(Comments and feedback welcome)
Just as with any industry, Information Technology has a common cultural basis. Just as doctors and lawyers from different parts of the country watch the same TV shows and read the same books, IT people have a common cultural basis.
IT culture is formed by movies (IT people generally watch a LOT of movies) and technology, and ironically, by movies ABOUT technology. The goal of this list (“required reading (movie) list”) is to expose a person to all the basic memes (A “meme” is a cultural element) common in IT culture. This is not a “all the cool movies in the universe” list, as numerous fanboys already have dozens of those, and spend countless hours presumably arguing about them.