This film from co-directors Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott about two brothers in the restaurant business is a fantastic comedy as well as a great movie about cooking and eating. But it’s also a terrific look at the nuts and bolts of the restaurant industry, especially the difficulty of balancing a grand and uncompromising vision against the realities of the marketplace. The two Italian brothers (Tucci as the South Jersey restaurant’s manager, Secondo, and Tony Shalhoub as its temperamental genius chef, Primo) have made a commitment to serving an authentic, old country-style version of their native cuisine. They’re doing so badly that they’re on the brink of closure. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a rival restaurateur (Ian Holm) has done fantastically well peddling the public a “Lady and the Tramp”-style image of Italian dining, with red checkered tablecloths and nonstop music and gratuitous flames and other forms of corny spectacle. The brothers are banking on integrity and the love of their neighbors to get them through the next fiscal quarter — and a good review from a New York Times critic whom they’re expecting to attend a Hail Mary fundraising dinner. But what they probably need is less pride and more shamelessness. When customers ask for a bowl of spaghetti with a meal that already includes risotto, and Primo balks because that would mean serving them two starches, Secondo later admonishes him: “This is a restaurant … not a fucking school!.

You know we had to list it. Mike Judge’s comedy is the precursor to both versions of “The Office” and the cinematic extension of Scott Adams’ classic comic strip “Dilbert” — a stinging, hilarious, maybe definitive portrait of life in a modern office, with its mordant humor, petty turf wars and death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts insults. It also has plenty to say about life in a post-industrial, post-dignity economy — one in which wage slaves terrified of losing their standard of living get shuffled around or deleted like lines of code in a program, and take the abuse while desperately clinging to phony-macho pop culture images of fearsome self-determination. (There’s a great running gag about nerdy white-collar workers listening to violent gangsta rap, culminating in a brilliant, music video-style action sequence of three characters destroying a defective printer in slow-motion while the Geto Boys’ “Still” blasts on the soundtrack.) All these characters are products of lifelong social conditioning. That’s why it takes a hypnotic suggestion to make hero Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) rebel against fear and conformity, and carry himself like a blissful rebel who doesn’t care about success. The movie detours (amusingly) into outright farce in its second half, but up till that point, “Office Space” is a great, grim comedy about what it means to be a worker in the information age, and being burdened by chains you don’t even know you’re carrying around.

It’s possible for non-Catholics who get all their knowledge of religion from movies to think that priests spend 98 percent of their time taking confessions and the other 2 percent molesting kids, exorcising demons or warning gangsters to mend their ways. Robert Bresson’s 1951 drama “Diary of a Country Priest” shows what the job actually entails: propagating religion and strengthening faith by getting to know as many parishioners as possible. One of the most uncompromising and realistic films ever made about the daily practice of religion, the film is one of the best stand-alone explanations of what a priest does. The title character (Claude Laydu) goes into his new parish with multiple handicaps: He’s a newcomer, he’s suffering from a mysterious stomach ailment, and he practices a lifestyle of deprivation that alienates him from more modern-minded townspeople. There are hints that his behavior suggests a death wish, that he’s doing himself in slowly, and he’s certainly very depressed — but who notices when a priest is depressed, except perhaps a priest, or a nun? On top of all that, almost none of the parishioners who converse with him are seeking to perfect their own faith; they just want to argue with him, or test themselves against him, or sarcastically belittle what he does. Why? Maybe it’s because, despite having a job that combines elements of a small-town politician, a therapist and a door-to-door salesman, the priest’s very existence reminds them of their own mortality. Bresson certainly photographs the hero that way: as a black-clad deliverer of uncomfortable truths, pedaling around town on his own version of death’s pale horse, a bicycle.

Although this debut film by actor-writer-director John Turturro won the Camera D’Or at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, it never quite found an audience in the United States; that’s too bad, because it’s a raucously entertaining and often ferociously intense film about brotherhood, business and hard physical labor, three subjects that film has always been good at exploring. Turturro plays the title character, Niccolo (Mac) Vitelli, the eldest of three siblings who takes over the family’s Queens, N.Y.-based homebuilding business after their father’s death. By turns gently comic and mortifyingly weird, “Mac” shows you every aspect of the title character’s trade, from the acquisition of land and materials to the drawing up of blueprints to the assembly of a crew and the constant struggle to capitalize new projects with competitors figuratively (and sometimes literally) stepping on your turf. Mac is the prototypical up-by-my-own-bootstraps artisan-entrepreneur, a passionate but often impossibly arrogant man who believes that there are two ways to do everything: the wrong way, and his way. (This is the only film I can recall that makes a point of showing you the correct way to drive a nail into wood with a hammer.) Anybody who’s ever owned a small business will appreciate this film. Schedule it as part of a DVD double feature with “Big Night,” eat Italian food, and put together some furniture.

Writer-director John Sayles’ greatest movie (and certainly his most strikingly photographed, courtesy of Haskell Wexler), this account of a 1920 strike in a West Virginia coal mining community gives you a sense of what life was like when corporations ruled entire states with arrogant certitude. The miners here are less employees than indentured servants, living on company land, wearing company clothes, using company gear and, when they get injured thanks to shoddy safety regulations, getting treated by company doctors and then losing money while they sit on the sidelines, healing. Chris Cooper plays the union organizer who tries to convince native whites and blacks and immigrant Italians to set aside surface differences and demand their rights, even if it means having to face hired strikebreakers who are willing to kill on behalf of the bosses. One of the organizer’s speeches distills a century’s worth of agitprop about the devious ruling class into three sentences: “They got you fightin’ white against colored, native against foreign, hollow against hollow, when you know there ain’t but two sides in this world — them that work and them that don’t. You work, they don’t. That’s all you got to know about the enemy.”

If you’ve never seen Akira Kurosawa’s sprawling crime thriller, you may feel a sense of d

One of the best American movies you’ve never heard of, this is also one of the great American indies that’s not available on DVD (though there appear to be a few VHS copies floating around the Internet. This is a truly baffling state of affairs considering that the film’s director, Chris Smith, went on to make a second film that’s widely regarded as a classic, and that might have made it onto this list if I weren’t saving for a future list of great films about filmmaking: the documentary “American Movie” (1999). Similar in tone to “Office Space,” which came out three years later, Smith’s “American Job” is based on a zine created by the film’s star, Randy Russell, about various menial jobs Russell held, including stints at a fast-food chicken restaurant, a plastic-mold factory and a telemarketing firm. There are no fictional characters or invented dialogue. It’s more like a neorealist experiment, with various real people playing themselves under their own names; Smith just had Russell revisit the jobs he held when he was publishing the zine, and re-enact situations Russell had written about while the director rolled film. Everything you see on-screen is really happening (including the boredom and the slightly surreal conversations with middle managers desperately trying to convince themselves that they’re important). The grinding repetition, the marking of territory, and the obsession with the microscopic fine points of policy and procedure remain constant no matter what job the hero is doing for a paycheck.

“All right! Let’s go to work!” That’s the last line of director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s Oscar-winner, a pulpy, impassioned melodrama that remains controversial to this day thanks to the filmmakers’ collaboration with the House Un-American Activities Committee. The film is compelling as a gangster picture, a romance, a tale of redemption, and a muckraking expos

Albert and David Maysles’ documentary “Salesman,” about door-to-door Bible salesmen struggling to make their quotas, is one of the greatest of all American films, and a tremendously insightful film about work — how it defines you and what it takes out of you. The tale begins in earnest when a representative from the salesmen’s head office warns them that they’re about to start trimming the fat from the company, and that anyone who doesn’t qualify as a top earner is in danger of getting fired. (The scene is very similar to the one in “Glengarry Glen Ross” where Alec Baldwin’s character puts the fear of God in the real estate office.) Much of the rest of the story unfolds in suburban Florida, and simply shows the salesmen making their rounds, knocking on doors and trying to sell fantastically elaborate, expensive Bibles to a variety of men and women, most of whom don’t want, much less need, the product. There’s a subtle but excruciating tension under every scene. You wonder if the salesman will make his sale, and if he’ll have to somehow bamboozle the customer in order to do it. Each encounter is a test of many different kinds: a test of gumption, of resourcefulness, of willpower, and most of all, of the ability to take the emotional temperature of a room and adjust one’s words accordingly. Anybody who’s ever worked for a living will appreciate this film.

Yes, indeed. This bloody science fiction movie about a drooling insectoid beast is perched at the top of a list of great films about work. And here’s why: Ridley Scott’s 1979 shocker isn’t just a haunted house movie set in space, or a nightmare fantasy of forced sex and reproduction: Instead, it’s a cautionary tale about what happens when employees of a major corporation fail to trust that little voice inside of them that says, “Something is wrong,” and decide to do as they’re told. The employees of the mining vessel Nostromo are deep in hypersleep when they’re awakened by a “distress signal” that’s not really a distress signal, originating from an alien starship that crashed on a planet that’s not even on the crew’s official return course. After some cranky discussion of “the bonus situation,” they head down to the planet in a shuttle and explore the wreck. From then on out, things get bad fast — and certain characters’ concern about successfully completing their altered mission or protecting company property only makes it all worse. (The most vocal advocate for obeying the letter and spirit of company policy is the science officer, Ash — who, significant enough, turns out not to be human at all.) You know how this tale ends: with sole survivor Ripley barely managing to save her pet cat and blast the title monster into space, and the stage being set for three sequels that show the company’s greedy plan (to capture and study an alien for use in some sort of military research), endangering the fate of the entire human race. What happens when you put the financial well-being of a company ahead of rational self-interest? You end up flat on your back in an operating room with a giant lobster creature on your face and a razor-toothed eel gestating in your belly. Happy Labor Day!