-level account of industrial cost-cutting’s human toll.

Industry and Exploitation

12 Years a Slave
As memorable for its beauty as its brutality, Steve McQueen’s best-picture winner stands out for its tragic reminder—by way of the slave-girl Patsey (the Oscar-winning Lupita Nyong’o)—that sexual violence was essential to the labor of slavery. Rare is the movie that confronts this head-on; McQueen’s is a worthy attempt, and a captivating depiction of slavery besides.

Blade Runner
An oft-overlooked fact: replicants are slave labor. This super-strong, superhuman species of artificial intelligence was designed to carry out the “off-world” labor humans couldn’t, at humans’ behest. And when you think of it that way, maybe the quests of Roy (Rutger Hauer), Pris (Daryl Hannah), and the others play a little differently. Maybe Harrison Ford’s mission to hunt them down, slave catcher–style, plays differently, too.

Leviathan (Fandor)
A wordless, brutal, atmospheric trip on a groundfish trawler, courtesy of documentarians Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel and the ship’s Massachusetts-based crew. More than merely an inside view into the fishing industry, the film is an overwhelming, discomfiting, sensory tour de force.

Machines (Amazon Prime; Kanopy)
The steaming, restless engines powering a textile mill in Gujarat, India, are no doubt the “machines” of this Rahul Jain documentary from 2016. But the laboring men and boys therein are machines, too, or expected to be, as they dazedly work their gruesome 36-hour shifts—you even see one boy fall asleep on the job. Sparse interviews and gritty images comprise this feat of mood and immersion, an unrepentantly damning account of wage slavery.

Manufactured Landscapes (Amazon Prime; Fandor)
Documentarian Jennifer Baichwal’s fascinating study of the photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose work documents the effect industrialism and manufacturing have on our built environments and everyday lives.

Modern Times (FilmStruck)
Charlie Chaplin’s last outing as his iconic “Little Tramp,” from 1936, starts out as a raucous comedy about the follies of an overworked production line—but what ultimately emerges is a poignant study of the ups and downs of unemployment, and of post-Depression hopes and dreams, in an industrial age.

Robocop
Paul Verhoeven’s timeless, antagonistic classic depicts a foolproof way to exploit someone after they die: stuff their brain into a robot so that they keep working. As a cop, no less!

A Touch of Sin (Fandor; Kanopy)
Chinese master Jia Zhang-ke’s surrealistically stylish cinematic quartet from 2013 scrutinizes an industrializing China from the perspective of the exploited. Each of its four separate threads—ranging from the travails of a village labor chief to a worker at a cell-phone manufacturer—ends in a startling act of violence: political rage manifest as sudden, ghoulish bloodletting that knocks the movie out of orbit, resets, and does it again.

Street of Shame (FilmStruck)
Japanese master auteur Kenji Mizoguchi made several films protesting the patriarchal ill-treatment of women, particularly of sex workers—of which this offering, from 1956, is the very last, and one of the best.

The Work of Art

Burden of Dreams (FilmStruck) and Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse
The parallel heights of filmmaking folly. One is Les Blank’s 1982 account of Werner Herzog’s needlessly ambitious trek into the Amazonian jungle—with two full-sized ships and an army of indigenous laborers in tow—to film Fitzcarraldo; the other is Eleanor Coppola et. al.’s 1991 documentary about her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s sweaty, panicked, disaster-prone efforts to film his 1979 classic Apocalypse Now.

Police Story (Kanopy)
Jackie Chan’s puts the “action” in action movie, with an astonishing, incredibly revealing end-credit blooper reel—an eventual Jackie Chan staple—that gives audiences a daring peek behind the curtain.

The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman (Kanopy)

No, not one movie, but an entire body of work. Frederick Wiseman—one of the greatest living documentarians—makes movies that study the complex, fraught, collaborative, and sometimes tragic inner workings of our cultural institutions, from our meat factories (1976’s Meat) and libraries (2017’s Ex Libris — The New York Public Library) to our political bureaucracies (State Legislature), health-care systems (Hospital and Near Death), strip clubs (Crazy Horse), police forces (Law & Order) and on and on.

Wiseman studies these institutions by training his eye on the people therein; he builds movies out of their unsensationalized everyday experiences, down to the rhythms of their debates and the ups and downs of their daily labor. Once rare and hard to see, his entire catalog is now streaming free of charge—with proof of a library subscription—on Kanopy.