Movies fulfill a crucially important mass-therapy function. WALL-E, for instance, made the terrifying threats of global warming and environmental disaster a little lighter if only for a couple of hours. Likewise, an enrossing film about people finding happiness amidst insurmountable odds are just what folks are looking for in these times of economic hardship (witness this year’s Best Picture-winner). To create a filmic buffer against hard times, re-fashion your Netflix cue with The Onion’s A.V. Club’s 21 Movies to Put the Recession in Perspective. It’s an interesting mix of hopeful and dire films, so we’d like to add one of each to their list.

Hopeful Addition: The Wiz (1978)

So much of the list is given over to Great Depression movies that it’s easy to forget other moments of economic disaster, like The Wiz’s re-imagined urban America of the 1970s.

Dire Addition: On the Waterfront (1954)

Another brutal vision of city-dwellers living in squalor, wedged between corrupt unions and greedy mobsters.