It's hard to predict much about Frank Ocean's new album from its title alone. Surely Boys Don't Cry is a callback to the Cure's 1980 album of the same name, but what if Ocean is referring to something else? What if instead, it's a stoic nod to the 1999 film of the same name? Directed by Kimberly Pierce, Boys Don't Cry is based on the true story of American trans man Brandon Teena, though it is as much about the broad themes of identity, nascent sexuality, and body politics as it is about the violence experienced by transgender bodies.

It wouldn't be the first time Ocean's music has alluded to a movie. From the Richie Tenenbaum outfit (yellow blazer, striped sweatband) he wore during his performance of "Forrest Gump" at the 2013 Grammy Awards to the mention of Dragon Ball-Z character Majin Bu in "Pink Matter", Frank Ocean is obsessed with film and TV.

-=-=-=-Sometimes, Ocean quotes movies directly – the "too weird to live, too rare to die" line in "Lost" is lifted from Terry Gilliam's madcap desert orgy Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), whose influence also looms large in the "Pyramids" video. In other instances, his imagery is subtly suggestive; the drugged-up silver-spoon students in "Super Rich Kids", for example, are from the same cinematic universe as their Less Than Zero (1987) counterparts. Occasionally, Ocean's film references are esoteric; who is "Novacane"'s "model broad with the Hollywood smile"? With her "stripper booty and a rack like wow", it's not that much of a stretch to read his "brain like Berkley" pun as a cheeky wink to Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995).

Pitchfork's own Ryan Dombal described Ocean's 2012 album Channel Orange as a "Magnolia-style cross-wired heartbreak epic", with its collage of multiple narratives connected by the thematic through-line of unrequited love, and indeed Paul Thomas Anderson's film would fit neatly within the canon of new New Hollywood movies from the 1990s that Ocean references. But Channel Orange and Ocean's 2011 mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra don't just engage with independent films—they also reference Gen X blockbusters and big-budget, conservative films like Pretty Woman and Forrest Gump. Ocean—a bisexual black millennial—uses these films to insert himself into a distinctly American mythology. He is neither fanboy nor voyeur. He is Richard Gere in a tux. He is Jenny Curran. He is Leaving Las Vegas. He is the history of American movies, revised.

In an interview with The New York Times, Ocean describes being inspired by "the anonymity that directors can have about their films." Channel Orange is too rich with life to truly claim anonymity, though given the grand narrative that runs through that album, there's certainly a case for Ocean-as-auteur.

Here are some of the movies that Ocean returns to again and again, paired with the corresponding tracks in his catalog:

Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)

"Bed full of women, flip on a tripod, little red light on shooting/ I'm feeling like Stanley Kubrick, this is some visionary shit / Been tryin' to film pleasure with my eyes wide shut but it keeps on moving"