You want made-for-tv, you have to look at the 70s.  They actually gave some of them decent budgets and paid for good writing.  ABC, especially had several tv movies, written by people like Richard Matheson, and the horror genre was well represented, with things like Trilogy of Terror, Bad Ronald, and a few others (including Killdozer, depending on your perspective).  By the 80s, accountants were running the networks, just as they had taken over the film studios and they were doing things on the cheap, apart from the odd pockets of extravagance, like Aaron Spelling.  That's also the decade they went from hiding brand logos to charging to have them displayed within a program.

Since a movie from 2012 doesn't really fall into the 'classic' category yet, and given this thread's title and the fact that it's already been touched upon upthread, this seems like the best place to mention that I finally got around to watching Django Unchained last night. I'm not the biggest fan of Tarantino's oeuvre (and I think he peaked with the excellent Jackie Brown), I wasn't really interested in seeing this when it first came out and became all the rage for a while. Also, I was leery about this one because I have seen Inglorious Basterds and despite it's over-the-top almost comic-booky premise (a team of mainly Jewish commandos killing Nazis behind enemy lines), some entertaining bits and a few stellar performances by its various stars, something about Tarantino's take on revisionist/alternate history presented therein rubbed me the wrong way.
However, I ended up really enjoying Django. I liked that it's sort of an homage to the spaghetti Westerns and the Blaxploitation flicks of the 1970s (with wink-and-nod suggestion that Django and Hildi are John Shaft's ancestors), while also not shying away from depicting the brutality of slavery. And Christoph Waltz just stole the show whenever he was on screen.

Hinkley obsessed about Jodi Foster and this film.  He actually stalked her well before the assassination attempt on Reagan and even turned up on her doorstep, while she was attending Yale.  He went to a play she was in, with the intention of killing her during the performance, but changed his mind during it.  He was a seriously sick puppy.  What's worse is that she has had to maintain constant high security because of other nutjobs who were inspired by Hinkley.

My interpretation is that Travis is a Vietnam vet, who longs to be a hero and/or someone important.  He was likely disturbed before Vietnam and his experiences made it worse.  He turns his attention to Cybil Sheppard, hoping to impress her, even if he has to kill the political candidate to do it.  He also is obsessed with Foster's character and rescuing her, which he eventually does.

I didn't see it until years later, but recall seeing the scenes of him working out, developing the fast draw rig, and the whole "You talkin' to me?" bit.  Those clips were played endlessly on tv.  They actually got him to parody it for Rocky & Bullwinkle, when he played Fearless Leader.

Martin Scorcese has spoken (perhaps written) about how much he was influenced by John Ford's The Searchers in general and in making Taxi Driver in particular. Substitute Deniro's Travis Bickel for John Wayne's Ethan Edwards, Harvey Keitel's Sport for Henry Brandon's Scar (notice his feathers), Jodie Foster's Iris for Natalie Wood's Debbie and the world of prositution for the Comanche camps and you're on your way. Of course it goes deeper than these clues that Scorcese is in a sense updatinf]g the 1956 classic. 

Paul Schrader, the TD screenwriter, is another of directors who point to The Searchers as the movie that influenced them most.

Schrader admitted that his film Hardcore is essentially a rewrite of The Searchers with George C. Scott playing a father obsessed with rescuing his daughter from the underworld of pornographic film. Not a pleasant film to watch  -- I've only seen it once, and that was close to 40 years ago  -- but it is just as intense as you might imagine it to be, given the presences of Schrader and Scott.

The Searchers is less graphic visually, but its portrayal of the violence, moral superiority and the ambiguity of heroism is no less obvious than it is in than its cinematic descendants.

Spielberg, Lucas, and the testosterone-fueled John Milius also have spoken, written and demonstrated in their films their admiration for The Searchers. 

Finally saw another recentish movie that created a ton of buzz when it came out but which I never managed to see: 2016's Arrival. It's already been discussed by other members on several occasions in the New and Upcoming Movies Discussion thread (here and here), so I won't go over the main plot points. I'll just say that I liked it quite a bit. I'm a big fan of high-concept SF when done right, and for the most part, I think Arrival was really well done. I didn't even mind the overriding somber tone, and I found the linguistic discussion at the heart of the story fascinating (I tend to enjoy explorations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in SF). Perhaps my only criticism would be the relative speed with which the main character, played quite well by Amy Adams, figured out a working vocabulary to kind-of/sort-of converse with the aliens.