The best movies on Netflix can be hard to find, but we’re not likely to run out of great films any time soon. There’s plenty to choose from, whether you’re looking for the best action movies, the best horror films, the best comedies or the best classic movies on Netflix. We’ve updated the list to remove great films that just left the streaming service, but there are plenty of top movies still streaming. New entries include the new Charlie Kaufman film I’m Thinking of Ending Things, as well as Glory, The Queen, Midnight Special and Muppets Most Wanted

Rather than spending your time scrolling through categories, trying to track down the perfect film to watch, we’ve done our best to make it easy for you at Paste by updating our Best Movies to watch on Netflix list each week with new additions and overlooked films alike.

Here are the 100 best movies streaming on Netflix right now:

Year: 2019

Directors: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie

Stars: Adam Sandler, Julia Fox, Eric Bogosian

Genre: Thriller

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 92%

Rating: R

Runtime: 135 minutes

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The proprietor of an exclusive shop in New York’s diamond district, Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) does well for himself and his family, though he can’t help but gamble compulsively, owing his brother-in-law Aron (Eric Bogosian, malevolently slimy) a substantial amount. Still, Howard has other risks to balance—his payroll’s comprised of Demany (Lakeith Stanfield), a finder of both clients and product, and Julia (Julia Fox, an unexpected beacon amidst the storm in her first feature role), a clerk with whom Howard’s carrying on an affair, “keeping” her comfortable in his New York apartment. Except his wife’s (Idina Menzel, pristinely jaded) obviously sick of his shit, and meanwhile he’s got a special delivery coming from Africa: a black opal, the stone we got to know intimately in the film’s first scene, which Howard estimates is worth millions. Then Demany happens to bring Kevin Garnett (as himself, keyed so completely into the Safdie brothers’ tone) into the shop on the same day the opal arrives, inspiring a once-in-a-lifetime bet for Howard—the kind that’ll square him with Aron and then some—as well as a host of new crap to get straight. It’s all undoubtedly stressful—really relentlessly, achingly stressful—but the Safdies, on their sixth film, seem to thrive in anxiety, capturing the inertia of Howard’s life, and of the innumerable lives colliding with his, in all of its full-bodied beauty. Just before a game, Howard reveals to Garnett his grand plan for a big payday, explaining that Garnett gets it, right? That guys like them are keyed into something greater, working on a higher wavelength than most—that this is how they win. He may be onto something, or he may be pulling everything out of his ass—regardless, we’ve always known Sandler’s had it in him. This may be exactly what we had in mind. —Dom Sinacola

Year: 2018

Directors: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

Stars: Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, Brian Tyree Henry, Lily Tomlin

Genre: Superhero, Animation, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Action & Adventure, Kids & Family

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 97%

Rating: PG

Runtime: 100 minutes

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There are, rarely, films like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, where ingredients, execution and imagination all come together in a manner that’s engaging, surprising and, most of all, fun. Directors Bob Persichetti and Peter Ramsey, writer-director Rodney Rothman, and writer Phil Lord have made a film that lives up to all the adjectives one associates with Marvel’s iconic wallcrawler. Amazing. Spectacular. Superior. (Even “Friendly” and “Neighborhood” fit.) Along the way, Into the Spider-Verse shoulders the immense Spider-Man mythos like it’s a half-empty backpack on its way to providing Miles Morales with one of the most textured, loving origin stories in the superhero genre. Plenty of action films with much less complicated plots and fewer characters to juggle have failed, but this one spins order from the potential chaos using some comic-inspired narrative devices that seamlessly embed the needed exposition into the story. It also provides simultaneous master classes in genre filmmaking. Have you been wondering how best to intersperse humor into a storyline crowded with action and heavy emotional arcs? Start here. Do you need to bring together a diverse collection of characters, nimbly move them (together and separately) from setting to setting and band them together in a way that the audience doesn’t question? Take notes. Do you have an outlandish, fantastical concept that you need to communicate to the viewers (and characters) without bogging down the rest of the story? This is one way to do it. Would you like to make an instant contemporary animated classic? Look (and listen). —Michael Burgin

Year: 2017

Director: Greta Gerwig

Stars: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts, Lucas Hedges, Beanie Feldstein, Timothee Chalamet

Genre: Drama, Comedy

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 99%

Rating: R

Runtime: 93 minutes

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Before Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan)—Lady Bird is her given name, as in “[she] gave it to [her]self”—auditions for the school musical, she watches a young man belting the final notes to “Being Alive” from Stephen Sondheim’s Company. A few moments before, while in a car with her mother, she lays her head on the window wistfully and says with a sigh, “I wish I could just live through something.” Stuck in Sacramento, where she thinks there’s nothing to be offered her while paying acute attention to everything her home does have to offer, Lady Bird—and the film, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, that shares her name—has ambivalence running through her veins. What a perfect match: Stephen Sondheim and Greta Gerwig. Few filmmakers are able to capture the same kind of ambiguity and mixed feelings that involve the refusal to make up one’s mind: look to 35-year-old Bobby impulsively wanting to marry a friend, but never committing to any of his girlfriends, in Company; the “hemming and hawing” of Cinderella on the, ahem, steps of the palace; or Mrs. Lovett’s cause for pause in telling Sweeney her real motives. Lady Bird isn’t as high-concept as many of Sondheim’s works, but there’s a piercing truthfulness to the film, and arguably Gerwig’s work in general, that makes its anxieties and tenderness reverberate in the viewer’s heart with equal frequency. —Kyle Turner

Year: 2020

Director: Charlie Kaufman

Stars: Jessie Buckley, Jesse Plemons, Toni Collette, David Thewlis

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 83%

Rating: R

Runtime: 134 minutes

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Many viewers will think of ending I’m Thinking of Ending Things not long after it’s started. A cross-dissolve cascade of crude shots details the interior of a farmhouse or an apartment, or the interior of an interior. A woman we have not yet seen is practically mid-narration, telling us something for which we have no context. It feels wrong, off-putting. Something is not right. This is not how movies are supposed to work. Finally we see the woman, played brilliantly by Jessie Buckley. She is standing on the street as puffy snowflakes start to fall, like we’re within a 3-D snow globe with her. She looks up at a window a couple stories up. We see an old man looking down out of a window. We see Jesse Plemons looking down out of a window. We see Jesse Plemmons in the next shot picking up Jessie Buckley in his worn car. The movie music twinkles and swirls. Jessie Buckley’s Lucy or Lucia or Amy is thinking of ending things with Jesse’s Jake. Things aren’t going to go anywhere good, seems to be the reasoning. Jake drives the car and sometimes talks; his behaviors seem fairly consistent until they’re not, until some gesture boils up like a foreign object from another self. Louisa or Lucy is forthcoming, a fountain of personality and knowledge and interests. But sometimes she slows to a trickle, or is quiet, and suddenly she is someone else who is the same person but perhaps with different memories, different interests. Sometimes she is a painter, sometimes a physicist, sometimes neither. Jessie and Jesse are great. Their performances and their characters are hard to describe. The best movie of 2020 is terrible at being a “movie.” It does not subscribe to common patterns, rhythms, or tropes. It doesn’t even try to be a great movie, really, it simply tries to dissect the life of the mind of the other, and to do that by any cinematic means possible. The self-awareness of the film could have been unbearable, except awareness (and our fragmentary experience of it) is so entirely the point of everything that the film is wrapped up within and that is wrapped up within it. To say the film accepts both the beauty and ugliness of life would be a platitude that the film itself rejects. To say that “love conquers all,” even moreso. But these false truths flit in and about the film’s peripheral vision: illusions or ghosts, but welcome ones. —Chad Betz

Year: 2016

Director: Jeff Nichols

Stars: Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Jaeden Lieberher, Kirsten Dunst, Adam Driver, Sam Shepard

Genre: Science-Fiction

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 84%

Rating: PG-13

Runtime: 111 minutes

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Jeff Nichols’ fourth film continues a streak of smart, idiosyncratic genre tales that focus on family matters. But in Midnight Special, he gets a little more cosmic, telling a very human sci-fi story about a concerned father (Michael Shannon) trying to keep his boy (Jaeden Lieberher) away from the Feds, who believe (correctly) that he has special powers. Midnight Special is the sort of personal, ambitious mainstream film that seems to have all but evaporated from studios’ release schedules, which makes the fact that it was a commercial dud even more upsetting and dispiriting. Maybe on home video people will have a chance to catch up with this emotional drama, whose intimate contours and precise character work make it just as transporting on the small screen.—Tim Grierson



Year: 2020

Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood

Stars: Charlize Theron, Kiki Layne, Matthias Schoenaerts, Chiwitel Ejiofor, Van Veronico Ngo, Henry Melling, Marwan Kenzari, Luca Marinelli

Genre: Action, Fantasy

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 81%

Rating: NR

Runtime: 93 minutes

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Gina Prince-Bythewood, given a budget more than worthy of the best DTV action flick anyone could hope could make it to permanent Netflix browsal, succeeds in towing, and then mildly subverting, the genre line: She proves she can capably steer a high-concept action blockbuster while cobbling together something that feels like the kind of movie “they” just don’t make anymore. All of it amounts to a one-step-forward-one-step-back appraisal: There is much to cull from the travails of Andromache the Scythian (Charlize Theron), an immortal warrior who, thousands of years later, still questions the purpose of her own endlessness, and sequels, given Netflix’s ostensibly unlimited resources, are all but guaranteed—but one wishes for more capably clear action auteurism, even when Prince-Bythewood’s action chops confidently step up. Still: There are countless joys to behold in The Old Guard, most of all the emergence of Kiki Layne—last seen as hyper-dramatic personae #1 in If Beale Street Could Talk—as exceptionally promising action star, executing a one-handed pistol cocking so confident and so unremarked-upon it automatically achieves cinematic canon. Otherwise, trigger-happy editing gets in the way of itself too often, admirable set-pieces sometimes chopped to shit, though plenty of violence—squelching and tendon-splitting—abounds, and the final villain is dispatched with such disregard for the human body that one can’t help but applaud Prince-Bythewood for getting it—for knowing that the key to good action filmmaking is treating people like piles of wet meat. —Dom Sinacola

Year: 1989

Director: Edward Zwick

Stars:

Genre: War, Action, Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93%

Rating: R

Runtime: 122 minutes

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Matthew Broderick may appear in the lead as Col. Robert Gould Shaw, but Glory belongs to Denzel Washington (Pvt. Trip), Morgan Freeman (Sgt. Maj. John Rawlins), Andre Braugher (Cpl. Thomas Searles) and Jhimi Kennedy (Pvt. Jupiter Sharts). These actors deliver incredible performances as members of the first all-black regiment in the Union army during the Civil War, with Washington going on to win the 1990 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Instead of focusing on the obvious North vs. South binary, Glory follows the men as they struggle against Northern racism and their own perceptions of what it means to be Black, and what it means to be Black in an army where they are almost never seen as equals—despite fighting on the same “side” as their white counterparts. With a hauntingly beautiful score, and some of the most memorable war scenes directed by Edward Zwick, Glory is one of the most important films not just about the Civil War, but about America’s eternally complicated history of racism and the black pride that persists in spite, on the battlefield and beyond. —Shannon M. Houston

Year: 2014

Director: James Bobin

Stars: Ricky Gervais, Ty Burrell, Tina Fey, Steve Whitmire, Eric Jacobson

Genre: Comedy, Adventure

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 80%

Rating: PG

Runtime: 107 minutes

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The follow-up to 2011’s rebooted The Muppets pays specific tribute to Kermit, the beloved amphibian behind the Muppets’ longevity; the film shows us what the crew might look like without his guiding influence, and it’s a pretty anarchic picture. But unlike The Muppets, Muppets Most Wanted doesn’t overtly pay homage to its subjects, and instead quite contently filters its bounty of heist caper tropes through a felt-tinted lens. By doing so, the film ends up being just as much of an ode to the Muppets’ brand of unbridled delight without having to wax sentimental; in the end, James Bobin and Nicholas Stoller cleverly get to have their cake and eat it, too. And so do we. —Andy Crump



Year: 2020

Director: Spike Lee

Stars: Clarke Peters, Delroy Lindo, Norman Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Chadwick Boseman, Jonathan Majors, Mélanie Thierry, Paul Walter Hauser, Jasper Pääkkönen, Jean Reno, Lê Y Lan, Johnny Trí Nguy?n

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 92%

Rating: R

Runtime: 156 minutes

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The hunt for buried gold neither ends well nor goes off without a hitch. The long road to reconciliation, whether with one’s trauma, family or national identity, is never without bumps. Glue these truths together with the weathering effects of institutional racism, add myriad references to history—American history, music history, film history—and you get Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, a classically styled Vietnam action picture made in his cinematic vision. As in 2018’s BlacKkKlansman, Lee connects the dots between past and present, linking the struggle for civil rights couched in conscientious objection and protest to contemporary America’s own struggle against state-sanctioned fascism. After opening with a montage of events comprising and figures speaking out against the Vietnam War, referred to predominantly as the American War throughout the rest of the movie, Lee introduces four of the five bloods: Otis (Clarke Peters), Paul (Delroy Lindo), Eddie (Norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), bonded Vietnam vets returned to Ho Chi Minh City ostensibly to find and recover the bones of their fallen squad leader, Norman (Chadwick Boseman). There’s more, of course, “more” being around $17 million in gold bars planted in Vietnamese soil, property of the CIA but reappropriated by the Bloods as reparations for their personal suffering as men fighting a war for a country governed by people who don’t care about their rights. Lee’s at the height of his powers when bluntly making the case that for as much time as has passed since the Vietnam War’s conclusion, America’s still stubbornly waging the same wars on its own people and, for that matter, the rest of the world. And Lee is still angry at and discontent with the status quo, being the continued oppression of Black Americans through police brutality, voter suppression and medical neglect. In this context, Da 5 Bloods’ breadth is almost necessary. As Paul would say: Right on. —Andy Crump

Year: 2016

Director: Barry Jenkins

Stars: Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, Trevante Rhodes, Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris, Janelle Monáe

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 98%

Rating: R

Runtime: 110 minutes

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What’s remarkable about Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is that it’s hardly remarkable at all. It’s actually mundane, though its mundanity can be mitigated—or, really, delineated—via qualifiers: buoyant, bitter, graceful, beautiful, harsh, coltish, doleful, vibrant. More to the point: Moonlight is familiar. If you strip away its exterior particulars, you’ll be left with the bones of a coming-of-age story. Every film has a skeleton to support its musculature. Moonlight’s just happens to look like Boyhood’s and The 400 Blows’. Moonlight is painted with brushstrokes of silence: of Jenkins’ unobtrusive direction, of Chiron’s mute trepidation, of his friends and caregivers, who speak to him in the knowledge that he’ll say little and less to them in return (if he says anything at all). But rather than make Moonlight inaccessible, silence opens it up. In film, silence is neither mortal nor venial sin—it’s actually a virtue. Jenkins is fluent in silence and possesses an innate understanding of how silent moments can communicate more than heaps of dialogue. It’s in glances that pass between Little and his surrogate custodians, Juan (Mahershala Ali, damn near ubiquitous in 2016 and at his best here) and Teresa (Janelle Monáe), the stillness Chiron responds with when in conversation with his chum-then-crush, Kevin. Moonlight is nothing if not empathetic. But describing the film solely in terms of empathy is a misguided oversimplification: All movies seek out empathy to degrees, after all, and so Moonlight does what any human story on celluloid has to do. Jenkins opts for sensation in favor of the sensational, eschewing flash and bluster while making old hat feel new again. Most of all, he invites our empathy at the cost of our vanity. He leads us away from navel-gazing to see the stunningly constructed drama he and his troupe have laid before us on screen. The film encourages self-reflection, but not at the expense of either its narrative or the viewing experience. That’s the surest sign of a deft cinematic hand. —Andy Crump

Year: 1994

Director: Steven Spielberg

Stars: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough, Samuel L. Jackson, BD Wong, Wayne Knight

Genre: Action/Adventure, Science-Fiction

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 91%

Rating: PG-13

Runtime: 126 minutes

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Jurassic Park’s standing as a technical milestone in cinematic storytelling isn’t only dependent on its then-revolutionary use of computer generated imagery: The special effects look as groundbreaking and seamless today as they did 25 years ago. The magic behind the film’s ability to bring dinosaurs to life could be in Spielberg’s expertise in approaching special effects on a shot-by-shot basis, merging each sequence with reliable miniature and animatronic work, making the connective tissue between these tricks as unnoticeable as possible. More than an achievement, Jurassic Park is an infinitely fun action adventure that also manages to insert some prescient themes into the mix—like whether or not humanity should interfere, on a deeply intimate level, with Nature—affording a moral angle that the sequels have pretty much abandoned or just plain bungled so far. —Oktay Ege Kozak

Year: 2018

Director: Orson Welles

Stars: John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Random, Susan Strasberg, Oja Kodar

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 83%

Rating: R

Runtime: 122 minutes

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As gaudy and inexplicable as its title, The Other Side of the Wind nonetheless sings with the force of its movement whistling past its constraints. The wind blows: Orson Welles channels it through his studio-inflicted/self-inflicted torpor, in that process finding an organic melody—or rather, jazz. The making-of documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, released by Netflix to go with this film—the streaming giant’s finest moment—shows Welles, enormous and half-baked, describing what he calls “divine accidents.” These accidents were responsible for some of his oeuvre’s best details (wherein God resides), like the breaking of the egg in Touch of Evil; they were something he aimed to chase after (like chasing the wind) with this, his final project, released several decades after its shooting as Netflix opened their coffers to open the coffin in which the raw footage was locked. His former partners on the shoot, Peter Bogdanovich and Frank Marshall, make good on their old oath to their master to complete the film for him, and in finding the spirit of the thing, deliver us a masterpiece we barely deserve. A divine accident. John Huston plays John Huston as Jake Hannaford who is also Orson Welles, trying to finish The Other Side of the Wind much like Welles tried to finish The Other Side of the Wind, over the course of years with no real budget and by the seats-of-everyone’s-pants. In contrast, the film’s scenario is set up over the course of one evening and night, Hannaford surrounded by “disciples” and peers who are invited to a party to screen some of the footage of what the director hopes will be his greatest masterpiece, in what Welles hoped would be his. The film within the film is a riff on art film, with perhaps the strongest winks at Michelangelo Antonioni and Zabriskie Point. Life imitates art: Hannaford’s house is just around the rock corner from the one Zabriskie blew to bits. Aptly, that house is the setting for most of the film about Hannaford, in theory constructed from found footage from the cineaste paparazzi. The density is dizzying, the intellect fierce. In terms of Welles’ filmography, it’s like the last act of Citizen Kane felt up by Touch of Evil, then stripped and gutted by the meta-punk of F for Fake. No art exists in a vacuum, but The Other Side of the Wind, more than most, bleeds its own context. It is about Orson Welles, showing himself. Killing himself. —Chad Betz

Year: 2019

Director: Martin Scorsese

Stars: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Jesse Plemons, Anna Paquin

Genre: Crime Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96%

Rating: R

Runtime: 209 minutes

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Peggy Sheeran (Lucy Gallina) watches her father, Frank (Robert De Niro), through a door left ajar as he packs his suitcase for a work trip. In go trousers and shirts, each neatly tucked and folded against the luggage’s interior. In goes the snubnose revolver, the ruthless tool of Frank’s trade. He doesn’t know his daughter’s eyes are on him; she’s constitutionally quiet, and remains so throughout most of their interaction as adults. He shuts the case. She disappears behind the door. Her judgment lingers. The scene plays out one third of the way into Martin Scorsese’s new film, The Irishman, named for Frank’s mob world sobriquet, and replays in its final shot, as Frank, old, decrepit and utterly, hopelessly alone, abandoned by his family and bereft of his gangster friends through the passage of time, sits on his nursing home bed. Maybe he’s waiting for Death, but most likely he’s waiting for Peggy (played as an adult by Anna Paquin), who disowned him and has no intention of forgiving him his sins. Peggy serves as Scorsese’s moral arbiter. She’s a harsh judge: The film takes a dim view of machismo as couched in the realm of mafiosa and mugs. When Scorsese’s principal characters aren’t scheming or paying off schemes in acts of violence, they’re throwing temper tantrums, eating ice cream or in an extreme case slap-fighting in a desperately pathetic throwdown. This scene echoes similarly pitiful scenes in Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel and Rashomon: brawls between wannabe roughs afraid of brawling, but forced into it by their own bravado. The Irishman spans the 1950s to the early 2000s, the years Frank worked for the Bufalino crime family, led by Russell (Joe Pesci, out of retirement and intimidating). “Working” means murdering some people, muscling others, even blowing up a car or a building when the occasion warrants. When disengaged from gangland terrorism, he’s at home reading the paper, watching the news, dragging Peggy to the local grocer to give him a beatdown for shoving her. “I only did what you should,” the poor doomed bastard says before Frank drags him out to the street and crushes his hand on the curb. The Irishman is historical nonfiction, chronicling Sheeran’s life, and through his life the lives of the Bufalinos and their associates, particularly those who died before their time (that being most of them). It’s also a portrait of childhood cast in the shadow of dispassionate brutality, and what a young girl must do to find safety in a world defined by bloodshed. —Andy Crump

Year: 2004

Director: Michel Gondry

Stars: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst

Genre: Science-Fiction, Romance

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93%

Rating: R

Runtime: 108 minutes

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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a beguiling hybrid romantic comedy and sci-fi gambol about a pair of estranged lovers hoping to alleviate their post-breakup blues by visiting a medical facility specializing in memory erasure, joins a longstanding tradition of films toying with the notion of science/technology as sprung genie—granting wishes easily enough but ultimately refusing to guarantee customer satisfaction. (Time-travel films, a la Back to the Future, have been wringing dry this conceptual sponge for years). But where Eternal Sunshine distinguishes itself most isn’t in concept or approach or even plot, but in the disheveled poetry screenwriter Charlie Kaufman plants in the mouths of his characters. Borrowing sequencing techniques from Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Eternal Sunshine delights and befuddles in much the same fashion, forcing viewers to experience the characters’ lingering sense of dislocation from the very circumstances of their own lives. Amid the unsettling confusion, however, lies the exhilaration of gradually piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of Joel and Clementine’s relationship, a romance so fitful, paranoid and off-kilter that it seems frighteningly documentary. These characters feel so emotionally credible, in fact, that when Kaufman predictably sends the film barreling pell-mell through his trademark Carrollian looking glass, you barely flinch. Don’t be fooled by the glib, offhand nature of the film’s surface demeanor. Kaufman’s endearingly off-the-wall antics are pronounced as ever, but he tempers his humorous sport with something called humanistic spirit. This anti-romantic comedy has a beating heart at its center. And while it insists on offering a vision of romantic love through a carnival funhouse mirror dimly, the view is bright enough to leave a camera-flash-to-retina-style impression. One you will not soon forget.

Jason Killingsworth

Year: 2018

Director: Armando Iannucci

Stars: Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, Simon Russell Beale, Paddy Considine, Jason Isaacs

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96%

Rating: R

Runtime: 107 minutes

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You can trace that dynamic from The Thick of It, through In the Loop and Veep, and then especially in his new film, The Death of Stalin, whose subject matter can be inferred from a mere glance. The Death of Stalin marks a major temporal departure for Iannucci, known for skewering contemporary political embarrassments and turmoil, by taking us back to 1953 Russia. Years out from the Great Purge, the country remains in the grip of widespread fear fomented by nationalism, public trials, antisemitism, executions, mass deportations and civic uncertainty. Iannucci asks us to laugh at an era not known for being especially funny. That’s the give and take at the film’s core: Iannucci drops a punchline and we guffaw, then moments later we hear a gunshot, accompanied by the sound of a fresh corpse hitting the ground. Finding humor in political violence is a big ask, and yet Iannucci’s dialogue is nimble but unfailingly harsh, replete with chafing castigations. We howl with laughter, though we can’t help feeling bad for every poor bastard caught on the receiving end of trademark Iannucci verbal abuse, which typically means we end up feeling bad for every character in his films. He spares no one from insult or injury, even when they’re lying dead on the floor, soaked in their own piss. A tale of mortal sins as well as venial ones, The Death of Stalin adds modern urgency to his comic storytelling trademarks: As nationalist sentiment rears its ugly head across the globe and macho authoritarian leaders contrive to hoard power at democracy’s expense, a farcical play on the political clusterfuck that followed Stalin’s passing feels shockingly apropos. It takes a deft hand and a rare talent to make tyranny and state sanctioned torture so funny. —Andy Crump

Year: 2012

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Stars: Gina Carano, Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas, Michael Fassbender, Bill Paxton

Rating: R

Runtime: 93 minutes

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With a needlessly complicated plot and a big enough budget to accommodate it, Steven Soderbergh’s take on DTV action thrillers seems to exist for the sake of refuting most established rules of DTV action-thriller filmmaking. Soderbergh doesn’t just break the 180-degree line, he shatters it repeatedly, but rather than strand the viewer in an amorphous geographic space while two people confusingly beat the pulp from each other, he offers up a singular cinematic language that thrives on both visceral style and astounding clarity. “No you shouldn’t think of her as being a woman. No, that would be a mistake,” slippery government operative Kenneth (Ewan McGregor) advises spy assassin (or assassin spy?) Paul (Michael Fassbender) about Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), our rogue and extremely capable hero. So Haywire proceeds, as Kenneth gets over getting dumped by Mallory by conspiring to kill her. Against the grain of Olivier Megaton’s nauseating Taken movies and Paul Greengrass’s inscrutable Bourne installments, Soderbergh follows Mallory from dingy European hallway to small diner in upstate new York to nice hotel room in Dublin, the empirical nature of the locations and the immediate athleticism of her brawls—typically just Carano and an A-list actor game to get grody—keeping all the action understandable even as it’s endlessly thrilling. Soderbergh trusts his audience to intuit what’s going on, and even if you don’t follow the international espionage plot, the violence tells a story known well enough: Mallory must prove herself at every confrontation, underestimated by every man she pummels her way through, punished for ever trusting them in the first place. It’s bleak, maybe, but it’s also really satisfying to watch her kick the shit out of some cops. —Dom Sinacola



Year: 1993

Director: Steven Spielberg

Stars: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 97%

Rating: R

Runtime: 196 minutes

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It’d be hard to find a more inspiring, moving story to tell than that of Oskar Schindler, and in doing so, Spielberg produced one of the most ambitious, wise and moving motion pictures of our lifetime. The acting is superb—a career-making role for big lumbering Liam Neeson, so carefree and cocky at the beginning, so concerned and determined in the middle, and so noble and humble at the end of the film. Ralph Fiennes and Ben Kingsley are perfect in supporting roles. A host of unknowns give everything in their one moment on the screen. John Williams’s haunting score and Janusz Kaminski’s breathtaking black-and-white cinematography sparkle. But the script—oh, Steven Zaillian’s majestic script—is the biggest star. He manages to take a Holocaust tale and turn it into a story of triumph, the story of how much one man can do, and the regret we’ll each someday have that we didn’t do much, much more. Oskar’s “I could have gotten more out” speech is almost too much to bear. —Michael Dunaway



Year: 2020

Director: Nadia Hallgren

Stars: Michelle Obama

Genre: Documentary

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93%

Rating: NR

Runtime: 89 minutes

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There seem to be two goals of Netflix’s new Michelle Obama documentary—first, to humanize (or normalize) the former First Lady of the United States as she embarks on a countrywide book tour (for her bestseller of the same name), and second, to reinforce the idea that Michelle Obama is a woman necessarily and eternally concerned with race and racism in America, particularly for Black women. The first goal is achieved, almost as much as it can be, and the personal stories and appearance of family members like her mother and brother are the strongest part of the Becoming experience. The second goal is a little more complicated, largely due to the fact that Michelle Obama occupies a strange space as a figure who is neither a politician, nor an activist—but who often presents like one or the other. Nadia Hallgren’s film is an attempt at a portrait of a lady seemingly on fire, now that she’s “free at last.” In an early scene, Obama and billionaire Oprah Winfrey laugh as they candidly discuss the relief that came with the end of her time in the White House. Becoming is about the “liberation” of Michelle Obama, and it takes care to remind us of all that she endured on the road to the White House. There’s a hollowness sometimes echoed in Obama’s celebrity interviews (on her press tour, she sits down with the likes of Oprah, Stephen Colbert, Gayle King and Reese Witherspoon), but something far more interesting happens when Obama is working as a mentor. In several scenes, she sits down with small groups—groups of Black women, young female students, Native American students in Arizona, and older black women in the church. In one especially compelling scene, we go home with Shayla, a teen in one of the groups, and we get to know the women who are inspired by Obama’s story of becoming. Watching a young black girl, giddy as she imitates the former First Lady’s walk down a hall, we get the sense that the mere experience of being in the same space as Obama will change some of these girls forever. They light up the screen in this documentary; they are the true stars, and they bring the real magic to this story. —Shannon M. Houston

Year: 1973

Director: Martin Scorcese

Stars: Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Richard Romanus, Amy Robinson, Jeanne Bell

Genre: Action & Adventure, War

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 97%

Rating: R

Runtime: 112 minutes

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Martin Scorsese’s fourth film begins in voiceover—rising wise guy Charlie (Harvey Keitel) speaks as much to himself as to God, knowing he’s a hypocrite for asking for guidance while working for his crime boss uncle (Cesare Danova)—and ends in a conflagration of voices, the indifferent thrum of New York City blotting out the film’s inevitable tragedy. Despite everything everyone tells him, especially his elders, a chorus of first-generation Italian immigrants, Charlie vouches for his dipshit best friend Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) and carries on an affair with Johnny’s cousin Theresa (Amy Robinson), whose struggles with epilepsy Charlie’s uncle relegates to a brain sickness unbecoming of anyone with whom Charlie would ever want to be involved. In between small-time grifts and messy bar fights and thankless errands for heavy-breathing mafia types—in between celebrations for returning Vietnam vets whose personalities are most likely blasted by PTSD, childhood neighborhood friends unequipped to understand anything about that experience on the other side of the world—Charlie spends all effort hiding the life he wants from the life he’s earning, from the life of his culture, his people, his neighborhood. Scorsese, the obvious cinephile, drew much from the French New Wave, especially in this portrait of careless youth beset by an impossible existential weight, but every moment of Mean Streets breathes with the claustrophobic, non-stop energy of New York in the ’70s: dirty, atomized and stubbornly stuck in its ways. Johnny Boy will let Charlie down, Theresa will never settle for being a hidden fling, Charlie’s uncle will never let him, unless he can prove himself to be clean of the sins of his friends, take over that Italian restaurant from the scumbum who owes them too much money—meanwhile, Charlie’s friend Michael (Richard Romanus) has no patience left waiting for the money Johnny owes him, the money Charlie helped Johnny acquire. As Charlie knows too well care of his Catholic upbringing, the sins of the past always catch up to collect. With Mean Streets, Scorsese crafted an indomitable ode to his home, an apologia for the hypocrites on his street that could never outrun their fate, the urban monoliths of their immigrant experience always closing in. —Dom Sinacola



Year: 2017

Director: Sean Baker

Stars: Willem Dafoe, Bria Vinaite, Brooklyn Prince, Valeria Cotto, Christopher Rivera, Caleb landry Jones

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96%

Rating: R

Runtime: 115 minutes

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However useful a surreal approach to reframing paradise may be, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project presents a more acute critique. Baker plunges his audience into his worlds through the lens of social realism, his camera on the same playing field as Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), her mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) and the manager of the motel they live in, Bobby (Willem Dafoe). The camera lives with the characters, watches them haul a bed-bug-infested mattress outside, or sit and eat pancakes by a small creek-ish ditch. Nothing climactic happens in these scenes, we just get to watch and not pass judgment—or pass judgment, whatever, it’s up to us. Baker never interferes; the equality of these scenes under the eye of his camera makes his film’s pointed ideas about survival and joy all the more striking. The film may be buoyed with a sense of humor and, occasionally, wonder, but Halley’s life is framed by an internal struggle over whether humor and wonder can help her retain her autonomy at all in spite of her class status. The Florida Project is spattered with profound sadness, with moments of externalized, violent frustration at presumed helplessness, at practically being born into all this. To what degree you believe Baker to be condescending or patronizing or exploitative is up to you, but the film’s bursts of light, its idea of what caregiving looks like when caregiving is a privilege, is handled with sensitivity. When the film switches from 35mm to digital in its final shots, Baker imbues his camera, now mobile, with freewheeling liberation: No matter what happens after The Florida Project ends, in those last moments, these kids are born to live.

Year: 2018

Director: Tom McCarthy

Stars: Carey Mulligan, Jake Gyllenhaal, Bill Camp, Ed Oxenbould

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93%

Rating: PG-13

Runtime: 104 minutes

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On its surface, Wildlife is a pretty familiar mid-century portrait of white-picket-fence America. (Spoiler alert: The nuclear family isn’t as harmonious as you might imagine.) But Paul Dano’s directorial debut is often subtler and more moving than would be expected, and the film is guided by Carey Mulligan’s stunning performance as Jeanette, a mother left to look after her teen son once her failure of a husband (Jake Gyllenhaal) leaves town for a temporary job. Based on Richard Ford’s novel, Wildlife sets up expectations about this woman—oh, poor Jeanette, the helpless, sensitive lass—which Mulligan expertly explodes, constantly surprising us with the character’s capacity for reinvention and calculation. Whether plotting to find a replacement for her husband or confiding in her son about what a disappointment his father is, Jeanette expresses a whole generation of women’s frustration at being repressed by a patriarchal society. Mulligan makes that frustration sexy, poignant and liberating—even if we never stop seeing the character’s increasing desperation to free herself. —Tim Grierson

Year: 2015

Director: Tom McCarthy

Stars: Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton, Brian d’Arcy James, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Jamey Sheridan

Genre: Drama, Thriller

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 97%

Rating: R

Runtime: 129 minutes

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Always a director who’s drawn great performances from his ensembles—we’ll set aside the disastrous The Cobbler for a moment—actor-turned-filmmaker Tom McCarthy has made his best drama since his first, 2003’s The Station Agent, with this stripped-down depiction of the Boston Globe’s 2001 investigation into the Catholic Church’s cover-up of sexual misconduct. Starring the likes of Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber and John Slattery, Spotlight is about nothing more than watching smart, passionate reporters do their job, digging into a story and using their savvy and moxie to bring it to the world. The cast lets its characters’ jobs fill in the backstory of their lives, and in the process Spotlight does what Zodiac, The Insider and All the President’s Men did before it: let us appreciate the difficulty and rigor required for good journalism. Special kudos to best-in-show Mark Ruffalo as Michael Rezendes, a ruthless bloodhound of an investigative reporter who may inspire a lot of impressionable high school juniors in the audience to take up the profession. —Tim Grierson



Year: 1981

Director: Steven Spielberg

Stars: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Wolf Kahler, Ronald Lacey

Genre: Action & Adventure

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 95%

Rating: PG

Runtime: 115 minutes

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A near-perfect distillation of the excitement and fun of the radio and pulp serials of yesteryear, Raiders of the Lost Ark established Harrison Ford’s wookie-free leading man credentials once and for all (with an assist from Blade Runner). The film also raises the question: Has anyone had a more impressive, more industry-transformative five-year run than Spielberg & Lucas did from 1977-1982? —Michael Burgin



Year: 2007

Director: Stephen Frears

Stars: Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen, James Cromwell

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96%

Rating: PG-13

Runtime: 103 minutes

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Although Stephen Frears’ film is called The Queen, it chronicles the days after Princess Diana’s fatal car crash and has nearly as much to say about prime minister Tony Blair and modern celebrity culture as it does Her Majesty. After the accident, the Queen (Helen Mirren) prefers to keep the family’s response private, but Blair believes she should speak to the rapidly growing throng of mourners outside Buckingham Palace. It may not sound suspenseful on paper, but The Queen is just that; it’s taut, energetic and frequently funny. What’s most interesting about the film’s attitude is that it casts Blair as its hero, but instead of possessing the traits that we’ve admired in other movie heroes—courage, wit, accuracy with a pistol—this hero’s talent is that he has the ability to project an image the people want to see. What he thinks of Diana is never entirely clear, but in this film—in this age—it hardly matters. The screenplay reduces Elizabeth to human scale, but Mirren, with a layered, realistic performance, brings her back from the brink of parody. If the entire royal family had bumbled around the house the way James Cromwell does as Prince Philip, the movie might have seemed like Fawlty Towers. But by playing Elizabeth as contrastingly sharp—even when she’s micalculating the public’s expectations—Mirren re-humanizes the caricature. She plays the queen not as someone unaware times have changed but as someone fighting to continue the old ways, more irked than confounded that people aren’t following the rules. It’s a clash of old and new, of royal privilege and celebrity privilege, and standing at the juncture is Diana, beholder of charisma, a royal and then a royal no more, a celebrity but one made through her connection to people who were born with power. —Robert Davis

Year: 2010

Directors: Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud

Stars: Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Russell Brand

Genre: Animation, Action & Adventure

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 81%

Rating: PG

Runtime: 95 minutes

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Followed by three more franchise flicks—one of which, 2013’s Despicable Me 2, is so old-timey racist and unabashedly violent and culturally tone-deaf it’s legitimately detrimental to the health of young children—the original Despicable Me shines best by flattening the dichotomy between good guys and bad guys, removing all but the most heart-strings-tugging stakes from what would otherwise be a minefield of superhero and spy thriller movie tropes. In the world of career super villain Gru (Steve Carell, playacting a mouthful of an Eastern European accent), good guys are boring state-subsidized bureaucrats, and bad guys aren’t all that bad, just ambitious pseudo-scientists with big ideas and healthy competitive natures. They don’t actually want to hurt anybody. So, really, once Gru begins unwittingly step-fathering three young orphan girls (the youngest voiced adorably by Eighth Grade’s Elsie Fisher) he sheds all of his sociopathic tendencies to become an ersatz Good Guy replete with brand new nemesis, Vector (Jason Segal). Though the two sequels and standalone Minions vehicle needlessly complicate the DM mythos, further muddying Gru’s lineage and giving the Minions personalities (the funniest joke in this first film is how Gru talks to each Minion as if they are an individual being, giving them normie names, even though they are impossible to distinguish)—which then means we have to ask questions about how Minions procreate and/or go to the bathroom—the first Despicable Me movie is a pleasantly pure distillation of family-friendly values, slapstick and indifferent character designs, bolstered by a good joke or two. If only it ended there. Instead, we must wonder, in 2019: If a Minion with its pants around its ankles has no genitals, is it really naked? —Dom Sinacola

Year: 1990

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone

Genre: Science-Fiction, Action, Thriller

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 82%

Rating: R

Runtime: 113 minutes

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Very loosely based on the Philip K. Dick short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (and aren’t all PKD adaptations “very loose”?), Total Recall functions as a construct for Paul Verhoeven to take a high-concept premise about memory implants and lost identity and motivational uncertainty and turn it into an Arnold Schwarzenegger schlock-fest. It should be bad, but it’s not; it should be, at best, cheesy fun—but it’s even more than that. Unlike many of it’s sci-fi action peers, Total Recall never runs out of steam or ideas; it starts with the memory implant stuff, but on the back end gives us a vividly imagined Mars society with an oppressed mutant population (which is, like, the best special make-up effects portfolio ever) and a secret alien reactor that’s a MacGuffin but also a deus ex machina. The plot’s a mess but so is Arnold. It all works. Total Recall’s $60 million production budget was absolutely huge for its time, but unlike similar Hollywood ventures that put money towards glitz (like the 2012 remake, so slick it slips right out of one’s head), Verhoeven uses the loot to give us more dust, more grit, more decrepit sets, more twisted prosthetics and maximum Arnold. Verhoeven, in fact, uses Arnold as much as he uses anything else in the budget to tell this darkly exuberant story, from the contorted confusion of the set-up right on through to the eye-popping finale. It results in a sci-fi screed written in the form of a hundred Ahh-nuld faces, absurd and unforgettable. For as many times as Dick has been adapted, this is perhaps the one time the go-for-broke energy and imagination of his work has made it into the cinema (Blade Runner is something else entirely). Total Recall may have little in common with the actual content of the story it blows up, but it knows the vibe. And PKD vibes are the best kind. —Chad Betz

Year: 1991

Director: Jonathan Demme

Stars: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine

Rating: R

Runtime: 118 minutes

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The camera hugs her face, maybe trying to protect her though she needs no protection, and maybe just trying to see into her, to see what she sees, to understand why seeing what she sees is so important. Not even 30, Jodie Foster looks so much younger, surrounded in The Silence of the Lambs by men who tower over her, staring at her, flummoxed by her, perhaps wanting to protect her too, but more likely, more ironically, intimidated by a world that would allow such a fragile creature to wander the domain of monsters. As Clarice Starling, FBI agent-in-training, Foster is an innocent who’s seen more than any of us could ever imagine, a warrior who seems unsure of her prowess. That Jonathan Demme—a director who came up under the tutelage of Roger Corman, able to adopt then immediately shed genres at whim—corners Starling within the confines of a “Woman in Peril,” only to watch her shrug off every label thrown at her, is a testament to The Silence of the Lambs as feminist, not because it so thoroughly inhabits a female point of view, but because its violence and fear is the stuff of masculine toxicity. Demme’s film is only the second to adapt Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lector novels to the screen, but it’s the first to draw undeniable lines between the way men see Clarice Starling and the way that serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) projects his neuroses onto his victims. Demme (and Harris) links seeing to transformation to one’s need to consume, all pursued through a gendered lens, represented by the seemingly omniscient perspective of Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins), a borderline asexual cannibal who literally eats those over whom he holds court. Buffalo Bill is a monster, and so is Lector, but the difference is that Lector does not attempt to possess Clarice Starling, though he sees her, because he is in control of that which he consumes. Buffalo Bill isn’t; as a man he believes that by consuming femininity he can become it, too stupid and too self-absorbed to realize that consumption is deletion, that wanting to protect a woman is only a matter of admitting that the World of Men is a weak and evil failure of the very ideals it strives to preserve. —Dom Sinacola

Year: 2016

Director: Naoko Yamada

Stars: Miyu Irino, Saori Hayami, Megumi Han

Genre: Animation, Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 94%

Rating: NR

Runtime: 129 minutes

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In a medium that too often feels at times constricted by the primacy of masculine aesthetic sensibilities and saturated with hyper-sexualized portrayals of women colloquially coded as “fan service,” Naoko Yamada’s presence is a welcome breath of fresh air, to say nothing of the inimitable quality of her films themselves. Inspired by the likes of Yasujiro Ozu, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Sergei Parajanov, Sofia Coppola, and Lucile Hadžihalilovic, Yamada is a director par excellence, capable of arresting attention and evoking melancholy and bittersweet catharsis through delicate compositions of deft sound, swift editing, ephemeral color palettes, and characters with rich inner lives rife with knotty, relatable struggles. A Silent Voice, adapted from Yoshitoki Oima’s manga of the same name, is a prime example of all these sensibilities at play. When Shoya Ishida meets Shoko Nishimiya, a deaf transfer student, in elementary school, he bullies her relentlessly to the amusement of his classmates. One day when Shoya goes too far, forcing Shoko to transfer again for fear of her own safety, he is branded a pariah by his peers and retreats into a state of self-imposed isolation and self-hatred. Years later, Shoya meets Shoko once again, now as teenagers, and attempts to make amends for the harm he inflicted on her, all while wrestling to understand his own motivations for doing so. A Silent Voice is a film of tremendous emotional depth—an affecting portrait of adolescent abuse, reconciliation and forgiveness for the harm perpetrated by others and ourselves. —Toussaint Egan

Year: 2017

Director: James Franco

Stars: James Franco, Seth Rogan, Dave Franco, Alison Brie

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 91%

Rating: R

Runtime: 104 minutes

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To tackle the ineffable mystery of Tommy Wiseau’s consciousness is to understand the mind of a crocodile, or of a shark, or of a space alien. I wouldn’t even know where to start. Which is precisely what makes James Franco’s portrayal of Wiseau in The Disaster Artist such an impressive and triumphant one. Franco has physically transformed into Wiseau in the same manner that usually draws praise for an actor such as Daniel Day Lewis: not necessarily via hair or makeup, but in a way that is more primal and intimate. Every odd little tic, every awkward laugh, each inexplicable grimace—the gestures all shine through as genuine to anyone who has seen The Room, or even an interview with Wiseau. The portrayal is a huge part of what makes The Disaster Artist so compelling and just plain fun. You could make a good argument that this is the greatest role of Franco’s career. And even if The Disaster Artist reads like it’s positioning for a shot at year-end honors and the largest possible audience, fans of The Room will ultimately get far more from the experience than the average multiplex dweller. It’s a film to see with an audience familiar with what it’s about to see, with people who can appreciate the dedication with which Franco and co. have recreated so many of the original film’s woeful charm. —Jim Vorel



Year: 2018

Director: Lee Chang-dong

Stars: Ah-in Yoo, Jong-seo Jeon, Steven Yeun

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 95%

Rating: NR

Runtime: 148 minutes

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Eight years after critical hit Poetry, Korean director Lee Chang-dong translates a very brief and quarter-century old story by Japanese master novelist Haruki Murakami into something distinctly Korean, distinctly contemporary (spoiler warning: there’s a news clip of Trump) and distinctly Lee Chang-dong. But also: into something that utterly captures the essence of Murakami. Lee Jong-su (Ah-in Yoo) is an aspiring young writer who quits his menial job to tend to his incarcerated father’s farm (a storyline the film takes from William Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning,” after which Murakami—as referential as ever—named his own story). Jong-su encounters a childhood acquaintance, Shin Hae-mi (Jong-seo Joon), who apparently he interacted with just once as a kid by calling her “ugly.” Anyways, Hae-mi’s all grown up and claims to have had plastic surgery; she and Jong-su strike up a relationship. It’s unusual and unnerving: Hae-mi is erratic and inscrutable, possibly a compulsive liar, while Jong-su can barely do more than gape and breathe. Nonetheless, Lee couches this set-up in exquisite details and rich observation. Spontaneously (as is her wont), Hae-mi asks Jong-su to watch her perhaps imaginary cat while she takes a trip to Africa. When Hae-mi returns to Korea, she—to Jong-su’s suppressed chagrin—has a rich new boyfriend in tow. His name is Ben, and he’s played as a bored but semi-cheerful sociopath by Steven Yeun (who has never been better). The way the film’s story flows into uncharted terrain is part of its spell. Something of a love triangle develops, some disturbing idiosyncrasies are revealed (not just about Ben) and some bad stuff happens. Murakami writes about that which he cannot grasp; he embraces the ineffable, inhaling and exhaling a cloud of unknowing. So, too, does Burning, while also managing to give us Lee Chang-dong’s signatures: visual lucidity and artful morality. It’s the rare symbiotic triumph between singular source material and singular cinematic vision. And while the film is a slow-burn, it expands the meaning of the term: You might never quench the flames it sparks within you, flames that send fumes up and away to a thundering, obscuring cloud. —Chad Betz



Year: 2005

Director: Noah Baumbach

Stars: Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline, Anna Paquin

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 92%

Rating: R

Runtime: 81 minutes

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Borrowing themes from his previous films—children of failed marriages; characters whose bookish smarts seem to work against them; a floating sense of fatalism—The Squid and the Whale creeps ever closer to Noah Baumbach’s own tempestuous past. His parents’ faltering union isn’t just a detail used to add depth to a certain character. It’s the whole story—a gorgeous, candid portrait of the messy car crash of divorce, from all angles. “It’s hard to even put myself in the mindset of those movies anymore,” he told Paste in 2005. “With Squid, these are reinventions of people that are close to me, and this is the movie I identify with the most. It is a natural extension of what I have intended and what I feel. I trusted myself more on this one.” —Keenan Mayo

Year: 2020

Director: Alice Wu

Stars: Leah Lewis, Daniel Diemer, Alexxis Lemire

Genre: Romantic Comedy

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96%

Rating: NR

Runtime: 105 minutes

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Netflix’s The Half of It begins somewhat deceptively, with a highly stylized animated retelling of an old Greek myth in which the four-armed, four-legged, two-headed humans of ancient times are sundered by the gods and wander about forever in search of the other half of their single heart. It ends with a scene between a boy and a girl, something that normally would come right out of a dopey rom-com, but in a way that subverts the trope on every level, from the inversion of its meaning to the quiet, intimate naturalism with which it is filmed. It’s a fitting juxtaposition because the film sandwiched between the two moments is about the fallacies that drive our neat and tidy narratives about love. Love is messy is the point, one called out aloud by main character Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis) in Alice Wu’s short little film about a Chinese-American high schooler whose incredible writing skills find her hired to help her classmate, the kindhearted but far less charming Paul (Daniel Diemer), woo another girl. Paul does not realize that Ellie shares his unrequited desire for Aster (Alexxis Lemire), and that every sweet late-night text and smoldering note passed in class is tearing Ellie apart. If the story borrows its central conceit from Cyrano de Bergerac, it at least puts a few interesting spins on it: Ellie is an outsider in unique ways. She is the only Asian student at her school, an immigrant whose underemployed and linguistically challenged father struggles to run her household. She is the student who is so good at writing that she runs a side hustle writing papers for her entire class. And then there’s the other little matter of her feeling same-sex attraction in a stiflingly small, overwhelmlingly Christian town. It’s a unique twist on a familiar story in a film that universalizes feelings of otherness for the audience, whether they come from being the runt of the litter or the child of an immigrant struggling to make it in America. —Kenneth Lowe

Year: 1980

Director: Jim Abrahams

Stars: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Robert Stack, Leslie Nielsen

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 87%

Rating: PG

Runtime: 88 minutes

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The writing trio of Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker (ZAZ) defined a genre with their disaster-movie spoof in 1980. The jokes fly fast and furious, from the “Who’s on First” confusion of a crew that includes Roger and Captain Oveur (“Roger, Roger. What’s our vector, Victor?”) to Oveur (Peter Graves) asking a kid in the cockpit, “Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?” to an old lady translating jive (“Jive-ass dude don’t got no brains anyhow! Shiiiiit!”) to “stop calling me Shirley!” Ridiculous and ridiculously quotable, it’s the funniest spoof film of all time. —Josh Jackson



Year: 2017

Director: Raoul Peck

Rating: PG-13

Runtime: 93 minutes

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Raoul Peck focuses on James Baldwin’s unfinished book Remember This House, a work that would have memorialized three of his friends, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. All three black men were assassinated within five years of each other, and we learn in the film that Baldwin was not just concerned about these losses as terrible blows to the Civil Rights movement, but deeply cared for the wives and children of the men who were murdered. Baldwin’s overwhelming pain is as much the subject of the film as his intellect. And so I Am Not Your Negro is not just a portrait of an artist, but a portrait of mourning—what it looks, sounds and feels like to lose friends, and to do so with the whole world watching (and with so much of America refusing to understand how it happened, and why it will keep happening). Peck could have done little else besides give us this feeling, placing us squarely in the presence of Baldwin, and I Am Not Your Negro would have likely still been a success. His decision to steer away from the usual documentary format, where respected minds comment on a subject, creates a sense of intimacy difficult to inspire in films like this. The pleasure of sitting with Baldwin’s words, and his words alone, is exquisite. There’s no interpreter, no one to explain Baldwin but Baldwin—and this is how it should be. —Shannon M. Houston

Year: 1977

Director: Richard Attenborough

Stars: Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine

Genre: War, Action

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 64%

Rating: PG

Runtime: 175 minutes

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It’s an oddity among WWII movies: a blindingly starry cast and an enormous budget, amassed by director Richard Attenborough to “celebrate” one of the colossal military failures of WWII. The flip side to The Longest Day, A Bridge too Far is the story of how the Allies bet big on winning the war by Christmas, 1944, and subsequently left thousands killed, wounded or captured across the Netherlands. Beginning as adventure, revved up by bally-ho Brits and spunky yanks (including Michael Caine, Elliott Gould and a mighty Edward Fox), Attenborough’s film quickly devolves into a series of glum anecdotes on the futility of war. Anthony Hopkins’ glider troop are met behind enemy lines not by the predicted “old men and kids” but by superior German forces; Robert Redford’s paratroop company are decimated capturing a bridge with leaky boats; and Gene Hackman’s Polish general, dismissively treated by a self-satisfied Allied upper echelon, is forced to watch as his army of free Poles is massacred just as predicted. All the while the German command in Holland, in a strand of black comedy, repeatedly insist the Allies must have secret plans up their sleeve, because they couldn’t possibly be dumb or reckless enough to be attempting what they appear to be. —Brogan Morris

Year: 2010

Director: David Fincher

Stars: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96%

Rating: PG-13

Runtime: 120 minutes

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The Social Network follows the evolution of one of the most financially successful and problematic institutions of the 21st century. The film opens with a break-up scene between Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), a young man completely devoid of social skills, and his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara). Zuckerberg confuses Erica with his literal, machine-like translations of her every word while occasionally throwing in a sarcastic witticism. Throughout the film this sort of wordplay ebbs and flows with comedy and tragedy. After Erica walks out on him, an inebriated Mark goes back to his Harvard dorm room and disses Erica with aspersions to her character and bra size on the school’s social page for everyone to see while also creating a new social website which, with help from a few friends, eventually becomes Facebook. Most of the film takes place as a series of flashbacks based on testimony in two lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg. The first is from a trio of Harvard upperclassmen who claim to have contracted Zuckerberg to create the network, and who also belong to an elite club that Mark wishes to be a part of. The other suit comes from his best friend and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) whose story in the film is as central as that of Zuckerberg’s. The disintegration of their relationship begins when the creator of Napster, Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) takes a bandwagon seat on the rising company while creating a wedge between the co-founders. Garfield is wonderful as the unsure Saverin who wants to carefully guide Facebook into its future while Zuckerberg and Parker are full steam ahead. Like Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street, greed is still king and the wolves are at the door. —Tim Basham

Year: 1979

Director: Terry Jones

Stars: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin

Genre: Comedy

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 95%

Rating: R

Runtime: 92 minutes

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Pretty much made on George Harrison’s dime and considered, even if apocryphally, by the legendary comedy troupe to be their best film (probably because it’s the closest they’ve come to a three-act narrative with obvious “thematic concerns”), Life of Brian got banned by a lot of countries at the butt-end of the ’70s. As a Christ story, the telling of how squealy mama’s boy Brian (Graham Chapman) mistakenly finds himself as one of many messiah figures rising in Judea under the shadow of Roman occupation (around 33 AD, on a Saturday afternoon-ish), Monty Python’s follow-up to Holy Grail may be the most political film of its ilk. As such, the British group stripped all romanticism and nobility from the story’s bones, lampooning everything from radical revolutionaries to religious institutions to government bureaucracy while never stooping to pick on the figure of Jesus or his empathetic teachings. Of course, Life of Brian isn’t the first film about Jesus (or: Jesus adjacent) to focus on the human side of the so-called savior—Martin Scorsese’s take popularly did so less than a decade later—but it feels like the first to leverage human weakness against the absurdity of the Divine’s expectations. Steeped in satire fixing on everything from Spartacus to Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, and buttressed by as many iconic lines as there are crucifixes holding up the film’s frames (as Brian’s equally squealy mother hollers to the swarming masses, “He’s not the messiah. He’s a very naughty boy!”), the film explores Jesus’s life by obsessing over the context around it. Maybe a “virgin birth” was really just called that to cover up a Roman centurion’s sexual crimes. Maybe coincidence (and also class struggle) is reality’s only guiding force. Maybe the standard of what makes a miracle should be a little higher. And maybe the one true through line of history is that stupid people will always follow stupid people, whistling all the way to our meaningless, futile deaths. —Dom Sinacola

Year: 1976

Director: Martin Scorsese

Stars: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, Peter Boyle, Harvery Keitel

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 97%

Rating: R

Runtime: 112 minutes

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Taxi Driver was Scorsese’s breakthrough: a seething condemnation of alienation—not to mention New York’s descent in the 1970s into a crime-ridden hellscape—delivered with such clinical coldness that when Scorsese’s star (and longtime collaborator) Robert De Niro finally explodes, it’s unspeakably upsetting. If Taxi Driver now feels slightly overrated, it’s only because the movie’s DNA has crept into so many subsequent filmmakers’ efforts. Scorsese grew up loving Westerns, and Taxi Driver could be his version of The Searchers—except his man-out-of-time finds no redemption. —Tim Grierson



Year: 1966

Director: Sergio Leone

Stars: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach

Genre: Western, Action & Adventure

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 97%

Rating: R

Runtime: 161 minutes

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Arguably the greatest of the Italian Westerns, but also one of the finest Westerns ever made. Leone’s penchant for turning the genre’s sacred themes and obsessions inside out goes full tilt here. Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef are back for this third Dollars movie, but the addition of Eli Wallach adds a significant amount of caustic humor and even more cynicism to the mix. Set during the Civil War, though in a dry, barren landscape resembling the surreal panels of a Krazy Kat cartoon more than historical reality, Leone’s epic is the sublime, gloriously cinematic creation that he was always gunning for. Composer Ennio Morricone’s score ties it all together, particularly in the orgasmic “Ecstasy of Gold” finale. The director may have gone even more baroque with his subsequent Once Upon a Time in the West, but this is still his greatest achievement. Pop culture and the genre were never the same. —Derek Hill

Year: 2008

Director: Ron Howard

Stars: Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, Kevin Bacon, Rebecca Hall, Toby Jones, Sam Rockwell

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93%

Rating: R

Runtime: 123 minutes

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A small-scale film with a large purview, Frost/Nixon strategically captures the interview as journalistic art, as we watch David Frost (Michael Sheen) attempt to destabilize the most difficult of subjects, Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon (Frank Langella, in a captivating performance). The film doesn’t much dig into David Frost personally, other than to indicate that he’s an entertainer above all, used to coasting on his natural charisma and not quite prepared for the potentially career-ruining interview he’s signed himself up for. There are some fun, awkward scenes with Frost and his research team (featuring the always-enjoyable Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt), meeting and greeting the former president, too. But most of Frost/Nixon’s running time is dedicated to what Nixon dubs a “duel,” and it is exhilarating to watch Frost, initially pummeled by the pro opposite him, come back to life in the final round. —Maura McAndrew

Year: 2013

Director: Jeff Nichols

Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Tye Sheridan, Sam Shepard, Jacob Lofland, Sarah Paulson

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 97%

Rating: PG-13

Runtime: 131 minutes

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The title character of Jeff Nichols’s Mud is the kind of romanticized outlaw one finds in adventure books. With a magnetic personality and a star-crossed love story, he was born to be an enigmatic presence on an uninhabited island. Matthew McConaughey plays this man who comes from out of nowhere, yet appears to be in his natural habitat, with gritty cheerfulness, creating a character who seems good-natured even when he’s obfuscating. For a 14-year-old in search of a hero, he’s an ideal candidate. Mud combines the poignance of a boy coming to terms with life’s realities with the excitement of top-notch suspense. Nichols works within the coming-of-age genre, mixes in elements of a crime thriller, and elevates it all with a supreme sense of character, place and detail. Tye Sheridan stars as Ellis, a 14-year-old who senses his world changing. Ellis lives in an Arkansas river community that’s a relic from another time. He and his neighbors live in makeshift bankside houses that would no longer legal without already being grandfathered in. His mother (Sarah Paulson) has had enough of the life and of her husband, and is leaving. His father (Ray McKinnon) wants to stay and continue to make his living on the river, but the house was passed down on his wife’s side, meaning that when she leaves, they all have to leave. Realizing that his parents have failed in their own relationship, Ellis desperately searches for something he can believe in. That’s where Mud (McConaughey) comes in. Ellis and his friend, Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), head to an island on the Mississippi River, where they found a boat dramatically stranded in a tree, washed up there after a flood. Their plan is to turn the boat into a secret project, but they soon discover that they aren’t the only ones who have been inside it. Despite a plot that exists entirely in the realm of the possible, Nichols gives Mud a fantastical air. It’s like a childhood memory with embellishments and holes that have been filled in. Mud himself is a symbol of the romantic and the unlikely. He first appears in a classically mysterious manner—unseen one moment, standing casually by the water’s edge the next. —Jeremy Mathews



Year: 2018

Director: Mamoru Hosoda

Stars: Haru Kuroki, Moka Kamishiraishi, Gen Hoshino

Genre: Anime

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 91%

Rating: PG

Runtime: 98 minutes

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Most, if not all, of Mamoru Hosoda’s original films produced in the past decade function, to some degree or another, as exercises in autobiography. Summer War, apart from a premise more or less recycled from Hosoda’s 2000 directorial debut Digimon Adventure: Our War Game!, was the many-times-removed story of Hosoda meeting his wife’s family for the first time. 2012’s Wolf Children was inspired by the passing of Hosoda’s mother, animated in part by the anxieties and aspirations at the prospect of his own impending parenthood. 2015’s The Boy and the Beast was completed just after the birth of Hosoda’s first child, the product of his own questions as to what role a father should play in the life of his son. Mirai, the director’s seventh film, is not from Hosoda’s own experience, but filtered through the experiences of his first-born son meeting his baby sibling for the first time. Told care of the perspective of Kun (Moka Kamishiraishi), a toddler who feels displaced and insecure in the wake of his sister Mirai’s birth, Mirai is a beautiful adventure fantasy drama that whisks the viewer on a dazzling odyssey across Kun’s entire family tree, culminating in a poignant conclusion that emphasizes the beauty of what it means to love and to be loved. Mirai is Hosoda’s most accomplished film, the recipient of the first Academy Award nomination for an anime film not produced by Studio Ghibli, and an experience as edifying as it is a joy to behold. —Toussaint Egan

Year: 2015

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Stars: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Jessica Barden, Olivia Colman, Ashley Jensen, Ariane Labed, Angeliki Papoulia, John C. Reilly

Genre: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Comedy, Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 88%

Rating: R

Runtime: 118 minutes

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Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos starts The Lobster with the familiar, leading man visage of Colin Farrell, gone full dad-bod for a role that is debatably the actor’s best example for his still unheralded genius. With a remarkable dearth of charm, Farrell inhabits David, a man who, upon learning that his wife has cheated on him and so must end their relationship, is legally required to check in to a hotel where he has 45 days to find a new mate, lest he be transformed into an animal of his choosing. David easily settles upon the titular namesake, the lobster, which he explains he picks because of their seemingly-immortal lifespans, the creatures like human ears growing and growing without end until their supposed deaths. At the hotel, David tries his best to warm to a beautifully soul-less woman, knowing his remaining days are numbered, but the depths to which she subjects his resolve eventually encourages him to plan an escape, through which he matriculates into an off-the-grid conglomerate of single folk, led by Léa Seydoux. There, of course, against all rules he has a meet-cute with another outsider (Rachel Weisz) involving elaborately designed sign language (a metaphor maybe, like much in Lanthimos’s world, for the odd ritual of dating), and they fall in love. The world of The Lobster isn’t a dystopian future, more like a sort of mundane, suburban Everywhere in an allegorical alternate universe. Regardless, Lanthimos and Filippou find no pleasure in explaining the foundations of their film, busier building an absurdly funny edifice over which they can drape the tension and anxieties of modern romance. In that sense, The Lobster is an oddly feminist film, obsessed with time and how much pressure that puts on people, especially women, to root down and find someone, no matter the cost. If you’ve ever had a conversation with a significant other concerned about the increasing dangers of becoming pregnant in one’s late 30s, then The Lobster—and its ambiguous but no less arresting final shot—will strike uncomfortably close to the home you’re told you should have by now but probably can’t afford. —Dom Sinacola



Year: 2019

Director: David Marmor

Stars: Nicole Brydon Bloom, Giles Matthey, Alan Blumenfeld, Celeste Sully

Genre: Horror

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 88%

Rating: NR

Runtime: 90 minutes

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In the middle of a horrifying housing crisis, 1BR holds up a mirror to the isolation and desperation crushing the greater population of Los Angeles. Hollywood and the surrounding areas may be viewed globally as a home for opulence, but the majority of Los Angeles county lives closer to the poverty line than the shoreline. These extreme levels of impoverishment come with about two dozen cults masquerading as sub-culture, a mortifying picture of co-dependancy, a coerced dismissal of personal rights, and loneliness. Sarah (Nicole Brydon Bloom), a recent Los Angeles transplant, needs to find a place to live. She also needs to get into college. Oh, and Sarah needs to figure out how to navigate her uptight boss. She’s the blueprint for every mid-twenties late bloomer. The apartment hunt has been a nightmare with limited funds, but then she finds the perfect apartment. The space is close to work, affordable, and comes with one extremely cute neighbor. Unfortunately, the property is owned by a cult, obsessed with making a perfect community. Prone to extreme measures, the group, known only as CDE Properties, watches the little colony 24 hours a day. Their tried-and-true method of converting new tenants includes sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, and threats of extreme pain. Sarah does her best to resist these tactics while simultaneously convincing her captors that she’s becoming one of them. In his feature film debut, writer/director David Marmor crafts a chilling survival story in the sun-bleached desert and stark fluorescent lighting of wearisome offices. A visceral expression of fear and longing, 1BR could be a new cult classic. With incredible performances, a solid twist and the possibility of a franchise sequel, 1BR aims high. The good news is the film hits most of its targets. —Joelle Monique

Year: 1988

Director: David Zucker

Stars: Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley, Ricardo Montalban, George Kennedy

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 87%

Rating: PG-13

Runtime: 85 minutes

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The final hoorah from the comedy trio David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker—ZAZ for short—The Naked Gun is so stupid it’s hilarious. This, of course, was ZAZ’s secret weapon in films like Airplane!, and in Leslie Nielsen’s stone-faced imbecility they found their muse. A former dramatic actor, Nielsen rejuvenated his career by playing Frank Drebin, a hapless L.A. police detective trying to prevent the assassination of Queen Elizabeth. (And in his courting of possible femme fatale Priscilla Presley, he taught us the importance of wearing full-body condoms.) A wonder of slapstick and deadpan silliness, The Naked Gun makes jokes about terrorists, gay panic, boobs, even “The Star-Spangled Banner.” There’s a character named Pahpshmir. Good lord, it’s all so gloriously idiotic. —Tim Grierson



Year: 2012

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Stars: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Jesse Plemons

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 85%

Rating: R

Runtime: 138 minutes

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The Master is deeply troubling; you won’t realize why you have such a problem with it until you realize why it is so damn good. At first, it seems a relatively straightforward if unique set-up: Adrift after World War II, Freddie Quell (a primal Joaquin Phoenix) gets sucked into a sort of pseudo-psychological cult led by charismatic Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Amy Adams is also present and also great, of course. The first part of the film is spent relishing in its performances and its craft (luminous 65mm photography and fastidious period detail)—what you’d expect from Paul Thomas Anderson, really—and you’ll find Dodd’s cult suspect and you’ll think you’ll predict the path the story will take. Then you get to the “processing” scenes and realize that you’re not ready for what PTA wants to say: that everything is far more complex and far more simple than we make it to be; that we can never really be what we want; that evolution is pain folded in on itself and multiplied, over and over. As the film progresses you’ll probably find yourself wanting something specific or maybe generously ambiguous from its resolution. Whichever, The Master will absolutely refuse to give you what you want. Instead, it will give you wisdom. Now, wisdom can be a terrible gift—an amorphous yet heavy thing that’s difficult to grasp even as it hurts and burdens, all while offering little hope for practical change. That’s the kind of wisdom that The Master wants to share with you. Yes, terrible, but take it. Take it so that you too can know your master. —Chad Betz

Year: 2007

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Stars: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Kevin J. O’Connor, Ciarán Hinds, Dillon Freasier

Genre: Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 91%

Rating: R

Runtime: 158 minutes

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There’s an odor of Citizen Kane about There Will Be Blood. Both Charles Foster Kane, the center of Orson Welles’ 1941 masterwork, and Daniel Plainview, the protagonist of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 gem, are Shakespearean in their contradictions—too creative and too wounded to be fully condemned, too ruthless to be fully admired. Like Welles, writer/director Anderson fashioned an original cinematic language to reveal Plainview’s strange mix of genius and monstrosity. Long stretches are virtually dialogue-free, punctuated by close-ups of Daniel Day-Lewis’ glowering face—splattered with blood, sweat and petroleum—and the long shots of rickety derricks and shacks perched precariously on a savage landscape say more than words ever could. —Geoffrey Himes



Year: 2018

Director: Susan Johnson

Stars: Lana Condor, Noah Centineo, Janel Parrish

Genre: Romance, Comedy

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 97%

Rating: NR

Runtime: 100 minutes

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To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, the teen scene’s newest runaway hit, is a flat-out excellent film. It is not excellent “for a teen flick.” It is not excellent “for a romantic comedy.” It is excellent for a film. TATBILB fully inverts the 80/20 ratio: Within the first 20 minutes, all five of the deeply private love letters our daydreamy, emotionally buttoned-up protagonist Lara Jean (Lana Condor) has written to her childhood crushes over the years have been stolen and mailed out—including the one to her neighbor and best friend, Josh (Israel Broussard), who just happens to also be her older sister’s just barely ex-boyfriend. This swift puncturing of any protracted emotional dishonesty Lara Jean might have hoped to indulge in, well, forever, leaves the film’s final eighty minutes free for her to embrace some really radical emotional honesty. That TATBILB allows Lara Jean to accomplish this not in spite of but through the fanfic-favorite trope of “fake dating” another, less-risky letter recipient (Noah Centineo’s ridiculously charming Peter Kavinsky) is a story strength. Of course, all the emotional honesty in the world wouldn’t matter if TATBILB’s leads didn’t burn with chemistry. Fortunately, Lana Condor and Noah Centineo can get it. Condor and Centineo are undeniably the stars of the show, but TATBILB doesn’t rest on their charismatic laurels: Mahoro as Lucas is a foxy ball of friendliness; Madeleine Arthur as Lara Jean’s best (girl) friend, Chris, is just the wide-eyed punk weirdo she needs to be; Janel Parrish plays against type as the sweet and steel-spined Margot; Anna Cathcart steals every scene as Lara Jean’s meddling little sis, Kitty; and John Corbett plays the healthily engaged version of Kat Stratford’s single OBGYN dad with a discernible glee. The importance of Lara Jean and her sisters being half-Korean, and the majority of the cast (along with Mahoro) non-white, is hard to overstate, but it isn’t the most impressive thing about the cast by a long shot. In a genre that can so often see its characters lean too far into caricature, Lara Jean’s world is instead populated with teens—and through them, love—you can believe in. —Alexis Gunderson

Year: 2020

Director: Marc Meyers

Stars: Alexandra Daddario, Amy Forsyth, Maddie Hasson, Keean Johnson, Logan Miller, Austin Swift, Johnny Knoxville

Genre: Horror

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 68%

Rating: R

Runtime: 91 minutes

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Roughly 30 minutes into Marc Meyers’ We Summon the Darkness, the tables turn. The twist isn’t telegraphed. Paranoid viewers might catch the scent of something “off,” the way people with hyperosmia know the milk’s gone bad before opening up the carton, but noticing the clues that Meyers, screenwriter Alan Trezza and the film’s main cast—Alexandra Daddario, Maddie Hasson and Amy Forsyth—leave on the screen takes a little deductive reasoning and a lot of psychological study. No one gives anything away. Instead, Meyers carefully pulls the truth from the set-up, and in the process hints at not a small amount of relish on his part. He’s having fun. A good twist should be fun, and We Summon the Darkness does indeed have a good twist, but Meyers, Trezza and especially Daddario appear to realize that the pleasure of a twist isn’t the reveal, it’s figuring out how to hide the twist in plain sight. This is, at first, a horror story about teenagers uniting under the banner of heavy metal in 1980s America, a time when God-fearing Christian bedwetters saw proof of devil worship everywhere they gawked and blamed the rise of Satanism on objectively awesome things like Dungeons & Dragons and Dio. Half an hour in, We Summon the Darkness still is that story, but told from the perspective of religious vultures who happily exploit the fears of the flock to profit the church. It’s a ferocious joy to watch, particularly in light of how well We Summon the Darkness holds back on secrets. Tipping the hand too much would be easy; the tells only become clear after the fact, couched in a choice of words here, a moment of hesitation there, a dose of forced enthusiasm there. For as unrestrained as things get, it’s the initial restraint that’s most memorable. —Andy Crump



Year: 1999

Director: Spike Jonze

Stars: John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93%

Rating: R

Runtime: 112 minutes

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The feature film debut from director Spike Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman is a long, absurd joke whose punchline is its final shot: the view of a man who whimpers as he’s forced to watch his loved ones forget he’s ever existed. Being John Malkovich admits, with sad clarity, that our lives are totally out of our control. In the film, we follow street puppeteer Craig (John Cusack, looking like a small, humming pile of hair) as he confronts the economic viability of his chosen occupation by getting an admin job on the 7 ½ floor of building that also happens to hide a tiny door which leads, if one crawls through cobwebs and puddles, to the inside of John Malkovich’s head, wherein for 15 minutes the brain tourist can vicariously live through famous actor John Malkovich’s eyes before getting spit up into a ditch off the New Jersey Turnpike. Having had his way with marionettes for years, Craig slowly understands how to control Malkovich while inside his head, crouching in the man’s sewer of an unconscious to hide away from the requisite 15-minute limit, but not before falling in love with a coworker (Catherine Keener) who seems to be falling in love with Craig’s wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), but only via various liaisons through John Malkovich’s manipulable corpus. Throughout, Jonze and Kaufman only afford as much logic as is needed to movie the story from one weird scenario to another, but never letting the bleak heart of the film’s happenings overtake how goofily the plot unfolds. Visual detritus litters Jonze’s shots: A chucked can from a speeding car bounces off Malkovich’s head, the culprit recognizing Malkovich in time enough to call him out by name, though why John Malkovich poorly disguised in a ball cap and covered in ectoplasm would be on the side of the road in Jersey is anyone’s guess; a documentary features Brad Pitt briefly only to ignore him; an alternate universe Charlie Sheen embraces his receding hairline. Ideas pile atop more ideas, until the whole thing collapses in on itself, the film’s centerpiece basically John Malkovich singing his own name to himself over and over, attempting to seduce John Malkovich into accepting what we don’t really understand. —Dom Sinacola

Year: 2017

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Stars: Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Barry Keoghan, Raffey Cassidy, Sunny Suljic, Alicia Silverstone, Bill Camp

Rating: R

Runtime: 121 minutes

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In the uncanny valley of a Yorgos Lanthimos film, characters resemble human beings…but not entirely. In movies such as Dogtooth and The Lobster, the Greek writer-director has become a maestro of the queasy/funny horror-comedy, turning our universal anxieties into psychologically rich satires in which life’s mundane surfaces give way to dark, often bloody realities we don’t want to acknowledge. His movies are funny because they’re so shocking and disturbing because they’re so true. But for them to really soar, their provocations need to be grounded in recognizable behavior, which gives Lanthimos a foundation to then stretch his extreme stories past their breaking point. With his latest, we see what happens when his underlying ideas are not as complex as the intricacies of his execution. The Killing of a Sacred Deer reunites Lanthimos with his Lobster star Colin Farrell, who plays Steven, a cardiologist, who’s married to an ophthalmologist, Anna (Nicole Kidman). They have two children, teen Kim (Raffey Cassidy) and her younger brother Bob (Sunny Suljic). It would be hard to describe their personalities because, in typical Lanthimos fashion, they don’t really have any. Quickly, Sacred Deer introduces us to the fly in this particular ointment. His name is Martin (Barry Keoghan), a moody teen who seems as lobotomized as the other characters. There’s one crucial difference, though: He has befriended Steven for reasons that feel sinister but will only eventually become clear, and he keeps insinuating himself into the man’s world. It wouldn’t be much fun to reveal where Sacred Deer goes from there, but Sacred Deer may be Lanthimos’s most visually and sonically ambitious work—technically, it’s pristine—clever without ever quite deciding precisely what it’s about. —Tim Grierson

Year: 2014

Director: Bong Joon-ho

Stars: Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Song Kang-ho, Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, John Hurt

Genre: Science-Fiction, Action

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 94%

Rating: R

Runtime: 126 minutes

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There is a sequence midway through Snowpiercer that perfectly articulates what makes Korean writer/director Bong Joon-ho among the most dynamic filmmakers currently working. Two armies engage in a no-holds-barred, slow motion-heavy action set piece. Metal clashes against metal, and characters slash through their opponents as if their bodies were made of butter. It’s gory, imaginative, horrifying, beautiful, visceral and utterly glorious. Adapted from a French graphic novel by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette, Snowpiercer is a sci-fi thriller set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic world. Nearly two decades prior, in an ill-advised attempt to halt global warning, the government inundated the atmosphere with an experimental chemical that left our planet a barren, ice-covered wasteland. Now, the last of humanity resides on “Snowpiercer,” a vast train powered via a perpetual-motion engine. Needless to say, this scenario hasn’t exactly brought out the best of humanity. Bong’s bleak and brutal film may very well be playing a song that we’ve all heard before, but he does it with such gusto and dexterous skill you can’t help but be caught up the flurry. —Mark Rozeman

Director: Jeremy Saulnier

Stars: Patrick Stewart, Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, Callum Turner

Genre: Thriller, Horror

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 91%

Rating: R

Runtime: 94 minutes

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What’s perhaps most refreshing in Green Room is writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s lack of interest in the kind of moralizing that made his last film, Blue Ruin, ultimately seem conventional. Instead, Saulnier simply presents us this nutty scenario without feeling the need to lard it up with anything as cumbersome as topical commentary or moral ambiguity. He proceeds to wring as much tension and suspense from its pulpy retro plot as possible, adding a few entertaining grace notes along the way, which can best be seen in its performances. In the ensemble-based Green Room, Saulnier revels in the contrasts of personalities and styles: band bassist Pat’s (Anton Yelchin) Bill Paxton-like desperation, for instance, set alongside the weary, near-drugged-out deadpan of Amber (Imogen Poots), a friend of the woman whose murder sets off the film’s violent chain of events; or the imperial calm of Darcy (Patrick Stewart), the ruthless leader of the band of white supremacists who attempt to kill Pat, Amber and the rest. It’d be a stretch to call these characters three-dimensional, but nevertheless, under Saulnier’s writing and direction, they all manage to stand out just enough as individuals for us to become emotionally involved in their fates. Meanwhile, Saulnier supports these characters and plot turns with filmmaking that is remarkable for its economy and patience. D.P. Sean Porter gets a lot of mileage out of the cramped quarters and grimy lighting of the bar, lending its wide (2.35:1) frames an appropriately nightmarish feel amidst many suspenseful set pieces. In those ways, the lean, mean Green Room stands as one of the best B-movie genre exercises in many years. —Kenji Fujishima

Year: 2001

Director: Ashutosh Gowariker

Stars: Aamir Khan, Gracy Singh, Rachel Shelley, Paul Blackthorne, Kulbhushan Kharbanda

Genre: Bollywood, Comedy

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 95%

Rating: PG

Runtime: 225 minutes

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For newcomers, Lagaan may be one of the most easy entryways into Bollywood. (The film famously received India’s third-ever Academy Award nomination in 2001.) Rooted in a rich entanglement of high-stakes sports gaming and forbidden romance, Lagaan is an epic drama based in colonial India, the story of a group of Indian villagers who challenge their British colonizers to a game of cricket in exchange for the removal of their increasingly burdensome taxes. We get recruiting and training montages, conflict amongst teammates, an intercultural flirtation and a bangin’ soundtrack from the legend A.R. Rahman. Lagaan has been rightfully hailed as one of India’s most entertaining and thoughtful productions, and it seems to only get better with age. —Radhika Menon

Year: 2017

Directors: Josh and Benny Safdie

Stars: Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Buddy Duress, Peter Verby, Barkhad Abdi, Taliah Webster

Genre: Thriller, Drama

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 91%

Rating: R

Runtime: 100 minutes

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The hero of Good Time is one of the canniest individuals in recent cinema, which might seem like an odd thing to say about a scummy lowlife who screws up a bank heist in the film’s opening reels. But don’t underestimate Connie: Several of the people who cross his path make that mistake, and he gets the better of them every time. Connie is played by Robert Pattinson in a performance so locked-in from the first second that it shoots off an electric spark from the actor to the audience: Just sit back, he seems to be telling us. I’ve got this under control. The financially strapped character lives in Queens, unhappy that his mentally challenged brother Nick (Benny Safdie) is cooped up in a facility that, Connie believes, doesn’t do enough to help him. Impulsively, Connie strong-arms Nick into helping him rob a bank. They make off with thousands of dollars, but what they don’t realize is that they live in the real world, not a movie. A paint bomb goes off in their bag, staining the money and the criminals’ clothes. Shaken and trying not to panic, Connie and Nick abandon their getaway car, quickly raising the suspicion of some nearby cops, who chase down Nick. Connie escapes, determined to get his brother out of jail—either through bail money or other means. As Connie, Pattinson is shockingly vital and present, unabashedly throwing himself into any situation. Following their star’s lead, the filmmakers deliver a jet-fueled variation on their usual intricate exploration of New York’s marginalized citizens. Good Time features no shootouts or car chases—there isn’t a single explosion in the whole film. The Safdies and Pattinson don’t need any of that. Like Connie, they thrive on their wits and endless inventiveness—the thrill comes in marveling at how far it can take them. —Tim Grierson



Year: 2019

Director: Mati Diop

Stars: Mame Bineta Sane, Amadou Mbow, Nicole Sougou, Aminate Kane

Genre: Drama, Romance

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 96%

Rating: NR

Runtime: 104 minutes

Watch on Netflix





Atlantics is quite the announcement for writer-drector Mati Diop. She takes the magic realism of a peer like Alice Rohrwacher and carries it to the world’s margins, examining class struggle in a Senegalese city by the Atlantic. Through the gritty, blustery opening images shot as artful document of the Dakar shore (outstanding work by cinematographer Claire Mathon) and the hypnotic electronic score by Fatima Al Qadiri, Diop is able to evoke an incomparable mood and sense of place. That it might look and sound so alien to an American watching this film on Netflix is perhaps a sharp enough indictment of the ways in which we intellectually seclude ourselves from realities beyond our own. Atlantics is about that and it’s about the breaking of that. It’s about the mystery of identity and how one can find identity by taking on the identity of something other, or can find it when looking in a mirror—not for the physical self but for the spirit. Congruously, it’s also about losing the identities that are culturally prescribed, that we may