Other streamers, especially those with close corporate ties to major movie studios, might reel in a few more major theatrical releases than Netflix. Where Netflix outshines them, however, is in its slate of original movies produced specifically for the streaming service. At a glance, it might seem as though the streamer emphasizes quantity over quality, but they've released nine Best Picture Academy Award nominees since 2019. Oscars aren't everything, of course—but they're not nothing, either.
Here, then, are some of the best recent movies streaming on Netflix, whether wide theatrical releases you might have missed, or originals.
Society of the Snow (2023)
The true story of the 1972 Uruguayan rugby team lost in the Andes following a place crash has been the subject of multiple documentaries and two previous dramas. For all that, this would seem to be the best of all of them: a thoughtful and tasteful take on what's sometimes been presented as a salacious drama, with director J. A. Bayona emphasizing both the physical perils faced by the team, but also the spiritual toll of survival.
Thanksgiving (2023)
Patrick Dempsey stars in this funny but bleak satire from Eli Roth, his first horror film since 2013. When an unruly mob storms a Walmart (sorry: RightMart) on Black Friday, violence and bloodshed ensue, leaving one of the victims of the incident to seek revenge. It's wild and gory holiday fun.
Anyone but You (2023)
A loose spin on Much Ado About Nothing, Anyone But You stars Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell as a couple who meet, hit it off—and then immediately piss each other off such that neither really wants to see each other again. Until, of course, they need wedding dates and find themselves surrounded by scheming friends. It's not wildly out there as rom-com premises go, but this one's briskly directed and boasts strong chemistry between the leads.
Orion in the Dark (2024)
Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) wrote this DreamWorks animated adaptation of the Emma Yarlett novel. When Orion is visited by the literal incarnation of his fear of the dark, he's taken on a whirlwind journey around the world to explore the world of night and help him to face his fears.
The Perfect Find (2023)
Numa Perrier’s film hits plenty of the traditional rom-com beats, but no matter: Lead Gabrielle Union provides the spark that ignites the whole film (based on the Tia Williams novel). She’s never been better than she is here, playing Jenna, a woman in her 40s making a clean break of a long-term relationship and taking on a high-profile, high-stakes career in beauty journalism—only to wind up in a one-night stand with Eric (Keith Powers), 15 years younger and the son of her boss.
Damsel (2024)
Netflix's favorite action lead, Millie Bobby Brown, is back in this dark fantasy from director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later). Brown plays Elodie, the damsel of the title, offered into an arranged marriage by her family, only to discover that she's marked as the sacrifice to a dragon. Which turns out to be bad news for her new in-laws.
Rebel Moon, Parts One and Two (2023/2024)
Zack Snyder, late of the entire DC cinematic universe, isn't to everyone's taste—but his Army of the Dead, also for Netflix, was a fun spin on the zombie formula, done as a heist movie. His followup is pure science fiction: a multi-part (it's unclear how many parts that will be) space opera that blends Snyder's distinctive visual style with Star Wars-style action. Sofia Boutella stars as a former soldier who rallies warriors from across the galaxy to join in a revolt against the imperial Motherworld on the title's out-of-the-way farming moon.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023)
This short adaptation of the Roald Dahl story finally earned Wes Anderson his first Oscar. Benedict Cumberbatch stars as the titular Henry Sugar, a man who uses his inherited fortune to fund his gambling habit. When he learns of a secret means of winning by seeing through the eyes of others, he comes to perceive more than he, perhaps, bargained for. It's cute and sweet, and among one of Anderson's most visually inventive works (which is saying quite a bit). At 39 minutes, it never has time to wear out its welcome—even if you're not a huge fan of Anderson''s twee sensibilities. Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, and Richard Ayoade also star.
American Symphony (2023)
Director Matthew Heineman's film follows a year in the lives of writer Suleika Jaouad and her husband, musician Jon Batiste, during which she confronts a recurrence of a rare form of leukemia while he constructs his first symphony. It's a moving film that goes beyond the obvious tropes to make the case that there are things that only music can say. It had a lot of Oscar buzz, while receiving just a single nomination for Best Song.
Scoop (2024)
The great Gillian Anderson plays real-life British journalist Emily Maitlis, who lead the BBC2 team that secured the disastrous (for the Prince) interview with Prince Andrew (Rufus Sewell) that laid bare his associations with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Keeley Hawes and Billie Piper also star.
We Have a Ghost (2023)
Christopher Landon, writer/director behind innovative comedy-horror movies like Happy Death Day and Freaky (and, briefly, of the next Scream movie), helms this similarly fun but more family-friendly entry. Anthony Mackie is in the lead as Frank Presley, who, with his family, buys a cheap fixer-upper, only for his son Kevin (Jahi Winston) to discover a ghost (played by David Harbour) unliving in the attic. So far, familiar territory, but Kevin wants to help their new ghost while dad only wants to make money—and so, their ghost goes viral.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)
He may be America's least favorite Chris, but Mr. Pratt still leads the voice cast for the year's second highest-grossing movie: a colorful, goofy animated adventure pitting proudly Italian-American brothers Mario and Luigi against Bowser (Jack Black), King of the Koopas.
May December (2023)
Todd Haynes directs this insightful and moving, but also deliberately campy, story of an actress visiting the woman whom she'll be playing in a film. The movie's deft, and unexpected, blending of tones makes it pretty consistently fascinating, and the lead performances from Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, and Charles Melton are all top-tier.
Nyad (2023)
Annette Benning stars as the real-life Diana Nyad, who swam from Florida to Cuba in her 60s. The movie succeeds in large part because of the performances from and chemistry between lead Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, both of whom received Oscar nominations for their work here.
The Killer (2023)
David Fincher's latest didn't seem to generate his typical buzz, perhaps because it's so thoroughly action-oriented (a far cry from his last Netflix original, the screenplay-writing drama Mank). Michael Fassbender plays the movie's nameless hitman protagonist, a fastidious and ruthless killer who makes the first mistake of his career—accidentally shooting the wrong person—and then finds his carefully managed life crumbling faster than he can keep up.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
The sequel to one of the very best superhero movies pretty much ever is also excellent, and even more visually innovative than the first. Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is back, joined by Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld), herself on a secret mission that puts them both at odds with pretty much every Spider in the multiverse.
Rustin (2023)
Colman Domingo gives a stellar performance (earning a Best Actor Oscar nomination) as the title's Bayard Rustin, the gay Civil Rights leader who planned the March on Washington. Not only is it a corrective to our very straight-centered vision of the Civil Rights Movement, it's a stylish and moving biopic in its own right.
Nimona (2023)
Long in the making, and based on the similarly delightful graphic novel by ND Stevenson, Nimona is a heartfelt, joyful, and funny fantasy set in a futuristic world that's also thoroughly medieval in its look and feel. Ballister Boldheart, alongside his boyfriend, Ambrosius Goldenloin, is about to be knighted by the queen, and he’ll be the first commoner ever to receive the honor. All good, until he’s framed for the queen’s murder and forced to flee, becoming the criminal that the snobs already took him for. Luckily (or not) he’s joined by Nimona, a teenager who’s an outcast because of her shapeshifting powers.
Wedding Season (2023)
Asha (Pallavi Sharda) just broke off her engagement and left her Wall Street investment firm in favor of a Jersey City startup. Her concerned mother sets her daughter up on a dating app, and Asha acquiesces to a single date with the first match: Ravi (Suraj Sharma). It doesn’t go particularly well, but they’re both under a lot of parental pressure to get married, and Asha has about a dozen weddings to go to over the course of the summer, most of them filled with busybodies who want to see her in a relationship. So, naturally (for a movie), Ahsa and Ravi decide to play at being a couple to get people off their backs—which works out fine, until it doesn’t.
They Cloned Tyrone (2023)
This smart, funny genre mashup spins plenty of plates, and mostly manages to keep them from crashing down. John Boyega stars as Fontaine, a drug dealer in a world just off to the side of our own (there’s definitely some Blaxsploitation influence in the dress styles). Following a showdown with one-time Pimp of the Year(!) Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), Fontaine is shot dead before waking up in his own bed with nothing, seemingly, having changed. Teaming up with Slick Charles and sex worker Yo Yo (Teyonah Parris), he leads the three of them into an unlikely web of scientific conspiracy.
Leave the World Behind (2023)
Look at this cast: Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, Myha'la Herrold (Industry), and Kevin Bacon are all on hand for this apocalyptic thriller that has that Bird Box vibe without the alien implications—the monsters here are all human. As technology begins to inexplicably fail, our protagonists find themselves in a last-days-of-America scenario, including a scene of self-driving Teslas run amok. It's occasionally a little on the nose, but still a pretty compelling thriller.
City Hunter (2024)
The City Hunter manga, about the titular detective agency, has been adapted several times in the past, with very mixed results. This latest looks like it might be the best: a candy-colored, high-action, appropriately goofy take starring Ryohei Suzuki as lead detective Ryo Saeba and Misato Morita as the daughter of his murdered partner, with whom he teams up to avenge that death and to find a missing teenage runaway with deadly superpowers.
Spaceman (2024)
Adam Sandler stars here in one of his occasional dramatic roles, here as a Czech astronaut coming to terms with the potential dissolution of his marriage. At the edge of the solar system. With some help from a spider-like alien creature trying to understand humanity. Carey Mulligan and Isabella Rossellini co-star.
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023)
If it's not entirely on the same level as the Aardman-animated original from way back in 2000, it's still a delightful and cheeky return from the escapees from Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy's Farm. Thandiwe Newton leads the impressive voice cast.
Down the Rabbit Hole (2024)
The House of Flowers creator Manolo Caro directs this quirky and thoughtful drama about meticulous, fussy kid Tochtli (Miguel Valverde), living in a palatial estate somewhere in rural Mexico. He's old enough to start questioning his wildly privileged and sheltered life, slowly discovering that his father Yolcaut (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is a major, well-connected drug lord. It's a quietly stylish drama that avoids taking any obvious routes.
From the earliest days of cinema history, cartoons were never just for kids, and it’s important not to confuse the medium with a genre.
Animation has produced movies that are charming, romantic, harrowing, musical, magical, dystopian, funny...and pretty much every other adjective you might use to describe a story that you’d find in a live-action. That said, the best animated movies tell stories that are particularly well-suited to a cartoon canvas. Here are 40 of those that you can stream right now, spanning many genres and age ranges.
Turning Red (2022)
Whenever 13-year-old Mei Lee gets too excited, she turns into a giant red panda, which happens for the first time the morning after her overprotective mother embarrasses her in front of the older boy she has a crush on. A bright and lively coming-of-age story about the virtues of embracing change and letting your giant red panda flag fly, it's very much a movie that works with kids—but the lessons here also apply to parents, who might need reminding that it's OK to let kids grow up and be a little (or a lot) different.
Where to stream: Disney+
Wendell & Wild (2022)
This was the first film since 2009 from director Henry Selick, of A Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline (both movies to which we'll return, don't worry). Having not lost a step, and joined here by co-writer Jordan Peele, the director fashioned another stop-motion masterpiece, this time about a couple of demon brothers (Peele and Keegan-Michael Key) and the troubled young woman (voiced by Lyric Ross) who they try to manipulate into helping them start their own demon carnival. Turns out she's not such an easy mark.
Where to stream: Netflix
Soul (2020)
Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) is a pretty good jazz musician—but the high school music teacher’s life hasn’t been quite all he dreamed. At least until he falls down a manhole, dies, and discovers what it really means to have soul. This Pixar movie about finding your purpose won a Best Animated Feature Oscar, as well as one for Best Original Score for the work of Jon Batiste, Trent Reznor, and Atticus Ross.
Where to stream: Disney+
The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021)
Danny McBride voices technophobic Rick Mitchell, who teams up with his movie-obsessed daughter Katie (Abbi Jacobson) to save the world in this smartass-yet-heartwarming animated movie. Aspiring filmmaker Katie is constantly at odds with her dad, whose nature and tool obsessions (and general anxiety) leave him out of the loop when it comes to her dreams. Instead of letting Katie take a flight to college, Ricks opts for a road trip to help the whole family bond, which isn’t working out too well, even before a tech company’s AI goes rogue and threatens the entire world in hilariously animated ways. The family has to learn to respect their differences and understand each other in order to beat the machines.
Where to stream: Netflix
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Peter Parker is a supporting character in the best Spider-Man movie of them all, with Miles Morales reluctantly learning to become a hero with a little help from Spider-people from across the multiverse. The gorgeous, intentionally messy, ultra-stylish animation is like nothing you’ve ever seen.
Where to stream: FXNow, Fubo
Nimona (2023)
Based on the graphic novel by ND Stevenson, Nimona is a heartfelt, joyful, and very funny fantasy set in a futuristic world full of medieval trappings. Ballister Boldheart, alongside his boyfriend, Ambrosius Goldenloin, is about to be knighted by the queen, and he’ll be the first commoner ever to receive the honor. All good, until he’s framed for the queen’s murder and forced to flee, becoming the criminal that the snobs already took him for. Luckily (or not) he’s joined by Nimona, a teenager who’s been an outcast because of her shapeshifting powers. The two work to clear Ballister’s name, even as Nimona has things to teach Ballister about being true to your authentic self.
Where to stream: Netflix
Spirited Away (2001)
Hayao Miyazaki’s triumph is, not surprisingly, also one of the greatest films of all time (live-action or animated). It’s a work of tremendous beauty, with great care taken in each and every single frame. It’s the story of stubborn Chihiro, who goes on an adventure in a world of spirits to rescue her parents from a witch and to reclaim her name.
Where to stream: Max
The Iron Giant (1999)
In Cold War-era Maine, a giant alien robot becomes the focus of fear and paranoia from an American military who can only see his potential as a weapon—but also becomes the best friend to a lonely little boy who believes in his mechanical heart. Aside from being a deeply emotional experience, the characters here (including the giant robot) are as complex as any in live-action film. (The director, Brad Bird, went on to make The Incredibles, which certainly also could be on this list, but I didn’t want to just include every Pixar movie.)
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Sea Beast (2022)
Chris Williams, an animator who has either directed or had a hand in some of the best animated movies of the last decade (Bolt, Big Hero 6, Moana, etc.), brings us this story about a girl who stows away on the ship of a legendary monster hunter (Karl Urban) and sets off on an adventure that gives her new insight into what truly makes someone (or something) monstrous. It makes use of modern animation technology without ever feeling gimmicky.
Where to stream: Netflix
My Father’s Dragon (2022)
Loosely adapted from Ruth Stiles Gannett’s 1948 children’s novel and geared toward younger audiences than most other all-ages animated movies on this list, My Father’s Dragon still has enough wit and surprises to make it easy to recommend to just about anyone—along with more emotional intelligence than many movies made for adults. A boy named Elmer (Jacob Tremblay) and his shopkeeper mother, Dela (Golshifteh Farahani) leave their tight-knit town in favor of a bigger city—though the promise of better circumstances doesn’t quickly materialize. Elmer’s patience is rewarded, though, when a talking cat invites him on a beautiful, candy-colored adventure to meet a dragon and save an island.
Where to stream: Netflix
Bubble (2022)
From Attack on Titan and Death Note director Tetsurô Araki and an all-star creative team, Bubble finds Tokyo cut off from the rest of the world when reality-bending bubbles rain down on the city (shades of Stephen King’s Under the Dome, perhaps). It’s a gorgeous, parkour-infused love story, but it’s worth checking out for anyone who loves animation (or great sci-fi films in general).
Where to stream: Netflix
Akira (1988)
Set in a dystopian 2019, this beautiful cyberpunk classic finds biker Kaneda forced to face down his friend Tetsuo after he gains telekinetic abilities in an accident. The wildly kinetic movie and its highly detailed world set a new standard for anime—we’re still living in the animated world that writer/director Katsuhiro Otomo and company gave birth to with this one.
Where to stream: Hulu, Crunchyroll
Toy Story (1995)
I’m not sure that the first Toy Story is the best of the series, but it’s brilliant in its own right, not to mention technically groundbreaking, so, if you’re rewatching (or watching for the first time), it’s still the best place to start.
Where to stream: Disney+
Lightyear (2022)
Unpopular opinion alert: This movie deserves another chance. Though its confusing premise (it’s presented as the movie about Buzz Lightyear that inspired the toy from the Toy Story series) sent it to the bottom of the box office, Lightyear is, at heart, a characteristically charming, poignant Pixar film with a strong science fiction hook. Investigating a new world, Buzz (Chris Pine) and his best friend and commander Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) become stranded along with their team. Buzz commits to testing the hyperspace fuel that they’ll need to get home, but the resulting time dilation means that every brief trip into space sees years pass by for his friends on the surface. It’s the kind of poignant set-up that Pixar is so good at, even if it’s understandable that it left theatrical audiences scratching their heads.
Where to stream: Disney+
Ghost in the Shell (1995)
A legitimate cyberpunk mind-bender in the William Gibson mold, manga adaptation Ghost in the Shell easily stands alongside spiritual cinematic siblings like Blade Runner or The Matrix (which it explicitly inspired). From director Mamoru Oshii and writer Kazunori Itō, the film finds cyborg security officer Motoko Kusanagi on the hunt for a seemingly invincible hacker, the case leading her to question not only her own identity as, essentially, a robot with a human mind—but also the very nature of reality itself. Along with Akira, this movie became a gateway to anime for an entire generation of American fans, and it inspired an animated franchise, even though it stands entirely on its own.
Where to stream: Tubi, Freevee
Dumbo (1941)
One of early Disney's shortest films, Dumbo is a brisk, occasionally heartbreaking story about the titular elephant with the enormous ears. The movie's racist crows are a problem, but otherwise it's a tender, occasionally heartbreaking story about a kid who just wants to belong. "Baby Mine" is among the most effectively tearjerking numbers in the entire Disney musical pantheon.
Where to stream: Disney+
The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013)
Isao Takahata, the co-founder of Studio Ghibli alongside Hayao Miyazaki, capped his brilliant career with this Academy Award-nominee based on the 1,000-year-old folktale known as "The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter." The deceptively simple pencil and watercolor style is endlessly gorgeous. The story itself involves a woodsman who finds a baby in the bamboo and ultimately decides that it’s his fate to give her the life of a princess. The girl wants nothing more than the love of her family, but the movie turns on the dichotomy between that simple virtue and the need to satisfy the desires of family and community.
Where to stream: Max
Mulan (1998)
Yes, this is another example of Disney doing a westernized version of a non-western culture, with all of the problems and inaccuracies that entails. Nevertheless, it's still a beautiful, inspiring story of a young Chinese woman impersonating a man to take her father's place in the military, and saving her country from invading Huns in the process.
Where to stream: Disney+
Shrek (2001)
While Eddie Murphy feels like a highly questionable choice for Chinese-folktale-inspired Mulan, he's very much at home here as Donkey, teaming up with Mike Myers as the titular ogre to save the imprisoned Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz). The movie blends genuine laughs with some genuine feels, ultimately turning the Disney princess formula on its head by making clear that true beauty is found in the swamp. It was the very first film to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Where to stream: Netflix
Coraline (2009)
From the director of A Nightmare Before Christmas and based on the book by Neil Gaiman, the stop-motion-animated Coraline is every inch the dark fantasy that you'd expect from that team-up. In the film, Coraline explores her new home in the general absence of her preoccupied parents, discovers a door into a slightly sinister, but definitely appealing alternate universe. Coraline is forced to choose which reality she'd prefer to live in, and fight for the opportunity.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Blame! (2017)
In the future, the City grows like a virus, endlessly in all directions, humans long since having lost control of the automated systems designed to run things. Those same systems now see views humans as “illegals” to be purged, so flesh-and-blood survivors are caught between the city’s murderous defense systems and the need to find food. One group of humans, though, is on the hunt for the existence of someone with a genetic marker that they believe will allow for access to the city’s control systems—a hunt lead by Killy, a synthetic human who might have the key. Neat world-building here, and solid CGI animation.
Where to stream: Netflix
Chicken Run (2000)
The sharp Aardman Brothers comedy has some incredibly fun stop-motion animation and an awful lot of chickens. It remains the top-grossing stop-motion animated movie of all time. And 20+ years later, we got a similarly good sequel.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)
The late, great Kevin Conroy is joined by Mark Hamill and Dana Delany in this short animated crime thriller, initially intended as a direct to video release and yet somehow standing with the very best movies of the entire Batman franchise. Even while reconnecting with a former love, Bruce is forced to re-examine his life’s choices as a mysterious vigilante is killing criminals in Gotham.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Princess Mononoke (1997)
Another triumph from Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke is set in a fantasy version of medieval Japan. Ashitaka is infected in an animal attack, and seeks a natural cure—only to discover that humanity’s activities have angered the gods and thrown the natural balance.
Where to stream: Max
The Little Mermaid (1989)
Following a series of flops, Disney was all-but finished as a producer of animated films. The Little Mermaid singlehandedly brought the company roaring back. It’s an instant classic to rival the triumphs of earlier decades.
Where to stream: Disney+
Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)
Another brilliant piece of stop-motion animation, this time inspired by origami and Japanese ink wash painting. Set in feudal Japan, the story involves Kubo and his enchanted shamisen (the title’s string instrument), on a beautiful, dreamlike quest to stop his grandfather, the Moon King, in a story that doesn’t talk down to a young audience.
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
This seasonal gem from Henry Selick and Tim Burton is so familiar at this point, it’s easy to underestimate its impact on pop culture. A wholly original dark fantasy and an enduring holiday classic (but is that holiday Halloween or Christmas?).
Where to stream: Disney+
Your Name (2016)
Never has a body-swap story been this gorgeously rendered, with a use of light like I’ve never seen in animation. Country girl Mitsuha begins mysterious trading bodies with Taki, a boy from Tokyo, and the two slowly come to understand each other and their separate lives. Gut-punching revelations in the second act take the story into deeper waters, the film revealing itself to have far more on its mind that a metaphysical meet-cute.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel, Crunchyroll
Weathering With You (2019)
Makoto Shinkai followed up Your Name with this equally impactful successor, a gorgeous vision of rain-soaked Tokyo, and a young woman who can control the weather (this movie doing for water imagery what Your Name did with light). Troubled runaway Hodaka meets and befriends Hina, whose emotions impact the weather. There are life- and world-threatening consequences to all of this, but, ultimately, it's about the triumphs and tragedies of first love.
Where to stream: Max
Sleeping Beauty (1959)
You know the story, but if you’ve never seen the film itself, you’re missing out on one of the signature artistic achievements of Disney’s golden era. Both the backgrounds (inspired by gothic art and medieval tapestries) and the gorgeous character designs and animation represent some of the finest hand-drawn work ever put to film. When it was released in 1959, after an eight-year development process, it represented a huge leap forward for both Disney and screen animation in general. (Audiences weren’t quite ready for it, and it was a financial disappointment. History has certainly redeemed it.)
Where to stream: Disney+
The Red Turtle (2016)
Dutch animator Michael Dudok de Wit teamed with Studio Ghibli for this dialogue-free film that tells the story of a man who becomes trapped on a desert island with only a giant turtle for companionship. What starts as a survival tale takes on deeper resonance as their bond grows. A powerful emotional journey.
Where to stream: Starz
Up (2009)
Its tear-jerking opening minutes ground all the silliness to come in Up, a wild, sometimes wacky adventure story about an old man who has given up on life until he finally decides to set off on a real adventure (with a young stowaway tagging along), floating his house to South America with the help of thousands of balloons. It’s an absurd romp that somehow never loses its grounding in the idea that grief and loss can only be challenged by forming real human connections.
Where to stream: Disney+
Flee (2021)
Presented as an animated pseudo-documentary, Flee sees director Jonas Poher Rasmussen telling the story of Amin Nawabi, heading off to marry his boyfriend but stopping to recount his childhood journey to escape Afghanistan at the end of the Soviet occupation. A gripping, and deeply moving, journey of self discovery.
Where to stream: Hulu
Perfect Blue (1998)
As good a reminder of the breadth of animation as anything (and proof that anime can do the psychological thriller genre as well as any medium) Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue isn't going to be for everyone. Its blurring of fantasy and reality draws comparisons to the films of Darren Aronofsky—though it's really the other way around, as Perfect Blue came before both Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, which echo it deliberately. Its story follows a young Japanese singer who is pushed to quit her career to take a job on television—a move with horrific consequences in the best tradition of high-price-of-fame stories.
Where to stream: Shudder
Fantastic Planet (1973)
This French science fiction film defies any attempts to succinctly describe its plot, except to say that it takes place in a distant future on a world where giant blue humanoid creatures keep humans as pets, when they're not treated as wild animals. It's almost pure allegory for whatever you'd like to slot in: perhaps animal rights, perhaps racism, but it's ultimately a beautiful, deeply trippy journey to a vividly imaginative world.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel
Frozen (2013)
While many Disney princess stories wind up with fairly straightforward good versus evil dichotomies, Frozen does something new in crafting a lead who’s also the film’s antagonist, following her on a journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance that’s as deeply meaningful as ever in a Disney film. (It’s also a top-tier sisters movie.)
Where to stream: Disney+
Paprika (2006)
Therapists can enter the dreams of their patients in the Satoshi Kon’s masterpiece, which clearly inspired Inception. The film plays with layers of emotion and reality without ever leaving its audience feeling lost or disoriented. Well, maybe a little bit.
Where to stream: Tubi
Coco (2017)
Miguel enters the land of the dead to find his grandfather, and bring the gift of music back to his family in this Oscar winner. The stunningly detailed depiction of the afterlife not only celebrates Mexican culture, it feels deeply universal.
Where to stream: Disney+
Waltz with Bashir (2008)
There’s documentary style here, but the film, involving the recollections of Ari Colman and his time as as young soldier in Israel’s 1982 war with Lebanon, recognizes the ambiguous nature of memory. It’s also a movie that makes clear the crimes and costs of war like few others.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
A gorgeous, deeply spooky fairy tale that sold audiences on the then-unheard-of idea that people would sit still for a feature-length animated film. It remains both entertaining and a work of art in its own right.
Challengers, director Luca Guadagnino's bisexual tennis movie starring Zendaya, may not be particularly explicit in its sex scenes, but it follows in the footsteps of other recent films like Saltburn, Anyone But You, and Poor Things—movies that put sex front and center. It's promising that movies for adults are carving out space at box offices that were once in the grip of sexless superhero movies, whatever your thoughts on the virtues of any particular film. They're also all movies that have managed to avoid an NC-17 rating in favor of the more theater-friendly R. Have we lightened up about sex? Remains to be seen.
It’s true that an NC-17 rating can make it difficult for a film to make money at the box office; major chains often won’t even carry them, seeing them as a like-for-like with the X rating it was introduced to replace. While that seems less of an issue in the streaming era, NC-17 still carries a stigma.
The thing is, NC-17 (and the X rating before it) was never intended to signal a movie was basically porn, but that it was thoroughly adult in content; classic examples include A Clockwork Orange, Midnight Cowboy, Nicholas Roeg’s Performance, and Lindsay Anderson’s if..., all of which were initially X-rated yet critically acclaimed (Midnight Cowboy even won the Best Picture Oscar). Unfortunately, eventually someone in the porn industry decided “X” was a good marketing hook, and it became common practice for pornos to self-rate (the meaningless “XXX: soon entered the lexicon), and the rating came to be associated with exclusively naughty films.
Eventually the MPAA introduced the NC-17 label as a way to reboot the system, with the 1990 Henry Miller/Anaïs Nin docudrama Henry & June being the first to get the new stamp. Thereafter followed a brief renaissance in adult-oriented films as, for a time, the NC-17 rating removed some of the stigma associated with films decidedly not meant for children, and even became an art-house badge of honor. Of course, an NC-17 in no way guarantees quality, but the following films are deserving of both their critical reputations and their restrictive ratings. (Note: Some of these films pre-date the NC-17 rating, having initially been rated X, but they’ve all had their official rating updated since.)
Blonde (2022)
This Marilyn Monroe biopic comes from director Andrew Dominik, and is based on Joyce Carol Oates’ highly fictionalized novel of the same name. The Netflix-produced film received an NC-17 rating, a fact that reportedly caused some consternation for Netflix management, which apparently expected a straightforward biopic from the same artsy director who turned the story of Jesse James into a slow-paced, elegiac tone poem (but with Brad Pitt!). Though many, myself included, weren't thrilled with the film's rather singular focus on Marilyn as a victim of her own sexuality, many (including Oates) were thrilled with it, and there's no question that Ana de Armas gives a stellar performance, even earning multiple Best Actress award nominations, including at the Oscars.
Where to stream: Netflix
Bent (1997)
Though the film certainly earns a high maturity rating for a few relatively tame sex scenes and moments of shocking violence (a large stretch of the film being set at the Dachau concentration camp), the NC-17 is hard to fathom—until we consider that queer content has traditionally judged much more harshly by censors and ratings boards than straight material. The film’s key love scene involves two men who aren’t able to touch themselves or each other, making this a solid example of film ratings run amok.
Where to stream: Peacock, Tubi, Pluto TV
Matador (1986)
Pedro Almodóvar, to whom we'll return, considers Matador to be among his weakest films, but I'll take the director's worst over the best of most others—to put things in perspective, this movie still has a 93% Rotten Tomatoes score. The NC-17 (which replaced the original X in 2005, nearly two decades after the film's release) here is probably not entirely unreasonable: the erotic thriller deals in rape, bondage porn, and snuff videos, while opening with a scene of unsimulated sex. It's also a rather brilliant satire on the dangers of sexual repression.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Bad Lieutenant (1992)
The indelible image here is Harvey Keitel's naked, crying, penis-swinging dance, so much so that the image features prominently in much of the movie's advertising art—though extra shadows have been superimposed for modesty, of course. Director Abel Ferrera's neo-noir stylings (and background in explicit porn) made him, briefly, one of the big names during the erotic boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s—movies like this one, China Girl, and Dangerous Game serving as examples of exploitation done right, turning sleaze into something like art. If this isn't quite his masterpiece (that'd be Dangerous Game) it's certainly his best known. The original NC-17 rating was attributed to "sexual violence, strong sexual situations and dialogue, graphic drug use"...that last bit being unique in that drug use alone isn't typically a criteria in assigning an NC-17. An R-rated version was hastily assembled for Blockbuster, so if you're looking for the uncut movie (with bonus Harvey Keitel masturbation!), you'll want to look for the 96-minute version.
Where to stream: Prime Video, The Criterion Channel, Tubi
Bad Education (2004)
As mentioned, Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education wasn’t the first of his films to receive an NC-17 rating, but was, instead, the last. Which probably says more about the standards of the certification board than it does about Almodóvar’s films, which frequently deal with sex but rarely include anything particularly pornographic (though I suppose that depends on your point of view). Given that the movies tend to be unapologetically queer and sex positive (at least when that sex is consensual rather than abusive), the ratings are more to do with attitude and orientation than actual content. This highly stylized murder mystery, with its depictions of substance abuse and sex abuse by Catholic priests, is among the director’s darker films, but it’s also one of his best.
Where to stream: Max
The Evil Dead (1981)
Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and company made The Evil Dead with absolutely no concern for ratings or censorship, and likely with little expectation the movie would receive the kind of distribution where any of that would make a difference. Subsequent decades saw a remake-cum-sequel, a straight-up sequel, a reboot, a TV series, a musical, several games, endless comic books, and, of course, a porn parody called Evil Head, so things turned out fine for the Lovecraftian franchise that began here. Served with an X rating for its gory and goopy violence (and reclassified as NC-17 in 1994), the movie actually did just fine in the U.S., but found more trouble in the U.K., where crusades against “video nasties” were rampant. The film’s 2013 reboot was initially primed for a similar rating, before a few judicious edits put it at a more cinema-friendly R.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Female Trouble (1974)
Pink Flamingos is the one everyone talks about but, for my money, Female Trouble is peak John Waters. Divine stars as middle-aged juvenile delinquent Dawn Davenport, whose innocent wish for a pair of cha-cha heels puts her on course for a life of crime and also beauty (same thing). It’s John Waters, so the movie’s X rating is mostly fair (anything less would probably be insulting), with an early trash-dump sex scene leaving little room for doubt. It was officially re-rated NC-17 in 1999, but has since been subject to a 4k restoration and a Criterion release, proving that one era’s cinematic trash is another’s treasure.
Where to stream: Digital rental
In the Realm of the Senses (1976)
An utterly unique bit of filmmaking, Nagisa Ōshima’s provocative psychosexual story blends eroticism (which, in this case, includes a fair bit of unsimulated sex) with hints of horror in its tale of love and murder, based on the true story of geisha, sex worker, and unlikely folk hero Sada Abe (flawlessly played by Eiko Matsuda). Unfolding like a tone poem, it’s a beautifully hypnotic and appropriately titled film that culminates in a genuinely shocking act of violence. The filmmakers got around Japanese prohibitions during filming by listing it as a French production and shipping the footage to that country for processing and development. The X rating was updated to an NC-17 in 1991.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel
Santa Sangre (1989)
Santa Sangre is the best film from cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky, a filmmaker as beloved as he is (justifiably) controversial. There’s very little point in describing the plot of this surrealist horror jaunt, though it involves Fenix (played by Jodorowsky’s son Axel) reminiscing about his childhood in a shabby Mexican circus, and the murder/suicide that left his father dead and his knife-throwing cult leader mother without arms. In the present, Fenix fills in as his mother’s arms, helping out with a variety of tasks up to, and including, murder. There’s much here that’s hard to stomach, but buried within are interesting and thoughtful ideas about the joy of escaping the past. An edited alternate version was created to secure an R rating, but the movie never received a proper stateside release anyway.
Where to stream: Shudder, Tubi, Free
Shame (2011)
Describing the movie’s NC-17 stamp as a “badge of honor,” distributor Fox Searchlight made no effort to dispute the rating, though I’m not sure it’s entirely well earned. The story of the rather grim life of sex addict Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender), it naturally involves a fair bit of sexuality, but none of it is shot to make it look particularly appealing (it’s possible to see in the movie both an honest look at addictive behavior and a rather prudish take on sexuality in general). Still, the performances from Fassbender and Carey Mulligan make it well worth experiencing.
Where to stream: Digital rental
A Dirty Shame (2004)
John Waters' most recent film is hardly one of his best, but it's a lot of goofy fun with a great cast lead by Tracy Ullman and including Selma Blair, Johnny Knoxville, Chris Isaak, and, of course, Mink Stole. There's a fair bit of nudity in this story of a war between the puritanical residents of Hartford Road and the regions various gleeful sex perverts, but the NC-17 probably has as much to do with the language, with a surprisingly emotional moment centered around the confession: "I'm a cunnilingus bottom." Given that it's all in good fun, the NC-17 feels excessive, and even a little shocking, unless you're one of the prudes that the movie takes aim at. The unnecessary rating also sank the movie at the box office, and has made it tough for Waters to get anything made since.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Killer Joe (2011)
After a decade or two of disappointments, the great William Friedkin ended strong with Killer Joe, his penultimate film preceding the similarly great, but posthumous, Caine Mutiny Court Martial. The film stars Matthew McConaughey as the titular hitman with a disturbing crush on Juno Temple's Dottie, the younger sister of a drug dealer. The NC-17 was primarily for the violence, specifically: "graphic disturbing content involving violence and sexuality, and a scene of brutality," a rare case in which sex wasn't first and foremost when it came to a rating like this. The film did pretty poorly at the box office, and the NC-17 rating certainly didn't help.
Where to stream: Prime Video
Wide Sargasso Sea (1993)
Adapting Jean Rhys’ feminist, anti-colonial take on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of that novel’s “madwoman in the attic,” here a West Indian Creole heiress who enters into an ultimately unhappy marriage with Mr. Rochester, and in the process finding herself isolated and alone in England, even more adrift than she had been in the Jamaica of her birth. The movie is damn sexy, which earned it that NC-17, though not everyone agreed it had reached its lofty ambitions (the Washington Post called it, “coffee-table pornography with sound effects.”)
Where to stream: Digital rental
Arabian Nights (1974)
Several of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films received X ratings upon their initial American releases, though his most notorious work, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, skipped the rating process entirely, as though there was no rating sufficient to do justice to that film’s imagery. Though perhaps his best known, it’s not nearly the director’s best; his typically horny but less characteristically joyous Arabian Nights has a better claim to the top spot. The film’s 16 vignettes pull from the latent (and not-so-latent) eroticism of the source material while throwing in plenty of slapstick humor. Though there was some very mild controversy over the film’s “obscenity” in some locations, for the most part audiences were willing to have fun with it. The X became an NC-17 in 1990.
Where to stream: Prime Video, Tubi, MGM+
Last Tango in Paris (1972)
Last Tango in Paris was wildly controversial upon its release in 1973 and remains no less so to this day, albeit for very different reasons. Here was the legendary Marlon Brando, just months after the release of The Godfather, starring in a film that drew literal mobs condemning the filmmakers as perverts while many (but not all) feminist critics saw something deeply retrograde in the central relationship between the 19-year-old Maria Schneider and the nearly 50-year-old Brando. In later years, Schneider described feelings of humiliation and rage regarding her on-set treatment (a dramatic TV series about the film’s production, Tango, is reportedly in development), making the already fraught sex scenes tougher to watch. Still, having become the highest-grossing import of its time, it represents an incredibly important moment in both American acceptance of foreign films and of depictions of frank sexuality. It’s complicated legacy notwithstanding, both Schneider and Brando give career-great performances. Its X rating was officially changed to NC-17 in 1997.
Where to stream: MGM+
Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013)
Blue has lost a bit of its luster in the years since its release, as the elements that made it particularly unique and memorable (and earned its NC-17 rating) have also made it controversial. Working conditions on the film under director Abdellatif Kechiche have been a topic of contention, and the explicit sex scenes have been viewed very differently by different audiences. To some, its frank sexuality is among its greatest strengths; an essential element of the taboo-busting lesbian romance. Others see a director’s very male gaze directed at two women, whose sexuality takes on a lurid quality. Still, the performances from Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos are outstanding and, if the film’s sexuality is a bit overdone, I suppose it’s merely bringing a bit of parity with the long history of films with straight sex of questionable necessity.
Where to stream: AMC+, Mubi
Inside Deep Throat (2005)
Thanks, in part, to the release of Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie in 1969 (good timing, that), explicit sex had a real moment in global cinema, with porn movies actually being taken seriously, at least in certain circles. The sexual revolution and the feminist movement opened the way for a slightly more broad-minded approach to the genre, even if the movies themselves weren’t always particularly good porn, nor good cinema, and were often exploitative. This Dennis Hopper-narrated documentary explores much of that, but focuses on the making of the 1972 film that entered the zeitgeist in surprising ways; Hopper, having himself been a figure of the counterculture who swung to the other end of that particular spectrum later in life, is a smart choice for a film about the rise and fall of the legitimate sex film. Inside Deep Throat earns its rating largely in presenting period footage, but a more prudish approach would have felt compromised.
Where to stream: AMC+, The Roku Channel, Mubi
Showgirls (1995)
There are many approaches to viewing Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, all of them valid. For some, it’s a very ‘90s nostalgia piece that places Saved By the Bell’s Elizabeth Berkley in an era-appropriate erotic drama; for others, it’s a so-bad-it’s-good guilty pleasure; for still others, it’s a sly (if problematic) All About Eve-esque satire. Whether more out of genuine affection or plain notoriety, Showgirls remains one of the highest-grossing NC-17 releases in history, and a cult classic par excellence.
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel, Tubi, MGM+
Lust, Caution (2007)
The sexuality in Lust, Caution is in no way incidental. Set in Hong Kong and then Shanghai during the Japanese occupation of China, it tells the story of Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei), recruited to insinuate herself into the circle of Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a recruiter for China’s puppet government; she’ll seduce him and lead him to his eventual assassination. Lee fought hard to keep the movie’s eroticism intact, feeling that it was all essential to the story. The result was also one of the highest-grossing NC-17 dramas in American box office history.
Where to stream: Digital rental
Crash (1994)
Not the 2004 Paul Haggis Oscar winner. David Cronenbgerg’s 1996 film stars James Spader and Holly Hunter as a pair whose lives become entangled after a car crash leaves them both with a uniquely cinematic fetish. Merging sex and our cultural love affair with cars, Crash deals with the intersection of sex and violence that informs many other American films, but rarely with such explicit, squirmy style. It proved controversial at every stage of its life; Cannes viewers reportedly stormed out, and the movie was banned by theaters in many parts of the world. It’s currently not streaming anywhere, and it remained hard to come by even on DVD until the venerable Criterion Collection released a definitive version of it in late 2020. Given I can’t say the same about the likes of The Human Centipede, I’d call this injustice.
Where to stream: Nowhere, at present—sadly common among NC-17 films, even decades later
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989)
One more from Pedro Almodóvar, if you'll indulge me. I suppose it’s taken filmgoers a while to warm up to the writer/director, and this comedy/horror film divided audiences at the time of its release, which was right around the switchover from X to NC-17, and became part of that debate. The story of a psychiatric patient who kidnaps an actress with the hope of romance, it’s as offbeat and weirdly funny as you’d expect. The rating is for an extended sex scene, mostly, but also because the movie shows people on the toilet peeing, an apparently shockingly aberrant act. The film was intended to be released unrated following its initial X classification, but instead accepted an NC-17 when that became an option.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel
Man Bites Dog (1992)
In an early example of what we’d later come to call “found footage,” Belgian mockumentary Man Bites Dog involves a film crew following around a serial killer, documenting his crimes and atrocities. Initially attempting to maintain an air of dispassionate observation, the crew inevitably become caught up in the darkness that surrounds their subject. The violent content remains shocking and effective, but the movie also succeeds in making broader points about our willingness to disassociate ourselves from the brutality that constantly surrounds us, both at the movies and in our daily lives.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel
Passages (2023)
One of the most recent movies to receive an NC-17 from the American Motion Picture Association is also a good example of the politics around the NC-17: distributor Mubi decided it was better to release the film with no rating than with the NC-17, seen as deadly in all but a few instances. The film involves a love triangle between Tomas (Franz Rogowski), Martin (Ben Whishaw), and Agathe (Adèle Exarchapoulos), who comes into the lives of the established couple and turns things upside down. Director Ira Sachs has stated strongly that the film's sex scenes are anything but gratuitous, while reminding us that queer content almost always leads to a more restrictive rating than the same type of scenes involving straight people. He's not wrong!
Some of the very best movies of all time have flaws that aren’t terminal, but that are nevertheless prominent: a questionable performance, a problematic element, an ending that doesn’t quite land. That’s fine—a film that takes risks and doesn’t quite stick the landing is generally preferable to one that’s technically proficient but dull, and a movie can be great without being perfect.
There are movies, though, with nothing worth complaining about; movies whose flaws (if they can be said to have any) fold so well into the total package as to be indistinguishable from touches of genius. Nothing in life is perfect—but these 50 movies are pretty much there.
Double Indemnity (1944)
Noir, most of the time, thrives in disreputability: The best of the genre are films that feel brisk and scrappy, as though there wasn't quite enough money or time to ass a layer of polish (think D.O.A., or Detour). And yet here's Double Indemnity: a decidedly A-movie from a major studio (Paramount) with bankable stars and a director, Billy Wilder, who'd already made a name for himself. Barbara Stanwyck (ably assisted by some truly unforgettable hair) brings all her talents to bear in her performance as Phyllis Dietrichson, a shameless femme fatale of the old school who draws Fred MacMurray into her insurance-fraud-by-way-of-murder scheme. Fred MacMurray plays Walter Neff with the kind of stolid, slightly dorky everyman quality that he'd later bring to his sitcom work, but here you absolutely believe that he's hanging on to enough barely repressed horniness to follow Phyllis straight into hell. And you kinda don't blame him. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Shining (1980)
Stephen King famously hated Kubrick's adaptation of one of the writers most celebrated novels, and it's not hard to understand why: In the book, we're meant to see Jack Torrance as an essentially good husband and father, his abusive tendencies exacerbated by a substance-abuse problem that he can't entirely control (as well as an evil hotel that keeps egging him on). The book is great, but the movie holds up so well for the exact reason that King hated it: Torrance here is a bastard from the outset, and we're not encouraged to see his abusive behavior as something that calls for a redemptive arc. The hotel doesn't nudge him into evil, it merely encourages him to cut loose. Shelley Duvall, once derided, is brilliant here playing a woman who is, believably, not holding up terribly well with the strain of living in an isolated hotel with her increasingly unhinged husband. Add to all of that Kubrick's deliberate, and deliberately disorienting, style of direction, and you have a masterpiece of domestic horror. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
It's nothing but a tribute to Humphrey Bogart's unique charm that he could have played one of the biggest bastards (Fred C. Dobbs) in American cinema history, and yet we're still willing to join him on his quest for gold. The movie feels so uniquely American in its preoccupations: Dobbs and company head off into the title mountains in hopes of promised gold, but greed and paranoia overtake the party in an increasingly horrifying way—it's clear to us, and to them, that simply sharing the very real abundance on offer would benefit everyone...and yet a very grasping, sweaty, American brand of cupidity leads them to their doom. We were still a year or two from the horrors of HUAC and the Red Scare, but Bogart and Huston were both on the front lines of the defense of civil liberties during that era, and this film feels more than a bit prescient as a result. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
There's a little bit of art and a whole lot of commerce in our (waning?) preoccupation with superhero movies, but in a sea of things, there are a handful of genuine triumphs. Among the most recent: This brilliantly animated celebration of teen heroism that's filled with heart while also being frenetically beautiful. It looks like nothing before or since, and, despite having an awful lot going on (including multidimensional spider folx), it always comes back to the story of a teenager trying to figure himself out in a big, confusing world. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
This Preston Sturges screwball comedy is among the best films to come out of the old Hollywood studio system, and acts as a defense of that very system. The story of a burnt-out director of lowbrow comedies trying to experience genuine hardship for his “art,” Sullivan’s Travels effortlessly blends whip-crack comedic dialogue and eccentric characters with social commentary on privilege and poverty that still works in the 2020s. —Stephen Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)
Made in Australia on a shoestring budget, this sci-fi/action movie defined the look and feel of cinematic post-apocalyptic societies for all time. Its cars-in-combat plot takes off immediately, and director George Miller never takes his foot off the gas until the final credits roll. It’s a pure adrenaline shot of a film, but it’s never witless or shallow. —Stephen Johnson
Where to stream: Tubi
Amélie (2001)
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s endlessly visually inventive romantic comedy is the last word on the delightfulness of The French (at least in movies). It’s the kind of movie you want to hate because the whimsy is off the charts, but Amélie melts even the most frozen hearts because the sweetness never gets sickening. —Stephen Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Master (2012)
Every frame of Paul Thomas Anderson’s study of the complex relationship between a 1950s cult leader and his damaged acolyte is fascinating. Joaquin Phoenix and Phillip Seymour Hoffman turn in best-of-their-lives performances and the lushness of the cinematography and attention to period details turns post-war America into a character of its own. It’s not the kind of movie with a by-the-numbers plot; instead, its stream-of-consciousness style burrows into your brain and stays there. —Stephen Johnson
Where to stream: Tubi, The Criterion Channel
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)
Sergio Leone’s epic film unwinds the entire cinematic mythos of the America West, presenting cowboys as grime-covered demigods or living ideals, locked in eternal struggle, unconcerned with the affairs of mere mortals. The combination of the unforgettable score, perfectly cast actors, and visionary cinematography and editing add up to one of the biggest movies ever filmed. —Stephen Johnson
Where to stream: Max
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Just when he thought he was out, Dr. Frankenstein gets pulled back in. Director James Whale followed up what would have been the greatest of the monster movies with one of the most impressive feats in American cinema history: something altogether funnier, weirder, and deeply more queer, with gay icon Ernest Thesiger prancing through the gothic sets, offering bitchy rejoinders and seducing his old protegé into reanimating the dead just one more time. That’s all before Elsa Lanchester trades her Mary Shelley outfit for the Bride’s wire-cage wig, giving birth to an icon with just a few short moments of film and no dialogue. Whale and company are clearly having a lot of fun, but the level of detail in plot, makeup, and sets ensures that nothing ever feels sloppy. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
His Girl Friday (1940)
When we think of the snappy, smart style of the better screwball comedies, we’re thinking of His Girl Friday. Or we ought to be. There are few better examples of the form, and director Howard Hawks deserves much of the credit for insisting on relentlessly fast-paced patter—the movie was based on a popular, dialogue-heavy play that had already been filmed once as The Front Page.
This version makes a couple of innovations over the original, the most significant of which is in co-lead character Hildy Johnson: a man in earlier versions, here “Hildy” is short for Hildegard and she’s played by Rosalind Russell, now the ex-wife of Cary Grant’s character, but still every bit the hard-charging reporter and equal (and then some) of every man in the newsroom. There’s not a single moment that sags. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Prime Video, The Roku Channel, Vudu, Tubi, Crackle, Kanopy, Freevee, and several others
Citizen Kane (1941)
Everyone knows about Citizen Kane, but I suspect that its reputation for cinematic greatness is off-putting to an awful lot of people who’d enjoy it. Which is too bad, because it’s more than great: It’s good. Stunningly beautiful to look at, with stylistic and technological innovations that are still impressive today, it’s also quirky, funny, and remains impressively timely in its portrait of an American whose youthful idealism curdles in the presence of his own increasing power and wealth (and a media magnate whose interest in the truth fades with time). —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Casablanca (1942)
Casablanca is a product of golden-age Hollywood—a slick movie, no doubt, which makes it easy to underrate. From its opening chase through the streets of the title city, to the poignant and all-time memorable ending, there’s nothing here that doesn’t work brilliantly, with off-the-charts chemistry among all the main characters, not just Bogart and Bergman.
What makes it even better is its ambiguities: It’s set in an underworld in which people may be doing some of the right things, but nobody’s good all the time. Bogart’s character Rick Blaine, one of the most beloved characters in film history, steadfastly refuses to stick his neck out in the face of Axis aggression until it’s absolutely unavoidable. That anti-heroism saves the movie from its own production values. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Max
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944)
Movies are all products of their time, but comedies are especially tricky. Laughter is often based on behavior that is in opposition to societal norms, so what’s funny to one generation may seem stale or toothless a few decades later. Which is why it’s remarkable that this nearly 78-year-old screwball farce from writer/director Preston Sturges is still so dang hilarious.
The plot is a lot more, uh, adult than you might expect for the ‘40s: Small town gal Trudy Kockenlocker is out at a bar celebrating with the boys before they head off to war. She has too much to drink and wakes up the next morning with a ring on her finger, but she can’t remember who she married (“...it had a z in it. Like Ratzkywatzky. Or was it Zitzkywitzky?”). Even worse, she soon realizes she’s pregnant and minus one marriage license.
The innuendo-laden script, which only gets kookier from there, ran into problems with the censors of the era, naturally, and even though it’s incredibly tame by today’s standards, it’s still sharp and funny throughout. (If you’re a classic cinema buff who thinks this list should also feature Sturges’ The Lady Eve instead, I can’t argue too much.) —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Hoopla, Kanopy
The Set-Up (1949)
Director Robert Wise remains underrated precisely because he didn’t seem to have a signature style, working in a variety of genres (he’s best known for slick Hollywood musicals like The Sound of Music and West Side Story). The Set-Up is very different: a sweaty, claustrophobic, and brutal boxing noir about a boxer who’s been set up to take a dive. Nobody told him; he’s just such a has-been that it’s assumed that he’ll lose. Except that he doesn’t. It’s as dark as noir gets, and doesn’t let up for any of its brisk 70 minutes. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Tubi
All About Eve (1950)
Commonly cited as a film with one of the best screenplays ever written, All About Eve is a behind-the-scenes Hollywood satire that is both of its era and timeless. It concerns a bitter feud between a beloved, aging actress, Margo Channing (played to bitter perfection by Bette Davis), and ambitious young up-and-comer Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), who is willing to do anything to become a star. Laced with barbed wit and deep cynicism and impeccably performed (the cast earned a combined five nominations at the 1951 Academy Awards; Marilyn Monroe also kills it in a four-line bit part), All About Eve will delight contemporary viewers who love the soapy, salacious work of Ryan Murphy. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Digital rental
Rashômon (1950)
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s Rashômon is one of the most-admired films ever conceived. The ubiquity of its once-novel central narrative conceit—reviewing the same series of events through the eyes of three different characters, each offering a different perspective on the truth, if it even exists—has earned shorthand status. (The AV Club recently described 2021's The Last Duel as Ridley Scott’s own take on this “influential ode to subjectivity.”)
The legendary Toshiro Mifune plays a woodcutter who claims to have discovered the body of a murdered samurai warrior in the forest. He is called into court alongside other witnesses, each of whom has a different explanation for how the body came to be there and why. Even after being imitated and parodied everywhere from The Last Jedi to The Simpsons, the original still enthralls. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Criterion Channel, Kanopy, Tubi, Max
Rear Window (1954)
A movie about watching movies, Hitchcock’s classic is as meticulous as anything he ever produced, but takes a delight in tweaking its audience for our own voyeuristic tendencies. It’s not as if it’s gotten harder to keep tabs on our friends and neighbors, and the film’s line: “What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change,” is at least as true now as it was in 1954. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Pather Panchali (1955)
Coming from a movie culture dominated by musicals and adventure films, Satyajit Ray leapt ahead of not only India’s film traditions, but those of Hollywood and even the French New Wave to shoot an ultra-realistic but still-beautifully-photographed story that’s both universal (especially in its fraught family dynamics) and tied to its time and place. The magic of the film (and its two equally great sequels) is that during its runtime, the separation between 1950s rural India and the modern world virtually disappears. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, Tubi, Kanopy
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Ingmar Bergman has a reputation for cheerlessness and, though that’s not entirely fair, it doesn’t help that his most famous movie involves a chess match with death in a plague-ridden medieval landscape. There’s extraordinary beauty here, though, and several extraordinarily humane moments. Bergman is far more interested in exploring than he is in answers or morals, but the suggestion here is that hard-won moments of love, sex, and family in defiance of death are that much more precious. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, Kanopy
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Forget Die Hard—The Lion in Winter is my favorite Christmas movie. This decidedly non-epic medieval historical is a two-hander between Peter O’Toole’s Henry II and Katharine Hepburn’s Eleanor of Aquitaine, as they convene at the king’s residence in Touraine, France to argue matters of politics and succession. Henry wants his son John (Nigel Terry) to inherit the throne, while Eleanor prefers their son Richard (Anthony Hopkins).
There’s more intrigue afoot, though, thanks to interference from King Philip of France (Timothy Dalton), but really, this is two hours of gloriously written arguments (the Oscar-winning script is by James Goldman, based on his play) between the king and queen more fascinating than any warfare that might unfold on the battlefield. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Digital rental
Alien (1979)
A B-movie premise produced with top talent, the science fiction/horror hybrid Alien is a masterpiece of both genres. The cast is an all-time great assembly of actors who would shortly become legends, all of whom manage to convincingly portray blue-collar workers forced to survive with absolutely no help from their employer. Just as importantly, H.R. Giger’s creature designs give the movie its iconic monster, one that hasn’t been matched for originality and sheer alien-ness in the decades since. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Hulu
Back to the Future (1985)
A masterclass in screenwriting, the BTTF script pays off every joke and plot point, balancing the arcs of different versions of dozens of characters across multiple timelines without ever dropping any balls. That alone might earn it a reputation for flawlessness, but the movie probably wouldn’t be as beloved without the manic energy of Christopher Lloyd and the loose and light touch of Michael J. Fox at his '80s coolest, each bringing personality and style to balance (and disguise) the machinations of the film’s finicky and knotty script. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Spike Lee’s third film may be his masterpiece. Set in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn over the course of an incredibly hot summer day, Do the Right Thing explores simmering racial tensions in the neighborhood, stoked by encroaching gentrification, unfair policing, and general prejudice. The plot, such as it is, concerns a conflict that arises between the Black residents and the Italian-American owners of Sal’s, the neighborhood pizza joint, but the film is more remarkable for how that conflict sheds light on the everyday lives of this particular strata of New Yorkers, and how injustice can force people to take sides and take action when they’d really rather keep the peace. But more than that, it’s as vibrant, funny, and full of life as it is tragic. It’s a hangout movie with a lot to say about America. And it’s 30 years old and more relevant than ever. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Digital rental
When Harry Met Sally (1989)
Is this the best romantic comedy ever made? It certainly is a film with no bad scenes. Perhaps the sexual politics seem a little dated—the whole movie operates from the premise that men and women can never really be friends (because “the sex part always gets in the way”), which means the relationship between the inseparable Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) is either doomed to implode or grow into something more—but I’ve also had similar arguments with my wife, 33 years later. Produced right in the middle of director Rob Reiner’s miracle run (which includes The Princess Bride, another film on this list), and with an insanely quotable script from a never-better Nora Ephron, it might be the most re-watchable movie ever made. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Digital rental
Home Alone (1990)
I’m going to get some crap for this one, but after countless seasonal viewings, I contend that this cartoonishly violent Christmas classic flawlessly executes its mission—which is probably why we’re all still watching Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) slap his hands against his face 32 years later. That’s not to say anything in it is realistic, but that doesn’t matter. You can poke a million holes in the setup (how could any parents actually forget a child at home? Why would criminals be so stupid as to plan such a conspicuous string of burglaries?) without letting the air out of the zany antics of the temporarily orphaned tyke’s attempts to defend his home from bad guys, or the distress the boy’s mother (Catherine O’Hara, the film’s true secret weapon) feels as she repeatedly fails to get back to him, and then does—just in time for Christmas. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Disney+
Groundhog Day (1993)
Like Rashômon, Groundhog Day is built on a plot device that has since become a narrative staple. Too bad it got everything right the first time. As grumpy weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray), snowbound in the picture-perfect hamlet of Punxsutawney, PA and pissed off about it, is forced by unexplained cosmic chance to repeat the titular holiday over and over again until he learns how to be a better person, we’re all forced to confront the terrifying fact that we’re only given one chance to get life right, so we’d better make it count. On one level it operates as a high-concept romantic comedy, and while it is satisfying to see Phil get the girl, it’s much more fun to contemplate this one’s philosophical core. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Haunting (1963)
Robert Wise never met a genre he couldn't master (think The Sound of Music and West Side Story among his musicals, The Set-Up as film noir, or sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still). This 1963 film, from the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House, is one of the definitive horror movies of its era, and remains a creepy, disturbing, strangely moving and, well, haunting bit of cinema about a haunted house that meets its perfect match in Julie Harris as Nell, a deeply lonely woman who has no idea where to begin connecting with other people. She almost makes a romantic connection with Claire Bloom's Theo but, ultimately, the movie works best as a love story (an often genuinely scary one) between a woman and a spooky old house. The Mike Flanagan Netflix miniseries is also an excellent, very different, adaptation of Jackson's book; the 1999 remake is best avoided. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Night of the Hunter (1955)
Actor Charles Laughton directed exactly one movie in his lifetime—and then he quit, because the reviews were savage and audiences didn't get it at all. The ones that did get it weren't particularly impressed with his take on religious hypocrisy. Nevertheless, it's a movie that's aged brilliantly: full of haunting imagery, pitch-dark satire, and a chilling lead performance from Robert Mitchum as traveling preacher and serial killer Harry Powell, traveling from town to town and murdering a succession of wives. Full of religious passion, Harry Powell has no doubt whatsoever that he's the hero of the story, and the townspeople—impressed with his fervor—are happy to follow him to hell. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Tubi
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
A war film that takes place entirely in the shadow of war, it's remarkable that director William Wyler and company were so clear-eyed about the costs of conflict so soon after the conclusion of World War II. The drama tells the stories of three United States servicemen re-adjusting to civilian life following tours overseas: Al left home as a successful bank employee, but risks his post-wartime promotion with excessive drinking and his soft touch when it comes to giving loans to fellow vets; Fred suffers from PTSD and has trouble finding a job; while Homer lost both hands and struggles with being an object of pity. Screen legends Fredric March and Dana Andrews play the first two, while real-life veteran and amputee Harold Russell plays Homer—the kind of stunt casting that shouldn't work, but instead lends the film an even stronger sense of maudlin reality. Given the era and the timing, it's almost shockingly prescient about the struggles that veterans would face following not just WWII, but each war that would follow. The performances are all top-rate, and there's a believability to the whole thing that sells every moment. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Prime Video, Peacock, Freevee
The Princess Bride (1987)
One of cinema's ultimate crowd-pleasers. It's often said that a particular movie has something for everyone, but it might be nearly true when we're talking about director Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride, based on William Goldman's book. The endlessly quotable screenplay (from Goldman himself) beautifully blends genres and tones into a joyous cacophony, where it might have just been a mish-mash. There's action, fantasy, comedy, and some very enjoyable kissing bits. There's not a moment here that isn't entirely memorable. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Max
The Others (2001)
Alejandro Amenábar's gothic ghost story earns its spot here, in part, from its staying power: despite the movie involving one of those twists that upend everything you thought you knew, it remains chilling, even scary, on successive viewings. Nicole Kidman plays Grace, a mom raising kids on a giant house on the channel islands in the shadow of World War II—when things start to get very weird. Like the best ghost stories, this one is never not about Grace and her increasingly fragile state of mind. She's not a great person, but it's a tribute to Kid's performance and Amenábar's direction that we never lose interest, nor entirely lose sympathy. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Harlan County, USA (1976)
Filmed as it was happening, the film documents what became known as the “Brookside Strike” against the owners of the Brookside Mine and Prep Plant in Harlan County, Kentucky. Director Barbara Kopple’s original intent was to create a film about efforts to unseat the wildly corrupt leader of the United Mine Workers of America union at the time, W.A. Boyle, who seemed to many to be in the pockets of the mine owners (he was later convicted of conspiracy in the murders of a reformist opponent’s entire family). That explosive story, though, turned out to be a side note of the brutal, bloody, violent opposition faced by the striking mine workers and their families.
Kopple and her crew's laser-focus on the local strikers and their families is the smartest of smart choices, and the movie holds up brilliantly as a result. It's timely in its depiction of corporate overreach, but also serves as a time capsule of an era in which unions were stronger and more effective forces. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel
Sounder (1972)
Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield are flawlessly matched here in this drama, set in 1933, about a couple of Louisiana sharecroppers and their family. Tyson's Rebecca is forced to cope as best she can when husband Nathan is sent to jail for very dumb reasons. Racism is very present, and a key driver of the plot—but, smartly, it's not a movie about racism. It's a wonderfully acted drama about a family impacted by American-style racism, but who are more than the sum of the cruelty of white people. There's heartbreak, but also plenty of joy. That's partly down to the screenplay from Lonne Elder III, and also to Tyson and Winfield. All three were Oscar-nominated, as was the film itself for Best Picture, though no one actually took home an award. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Prime Video, Peacock, Tubi, Freevee
Halloween (1978)
What makes a perfect slasher? In some ways, it's tempting to pick something like Friday the 13th—brilliant in its own way for being a brisk, efficient machine that delivers exactly the kind of bloody good time you might be in the mood for. Halloween is something else entirely, though, and much of that is to do with the behind-the-scenes talent. Though this was early days for John Carpenter, his talents are fully on display in his nearly Hitchcockian ability to build tension and suspense. It's also to do with brilliant, undersung producer Debra Hill, who also co-wrote the screenplay and gave life to the day-to-day interactions between Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her friends. The movie smartly left Michael Myers a cypher, even as he was also inspired by the racial violence that Carpenter witnessed as a teenager transplanted from New York to Kentucky as a teenager. That ability to view Michael as either a universal evil, or as something more insidiously specific, is a big part of the character's staying power (for better or worse). —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Shudder, Crackle, AMC+
Black Narcissus (1947)
The films jointly directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, including The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, are among the most stunningly photographed films...ever? Possibly ever. And yet Black Narcissus, with cinematography by the great Jack Cardiff, is probably the most beautiful of all—a fact which serves to both underline and contrast the plot, about a group of nuns invited to start a school in a dilapidated palace in the Himalayas. What starts out looking like it'll be an inspirational drama quickly turns to something vaguely resembling horror, as the stunning, but stark environment and psychological isolation begin to take their respective tolls. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel, Tubi, Freevee, Shout Factory TV
Eve’s Bayou (1997)
Eve’s Bayou, the impossibly assured debut of director Kasi Lemmons, is transporting, conjuring a world of southern gothic mystery and magic that’s never loses sight of the emotional realities of its main characters. Jurnee Smollett plays the title character, who begins the film with the promise of a story: one in which she killed her father as a ten year old. The film proceeds to deal in dark and thorny issues, but does so with a Rashômon-esque understanding of the mutability of memory and the ways in which time and perspective can drastically change our view of events. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Freevee, Mubi, Starz
The Truman Show (1998)
The Truman Show would be remarkable if only it had predicted the rise of reality TV and our coming obsession with being main characters in a narrative unfolding across the canvas of social media. But this weird sci-fi fable about a man who is unwittingly the star of the world’s most popular show is also a moving exploration of the human desire to question our origins and find a way to live meaningfully, despite the risks involved. Director Peter Weir brings just the right blend of the grounded and the surreal to Andrew Niccol’s high-concept screenplay, and Jim Carrey totally deserved the Oscar nomination he didn’t get. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Paramount+
All About My Mother (1999)
Pedro Almodóvar’s films are, by deign, boisterous, colorful, and wild, so much so that to call any one of them “flawless” sounds like faint praise. Flawless can be dull, and Almodóvar is never that. All About My Mother reinvents the melodrama (and expands our ideas of motherhood) with this queer, sex-positive, and hilarious story of a grief-stricken mother who discovers a whole new family on a journey to Barcelona. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
The Sixth Sense (1999)
A great twist ending can really make a movie, but the true mark of quality is whether there’s more to it than just the twist. You could lop the final reveal off of this box-office smash about a boy (Haley Joel Osment) who can see ghosts and the psychologist (Bruce Willis) who tries to help him, and you’d still be left with one of the most expertly crafted, emotionally devastating horror films ever made. Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan made his name with it and has never quite stepped out of its shadow. Which is understandable, because how do you improve on a film that’s damn near flawless? —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: FXNow, Fubo
The Matrix (1999)
Come on, I don’t need to tell you why The Matrix is perfect, do I? Beyond the discourse, beyond the divisive sequels, this is one for the ages: A never-bettered blend of martial arts action, anime style, flashy sci-fi, and thematic depth, it only gets better with the passage of time. Whoa. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Max, Netflix
Spirited Away (2001)
Hayao Miyazaki’s love of animation as an art, and his passion for his own story is present in every single frame of Spirited Away. There’s not a second, not a single frame of the film that isn’t stunningly detailed, to the point that you feel like you could fall into the frame and live there for a long time without ever getting bored. I’m not sure that Spirited Away is any more or less perfect than several other Miyazaki movies, but its story of a lonely child who gets lost in a dark fantasyland is among his most moving. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Max
Memento (2001)
The breakout film from Christopher Nolan, this crime thriller is less flashy than his later hits like Inception and Tenet, but no less high concept: Unfolding in reverse, it tells the sad story of a man with no short-term memory who is hunting for his wife’s killer, and at the mercy of whoever happens to be controlling his narrative at any given moment. It plays out like a magic trick; even after you’ve seen it performed backwards and forwards, you can’t quite figure out how the director pulled it off. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Peacock, Freevee, The Roku Channel, Pluto TV
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
This mind-bending comedy-drama is that rare example of the “aromantic comedy”: a movie about two people whose relationship is so clearly doomed, we can’t help but hope they wind up together in the end. Music video director Michel Gondry brings a grungy, handmade, low-tech charm to the outlandish story of a dysfunctional couple (played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet) that makes use of weird new tech to erase their memories of one another from their minds (“Technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage,” the doctor notes), but still manage to find one another again, suggesting even (possibly) doomed love is better than no love at all. In the wrong hands, Charlie Kauffman’s screenplay would come off as confusing or overly misanthropic. Instead, this is one of the best stories of doomed love ever told. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Starz
No Country for Old Men (2007)
The only thing wrong with this Coen brothers/Cormac McCarthy quasi-western crime thriller is that it’s so exacting as to border on nihilistic, which means it’s not exactly the kind of movie you want to watch over and over. Still, there’s nary a false note to the cascading nightmare of violence that follows in the wake of a drug deal gone wrong, as a small-time criminal (Josh Brolin) is pursued by a nigh-supernatural hitman (Javier Bardem in an instantly iconic performance—and haircut). Spare, methodical, and uncompromising, it’s a dark exploration of the line between destiny and self-determination, unfolding against the stark emptiness of the American west. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: PlutoTV
Get Out (2018)
If you weren’t around to witness the fervor Get Out’s release generated (box office success, mega-awards attention, instant meme status), you’d be excused for wondering how the hell Jordan Peele managed to be anointed the future of cinematic horror after a single film. But you were, so you know what I’m talking about.
In some ways, this grim sci-fi fairytale plays out like an episode of The Twilight Zone, as a young Black man (Daniel Kaluuya) apprehensively visits the upstate New York estate of his wealthy girlfriend’s family and discovers weirdness that goes beyond the expected cultural and social classes. Peele’s wry screenplay blends surreal laughs with true horror, even as it crafts a perfect metaphor for the Black experience in a “post-racism” America in which those with the power pretend that inequality and injustice are relics of an earlier, unenlightened era, and even as they continue to benefit from both in terrible and transformative ways. —Joel Cunningham
Where to stream: Prime Video, FXNow, Tubi, Prime Video
Weekend (2011)
Two-hander, more or less, between Tom Cullen and Chris New, Andrew Haigh's Weekend signaled a new verisimilitude in queer cinema. Just two guys meeting with nothing more in mind than a quick hook-up, and finding that there's plenty to learn about each other over the course of the titular weekend. The encounter feels very specifically gay, and also perfectly ordinary, nary a hate crime to be found. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: The Criterion Channel, Mubi
Happy Together (1997)
A beautifully dark triumph from Wong Kar-wai, Happy Together follows a stunningly mismatched couple (Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai) as their relationship falls apart during a trip to Argentina. The very hot, but deeply codependent couple, keep being drawn back into each others orbits—and they make being young, gay, and in sweaty love look so cool that you can't help but hoping they make it. The cinematography here is stunning, with every single framing feeling and looking like a mini work of art.
Where to stream: Max, The Criterion Channel
Knives Out (2019)
We’ve seen these types of all-star murder mysteries before (including in Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express just a couple of years before this), but never with this type of style. Keeping all of the frothy fun of earlier locked-room mysteries (and then some), Rian Johnson’s film goes deeper into the dark hearts of our array of suspects, while still willing to have a laugh at the expense of their rich white asses. And rarely has a resolution ever been quite this satisfying. —Ross Johnson
Where to stream: Digital rental
Parasite (2019)
Bong Joon-ho’s ambition here is nothing less than to pull the rug out from under all of us, examining the scaffolding that holds our social structures together before making a good case for ripping the whole thing down. The genre-defying masterpiece begins as something like a dark comedy before becoming something not unlike a horror movie. At several moments, it appears as though Bong’s movie is about to run completely off the rails, but each carefully navigated twist and turn only makes the movie that much more exhilarating. —Ross Johnson
HBO was, for at least a couple of generations, the home of movies on cable. No one else could quite compete. So the rise of HBO Max seemed like it could well have been the ultimate streaming destination for movie lovers—a designation that the jury's still out on, especially given the decision to drop the "Home Box Office" portion of the name in favor of the simpler, but more generic, Max. Still, Max maintains a collaboration with TCM, giving it a broad range of classic American and foreign films, as well as much of its catalog from HBO itself. It's the primary streaming home for Studio Ghibli and A24, so, even though Max hasn't been in the business of making many originals, it still has a solid assortment of films that you won't find anywhere else.
With all that in mind, here are some of the best of Max's more recent exclusive offerings.
The Color Purple (2023)
It was a tall order, following up the beloved 1985 version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, but this adaptation of the subsequent Broadway musical clears those hurdles and then some. If it can't quite replace previous iterations, it offers up a unique, lively, and colorful vision of the story of hard-working, hard-pressed Miss Celie (Fantasia Barrino) surviving and, ultimately, thriving despite being "poor... Black...and ugly" in the rural south of the early 20th century. Danielle Brooks, as Sofia, was nominated for an Academy Award.
Dicks: The Musical (2023)
You have no idea what you're in store for if you haven't seen this genuinely raucous musical about a couple of separated-at-birth twins (Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson), both misogynistic jerks, who take to impersonating each other in order to reconcile their long-separated parents (Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally). It's a simple, silly premise—but things quickly get more and more wild. Mom Evelyn's vagina fell off years ago, newly out dad Harrison keeps a couple of mutant "sewer boys" in a giant birdcage in his apartment. It's all wonderfully, jaw-droppingly weird.
Class Action Park (2020)
The dark, and darkly comic, real-life history of Vernon, New Jersey's once-popular Action Park is jaw-dropping. In 1978, stockbroker Eugene Mulvihill set out to create a theme park with as few restrictions as possible, and as cheaply as possible. The result was a local attraction that drew in teens with promises of a rule-free good time; the hint of danger in the park's shoddiness likely making it more of a draw—at least until the shady deals with local government made it clear that not only injuries, but deaths, were being hushed up.
Barbie (2023)
What's left to say about the movie of 2023? Oppenheimer might have won the Oscars, but Barbie owned the discourse—and the box office, with the pink candy-colored pro-feminist raking in more money than any other movie. Margot Robbie is perfect as the fish-out-of-water doll stranded in the real world, Ryan Gosling is more than Kenough, and it's the third triumph in a row from director Greta Gerwig.
Wonka (2023)
The horrifying Willy Wonka Chocolate Experience might have stolen the spotlight from Timothée Chalamet's turn as our favorite vaguely threatening chocolatier, but that's no reason to sleep on Wonka. An old-school musical with modern production values, Wonka feels like a thoroughly refreshing throwback to a less cynical time, with some memorable songs and emotional beats that really land.
Dream Scenario (2023)
One of the latest from A24 didn't make quite the splash of some of the distributors other recent offerings, but it still pulled in very good reviews and a couple of awards and nominations for lead Nicholas Cage. Here he plays college professor Paul Matthews, who starts appearing in the dreams of dozens of unconnected people, but as a dull and passive observer. Until he isn't, and the appearances start taking on a more menacing, nightmarish quality. The whole thing winds up being an impressively unhinged meditation on fame, A24-style.
Priscilla (2023)
The great Sofia Coppola wrote and directed this biopic based on Priscilla Presley's own memoir about her young life and troubled, troubling romance with the older Elvis Presley. Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi offer up great performances, and the result is the portrayal of a relationship that's tender, in its way, but also complicated and deeply unbalanced.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)
I'm not here to make the case that Aquaman 2 is high art, nor that it's even entirely memorable—but it is a charmingly goofy bit of superhero fun, pairing Jason Momoa and Patrick Wilson as a pair of mismatched super siblings on a quest to save the planet from some greenhouse-gas spewing villains. The stakes are high enough to keep things interesting, but the movie lacks the self-seriousness that plagues so many other super-movies, particularly the DC-adjacent ones.
Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)
The second, and last, Wonder Woman movie helped by Patty Jenkins (following a break with the Zack Snyder-era DC universe) takes Diana out of the trenches of World War I and into the shopping malls of the 1980s. Given all the technology-based villains in these types of movies, it's nice to see antagonists Kristen Wiig and Pedro Pascal come at our heroine with mythological magic as a nod to WW's history. A little sad, though, about the post-credits cameo who we won't see more of.
Unpregnant (2020)
Travel way, way back to the year 2020, when a young pregnant woman might have to travel across several states in order to secure an abortion. Such a thing could never, of course, happen in modern America, during our more enlightened era, a right to bodily autonomy boldly and irrevocably ensconced among our inalienable rights. Ahem. In Unpregnant, Haley Lu Richardson plays Veronica, a young woman who needs to leave her home state of Missouri to avoid her parents preventing her from getting an abortion, joined by a childhood friend Bailey (Barbie Ferreira). If sounds heavy, but the movie is, at heart, a breezy road-trip movie involving a couple of mismatched friends. It's pretty delightful.
All That Breathes (2022)
For some Muslims in New Delhi, it's long been traditional to feed the black kites (a type of raptor), with the belief that such a good deed will help to ward off trouble. Except that it's become increasingly hard for the birds to survive in the modern city, with the birds falling victim to all manner of dangers—pollution and overpopulation being the prime culprits. The documentary All That Breathes follows brothers Saud and Nadeem, who run a bird sanctuary that's saved tens of thousands of raptors over the past two decades in a story about the interconnectedness of our ecosystems, and also about the virtue of staving off what feels like inevitable decline.
The Zone of Interest (2023)
Jonathan Glazer's Oscar winner examines the banality of evil in the story of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (the always brilliant Sandra Hüller), living ostensibly ordinary lives while being complicit in the extraordinary evil happening just outside of the frame. It's very specific in its treatment of the Holocaust and the real-life figures portrayed, but also suggests, more universally, that we all are capable of becoming blind to the horrors we have a hand in.
Good Time (2017)
This stylish, intense crime drama follows Robert Pattinson's Connie as he attempts to extracts his disabled brother from police custody following a bank robbery gone wrong, while trying to avoid his own arrest for the same crime. It's one of those great neo-noirs in which everything that can go wrong for our protagonists does; Pattinson turns in a thoroughly impressive performance.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)
The movie's co-writer Jimmie Fails plays the lead here under his own name, a Black San Franciscan with long roots whose old family house (built by his grandfather) is now in a gentrified neighborhood and and worth millions. Unable to buy the house back even as it sits vacant, Jimmie makes the vacant Victorian a sort of home base for an exploration of his place in the modern, changing city. The beautifully photographed and acted movie had Oscar buzz for a time, though wound up being ignored. It's very much worth a first or second look.
Parasite (2019)
One of the most unambiguously deserving Best Picture Oscar winners of recent years (maybe decades), Bong Joon-Ho's dark satire is a searing indictment of modern capitalism, but also a very funny comedy of manners. Also, a horror movie. Get you a movie that can do it all.
Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)
Daniel Kaluuya won an Academy Award as Fred Hampton in this searing biographical drama about the FBI infiltration of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in the late-1960s Chicago. LaKeith Stanfield plays FBI informant William O'Neal in the movie that was also nominated for Best Picture.
In the Heights (2021)
Before Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the book, music, and lyrics for this musical set over three days in a largely Dominican American neighborhood in Upper Manhattan. The film version captures all the joyousness of the stage version, while adding location shooting that grounds all of the singing and dancing. It's a gorgeous, moving celebration of life, change, and community.
Green Knight (2021)
David Lowery's Medieval pastiche, based roughly (but authentically) on the 14th-century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is a visual feast as well as a dark, sensuous journey into an imagined past. Dev Patel stars as the title's knight in a movie that adheres more closely to the conventions of middle age storytelling than pretty much any movie I've ever seen. The result is something that feels a bit like a fever dream, but an experience for anyone willing to sink into it.
Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (2023)
Rob Reiner directs this delightful documentary about the actor, comedian, director, and screenwriter Albert Brooks, covering his early life as well as a decades-long career that includes SNL, Scorsese movies, Simpsons voices, and an Academy Award nomination. It's mostly just a conversation between Brooks and Reiner, but it's all pretty fascinating, whether or not you're a long-time fan.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)
A fascinating portrait of photographer, artist, and activist Nan Goldin, whose work documenting the HIV/AIDS crisis and the more recent opioid epidemic after her own near-death from a fentanyl overdose. At the movie's center is a moral conflict: Goldin's tireless work against the Sackler family's companies, for their roles in relentlessly marketing OxyContin, puts her in a tricky spot when it comes to displaying her work. Having encouraged the arts community to divest from these pharmaceutical giants, she also comes to question the value of displaying her work at museums, many of which are heavily funded by the Sacklers. How much must an uncompromising artist compromise for the greater good?
Sometimes what seemed great when we were kids looks silly to adult eyes. Other times the whys are more complicated—think Rambo III and The Living Daylights making heroes of mujahideen jihadists because, at the time, they were fighting the Soviets. Standards change, too, often for the better—we don’t look on the obvious racism of Gone with the Wind with the tolerance we once did, and we don’t celebrate the rape culture that snuck its way into 1980s comedies in the same way (at least, we say we don’t). Or maybe it’s that the language of moviemaking has changed, or that special effects that were OK back in the day are distracting to our more evolved modern eyes.
Looking back with a more critical eye is usually, in my experience, a positive thing. The cost of growth, as individuals and a culture, requires us to look back with a little embarrassment, and strive to do better. It’s not necessarily that the movies are bad (although some of these are, in all honesty, absolute shit); time complicates the legacy of most every films, but these more than most.
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1953)
Even making allowances for changing attitudes, it's hard to look past the core conceit of this ostensibly charming classic musical: it's about kidnapping women en masse, taking them back to your deep backwoods hovel and holding them hostage until they fall in love with you. The kidnappees already had boyfriends and partners, which is a big part of the reason why they'd refused any such arrangement in the first place. Lest we mistake the intent of the creatives behind the show and film, a central production number called "Sobbin' Women" is all about the mythological and possibly historical rape of the Sabine women—when the men of early Rome decided to build their civilization by capturing and forcibly impregnating the women of a nearby region. The song has a goofy old time with the idea that their "loot" (as the women are referred to) might spend a lot of time sobbin'—but don't worry: "We're gonna make them sobbin' women smile!"
There was really no need for Blake Edwards’ adaptation of Truman Capote’s novella to indulge in notably caucasian actor Mickey Rooney’s over-the-top, unquestionably racist characterization of I. Y. Yunioshi, Holly Golightly’s Asian landlord. Harkening back to the most horrific stereotypes of the World War II propaganda era, Yunioshi is presented as a squinting, bumbling, buck-toothed Orientalist stereotype whose only purpose is comic relief—the “comedy” having to do entirely with the apparently intrinsic silliness of Japanese people, in general, and funny fake teeth in particular. The character in the novella wasn’t nearly such a caricature, and Rooney’s slapstick-y turn feels out of place against the rest of the film’s subdued tone. Even contemporary reviews noted the character’s dissonance and offensiveness, and I’ve never been able to watch it without his every scene derailing an otherwise pleasurable experience. (If you struggle similarly, good news: Mickey Rooney forgives you.)
Franco Zeffirelli’s take on the Shakespeare play is both daring and problematic in ways that have been debated for decades. The sumptuous production dared to cast actual teenagers in the lead roles, an innovation that shouldn’t be surprising...except that it had been done so very rarely before (the previous 1936 screen version cast actors in their 30s). By heightening the emphasis on burgeoning sexuality, Zeffirelli trod a dangerous road; there’s something to be said for a clear-eyed treatment of the subject, but the film’s nudity has been controversial for decades. Just recently, stars Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting filed a lawsuit claiming that they were coerced and tricked into appearing naked in the film, allegations that place a darker cloud over the once-lionized production.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s erotic drama finds middle-aged widower Marlon Brando involved in a highly sus relationship with a young Parisian woman played by Maria Schneider. The movie’s most memorable scene, involving forced sex and a stick of butter, was once seen as a bit of oh-so-1970s sexual libertinism, but has since come to stain its reputation. Schneider has spoken out about the abusive treatment she experienced from Bertolucci and Brando, particularly during the filming of that scene.
The font from which an entire era of raunchy slobs versus snobs teen comedies would spring (think Revenge of the Nerds, Police Academy, Porky’s), Animal House is tough to revisit. There are hilarious moments, but also plenty of scenes that put a spotlight to the culture of sexual aggression we’re still living in. The movie’s gooiest good guy, Pinto (Tom Hulce), has a serious debate about whether or not to rape an unconscious girl, who we later learn is 13 (he doesn’t do it, but still). John Belushi’s Bluto spies on unsuspecting sorority girls in the nude, while a trip to a roadhouse sees the movie’s only Black characters menacing our leads because they want to steal their white dates. Enlightened stuff.
The late 1970s, a great time for American cinema as a whole, also generated a sub-genre of movies that have become increasingly uncomfortable to modern eyes. This was Woody Allen’s world, in which a movie like Manhattan, about a man in his 40s dating a 17-year-old, felt entirely reasonable, at least to all of the other men having mid-life crises and fantasizing about their own continued sexual relevance. Blue Lagoon is a bit different, in that the two primary actors (Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins) are at least age-appropriate to each other, but its story of sexual awakening on an island feels excessively prurient—as though we’re meant to appreciate their youthful innocence while gawking at their supple, mostly naked bodies. Shields herself has recently spoken about her discomfort with the film’s marketing and approach, which placed an undue emphasis on her youth (she was 14 at the time).
I adore Arthur (and its all-time great theme song), but it’s hard not to find the movie’s flippant attitude toward alcoholism distasteful circa 2023. Dudley Moore plays the title character as the venerable lovable drunk, a character type that goes back to Shakespeare’s Falstaff, so it’s not like the mores of the ‘80s are particularly to blame. Still, Arthur drives drunk and has a grand old time whenever he’s not being a bit of a sad-sack, and the plot’s prescription for him is the love of a good woman (a phenomenal Liza Minelli) rather than a trip down the road to recovery.
Like much of John Hughes ‘80s output, Sixteen Candles blends elements that are thoroughly charming and funny with plot points that dated almost immediately. Most obviously, Gedde Watanabe’s Chinese exchange student Long Duk Dong is a rare instance of a person of color wandering into any of the writer/director’s films, and he is a head-to-toe Asian stereotype, his every entrance accompanied by the sound of a goddam gong. At least Hughes hired an Asian-American actor to play the character, though not distinguishing between the Chinese Dong and Japanese-American Watanabe. Less overt, but just as troubling, is the film’s relationship with consent: Ted (Anthony Michael Hall) pursues vocally uninterested Sam (Molly Ringwald) to the point that she gives him a pair of her underwear in exchange for being left alone. He later exchanges said drawers to another guy to earn some time alone with his unconscious Caroline (Haviland Morris). It’s not entirely clear what happens afterward, but it’s disturbing in any event.
Always the least of the original Indiana Jones trilogy, Temple of Doom still has enough of a spirit of rollicking adventure (and that memorable performance from Ke Huy Quan) to recommend it, generally. The problem comes in its depiction of Hindus, and Indian culture more broadly. In attempting to recreate the spirit of adventure serials of the 1930s, the film unfortunately carries along much of the related racist baggage. The Indian characters are all either victims to be saved by Indy, or insidious cultists/organ-extracting wizards. It all leans too far into stereotypes; what was controversial at the time of its release looks worse 40 years later.
A generally delightful kid-friendly sci-fi comedy about a robot made for war who decides that he’d much rather hang out with Ally Sheedy and Steve Gutenberg (there’s a nice message about personal identity and autonomy) is muddied by goofy comic-relief sidekick character Ben Jabituya, played by white actor Fisher Stevens in brownface makeup, and sporting an exaggerated Apu-from-The Simpsons accent alongside various tiresome malapropisms. Even worse? The character takes over the lead in the sequel.
The entry point in what became the Rambo series, First Blood, nodded toward dealing Vietnam-era post-traumatic stress, while the second sent Rambo after forgotten POWs. Number three sends him off to Afghanistan to rescue an old friend, and in doing so takes a definite side in the long-running conflict between the Soviet Union and Afghan Mujahideen rebels, cutting a swath through Soviet forces with a machine gun and a rocket launcher and generating a record-breaking body count (literally! Guinness named it the most violent film ever made in 1990). This wasn’t just a fantasy—supporting Afghan militant groups was a centerpiece of U.S. anti-Soviet planning for over a decade; in a sense, this is Stallone bringing dry government policy to life for children who act out American imperialism via toys, comic books, and video games based on the movie.
In the 1980s, there was no bigger threat than the Soviet Union, so anyone opposed to the USSR was automatically one of the goodies. It's complicated, of course, but many of those Afghan militants went on to form the core of what became the Taliban—so that element hasn’t aged very well. In the movie's favor, it dodges some of American cinema's Islamophobic tropes, but speaks more to America's habit of offering unwavering support for a particular faction in a region without considering the long-term consequences there or here.
Driving Miss Daisy will forever stand among the ranks of highly praised, well-intentioned Oscar-winners that wowed Academy members by dealing with issues of race by forefronting the experiences and perspective of white Americans. Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman give great performances, and the whole thing has an undeniable charm—but that’s rather the point. It’s cute, with a pat “can’t we all just get along?” take on racial harmony. Do the Right Thing, an undeniable classic with a far more complex and nuanced story to tell, came out the same year and wasn’t even nominated.
From Driving Miss Daisy we jump one year later to 1990's Dances With Wolves, another well-intentioned but awkward attempt by a white filmmaker to tackle race relations. This one mangles history while also including problematic portrayals of indigenous Americans: the Sioux characters are largely in the “noble savage” mode, while the Pawnee characters are exclusively villainous. The biggest problem is the tired white savior narrative, in which a Caucasian character is not only our guide to the world of indigenous Americans, but the hero of the story. Because, as we know from history, white people were definitely on the side of indigenous North Americans.
Chasing Amy feels like a movie that could have worked, if there were any queer voices behind the scenes. The story of Holden (Ben Affleck’s) pursuit of lesbian-identified Alyssa (Joey Lauren Adams) could have been an exploration of sexual fluidity, or of bisexuality, but instead it plays as a straight guy’s fantasy—spend enough time with the hot lesbian, and you’ll land her eventually. It’s well-intentioned, mostly, and so close to working, but the emphasis on a hetero dude’s desire for an unattainable woman means that it winds up feeling a lot less groundbreaking than it thinks it is.
For some reason, this splashy Mel Gibson/Julia Roberts-starring, Richard Donner-directed thriller, in which it turns out the paranoid loner’s ramblings about a vast, global network of deception turn out to be exactly spot on, hits different in the post-Jan. 6, mid-pandemic, anti-vax era. Weird. (Also, Mel Gibson, oof.)
Not spending a lot of time on janky effects here...times change, standards change, and things that look funky to us now might have been cool as sh*t back in the day. Not so much with Spawn, a movie that blends some impressively dark superhero action with some very dumb nonsense...and ties it all together with some CGI that looked silly even at the time. Spawn's visit to hell, in particular, involves shots that look hardly better than video games of the era. the cartoon adaptation does a much better job with the source material.
On the surface, a cute movie starring the consistently delightful Drew Barrymore as a 25-year-old copy editor who takes an assignment to go undercover as a high school student and finds herself getting hot for teacher Michael Vartan. The two begin a flirtatious relationship which (fortunately) doesn’t go anywhere before Barrymore’s character outs herself...at which point the teacher becomes deeply upset about her lies. And possibly about her not being an actual teenager? Without ever quite crossing the line, the movie is rife with creepy subtext. Odds are that the high school student you think is hot is not going to turn out to be secretly older, so probably don’t flirt with them.
We could spend all day talking about American Beauty's fall from beloved Best Picture winner to a movie that's largely been forgotten, if not openly mocked. Some of that's a little unfair: Suburban ennui in the 1990s was more in the zeitgeist than it is now, and there were people (white people, mostly) who had genuinely come to feel that life had gotten too stable, and boring, and that the draw of conformity was the biggest threat. Following 9/11, the Iraq War, and Donald Trump, those fears have come to look a bit, well, overstated.
But there are more specific reasons why American Beauty plays less well: the first involves Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper) a violent conservative who turns out to be a closeted gay man, and who is driven so insane by the contradiction that he turns to murder. Even the film's gay writer and gay director can't quite make that old trope fly. More than that, though, is in Kevin Spacey's lead character. He's obsessed with Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari), a 16-year-old neighbor, and we're meant to see his leering lust for her as a metaphor of some kind, and also his decision to finally accept her as a human child and not an acceptable object of lust as somehow redemptive. If it was once hard to do that, it's nearly impossible given the actor's fall from grace.
Shallow Hal stars Jack Black as a man who’s hypnotized into seeing only the inner beauty in people, leading the appropriately shallow character to overlook the weight of new love interest Rosie, played by then-recent Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit. He only sees a skinny Rosie, and it all winds up having something to do with the idea that we shouldn’t be so concerned with what’s on the outside. The problem (and this isn’t uncommon in this kind of movie), is that the feel-good message is completely belied by a near-constant barrage of fat jokes (never mind that fact that representing “inner beauty” by conforming to conventional beauty standards is shallow in a different way). Even the otherwise sweet finale, in which Hal sees and accepts Rosie as she truly is, includes a last jab as Hal tries to pick her up only to find that, of course, he can’t.
The second Mummy movie is a smudged copy of the throwback adventure of the 1999 original, if enjoyable on its own terms. But oh boy have the VFX dated poorly. To say that the title’s Scorpion King (motion-captured by Dwayne Johnson, in his feature debut) look like something from a video game does a disservice to video games, even 22-year-old ones. Brendan Fraser has defended the effects as janky fun. I’m more or less willing to go down that road with him, but the fact remains what looked subpar in 2001 is positively jarring in 2023.
Standing tall as one of the many love stories that look less romantic than creepy to modern eyes, The Notebook includes a scene in which the male lead (Ryan Gosling) dangles from the top of a ferris wheel and threatens to fall to his mangled death if Rachel McAdams’ Allie continues to clearly and loudly refuse to date him. Cute!
“Maybe we’re all a little racist?” is, I guess, the point inexplicable Best Picture winner Crash is trying to make, while pretending that’s some kind of revelation. Excessively ironic, and chockful of redemption arcs for its white characters, it presents a mawkish idea of racial harmony that’s too pat and simplistic, by far, but especially in 2023. It won awards because some Academy members weren’t going to vote for the homo cowboy movie, and I can’t imagine many have bothered watching it since. (Don Cheadle’s great, at least.)
We talk about Hollywood's history of whitewashing in casting, but casting white people in non-white roles isn't the only potential problem: Here, director Rob Marshall and company assembled a talented Asian cast, but didn't bother distinguishing beyond that. Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh, Chinese and Malaysian actresses respectively, were cast to play the Japanese leads in this very distinctly Japan-set story. Japanese audiences (or, really, anyone who could be bothered to tell the difference) were disappointed that non-Japanese performers were playing geishas, and Chinese audiences were upset because of the uncomfortable historical connections between geisha culture and sex slavery.
Oliver Stone's take on the events of September 11 received middling reviews, which would be fine, but its reputation is marred by a couple of things: First, Oliver Stone's increasingly loony conspiracy theories, some of which involve September 11, have made it increasingly difficult to approach his movies objectively. The movie doesn't get into any of that, but it does make a smaller, but altogether uglier casting choice: 9/11 rescuer Jason Thomas is a U.S. Marine who also happens to be a black American. Oliver Stone and company cast white actor William Mapother in the role, which they claimed was just a mistake when pressed. Not buying it.
This Roland Emmerich’s disaster flick has a pretty fabulous cast: Thandiwe Newton, John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Danny Glover, etc. But otherwise, it’s about as generic as these things get. Add to that the fact that it was created to capitalize on the weird idea that the world would to an end in 2012 (thanks to a deliberate misreading of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican calendars), and there’s really no reason to revisit the film. Now if the world had actually ended...
Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for her performance in The Blind Side; it’s hard to deny her charm, and she gives an excellent performance, but her star power only exacerbates the fundamental problem with this story. While very much based on facts, the emphasis is placed not on star-in-the-making Mike Oher, who spent years shuttling between foster care and his substance-dependent birth mother, but instead on the wealthy white family who "adopted" him. It’s all fairly watchable, but the movie can’t overcome the problems of its white savior narrative. More recently, Michael Oher has alleged that it's all pretty much bullshit—that he was never formally adopted by the family, who instead convinced him to make them his business conservators. The Tuohys and their two birth children all received huge royalties from this film, while Oher himself received nothing. If that's all the case, it rather dramatically drives home the problem with white savior narratives that center the wrong people.
Though relatively recent, and full of sterling performances that earned Oscar nominations, The Help feels like a throwback in its framing of the Civil Rights movement. On the surface, it feels like a charming, feel-good movie about people coming together, but the experience of Black domestic workers in the 1960s is told from an almost entirely white perspective (perhaps not surprising given that there were very few non-white filmmakers with significant roles behind the camera; also true of the source novel). Despite her Oscar nomination, Viola Davis has expressed her disappointment in very strong terms, saying that by appearing here she "betrayed myself, and my people." More than a decade on, we might (maybe) be more sensitive to the fact that the era was about the challenges faced by, and victories earned by, black Americans—not the learning curve of a white suburban lady named "Skeeter."
In Passengers, interspace traveler Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) wakes up in his hibernation pod 90 years too early; the ship is on its way to a new Earth, and he’s now facing the rest of his life awake and alone, with no way to return to sleep. A sad situation, sure, until he notices a pretty face among the other sleepers (Jennifer Lawrence) and decides to cyber-stalk the details of her life (she’s a journalist) before waking her up and pretending it was a malfunction. She eventually discovers his deception—which has destroyed her dreams and plans and condemned her to live out the rest of her life with no one for company but Chris Pratt—and, sure, she’s mad—at first. But she gets over it and they live happily ever after. It’s as good a metaphor for destructive and toxic masculinity as you’re likely to find, except that the self-justifying creep here isn’t just our point-of-view character, he’s presented as the empathetic hero.
There’s a part of me that appreciates the chaos era of DC superhero films—a time when a movie’s plot could turn on the presence of a jar of piss (thanks, Batman v Superman), but the first wave of Warner Bros’ attempts at a cinematic universe fell apart about midway through its first team-up movie. Contrasted with the airless, meticulous self-management of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the all-over-the-board DC style has been interesting to follow, anyway. Justice League, originally intended to be a huge, two-movie tentpole, was ultimately whittled down and cobbled together by two drastically different directors (Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon), and it never feels like anything other than the Frankenstein’s monster it is. Snyder’s later, much longer cut still isn’t particularly great, but at least it feels like the product of a singular (misguided) vision. Also the special effects look like they cost more than $15.
Where to stream (if you care to): Hulu, Amazon or Max
The Flash (2023)
In a similar vein, though this one feels like an even lower blow: The Flash had aged out of relevance well before it was even released. Delayed, in part, because of Covid, the movie became another victim of the increasingly problematic behavior and legal troubles of its star, Ezra Miller. It's tough to market a superhero tentpole movie when you’re mostly hoping that people will forget who's playing the lead. At the same time, decreasing returns on DC movies in general meant that this attempt at a soft reboot was already pretty well doomed without any of that: By the time it came out, Warner Bros. and company had already made clear that they had no interest in continuing the adventures of the Zack Snyder -era characters. Attempts to create a DC multiverse here felt more ghoulish than anything else, the CGI recreations of beloved actors like Christopher Reeve feeling tacky rather than moving—I suppose that, given recent discussions over actors AI likenesses, that bit might come to feel like a sign of things to come—but, at the moment, just feels like all the more reason to let the dead rest.
Peacock has come in from behind with a strong bench of original shows (the greatest of these was/is Poker Face)—but also a solid assortment of original or exclusive movies, some brand new, and some that dropped during quarantine times that you might have missed, being otherwise occupied. There’s some prestige stuff here, but also some slightly more disreputable fare, including a drama from some people you may have liked in Real Housewives, and a bunch of clever Blumhouse horror. There’s a little bit here for everyone.
Drive-Away Dolls (2024)
Ethan Coen goes solo as director (co-writing with Tricia Cooke) on this gloriously unhinged tribute to '70s exploitation romance movies. Marian and Jamie are a couple of friends who, setting off on a road trip to Tallahassee, Florida, discover that they've taken the wrong car. They learn this when they discover a briefcase full of sex toys and a human head. Of such things are great lesbian adventures born.
The Holdovers (2023)
Paul Giamatti stars alongside Oscar winner Da'Vine Joy Randolph in this Alexander Payne-directed movie about a curmudgeonly teacher at a New England prep school who winds up getting stuck babysitting a bunch of students stuck on campus over a Christmas break. Randolph plays Mary Lamb, a cafeteria worker who recently lost a son; the two bond over shared loss and changing times.
Lisa Frankenstein (2024)
Written by Diablo Cody and directed by Zelda Williams, Lisa Frankenstein didn't do much business at the box office, which is a shame. It's the unique and funny story of a misunderstood '80s goth girl (Kathryn Newton) who accidentally reanimates the corpse of a young man who died in 1837 (Cole Sprouse). Blending tones and genres with a 1980s neon-lit visual style, it's a fun—and surprisingly charming—horror-comedy.
Mr. Monk's Last Case: A Monk Movie (2023)
Tony Shalhoub is back as America's favorite obsessive-compulsive detective, Adrian Monk, picking up the role 14 years after the end of the series. Impressively, he doesn't have appeared to miss a beat in a movie that, very sensibly, addresses the impact of Covid on the life of the fastidious and phobic Monk as he becomes embroiled in a case involving his stepdaughter's dead fiancé.
If You Were the Last (2023)
An unlikely rom-com in space stars Anthony Mackie and Zoë Chao as a couple of astronauts who've been adrift for three years on a ship without navigation. Everybody back home thinks they're dead, so, for them, they're literally the last two people around. Kristian Mercado's movie finds them poles apart, on opposite ends of almost every conversation, but with a need to communicate that draws them closer together. It's charmingly old-fashioned in its willingness to rely on dialogue to carry us forward.
Sick (2022)
This Blumhouse slasher dropped on Peacock at the height of the Covid pandemic which was, well, a lot. Now that enough time has passed that we can pretend it never happened/isn't still happening, it's a bit easier to swallow this wonderfully nasty cabin-in-the-woods slasher. Scream's Kevin Williamson wrote the tale of murder in quarantine.
Oppenheimer(2023)
You might have heard of the latest Christopher Nolan joint, the explosive story of Manhattan Project director and ambivalent father of the atom bomb: J. Robert Oppenheimer. The movie took home seven Academy Awards, including for Best Picture. Its box office success offers hope for a post-superhero future.
Bros (2022)
Billy Eichner (who also co-wrote the movie) stars alongside Luke McFarlane in this cute, funny, and charmingly old-school rom-com that blends genre tropes with a refreshingly pro-queer context. Bros turned off a lot of straight moviegoers at the box office, but it makes for fun home viewing.
They/Them (2022)
Another unique Blumhouse slasher, this one set at an LGBTQ conversion camp. Scary enough, even before the bodies start to drop. The talented cast includes Carrie Preston, Anna Chlumsky, and Kevin Bacon. Not everything lands perfectly, but everyone’s having fun with the spin on a classic premise.
Mid-Century (2022)
That gorgeous rental property that you’re looking at might not be all it’s cracked up to be—particularly when the architect was an occult-obsessed polygamist who keeps making his presence known decades after the house was built. A Covid-stressed doctor and her husband head off for a rest at the very cool house, only to get caught up in a bunch of deeply weird shit. It doesn’t all hang together, but it’s effective enough at moments to make for a spooky time at the rental office.
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (2022)
This effective Peacock original documentary serves as a still-needed reminder that the Rosa Parks of our collective imagination is largely a work of fiction. Far from the little old lady too tired to give up her seat, Parks, at the time of the Montgomery bus boycott, was a young-ish activist who’d been planning and strategizing around civil rights for years. Her resolve and radical politics shine through here.
You Should Have Left (2020)
Another Blumhouse horror, another creepy house—and more Kevin Bacon. There might be an emerging flavor to Peacock’s horror offerings and, honestly, I’m not mad about it. Here, Bacon is joined by Amanda Seyfried as his too-young actress wife, of whom he’s perpetually jealous—a situation complicated and exacerbated by their Welsh vacation house. The property itself seems to be loaded with malicious intent, mirroring the marital troubles of our unhappy couple.
Shooting Stars (2023)
Though it hits plenty of stock biopic notes, this sports drama offers an inspiring origin story for LeBron James, starring Mookie Cook as a young LeBron who, along with his friends, formed the #1 high school basketball team in the country. It’s based on the book of the same name co-written by Buzz Bissinger, best known for Friday Night Lights.
Kandi Burruss and Todd Tucker's The Pass (2023)
Awkward name aside (presumably there are a lot of movies named The Pass?), this one’s an entertainingly soapy drama from the titular Real Housewives of Atlanta power couple. Drew Sidora and Rob Riley star as a couple that give each other one night off from fidelity, with predictably steamy results. Nothing wrong with a movie that gives exactly what it promises.
The Year Between (2022)
Writer/director Alex Heller also stars here, alongside J. Smith-Cameron and Steve Buscemi, as a young college dropout coping with bipolar disorder who returns home to her challenging family. Heller’s great, the dialogue is clever, and the movie gets high marks for its more-authentic-than-usual portrayal of life with bipolar disorder.
Nope (2022)
Jordan Peele’s latest managed a thoroughly unnerving atmosphere even as it blends comedy and scares in an alien invasion horror film that’s also a little bit of a western. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star in another unclassifiable and original triumph.
She Said (2022)
Solid reviews met abysmal box office returns when this docudrama was released way back in 2020, but it’s worth a look. With some of the style of great journalism-themed dramas of days past, She Said looks at the investigation that ultimately exposed Harvey Weinstein’s history of abuse and assault, as led by New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan).
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022)
A London cleaning lady (circa 1957) becomes enamored with a client’s Dior dress, and heads off to Paris to get one of her own when she comes into a bit of extra money. In the process, she falls into the world of haute couture and high culture. Lesley Manville is an absolute delight as the lead in this adaptation of Paul Gallico’s 1958 novel.
Promising Young Woman (2020)
Cassie (Carey Mulligan) seemed like she had everything going for her before she dropped out of medical school and started spending her nights hanging out at bars, seemingly easy prey for skeezy guys. Except that there’s more to Cassie than meets the eye, and those dudes at the bar have no idea what’s coming. Writer/director Emerald Fennell (who followed this up with the similarly tough-to-classify Saltburn) blends comedy with revenge thriller themes and wraps it all in an ultra-stylish candy-colored package.
Bosco (2024)
Based on a memoir from Quawntay “Bosco” Adams (here played by Aubrey Joseph), who was sentenced in 2004 to 35 years in a maximum security prison for the heinous and unforgivable crime of—well, the movie keeps that under wraps for quite a while. Suffice it to say that it’s not hard to root for him as he plans an ingenious and fairly spectacular escape with the help of a prison pen pal played by Nikki Blonsky.
House of Gucci (2021)
Ridley Scott hasn’t had a ton of luck with his big historical epics, but this very slightly smaller film about the Gucci dynasty had more success at the box office, and generally positive reviews. Lady Gaga and Adam Driver star in the glitzy, moderately campy crime drama about the battle for control of the fashion brand.
Night Swim (2024)
Writer/director Bryce McGuire expands his 2014 short to feature length with somewhat mixed results, but the horror-fantasy kicks off with a fun premise: this one's about a haunted swimming pool—keeping, I suppose, in line with the "spooky property" theme of other Peacock horrors. It doesn't all float, but Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon are effective leads, and there's some legitimately scary stuff going on.
On Fire (2023)
Old school survival drama (based on true events) about a family living in the backwoods confronted by a horrific fire. Peter Facinelli and Fiona Dourif star.
Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power (2022)
A broad approach to the history (and present) of the American Civil Rights movement can be useful, but it's often more illuminating to zoom in. This smart doc uses interviews and archival footage to tell the story of the title county in the 1960s, a time when the area was rough 80% Black in population, but with zero non-white voters.
Trolls Band Together (2023)
Feels a little late in the day, perhaps, for a movie parodying boy bands, but this third Trolls movie is otherwise well on par with the series: It's joke-heavy, family-friendly, and just generally silly fun. Justin Timberlake heads up one of those all-star voice casts that includes Anna Kendrick, Keenan Thompson, Ron Funches, and RuPaul. There's also a sing-along version for brave parents.
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