Tom Cruise needs no introduction. Seriously, one of the most popular and greatest movie stars of all time. The man had been in countless box-office hits with critical acclaim, directed by auteurs or well-recognized directors for nearly five decades now. Kubrick, Spielberg, Tony & Ridley Scott, Coppola, De Palma, Mann, PTA – you name it, he has worked with them all.

Early on, some doubted his talent because the media attention around him were little too much through the late 80s and 90s but Cruise kept proving them wrong all the time. He got criticisms for some of his public interviews (especially in 2005) and his association with the Church of Scientology but when you ask any co-star of his, most of them have only nice things to say about his dedicated professionalism and work ethic as well as his kindness. Some found his friendly and kind attitude rather phony in real life but that might just be because he’s a born-entertainer. His whole career is about pleasing others and bringing high-quality entertainment to audiences. You can just google nice stories about him, they’re pretty much endless.

Since “Top Gun Maverick” came out, there had been a lot of articles calling him the “last movie star”. The man who still brings audiences to theatre for his name recognition alone everywhere in the world, a star whose films still feel like an “event”, someone who creates his own franchises based on his name, an actor who refuses to do anything for streaming or television, someone who still has the mystique of movie stars of the previous times. There’s so much to talk about Cruise, but instead of talking about it here, it’s better to explore his incredible filmography which will help to understand what made him special as a movie star as well as his versatility as an actor.

20. Rock of Ages (2012)

Cruise is a serious man, he’s serious about his craft but he’s not afraid of poking fun at himself from time to time, or his industry (in a film that we’ll discuss later on). His comedic chops were well-known at the very beginning where he handled the satiric tone of “Risky Business” perfectly and his singing in things like “Top Gun” is serviceable for a non-singer.

In “Rock of Ages”, Cruise is here once again to steal the show with his singing and comedic chops. Admittedly, this is not a good film. It feels like a cheap Broadway show and it’d be a hit there with all the 80s songs and tributes but its silliness is not enough there to cover the bland tone and overlong runtime, as many critics complained.

The movie would also heavily benefit if it was R-rated, here it feels like they played it rather safe. Thankfully, Cruise is as committed as ever as fictional hair metal rocker Stacee Jax. He’s bit channeling Axl Rose while singing a Bon Jovi song. His singing is good, and his charisma is off the charts but also not afraid of going silly or showing some vulnerability. His scenes with Malin Akerman are particularly a highlight. As a film, it’s not one of Cruise’s best films but if we’re talking about performance, he’s got another chance to prove his versatility and he once again did it.

19. Minority Report (2002)

One of Spielberg’s best films, Minority Report expertly combines the elements of tech noir, whodunit, thriller, and science fiction elements and delivers high-quality entertainment. It’s also aging incredibly well. Looking into the future and its effects, the interplay of cause and effect between the time levels and the idea of ​​the time paradox have always been among the most fascinating subjects of the science fiction genre. It probably has to do with the narrative possibilities that the question of “what if” is so often asked in the cinema. In Spielberg’s film, it’s not people that travel but rather the information.

The film sets in the future where there’s “precrime” police program. Would-be killers are imprisoned in a benevolent virtual reality state. However, an officer from that unit is himself accused of a future murder. That officer is Tom Cruise. Most of it plays like a chase movie and Cruise’s screen charisma keeps you engaged all the time, not only that, he brings a lot of nuance to his character as well, largely via his character’s struggle to deal with the years-earlier kidnapping and death of his son. It’s a perfect kind of “star” performance.

18. War of the Worlds (2005)

As extraterrestrials invade the Earth and destroy cities with giant war machines, Cruise’s dockworker character tries to protect his children. Tom didn’t stop with “Minority Report”, and he made another film with Spielberg. This time based on a sci-fi novel by H. G. Wells. It was an interesting year for Cruise, he was on the news all the time. It was like he was having a mid-life crisis; his couch-jumping on Oprah Winfrey show was everywhere even if Oprah later defended his behavior as him expressing his love for his then love Katie Holmes. The infamous Matt Lauer interview and his feud with Brooke Shields (for which he later apologized) were other controversial moments in a career that usually avoided any of it. His off-screen persona was getting so much attention that it created an idea that his career is over and he was trying to get attention to stay “relevant”.

It’s funny think about it now but maybe it was funny then too because “War of the Worlds” was a major box office success, and critically acclaimed. Cruise’s performance was also praised. At the beginning of the film, he comes off like an unsympathetic jerk more interested in rebuilding car engines than spending quality time with his offspring. That alone shows even in the same genre, Cruise avoids getting typecast. His character also has an arc; he transforms into a reluctant hero and there are moments where he struggles to hold his emotion for the sake of his kids, and these are all amazing to watch. He’s convincing in every minute of it.

17. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

As we’re talking about his sci-fi/action films, it fits to continue with “Edge of Tomorrow”. Unlike the previous two, “Edge of Tomorrow” finds him as a less macho and more flawed type of action hero. He plays a captain who sells the war to the public but is privately a coward. He has no combat experience, it’s not an Ethan Hunt type of character. He finds himself in combat, he gets killed and then he realizes he’s brought back to life in an endless vicious cycle. “Groundhog Day” might be a rare Hollywood film that established its own genre. One might find a similar concept prior to that but this one made it popular. Luckily filmmakers managed to find to make this concept always feel fresh.

“Edge of Tomorrow” is doing that with impressive sets, amazing combat scenes, lots of black humor, and amazing chemistry between Cruise and Emily Blunt. All these, in fact, show what a great leading man Cruise actually is. Also shows that in the genre, Cruise is not afraid of taking roles that challenge his image. Edge of Tomorrow was listed on 23 critics’ top ten lists of movies of 2014 (out of 201 evaluated), another proof that Cruise might go after the blockbusters but he often chooses great ones.

16. “Top Gun” franchise (1986, 2022)

Tony Scott’s “Top Gun” was where everyone fell in love with Cruise. Always smiling, bike riding hotshot young pilot who pushes the limits with his cool glasses and jacket, singing “You Lost That Loving Feeling” – everything about it made Cruise iconic. Now that the film is often criticized for its jingoistic tone but if you take it less seriously, it has a lot to appreciate, especially how Tony Scott builds the atmosphere. Those uses of sun give a dream-like quality to the whole film and most of the film doesn’t have a linear plot, it feels more like a 70s hangout movie. Sure, with thin characters but since they’re all played by talented actors, you don’t mind it all. With great action sequences, a fine romance subplot, and an unforgettable soundtrack, “Top Gun” became an iconic film.

Cruise came back to the characters years later in “Top Gun Maverick”. Now Maverick is an old teacher. While you don’t have to watch the original to appreciate the sequel, it somehow makes it surprisingly richer because Cruise’s character reflects on another time, another era of life. It’s a bit of a moment where Cruise himself faces his age. Almost a moment for Maverick’s character arc to complete. Both films are good or great for several other reasons but one thing is for sure, they won’t be the same without Cruise and he took people’s breath away in both films.

15. The Color of Money (1986)

“Top Gun Maverick” gets a lot of praise and many people have commented that this is how legacy sequels should’ve been made. It’s indeed a brilliant piece of work but Cruise is also no stranger to great legacy sequels. Some critics were ready to dismiss it as if it was a work-for-hire film for Martin Scorsese, one of the many auteurs he has worked with. Instead, it’s a beautiful film and if you had seen “The Hustler”, it’s a great reflection on aging and many other things. Full of gorgeous, clever shots as you might expect from Michael Ballhaus.

One of the many impressive things about Cruise is that at a young age, he was not afraid of co-starring with some of the giants of their generation; Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, Jack Nicholson, and in this case, Paul Newman. They make a great duo together, delivering subtle and nuanced performances with great arcs. Since they both can play the game, Scorsese uses this to get great frames from them both.

Unlike the original, this one is not full of tension but these two men are so great together, them playing, them talking, them doing everything – so it becomes a joy to watch. It’s not a film about sports clichés, it’s about characters. Cruise has some of the cockiness he displays in Top Gun but this time he’s not that bright and somewhat insecure. He loved working with Newman who raised his interest in racecars. Soon later, Cruise ended up even doing a race car movie in “Days of Thunder”. Cruise also did his own trick shots for the film, the man was all ready to perform his own stunts.

14. The Firm (1993)

While working for a law firm, a young Harvard graduate encounters inconsistencies and suspicions that catapult him into a career- and the life-threatening situation between the FBI and the mafia. There’s a better lawyer character in his filmography in a better film for sure but “The Firm” is somewhat underrated right now. Would be good to start with the fact that this film made $270.2 million against a budget of $42 million, making it the highest-grossing film adapted from a John Grisham novel (“A Time To Kill”, “The Client”) and the highest-grossing R-rated film of 1993.

It shows that the times have changed a bit, nowadays a legal drama/thriller over two hours would hardly made that much money but one of the factors that contributed to its success was Tom Cruise’s star power. People wanted to watch what Cruise does and what he does is extraordinary; playing a young, naive man full of fear and confusion who finds himself in extremely dangerous situations. Cruise carefully builds his character and rooting for him becomes very easy. “The Firm” is an intelligent thriller of its time and Cruise’s performance being at the center of it elevates it even further. The thing about Cruise is that he doesn’t play anyone extraordinary, he has a lot of puzzled moments but he finds in an himself in an extraordinary situation and tries to find a way out in rather realistic scenario.

13. Vanilla Sky (2001)

Inferior to its Spanish original “Close Your Eyes” for sure and even Penelope Cruz performance is not on the same level but it’s understandable that Cruise liked the concept and wanted to bring something fresh to Hollywood mainstream cinema. Maybe Cameron Crowe was not the right choice for the project but still, he pulls it off to a degree. Some critics dismissed Cruise’s performance as yet another star vehicle without depth but they’d be wrong, mostly because there was some judgment against this being a remake of a European film.

Cruise’s performance is pretty fascinating and he surprisingly takes on a very unlikable character in the leading role. He accomplishes to make us care about him or at least intrigued by him because we never get too sure about everything his character faces – the accident, the disfigurement, and his conviction and therapy – are all real or not. From handsome and arrogant to disfigured and self-loathing, Cruise is mesmerizing. The problem with the film was that it came out at the wrong time, it felt like, probably because of the character he plays as an attempt to gain sympathy for his own public persona but when you get rid of that on your mind, you’ll end up watching a complex, unusual work from a talented actor.

12. Interview with the Vampire (1994)

The author of the book Anne Rice wrote the script for the film version herself but totally opposed Tom Cruise’s casting in the leading role. She had more of a young Rutger Hauer type of someone to play Lestat. She didn’t see that in Tom Cruise. She offered Jeremy Irons or John Malkovich instead and even asked Brad Pitt and Tom to replace their roles but nobody listened. She was ready to disown the film because Cruise was not her Lestat.

When the film came out, Anne Rice saw it and her quote describes it the best: “From the moment he appeared Tom was Lestat for me. He has an immense physical and moral presence; he was defiant and yet never without conscience; he was beautiful beyond description yet compelled to do cruel things. The sheer beauty of Tom was dazzling, but the polish of his acting, his flawless plunge into the Lestat persona, his ability to speak rather boldly poetic lines, and speak them with seeming ease and conviction were exhilarating and uplifting. The guy is great. I’m no good at modesty. I like to believe Tom’s Lestat will be remembered the way Olivier’s Hamlet is remembered. Others may play the role some day but no one will ever forget Tom’s version of it.”

She also praised him for pulling off subtly humorous moments and also giving depth in all the subtle ways, creating a fully dimensional, interesting, and haunting character. And she was right. While the film could’ve benefited if he had better chemistry with Brad Pitt, still the performance works on the individual level. Critic Roger Ebert also agreed with the author, saying Tom is “never less than convincing, and his slight British accent, combined with makeup that is dramatic without being obtrusive, disguises the clean-cut star – makes him seem unwholesome in an odd, insinuating way.

11. Risky Business (1983)

Tom Cruise the movie star was in the making. He already got some attention to himself in “Taps”, he didn’t get the best role in Curtis Hanson’s “Lovin It” which he somewhat hated, but Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Outsiders” and underseen sports drama, Michael Chapman’s “All the Right Moves” showed that the guy has something special going on. In “The Outsiders”, you could see that he was willing to give himself to the part, both mentally and physically. Finally, it was time for a true breakout, in arguably the most stylishly directed (though some may call it “MTV aesthetics”) teen sex comedy “Risky Business”. Now the film is good, could’ve been even better with the alternative ending and better control of the satire. What is truly fantastic is Cruise’s performance. He’s young but very confident in himself.

The 80s were probably the golden decade of teen films but rarely any of them try to tackle the serious subjects of capitalism, materialism, and prostitution this well. This is also the closest Cruise came to playing a “loser”. He’s obviously too charming and charismatic to play one but he was 21 here, and while he has a lot of self-confidence and some amazing experiences, he’s still the same guy throughout the whole film. There’s no “Tom Cruise star film formula” for him yet. Even when he’s at his supposedly most powerful, he’s desperately trying to get money because he ruined his dad’s Porsche. It’s also the movie where he danced to “Old Time Rock and Roll” in his underwear when his parents leave him home alone. So iconic that even Sam Rockwell thanked him for influencing him in his SAG award speech.

How the mighty have fallen. Adam McKay was, for a time, one of the comedy masterminds of the 2000s. Sadly, he has made some heinous misfires in the past few years that have largely tanked his reputation.

At the same time, it would be a disservice to write off all the great works he has delivered. McKay’s comedies are still some of the best of the past twenty years and at least one of his more serious fare is a great and informative watch. He is a man that has enjoyed high crests and low troughs. Without further ado, the films of Adam McKay from worst to best.

8. Don’t Look Up (2021)

Don’t look up is the clear weak spot in McKay’s filmography. It’s the type of patronizing piece of work that makes viewers more distant from the message the film is conveying. Don’t Look Up was promised as a biting satire making fun of the complacency of humans in the face of their own destruction, but it ended up being a parody of McKay’s own style. Stuffed full of stars batting way below their acting weight, being shockingly unfunny every step of the way.

McKay furiously attacks you with his views with no tact or entertainment value attached. Its political nature is so simultaneously aggressive and vapid that it renders the message of the film moot altogether. Don’t Look Up feels like a horrible missed opportunity because it could have been a Dr. Strangelove, albeit a less revolutionary one, for a new age. It could have smartly commented on an urgent issue while providing frequent laughs, but it not only proved McKay is maybe the worst in Hollywood at transcribing his ideology onto a film, but that even his penchant for comedy has waned when he has been striving to become a more serious director.

7. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues (2013)

Anchorman 2 is its fight scene. It’s virtually the only reason it edges out Don’t Look Up and the only reason you would go back to visit the film at all. It’s a great scene but like everything in Anchorman 2, just owes its identity to the original. Way too many jokes are retreads of the original’s material, asking the audience if they remembered how much they loved the first one. But that of course defeats the purpose of Anchorman.

When the first came out, it boasted one of the strongest jokes to screen time ratios in years for a comedy and boasted a competent plot as well. Anchorman 2, meanwhile, stands on Ferrell’s legacy and his comedic tendencies without understanding what makes him funny in the first place. Its plot is exhausting and banal and the good jokes are severely overshadowed by groanworthy ones that have only damaged the series.

6. Vice (2018)

Vice isn’t a total failure. It’s evident McKay has a lot of scorn for the bush administration and occasionally it is able to be righteously angry and also somewhat sympathetic to Cheney himself. But all too often it is a bitter piece of work lacking the wisdom of something like Oliver Stone’s Nixon. it instead makes Cheney and his associates into caricatures instead of the Shakespearean monsters he wants to portray them as. And speaking of Shakespeare it’s hard to forget Vice actually using dialogue from Shakespeare’s work in the middle of dialogue scenes. In fact, it is all too likely scenes like that, and the edits of a fish being pulled in will be burned into your brain.

McKay takes a flamethrower to subtext and replaces it with insultingly bad images meant to represent the secondary meaning in any given scene. Down to the Fast and Furious post credits scene, Vice just feels hateful but not in a way that is complex or simply too good to turn away from.

5. The Other Guys (2010)

The Other Guys gets the job done. It’s a good comedy that shows just how funny Mark Wahlberg can be and also is an indication of just how well McKay can open a movie. The fall (quite literally) of Dwayne Johnson and Sam Jackson’s badass cops is a perfect way to setup the eventual triumph of Terry and Allen. Wahlberg and Ferrell don’t quite have the chemistry of Ferrell and Reilly, but they do carry the film with considerable ease for much of the runtime.

The Other Guys is an example of McKay’s comedy falling short in the home stretch. The sheen wears off after a while and the banter between the leads turns into the unbearable, far too long exchanges that dominate Netflix’s so called original “comedies” it’s also the earliest example of McKay botching his own social commentary, weakening the film’s tonal consistency with the occasional furious attack at American capitalism. It’s a less vicious and condescending watch than his later features but it’s also less funny engaging as his earlier ones. no doubt a good time but also not the pinnacle of his work.

Year after year, more movies are made and more movies are eligible to become classics. Here on this list you will find a variety of movies – in terms of genre, decade, style – that earned the title of classics; whether they left the mark through aesthetically pleasing shot compositions, detailed and flawless screenplays or unforgettable performances in front of the camera, they all deserve to be classic, because they stuck in the cinematic imaginary perfectly and never left.

1. Branded to Kill (1967)

Directed by Seijun Suzuki and produced by the Nikkatsu Company, “Branded to Kill” reinvents the yakuza genre with the use of an avant-guard aesthetic and a surrealist undertone. Considered today a cult classic, the movie didn’t perform well when it was released in 1967 and, due to a conflict between the director and the production company, Suzuki was subsequently fired. Supported by student groups and fellow filmmakers, the director sued Nikkatsu and became a counter-culture icon in Japan, after being blacklisted for more than 10 years. Goro Hanada (Joe Shishido) is third in the ranking of the best hitman in the Japanese criminal environment. With his wife Mami (Mariko Ogawa), he flies to Tokyo and he meets former hitman Kasuga (Hiroshi Minami): now working as a taxi driver, he wants back into the old “business.” Hanada agrees and the three of them move to meet Michihiko Yabuhara (Isao Tamagawa), a yakuza boss who hires them to protect and escort a client during a trip. The situation will soon escalate.

“Branded to Kill” is a pleasure for the eyes. The aesthetic is rendered through a fantastic use of the black and white, perfect camera movements and a complete deconstruction of the cinematic grammar; moreover the editing is chaotic, non-chronological and featuring jump cuts. Moreover, the movie is very effective in its deconstruction of the noir genre; while certain themes like sex and violence remain, they are pushed to the limits. For instance, Hanada’s sexual appetite resembles other characters like James Bond, this time, though, drenched in oddity. In fact, the third ranking hitman gets aroused by sniffing boiled rice, nothing less! One last astonishing fact about this classic: many scenes were created the night before the shooting or directly improvised on set the same day. Counter-cultural classic cinema.

2. The Trip (1967)

Don’t expect one of those hyperbolic and completely mystified Hollywood movies about drugs and teenagers, usually accompanied by cheap moralism and biased point of views. “The Trip” is something else, as you can see from the craftsmanship behind this LSD infused, countercultural classic. Directed by Roger Corman and written by none other than Jack Nicholson, this low budget psychedelic adventure will amaze you for its realistic depiction and its cultural atmosphere; given the familiarity with hallucinogenics of many people who worked on this movie, you couldn’t expect anything better than this.

Paul Groves (Peter Fonda) works as a television commercial director; his life is in a transitional period, emotionally challenged by his divorce from an adulterous wife. With the help of John (Bruce Dern), who will be his guide, Paul decides to take LSD for the first time. However, during the trip, he escapes from John, running away. As the LSD keeps going, Paul will think about his life and meet other characters, including his second guide Max (Dennis Hopper).

“The Trip” is the classic movie that brings you back in time. It’s not only about the old scenography, props and costumes, it’s the atmosphere that emanates as the movie progresses that is so special. It’s like being there in sunny California, with the Summer of Love finally arrived and everything that comes with it: counterculture, drugs, life-changing ruptures. Other than that, Corman is always amazing behind the camera, the screenplay is just top notch and realistic and the actors are all flawless in their acting. Considered a cult in the psychedelic movement, “The Trip” is also a classic movie that acts as a perfect time machine. Groovy!

3. The Third Part of the Night (1971)

Directed by the Polish master Andrzej Żuławski and written in collaboration with his father Mirosław, “The Third Part of the Night” is a horror movie that mixes avant-garde aspects and a psychological undertone. It debuted at the Venice Film Festival in 1971, but didn’t contend since the Festival was not competitive from 1969 until 1979. World War II. Poland is occupied by Nazi Germany. Michal (Leszek Teleszyński) escapes death by hiding in a forest with his father (Jerzy Goliński), while witnessing Nazi soldiers murdering his wife, son and mother at their home. After the horrific experience, Michal decides to take up arms and to join the resistance against the occupiers. However, before having his first meeting with the freedom fighters, Michal is chased and forced to run, after his intermediary is killed by the Gestapo. He finds refuge in an apartment, where he helps a woman giving birth. Surprisingly, she is a doppelgänger of Michal’s wife. From now on, madness will reign in Michal’s life.

Inspired by real life events experienced by Żuławski’s father when he was working at the Weigel Institute in occupied Lviv, “The Third Part of the Night” presents us with a piercing and horrific description of war and the violence it propagates. The viewer is not spared from the gory details, with body horror elements that reinforce the sheer terror of World War II. If that wasn’t enough, the horror is not only physical, but also psychological; the atmosphere becomes dark and dreamlike, totally capturing the characters. The technical aspect shouldn’t even be mentioned; despite being his debut film, Żuławski is already tasteful in his choices: cast, cinematography, screenplay. Everything is in the right place. Don’t waste time. Add this to your classic watchlist!

4. Love and Anarchy (1973)

Written and directed by the late Lina Wertmüller and starring Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato, “Love and Anarchy” is a political satire with strong feminist undertones that tackles the relationship between the private and the political, while at the same time proposing a critical view of the fascist regime in Italy. It was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 1973 Festival de Cannes; Giannini won the prestigious French award for Best Actor. Antonio Soffiantini, nicknamed Tunin (Giancarlo Giannini), finds out that his anarchist friend has been killed by the fascist police, while planning on killing Mussolini. As a consequence, Tunin decides to go to Rome, to keep going with his friend’s mission of assassinating the dictator. Once in Rome, Tunin is hosted in a brothel and gets to know two prostitutes, Salomè (Mariangela Melato) and Tripolina (Lina Polito). He will fall in love with Tripolina while Salomè will help him continue his mission. Will Tunin succeed and avenge his friend?

“Love and Anarchy” is magisterially directed and written by Wertmüller: the plot, the dialogues, the dynamic, everything is in its perfect place. At the same time, the cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno is perfect in conveying the grey and joyless everyday life within the fascist regime in Italy; the colors are dull, faded and almost without life. Moreover, the performances by Giannini, Melato and Polito are just spotless and they tend to elevate and compliment the great substance of the movie: the intersection between the personal interests and the political ones, between the microcosm of everyday life and the weight of history in the making. “Love and Anarchy” celebrates those anonymous characters that took part in the fight against fascism but were never acknowledged by the history books. A movie for those who don’t take freedom for granted!

5. Jabberwocky (1977)

Directed by Terry Gilliam and written in collaboration with Charles Alverson, “Jabberwocky” is the debut film from the American-born British director. Based on the homonymous poem by Lewis Carroll – contained in the sequel of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” titled “Through the Looking-Glass” – this movie mixes comedic and slapstick scenes with a fairy-tale atmosphere. Dark Ages. During the reign of King Bruno the Questionable (Max Wall), a terrible monster is roaming around villages and forests, ravaging everything. In one of those villages, Dennis Cooper (Michael Palin) is looking to become a cooper; after Dennis is disinherited by his dying father, he decides to travel to the capital city, in search of a new chapter of his life. At the same time, Dennis is in love with the fellow villager Griselda Fishfinger (Annette Badland), who does not reciprocate the feelings. The future will reserve unexpected consequences for Dennis.

Often paired with “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975) for its medieval setting, “Jabberwocky” is everything you would expect from Terry Gilliam: mad, funny, nonsensical and thought provoking. At the same time, certain political themes that will become more and more relevant in Gilliam’s future career are present here; the criticism of a stale and rusty bureaucracy, in this case represented by King Bruno’s problematic reign. Aside from the criticism of bureaucracy, the movie also describes how merchants and priests profit from the crisis created by the monster and how they had no intention of contributing to the safety of the city. A classic that should be rediscovered!

There’s no place like New York. Both the birthplace of myriad geniuses as well as the backdrop to some of the most iconic films ever captured on celluloid, living up to its lofty cinematic heritage may seem like a hefty endeavor to most. But not to the Safdie Brothers — a maverick pair of auteurs who spent the best part of their childhood shuttling between Queens and Manhattan before carving out a name for themselves in the past decade by using its concrete jungle as their personal playground.

In a growingly rootless and homogenous industry, it’s refreshing to stumble upon a brand of filmmaking that’s so indebted to its geographical setting. Admittedly, the Safdies are far from being the only high-profile auteurs to settle in the Big Apple, but none of their peers have probed its lower depths with such unflinching authenticity as them. From heroin junkies, sleazy bank robbers and homeless kleptomaniacs, their stories tend to chart the spiritual endeavors of those living on the fringes of society; hopeless souls who seldom get a chance of being represented on the silver screen.

Cribbing from classic new wave masters the likes of John Cassavetes and Jerry Schatzberg, the Safdies employ a naturalistic style that seems to blur the lines between fiction and reality, capturing the congestion and hurried existence of urban living through invasive close-ups and immersive sound design. They have also perfected the art of getting under our collective skin by introducing despicable, self-serving antiheroes and throwing them into impossible predicaments that often escalate into high-wire drama.

Watching self-sabotaging knuckleheads dangle on the edge of oblivion certainly makes for great entertainment, but one never gets the impression of feeling manipulated. In fact, one trait that sets the duo apart from the rest of the pack is their uncanny ability of capturing spontaneity on-screen, which may be attributed to their frequent use of amateur actors and penchant for improvisation that permeates their entire work.

The Safdies’ meteoric rise from unknown indie darlings to household names has been nothing short of remarkable. And if anything, the pair have shown no signs of slowing down. Lately, Bennie has had a chance at showing off his acting chops in the latest films by Paul Thomas Anderson and Claire Denis, while Josh has been hands full working on their next script following ‘Uncut Gems’ — a film that single-handedly resurrected Adam Sandler’s career and elevated the risk of heart attack among film buffs manyfold. As we bide our time until their next emotional rollercoaster knocks our socks off, let’s take a look at their six feature-length films to date.

6. The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008)

As far as debuts go, ‘The Pleasure of Being Robbed’ is nothing to scoff at. Though the Safdies would still need to iron out their style for a couple more years before truly hitting their stride, they sure made their presence felt right out of the gate. As such, their first foray in the director’s chair (technically only Josh is credited here as Bennie was officially listed as editor) feels like a fascinating prism through which to view their subsequent efforts.

The film centers around Eleonore, a troubled kleptomaniac who spends most of her spare time aimlessly wandering around the busy streets of New York City and blending with the crowds while stealing items — one suspects out of boredom rather than sheer necessity. The film charts her pickpocketing sprees in a stream of vignettes that bleed into each other, making the film feel less like a conventionally strait-laced narrative than it is an experiment on style. But not even the constraints of a shoestring budget and an unproven ensemble of actors (including Josh himself in a supportive role) fully undermines the intriguing display of guerrilla filmmaking. If unabashedly a minor work, ‘Being Robbed’ is a serviceable steppingstone that laid out the groundwork for the rest of their output.

5. Lenny Cooke (2013)

As further established in ‘Uncut Gems’, the Safdies’ love for the game of basketball runs deep. This 2013 sports documentary tells the story of Lenny Cooke, a former New Jersey talent who made rounds around the nation as one of the most hyped prospects in the same high school class as LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony, who then quickly faded into obscurity after seeing his chances of playing in the NBA slip away in front of his eyes.

The film charts his sudden rise to fame, short-lived glory and subsequent failures by weaving through decades-worth of archived footage that was unearthed a decade later. All but destined to make it big, Lenny was led astray by the alluring dreams of success and financial security, not to mention unbearable pressure from friends and relatives, deciding to forego college education for a chance at getting drafted at the pros. His cautionary tale serves primarily as a poignant reminder of the predatory nature of American professional sports, a ruthless system that lures thousands of gullible young athletes with empty promises of generational wealth.

Although at first glance a documentary may seem to come out of left field, given the subject matter it’s hard to think of a better suited filmmaker than the Safdies to helm this particular project, especially considering their long-running artistic obsessions.

4. Heaven Knows What (2015)

The Safdies refined and expanded upon the talent shown in their debut with a gritty portrait of drug addiction that officially put them on everyone’s radar as a force to be reckoned with. Loosely based on Arielle Holmes’ memoir — and starring Holmes herself — the story follows Harley, a homeless city-dweller who’s just barely scraping by and who makes futile attempts at reconciling her love with her abusive and heroin-buddy boyfriend. The film puts us through the wringer for ninety-seven scorching minutes where we see the couple helplessly trying to escape their downward spiral only to be tangled in a web of emotional co-dependency, heroin needles and dead-end dreams.

Even judging it by Safdie standards, this is not for the faint of heart. It’s a raw and pretty unforgiving film with plenty of soul-stirring moments that can lodge into one’s memory banks, though one that ultimately allows for a ray of hope. Despite being full of insights, the Safdies never deal in platitudes and deftly circumvent the heavy-handed moralizing that films of this ilk are so prone to. On a visual and acting standpoint, there’s also a clear step-up from previous efforts that punches the film’s naturalistic aesthetic up a few notches, marking it a high-water moment in the Safdies’ young career.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent has all but certainly been released since this has been published which means audiences nationwide can see the definitive meta tribute to all things Nicolas Cage. But it is only right that this site has its own dedication to one of the most puzzlingly marvelous actors to ever grace the eyes of moviegoers. He is a man with so many great works, that this list only counts down the best of his more recent works. These are the 10 best Nicolas cage movies of the 21st century.

1. Pig (2021)

In the same way that John Wick marked the official return of Keanu Reeves to the upper echelons of Hollywood, Pig seemingly solidified Cage’s return to mainstream popularity. After years of having of being in small, middling indie projects, Cage finally stars in one that was actually worth seeing. Pig is a testament to just how good of an actor Cage is. He uses this quiet, brooding character to go against the zany, intensely angry persona he has built up for literal decades. Pig is about the softest Cage project you will find.

It is a tribute to the smaller things we love in life with a poetic ending that asks us how do we move on when the smaller things dissipate. The restaurant scene is one of the best Cage has ever been in, and it on the whole is a film that seemingly gets deeper the more you think about it. It certainly is a nuanced tale of revenge and letting go, but it also is rather densely packed with commentary on pretentiousness food culture and any art form for that matter. It mocks selling out and following trends and wholeheartedly embraces sticking to your aspirations, no matter how nonsensical or “uncivilized” they may be.

2. Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse (2018)

Into the Spider Verse is obviously not a huge showcase of Cage’s acting talents. Of course, Cage is still phenomenal in the role and makes every line he’s given a marvel of voice delivery (“We don’t pick the ballroom. We just dance” a huge standout). But even if it’s not an anthemic work for Cage himself, Spider Verse is a work to take immense pride in. Cage is merely a hilarious audition to an exceptional group of heroes that burst with personality. The dazzling, inventive animation, Miles’ authentic hero’s journey, and the film’s insightful look into what the character of Spider-Man means are the shining stars.

Cage is a delightful addition to a vibrant cast of heroes and villains, each one just unbelievably memorable and quotable in their own right. The whole film does not crumble in his absence. The interplay between Miles and Peter B. is too well written for a side character’s removal to have such an impact, but who are we kidding? Is Spider Verse really the same with any other voice actor drinking milkshakes and solving Rubik’s cubes? No, because it’s Nicolas freaking Cage.

3. Mandy (2018)

But enough of Nic restraining himself or being a background character. Just because we do not want Nic to overact to oblivion does not mean people are not craving the batshit lunacy projects he takes part in. It’s so metal. So unforgiving in its harsh colors and violence. Goes so hard in B movie dialogue that you halfway through you cannot tell if it is even aware of how 80s it truly is.

It has just the right amount of sincerity to make it work, largely thanks to an underrated Andrea Riseborough performance and a score with a lot of flexibility. A beautiful revitalization of Nic Cage excess that does not lose its artistry among its chainsaw fights and hilarious low brow jokes. The film is just as hypnotic and metal as its poster. If you don’t vibe with it, you better just get out of its way.

4. Color Out of Space (2019)

Color Out of Space was just never going to be as acclaimed as Mandy given its intense similarities. This is very much a throwback 80s bonanza fest where Nic is screaming about alpacas just for the sake of Nic Cage screaming at alpacas. But Color out Of Space is important for assessing Nic’s resurgence because it is a cautious response to past critiques of his movies. It still maintains the fun and unpredictability of Mandy while having a soul, taking time for concrete emotional moments so the style does not trample over the substance.

Its theme of dread is delicately drawn out over the runtime, capturing that slow burn descent into madness that comes with Lovecraft stories. “Lovecraft” is the buzz word when it comes to this movie, but it honestly should be. How many pieces of media outside of Bloodborne faithfully replicate the ominous features of such a neat nano genre? Nowadays, barely any director is giving their time to bring the monsters and imaginative horror of Lovecraft to life. And for Nic Cage to be at his boldest in a movie that does that; that is just marvelous.

5. Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021)

And here is the final entry in the trilogy of madcap projects Cage has done. A movie that revolves around him trying to complete his mission before the bombs attached to his balls explode. Cage once again being bold as all hell here, not at all afraid to lean into the crazy side that arguably cost him his fame in the first place. Sion Sono may not make the best movies of all time, but he certainly makes some of the coolest, and the fusion of western, cyberpunk, and samurai genres just reinforces how awesome the worlds he puts together are.

It likely contains the best action scenes Cage has been a part of post-2000, and is able to reach a hilarious, awe-inspiring climax that does not feel like it is trying too hard to be as weird and out-of-the-box as possible. And, like his other recent efforts, Prisoners of the Ghostland taps into a more profound part of Cage as well. This is another protagonist that expands on Cage playing men that have fallen apart and need violence to in some way quell the suffering they constantly battle from previous loss. What a world we live in to get the seediest and most intelligent version of Cage at the same exact time.

2022 saw the release of Sam Raimi’s first movie in nearly 10 years, so it’s no surprise that many in the film community took the opportunity to celebrate one of our finest pop auteurs, a director whose work has over time become so iconic that it’s easy to take his unique style and artfulness for granted.

After all, how many filmmakers today making either low-budget schlocky horror films or big studio blockbusters have even a fraction of the artistry and craft Raimi brought to classics such as his “Evil Dead” and “Spider-Man” trilogies? And not only that, where are the auteurs primarily known for working within a certain genre who can branch out and direct films as different as a modern spaghetti western or a grounded crime drama, and do both just as well?

That’s Raimi for you – a hugely gifted artist always worthy of celebrating. With that in mind, here’s a list of all his features, from worst to best.

15. For Love Of The Game (1999)

Raimi has made his fair share of bad movies, but even his worst, most incoherent films are unquestionably the product of a distinct voice – the pictures may fall short of greatness but at least they have personality and verve.

The only time Raimi made a completely anonymous work, a film so devoid of any distinguishing features that it could’ve been directed by virtually anyone, was with “For Love Of The Game,” a Kevin Costner-led baseball drama so bland and forgettable that it couldn’t even find a shelf life on cable – despite being a quintessential “dad movie” tailor-made for such viewing.

But even by these standards, “For Love Of The Game” is subpar; a relentlessly boring endeavor that sidelines its sports drama nature in favor of an utterly soporific romance that feels endless. Raimi may have technically made “worse” movies in many ways, but for a director known primarily for the unique visual energy he brings to every project, there could be nothing worse than something as lifeless as this.

14. Oz: The Great And Powerful (2013)

While not as uncharacteristically bland as the aforementioned baseball drama, “Oz: The Great And Powerful” is another film that feels almost completely alien to the distinct style that defines Sam Raimi’s best work.

In fact, less the project of an individual auteur, “Oz” seems more, in the worst ways, like the product of corporate trends. Cashing in on the early 2010s craze for retellings of classic fairy tales with Disney in particular looking to recapture the success of Tim Burton’s “Alice In Wonderland” – which would explain this film’s garish CGI aesthetic, very reminiscent of Burton’s movie.

Raimi does manage to smuggle in here and there some visually inspired sequences (the black and white prologue and the meta climax are particularly well-crafted), but overall “Oz: The Great And Powerful” can’t escape it’s mercenary nature, a soulless studio-mandated affair that got it’s director to stop working for almost 10 years.

13. Crimewave (1985)

A film disavowed by virtually everyone involved in it’s making, from co-writers Joel & Ethan Coen to actor Bruce Campbell (not to mention, of course, Raimi himself), “Crimewave” is really not as bad as it’s reputation would suggest – which is not to say, in turn, that it’s a “good” film, exactly.

If anything, it’s the most frustrating example in Raimi’s career of missed potential; the heavily compromised production (with endless studio interference even leading to Raimi being kicked out of the editing process) destroys much of the essential rhythm of the director’s comedy. Here the chaos feels sloppy rather than deliberate; the gags don’t land as they should and the tricky tonal balancing at work (mixing noir plotting with madcap screwball comedy) is never properly achieved.

Still, amid the relentless noise of it all, “Crimewave” does feature glimpses of Raimi’s Looney-Tunes visual brilliance – it is at times a genuinely funny and inventive caper. Those moments alone would justify a watch, but they’re also enough to make one sad just imagining what the picture could’ve been had Raimi been allowed to fulfill his vision.

12. The Gift (2000)

Following their glorious collaboration on “A Simple Plan”, Raimi and Billy Bob Thornton reunited for a wildly different project with “The Gift”, a southern gothic supernatural mystery that is equal parts indebted to Tennesse Williams and Stephen King.

The film (written by Thornton) boasts one of the most impressive, insanely stacked casts of Raimi’s career; from movie stars such as Cate Blanchett, Keanu Reeves and Hilary Swank to wonderful character actors like J.K Simmons, Kim Dickens and Giovanni Ribisi – almost all of whom are giving extremely big, un-naturalistic performances that fit the melodramatic nature of the story.

Interestingly, however, Raimi himself has rarely been more restrained; forgoing his trademark manic camera moves for a brooding, atmospheric visual stillness. It’s an interesting departure from his style, but also undoubtedly a step down from it. Ultimately “The Gift”, while perfectly competent and mildly entertaining, is simply not interesting enough to stand up to Raimi’s finest outings.

11. Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness (2022)

The rare Marvel movie eagerly anticipated not necessarily for any larger brand-related reasons (though, of course, there were those who cared about that) but for who was at the helm, “Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness” bridged the gap between mainstream comic book fans and cinephiles, for even the most anti-Marvel among us Raimi fans couldn’t help but be excited for his first movie in 9 years.

Of course, there was the concern of whether this was gonna be a real Raimi film or if his style would be completely numbed by Marvel’s absolute commitment to visual blandness; all pre-viz and gray color palletes. Now that the movie has finally come out, we can confidently say that the answer to the question of “Did Sam Raimi actually direct Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness?’ is a resounding “kind of.”

Like all late Marvel productions, the film can’t escape the obligatory cameos and empty tie ins to other titles; in fact, it’s even more dependent on the larger brand than most other films, because in order to even understand it’s basic premise one would need to be familiar with not only previous Marvel movies but even a TV show.

So, narratively, this is one of Raimi’s weakest and least personal endeavors; just another inconsequential chapter in an endless ouroboros of interconnected storytelling. But the good news is that a great director can insert some sense of personality and visual inventiveness even in the most barebones material and that’s just what Raimi does here, relishing every opportunity he gets to craft some genuinely creative sequences.

10. Spider Man 3 (2007)

Raimi’s Spider Man trilogy, being the blueprint of not only the entirety of modern superhero movies but also, in a broader sense, of current blockbuster filmmaking in general, was the harbinger of many trends of popular cinema that’ve come to be commonplace.

It established the basic structure of an origin story, helped to usher in the age of astronomical box office numbers and, most telling, in the case of the third film, was one of the first examples of a major blockbuster being the recipient of entitled fan vitriol. The main points of contention against this have been repeated ad nauseam (“emo” Peter Parker, the excessive number of villains, the representation of Eddie Brock and Venom), so instead of re-litigating those same old arguments it’s better to ask ourselves how valid those criticism are in the first place.

Fifteen years later, with the benefit of hindsight and a decade and a half of increasingly more formulaic and subpar superhero cinema behind us, it seems clear that Raimi’s final entry in the trilogy deserves much more than it’s bad reputation – it is undoubtedly inferior to the first two movies (a little too scattered and narratively clumsy; hampered by studio demands) but still filled with tremendous sequences and ideas – the action scenes remain as thrillingly intense as ever,the central character relationships are just as emotionally engaging and everything relating to the Sandman is just brilliant.

9. The Quick And The Dead (1995)

In a lesser director’s career, a movie like “The Quick And The Dead” (deeply stylish, endlessly entertaining, jaw-droppingly cast across the board) would be their crown jewel – so it’s a testament to Raimi’s excellence that this wonderful western doesn’t even rank among his very best efforts.

Like many of his contemporaries, Raimi’s artistry is frequently birthed from pastiche, taking established styles from the past and putting his own spin on them – his main influences being, specifically, Tex Avery-style chaotic visual comedy and comic book silliness. The key to Raimi’s longevity and talent, however, is that (much like his longtime friends and sometimes collaborators the Coen Brothers) he never stoops to simple imitation – every time he tackles a genre or style he doesn’t seek to simply mimic the tropes and visual ideas of the classics, but rather uses them as a stepping stone to exercise his stylistic predilections.

“The Quick And The Dead” is perhaps the clearest example of that. Nominally a spaghetti western (featuring vaguely Morricone-esque twangs in the score, staredowns, and a standard revenge plot), the film is actually an excuse for Raimi to indulge in his most giddy camera moves; a playground for a brilliant stylist to go insane with complicated compositions and wild edits. So, needless to say, just an absolute blast.

Ti West has been a favorite among horror fans for over a decade, and it’s easy to see why. His slow, methodical films have a tendency to ratchet up tension until the balls-to-the-walls climax finally occurs. Although his leisurely horror flicks have limited mainstream appeal, he has gained a considerable cult following over the years.

After a 6 year break from filmmaking, West has recently returned with the release of X. This old school slasher has managed to earn rave reviews from critics, but is it his best release yet? Below, you’ll find every West movie ranked. This goes from the low-budget beginnings all the way until 2022. You should be able to find his highs, lows, and everything in between.

8. Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009)

Before Eli Roth gave the world Hostel, he gave us Cabin Fever, a gruesome body horror flick with a surprising amount of personality. While squeamish viewers quickly dismissed it, the film gained a minor cult following. This following continued to grow after Roth became more of a household name. Ultimately, this success led to a way-too-late direct-to-video sequel that garnered less-than-stellar reviews from critics and audiences.

These reviews are, unfortunately, right on the money. Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever is a dull, uninspired sequel that borrows heavily from its predecessor without adding anything interesting. A cast of throwaway characters have to survive a flesh-eating virus, and that’s about all there is to it. There’s no clever dialogue or interesting plot developments; it’s just a mindless bloodbath with about as much substance as you would expect from a lazy sequel. No wonder Ti West tried to disown it.

7. Trigger Man (2007)

West’s sophomore feature is rough; that’s the kindest way to describe it. Not only is the shoestring budget beyond apparent, the amateurish acting and shoddy cinematography quickly become distracting. When you also factor in West’s signature snail-like pacing, you’re left with a movie that is bound to frustrate and bore the average viewer.

Trigger Man focuses on a trio of friends who become the target of someone’s sadistic game during a hunting trip. After a misleading opening half-hour where characters chat nonchalantly over quiet bird chirps, the first shot is fired. From there, the characters have to outsmart the mysterious gunman if they want to survive.

The biggest issue is that first third. West has never been known for fast-paced Blumhouse-style horror flicks, but he usually finds a way to build up to the more climactic moments. With Trigger Man, there is no buildup. Cardboard characters have dull conversations until the big moment finally happens. Defenders will say that West wanted to catch viewers off-guard, but certain viewers won’t have the patience to make it past the ho-hum opening.

This all sounds very negative, but there are silver linings. In spite of its many shortcomings, Trigger Man is a far more competent film compared to something like Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. After all, it still feels like a Ti West movie rather than a soulless Hollywood cash grab. You can clearly see inklings of West’s talent; he just didn’t have the resources or experience to fully deliver. Ultimately, Trigger Man is worth a watch if only to see how this well-regarded director has grown.

6. The Roost (2005)

When it comes to West’s directorial debut, your mileage will likely vary. If you can handle piss-poor acting and ultra low-budget thrills, you’ll find something to be entertained by. If that doesn’t sound like your kind of thing, you can safely skip this microbudget vampire-adjacent flick.

The Roost wears its B-movie influences proudly on its sleeve. It lacks the polish of something like The Descent or The Devil’s Rejects, which were released the same year. Instead of going for big, jaw-dropping jump scares, this is a movie that just wants to keep its viewers entertained with its excessive schlock. To some extent, it succeeds, but it’s not a slam dunk by any means.

Goofy thrills are present, but The Roost is still a slow, meandering 80 minutes. There are moments that really grab your attention, but they’re not as frequent as you would expect. Patience is required to make it through West’s first feature-length release. Plenty of people are bound to appreciate the more ridiculous moments, but this isn’t as approachable as the director’s more contemporary releases.

5. The Sacrament (2013)

This is where we get to the good stuff. Everything from The Sacrament onward earns a recommendation. With the lower ranked films, you’ll find a director struggling to find his voice. Thankfully, he managed to establish himself pretty quickly after his subpar beginnings as a director.

The Sacrament, West’s sixth feature, may lack the subtlety of some of his strongest outings, but he makes up for any misgivings with a consistently ominous sense of dread. The film, which is based on the infamous Jonestown massacre of 1978, puts viewers in the shoes of a VICE reporter who decides to investigate a mysterious compound that’s secluded with a capital S.

What they find is, no surprise, haunting. This seemingly utopian society has its own set of secrets, and although you can predict the ending from a mile away, the journey is worth sitting through. Thanks to a phenomenal cast and consistently confident direction, The Sacrament proves to be more than the sum of its parts. Even when it stumbles, it adds up to something worth watching.

2022 has been a very good year for movies so far. The unusual bump in quality may be because of the flood of releases coming in after the delays caused by the pandemic, but that does not stop this year’s slate of movies from being any less impressive. From horror to comedy, blockbusters to indie fare, Vikings to multiverses, 2022 has offered a lot from all types of movie fans. These are the best of the year so far.

10. RRR

RRR is a movie of moments above everything else, so much so that the gonzo moments of spectacle have clouded some from acknowledging how contrived the dialogue can be for much of the feature. Too much of RRR, especially when it comes to the conversation with the love interest, feels amateurish and contrived. They sometimes are frighteningly similarly to the quid pro quo exchanges found in Netflix originals, where almost all the words are expositional and meant for an audience far dumber than anyone who would be watching this movie.

But the moments that do work in RRR are marvelous. RRR is the rare ballsy action flick that doubles as an absurdly well-choreographed musical. Its opening fistfight is just as thrilling as the free-for-all dance battle. This is all the more impressive considering how these scenes are woven in between a uniquely tuned movie bromance and a whole thesis on colonialism and revolt. RRR could seriously use trimming and a more subtle script that does not overdo virtually all of its plot points. Yet, the big moments its fanatics dwell on as well as the irresistible charm of its leads make it a vital film for the first half of 2022, even if it will not stand as one of the year’s best by the end.

9. Navalny

Navalny is likely the leading candidate for documentary of the year so far, and it should be. It is a lean piece of filmmaking that is both a successful portrait of a daring political figure constantly under threat of death, and a rather provocative form of investigative journalism.

The ride it provides to viewers is typical for a muckraking documentary, but that does not keep any of its reveals being any less astounding, with the phone call of course being an absurd accomplishment for such a small team to realize. Its investigation into the plot against Navalny is timely and well-paced, with not a single piece of footage really seeming out of place. A deeper look into the character and quirks of Navalny would have set this apart from other documentaries like it, but it remains a more than solid example of no-nonsense filmmaking.

8. The Northman

If The Northman strays more from the Hamlet formula, it could have skyrocketed up this list. Eggers is as good as ever here capturing era-specific dialogue and giving it a melodious flow. It is the rare film, not unlike a Coen feature, where merely listening to it is a delight because of how noticeably fine-tuned the script was. And The Northman is likewise no slouch to look at either. The cinematography tracks our hero across various painting-like vistas, most notably the inside of a volcano.

The Northman, like a surprising amount of the best films this year, also doubles as a great action film. It bathes in the brutality of its action and carries over that aggressive energy to virtually the whole plot. Many have described it as the most metal film of the year and that is more than a fair characterization. It is a testosterone fueled rage fest dominated by sword fights, grimaces, and battle cries. It could benefit from a main character with more depth and less exposition, but it still is a top tier.

7. Top Gun: Maverick

Maverick’s praise may be a tad overblown. The actual target and Hangman’s rescue attempt are just eerily similar to A New Hope’s trench run, the newcomers are severely underwritten, and the lack of a clear enemy is both confusing and robs the audience of someone to root against. The film has more problems than some will let on, but I would be lying if it still does not deserve to be called one of the best of the year.

The obvious acclaim is properly directed towards the flying. It is insane what the actors had to go through. Their faces contorting from the G-force, mixed with the sound design from the theater leads to an often-visceral experience at the movie, a triumph for the art of moviegoing itself. The final action scene is nothing short of a phenomenal set piece, with just the right length, direction, and momentum shifting between heroes and villains. But Maverick is a little more than that.

It also is a very well done legacyquel that pays homage to the original without feeling cheap and expands on the story in a simple yet compelling way. And it also is a thoughtful reflection on Cruise himself, this relic of a man refusing to quit and providing entertainment for audiences despite his age. It is a pretty darn good popcorn flick that should make all fans of the movies happy that it is succeeding.

6. Scream

A weak lead acting performance aside, Scream was as an elite January film to kick off the year in film. It successfully captured the meta spirit of the original and was as acerbic as Craven. Its takes on fandom and elevated horror do not always ring true but when they land, you get something as brilliant as that opening scene.

Scream’s opening sets the stage for what the whole movie sets out to be, a bitter and playful look at the current horror landscape but also a delightful slasher. It has the all the jumps and violence the first one offered but in a new, oh so bloody coat of paint. It is not revolution like the original Scream, but it is the first time in a while where the franchise feels like a competent balance of hilariously overdone slasher encounters, and ultra-self-aware dialogue exchanges.

Zack Snyder is at once one of the most despised and beloved directors in Hollywood. Some fans think he can do no wrong, that he is a misunderstood auteur pumping out singular, genius works of art. Others think he is an abomination to the art itself and medically allergic to making good movies. He has got some absolute stinker but also has some admirable works. Here they are, ranked worst to best.

9. Sucker Punch (2011)

Snyder can argue all he wants this is some misunderstood critique of nerd culture and how women are sexualized by male creators, but with his given track record and just the outfits the characters wear in the film, it really is hard to take him seriously.

Sucker Punch is nauseating to look at and nauseating to hear. Snyder classically using just one color and darkness to overwhelm every other color, also butchering the look with CGI and a whole lot of slow motion. Dialogue is about as bad as it gets when it comes to modern blockbusters, with a healthy dose of references to nerd culture just make it all the more agonizing to hear. All around just a challenge to endure.

8. Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

Nothing is going to make this movie good. Time may pass by, but Batman v. Superman’s positive aspects largely start and stop with the warehouse fight scene. Even that is worth scorn, as it teased a more brutal version of Batman that we barely got to know. It is Snyder at his ugliest, brutally conducting an onslaught of pure gray onto the color palette. The action scenes we do get not only lack punch due to the lack of weight behind them but for how exceptionally dull they are. It awkwardly has to build Batman’s character, then rush the rivalry with Superman before having to confront the predictable threat of Doomsday at the end. Jesse Eisenberg’s turn as Luthor remains one of the worst performances of the past 10 years.

You can get glimpses of a genuine vision here, like with Holly Hunter’s Senator. There is something to be said about the jurisdiction of superheroes and how they would interact with the world we know today when they cause so much destruction, but what does that mean when it is buried under so many other things? How can any reasonable, interesting theme come to the surface when the film has to deal with all of the aforementioned things, and also introducing Wonder Woman, and dealing with Superman and Lois’s romance, and the insanely bad “Martha” connection between the two leads. Still a disaster.

7. Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)

It really was not that Zack Snyder radically reconstructed Whedon’s Justice League, he simply added more to it. He did not fix the fact the movie still serves as introductions to both Cyborg and Flash in the middle of a superhero team-up movie. The structure is, therefore, still horribly unnatural. And when we do get genuine character building it feels out of place. Flash is a whiny, fanboy type that feels more akin to Peter Parker than anyone else. Wonder Woman is a condescending jerk the entire time that has a superiority complex that is both obnoxious and rather contradictory to her characterization in her solo movie. Bruce Wayne has to serve as the Nick Fury of the group with no real time to shine on his own, popping up mysteriously to assemble a team of unsuspecting heroes.

The new aspect ratio helps the look, but the color is still way too drained here, and the CGI makes this feel like Snyder’s least organic looking film. Exposition is delivered incessantly, and the dramatic beats are telegraphed from start to finish. And what a battle to get to the finish. With really only the Superman vs. Justice League scene standing out, this is nothing short of painfully boring when it sits at over four hours. It is remarkable how little the Snyder cut says in that time period, and how little fun it offers for fans of the genre.

6. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (2010)

Legend of the Guardians is the obvious outlier in Snyder’s collection. It is a largely innocent animation film the whole family can enjoy. And it has some good stuff in it. Some of the visuals are quite impressive, the voice work is sturdy, and in a theater, it probably was a perfectly serviceable moviegoing experience. With that being said, there is still something remarkably uninteresting and cold about the film.

Snyder is no Pixar, and the screenplay really struggles to find dialogue and character motivations that are understandable to children but carry a secondary meaning for adults. It is both too serious and carefree at the same time, which makes for an odd tone. And the core of the film simply does not run warm. You get no real sense of passion when watching it. The film is hollow, with no character or scene capable of making an impact on you.

As far back as we can remember, Ray Liotta had always been a great actor. Type of an actor who was always committed, never phoned it in, and always elevated the material no matter what the role was. Some actors need a good director to do that, some don’t bother if they’re in some low-budget, possibly direct-to-video type of film. Not Ray. His enigmatic screen presence, remarkable charisma, and his amazing ability to bring so much depth to whoever he plays had always been appreciated by movie fans.

For a man so versatile and someone who’s known to be a great person off-screen as well, it’s surprising that he never got an Oscar nomination. Recently, it seems the hype was building up to him getting his due but unfortunately, at the age of 67, Ray Liotta has passed away. However, he left us a rich legacy we can always go back to. Here are the ten of many amazing performances he has given to us. Each of them is different than one another but they all remind us of one thing: He was a legend.

10. Cop Land (1997)

James Mangold’s “Cop Land” has a strange old-school feeling about it. It’s one of those crime dramas Sidney Lumet used to make. In his second film in the director’s chair, Mangold almost pays a tribute to Lumet, Scorsese, and several other directors here while carefully establishing his own style.

In a way, the film works and feels like a western. The suspense keeps you hooked and the drama about police corruption remains intriguing. However, the biggest strength of the film is its cast. Sylvester Stallone who long was trying to get some respect as an actor in the mid-90s, so he fully dedicated himself to a somewhat against-type role here with his physicality. The screen legends De Niro and Keitel are reliable as ever and it’s always nice to see people like Janeane Garofalo, Annabella Sciorra, and Robert Patrick on screen.

That said, the real MVP is Ray Liotta. In fact, chances are the scene you’ll remember the most is Ray smashing Robert Patrick against a wall. He’s great in all of his scenes as a complex cop Figgis but that scene is a highlight because it shows one of Ray’s trademarks: the danger he possesses. You see him ready to explode, you’re expecting it coming and then that moment happens, you can’t take your eyes off the screen. You’re shocked and impressed at the same time. Liotta always had that intensity about him, a treat that made him always watchable.

9. Marriage Story (2019)

Noah Baumbach is a terrific writer and he creates great characters. In “Marriage Story”, the show belonged to Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson but every character is interesting here, especially their lawyers, played by Alan Alda, Laura Dern, and one and only Ray Liotta. They all are so great that you end up wishing for a spin-off film about them.

Liotta played Jay Marotta, the second lawyer Adam Driver’s character hired after he felt like the first one was somewhat weak. Marotta is a type of character Liotta excels in. He’s loud but not over-the-top, he’s tough but in a convincing way, yet he’s also funny. Some of his line deliveries are what make the scene. You keep wanting to hear him again and again. That’s what a truly special actor is. His screentime was probably around ten minutes but he makes the most of it. So much so that many people probably thought he had a bigger role when the film ended because he’s very memorable.

Laura Dern won an Oscar for her performance but unfortunately, Liotta got snubbed for a nomination. AMPAS just ignored the “overdue” narrative for him. Liotta was always taken for granted but recently, with this and his amazing performance in “The Many Saints of Newark”, it felt like he’s having a career resurgence. He was one step closer to getting recognition from his industry and we were lucky to see him delivering all these great performances back to back again.

8. Killing Them Softly (2012)

Liotta often acted in crime dramas but surprisingly, he was never exactly “typecasted”. In a sense, he never played the same role over and over again. There was always something that made them so distinctive. In Andrew Dominik’s polarizing “Killing Them Softly”, Liotta played a guy named Markie Trattman. Markie operates high-stakes poker games for the mob. Small-time crook Frankie and his junkie friend Russell are hired to hold up the game. Markie becomes the obvious suspect.

In the first second Liotta comes to screen here, he gets your attention. You know that you’re in for a treat. He’s brilliant and tragic here. In one of the film’s most memorable sequences, his character takes a beat. Arguably one of the best beating scenes on film because it’s truly disturbing to watch, almost sickening. It feels like you’re watching something you shouldn’t be watching. It’s so hard to sell a scene like that but Liotta is doing it brilliantly and devastatingly. “The most important thing is the story…What I liked about [Killing Them Softly] was that it wasn’t me going around beating on people, but it was happening to me. I found that interesting,” said Liotta which also shows that he was always after films where he can do something different.

7. Field of Dreams (1989)

Ray Kinsella is a corn farmer who lives in Iowa with his wife Annie and their young daughter Karin. His life runs smoothly until one day, while he is working in his field, a quiet, mystical voice rings out: “If you build it, he will come back.” His cornfield attracts the ghosts of baseball legends, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, an American outfielder who played Major League Baseball (MLB) in the early 1900s.

Liotta admits he didn’t understand much from the script when he first read it and he didn’t read the book but he soon found himself in the project. It’s far from the roles he’s often associated with but yet, he’s brilliant once again. Liotta talks exactly how an actual athlete would talk and he sells poetic lines very effectively that nothing in the script feels corny. This is also a great moment to show his physical acting. In one memorable sequence, Kevin Costner’s character teases him “Think you can hit my curve?”. Shoeless Joe hits it. “What happened that moment in the film was real,” Costner wrote when Ray passed away. “God gave us that stunt. Now God has Ray.”

6. Corrina, Corrina (1994)

He might look intense but if you had caught Liotta off-screen, in one of his public appearances and interviews, you can see that he was a sweet man. It’s evident in many of his roles, even in some of his villainous turns, that he brings so much charm. Even in “Field of Dreams”, he was basically the emotional center of the whole thing. Unfortunately, he rarely got a chance to be a romantic lead despite having very handsome looks and easy charm but whenever he got one, he rose up to the task.

Whoopi Goldberg plays a kind-hearted nanny hired to look after a girl who has been left speechless after the death of her mother. She not only gets the little one to talk but ultimately turns out to be the ideal wife for the father, played by Liotta. It’s very entertaining in the beginning but it’s a kind of film that will take a predictable turn after some point. If you’re an avid movie watcher, you know those beats but you’re interested in if the film will deliver those beats in an effective manner. For clichés to work, you need an actor who can bring something warm, something fresh to the part. Liotta is amazing in the leading role and finds great chemistry with Goldberg. Just a great testament to his graceful presence in movies.

When it comes to thrillers deliberately crafted to make your skin crawl and haunt you long after the credits roll, Park Chan-wook is second to none. With iconic masterpieces such as ‘Oldboy’, ‘Thirst’ or ‘Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance’ under his belt, it wouldn’t be too much of an overstatement to claim that he’s pushed the envelope of the genre as much as any given filmmaker in the past few decades.

The Korean auteur is once again on everyone’s lips after picking up his first Best Director nod in Cannes for ‘Decision to Leave’, a new romantic thriller that has premiered with much fanfare at the Croisette. This marks a welcomed return to form for the master of poetic mayhem after a six-year hiatus since rendering us speechless with ‘The Handmaiden’ back in 2016. And though being recognized at the biggest stage has been long overdue to a trendsetting figurehead in world cinema, Park Chan-wook is merely reaping the benefits of over two decades of filmmaking of the highest order.

Long before ‘Parasite’ sent shockwaves all around the industry with a historic awards sweep, Park helped put South Korean cinema on the map with a string of stylized thrillers that took the world by storm and instantly established him as a force to be reckoned with. Subsequent efforts have only reinforced his global stature as one of the most transgressive voices in the industry, amassing a fervid following overseas as well as in critic circles for his morbid portraits of the human condition, the folly of revenge and the inescapable stranglehold of fate.

But before putting his stamp on contemporary cinema, Park Chan-wook was once a philosophy student and bidding film critic. Across that time, he passed judgment on many of his peers including some of the most celebrated directors of all time. And he did so without ever biting his tongue or sugar-coating his opinion, no matter how controversial — tearing apart renowned classics like ‘Citizen Kane’, ’Full Metal Jacket’, ‘Chungking Express’ or ‘Psycho’ without a hint of hesitation. But he wasn’t shy when it came to singing the praises of plenty of films that influenced his own work either. Drawing from a plethora of interviews, lists and reviews, we have assembled ten that’ve been blessed with his seal of approval and that should come in handy as we celebrate his latest nail-biter.

1. Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Few filmmakers know how to tell a story and send shivers down our spines better than Alfred Hitchcock. In fact, it’s hard to find a thriller in the past half century that doesn’t owe something to the master of suspense. Not without reason, Park films have triggered many comparisons with Hitchcock, with many critics going as far as anointing him as his spiritual successor. Any parallels between both are taken as a compliment for the Korean director, who cited him as one of the biggest reasons he decided to pursue his directorial aspirations in the first place.

“One day, I saw ‘Vertigo.’ During the movie, I found myself screaming in my head, ‘If I don’t at least try to become a film director, I will seriously regret it when I’m lying on my deathbed!”, the director revealed during an interview for the New York Times. “After that, akin to James Stewart when he was blindly chasing after some mysterious woman, I searched aimlessly for some kind of irrational beauty.” Park highlighted the scene where “the real character that Kim Novak plays, Judy, fully becomes the character of Madeline, and her transformation from one to the other is complete” as one of his favorites of all time.

2. M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

Revenge is a recurring motif burrowed deep into Park’s body of work. Far from endorsing violent retribution, his films work best as incisive morality plays that urge the audience to reconsider their primal instincts and dwell on the futility of such endeavors. One of the darkest sequences the director has ever churned out can be found in the climax of ‘Sympathy for Lady Vengeance’, where a group of grieving parents viciously get back at the serial kidnapper who abducted and murdered their children.

This particular scene is cribbed straight from Fritz Lang’s seminal thriller, which probes similar themes of institutional retribution and mob justice during an eerily reminiscent conclusion. Vengeance is once more the driving force behind the story, which centers around another child killer who triggers a city-wide manhunt across the streets of Berlin. After the police investigation hits a snag, the local crime syndicate takes matters into their own hands — hunting down the culprit and sentencing him to death in an underground court in front of all the victims’ parents. As the screen fades to black, a grief-stricken mother laments that “no sentence will bring the dead children back” — a simple statement that underscores what Park Chan-wook has been desperately trying to convey for the better part of the century.

3. The Housemaid (Kim Ki-young, 1960)

Though Park Chan-wook might not be associated with themes of economic struggle and class resentment to the extent of Bong Joon-ho or Lee Chang-dong, a closer look at his films shows he’s just as much a moralist as his peers. From ‘Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance’ and ‘The Handmaiden’ to ‘Stoker’, his characters range from social outcasts, oppressed women and marginalized workers all fueled by rage and guilt.

This staple in Korean cinema uses many of the aforementioned themes as the baseline for its exploration of social and gender inequalities, thrusting us into an upper-class household where all hell breaks loose after a scheming, two-timing housemaid is hired. Connecting the dots between the groundwork for this anti-bourgeois tale and ‘The Handmaiden’ is fairly easy to anyone who’s seen Park Chan-wook’s period piece.

Though he rarely rewatches films, Park claims he always feels the urge of revisiting this classic courtesy of Kim Ki-young — a director he regards as the greatest in the history of Korean cinema. “He’s able to find and portray beauty in destruction, humor in violence and terror. I’m still making films that are too modest compared to his, but I will continue to work hard to make films as daring and brave as his.” That’s high praise coming from one of the most provocative filmmakers of our time.

4. Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981)

When prompted to name his favorite revenge movie — not including his own Vengeance trilogy — Park Chan-wook mentioned Abel Ferrara’s grindhouse classic “for Zoe Tamerlis’ beauty”, claiming he was at a loss of words upon first viewing. In hindsight, it doesn’t come as a shocker to learn this was right up his street considering his artistic obsessions as a director. Much like Park’s work, ‘Ms. 45’ is not for the faint of heart and conceals plenty of moments that can lodge in one’s memory banks — blending exploitation sleaze and arthouse trappings in an explosive cocktail of stylized bloodshed.

The predator become the prey after a deaf mute decides to even the score and go on a killing spree after being raped by wandering around the streets of New York City and blasting any man that picks her up with her .45 caliber handgun. Watching our female vigilante claw her way back to retribution can be as morbidly cathartic as watching any of Park’s heroines lay waste on their abusers, but the fact that we find it an unabashedly exhilarating affair says quite a lot about our own emotional desensitization to on-screen violence.

5. High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)

Kidnapping takes center stage in several of Park’s films, most notably in ‘Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance’, where a deaf-mute abducts the small child of his former boss — a greedy businessman who recently fired him — in order to raise money for her dying sister’s kidney transplant.

When coming up with his own morally ambiguous crime tale, the Korean director sought inspiration in Akira Kurosawa’s classic, one he listed among his ten favorite Asian movies of all time. ‘High and Low’ shares a similar thematic fabric to ‘Mr. Vengeance’, disguising itself as a conventional thriller first before showing its true colors as a scathing portrait of class relations. The plot is set in motion when a wealthy shoe executive becomes the victim of extortion when his chauffeur’s son is abducted and held for ransom, creating quite a dilemma for all parties involved.

“I thought it would be good to see the movie first. Then I gave up. I thought, ‘No one can make kidnapping movies anymore’. I wanted to somehow chew his movie and digest it and make my own with the nutrients. But even if I couldn’t make a movie that surpassed him, I could at least try to make a movie that felt different from him.”

Ang Lee is a sleeper pick for one of the greatest directors of all time. His recent works have weakened his legacy and diehard fans are yearning for the quality films he was once known for, but he still has quite the collection of films. These are the movies of Ang Lee worked worst to first.

14. Hulk (2003)

The obvious pick for Lee’s worst film, but the right one. Hulk is just intensely unmemorable. Lee arguably adds some degree of personality to the story but even the action isn’t quite on the level of the Hulk and Abomination battle at the end of The Incredible Hulk.

Is this better than that 2009 film? Perhaps. Having sexual desire be a part of Hulk’s character is certainly a Lee specific touch, but it doesn’t prevent the romance itself from being one of the most milquetoast, ineffective love stories you will see in a superhero movie. The CGI just isn’t acceptable by today’s standards and Hulk’s conflict with the military is as plain as you can get. It’s nice that the movie has its fans, but the overwhelming majority are going to see this and think nothing of it the next day.

13. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016)

A classic case of Lee getting caught up in the technology of the movie and forgetting about the quality of the story itself. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is the embodiment of everything wrong with Lee’s most recent works. The big story behind it is that it’s shot at 120 fps in high-definition 3D. That was supposed to be the selling point of a new Ang Lee movie of all things. It is not just a visual trick that distracts Lee from the story, but it is an actively distracting part of the movie. Makes numerous scenes look totally unnatural and overall makes for an experience of a movie that really cannot be seen at home with any degree of pleasure.

As for the story, it is a saccharine, stereotypical take on American courage that dampens the power of the actual true story. Mix that in with some mind-boggling turns from Chris Tucker and Steve Martin and you have simply a bad film from Ang Lee. Both painful to look at and to endure such a boring story that feels as though it has been told numerous times before.

12. Taking Woodstock (2009)

Taking Woodstock is only worth a watch for the Lee diehards. The movie may conjure up feelings of nostalgia for a crazy era, it may make you laugh, and it may make you in awe of what Lee can do with a camera. But it’s much more likely you will be disappointed with how empty Taking Woodstock is.

It takes a pivotal cultural moment, a mix of seediness and righteousness and a whole lot of drugs and music but does not strike an emotional chord. It really does not have much to say about the festival itself and the main character’s arc is tolerable enough but very derivative of other coming-of-age stories. Probably just best if you watch the Paul Dano scene on YouTube and skip the rest.

11. Ride with The Devil (1999)

People may admire Ride with the Devil for its impressive vistas and sense of scale. And while some separate elements of the film are admirable, the film on the whole is just not that impressive. In all the ways The Ice Storm is a hyper-intelligent version of a typical Oscar bait drama, Ride with the Devil really just is standard Oscar bait fare.

It aimlessly wanders in certain sections of the movie, is overlong, and mixes in romance, war, and a western revenge tale unsuccessfully. It is both overstuffed and unsuccessful in justifying or even remotely examining the heinous acts of its main characters. Maybe this could be considered as a superior Lee flick with more efficacious pacing and more engaging moment-to-moment dialogue, but as it stands it simply is not a good movie, but rather a very mediocre movie with some very good aspects.

10. Gemini Man (2019)

Did anyone think Gemini Man would be good? From the trailers it seemed like an excuse for Lee to play with technology rather than make an actual movie and that’s what it is, consistently soulless throughout and way too caught up in perfecting young Will Smith, Gemini Man forgets that it actually has to have a functioning, well-written story to be memorable.

Gemini Man lacks all the subtlety of Lee’s previous movies. It was past its expiration date the second it came out and features the same labored dialogue exchanges you expect in a story where a character goes against an older version of oneself. The action is nothing special but even if one tries to justify Lee’s resistance to quick-cutting as a strength, it simply cannot make up from a shockingly bad screenplay. Don’t let the bold reviewer fool you into thinking this is the underrated work of a masterful auteur, it’s a downright blunder.

9. Pushing Hands (1991)

Pushing Hands definitely feels like a debut film from Lee. It is him trying to fire on all cylinders. We got kung-fu, we got elements of magical realism, a clash between the young and the old, a clash between the east and the west, a look at the middle-class experience, a look at the Asian-American experience.

It feels amateurish insofar as most of these themes half-baked and could each use more attention. But at the same time, it is wildly impressive that Pushing Hands is as poignant as it is. The dramatic moments hit home thanks to warm, lowkey performances from the cast and the absurdist moments are unpredictably hilarious. Despite having so many plates spinning at once, the film is deceptively simple and impactful, and an indication of how good Lee would become.

8. The Wedding Banquet (1993)

The Wedding Banquet is likely not going to knock your socks off, but it thrives thanks to a consistently interesting plot and typical Lee optimism. Unlike some of his other movies, the sweetness here is not overdone. It is both proper and helpful in making for a sometimes goofy, always delightful farce of a movie.

It is not nearly as funny as it could be and really would benefit from edging closer to a traditional romantic comedy. At the same time, it is relatively thoughtful when it comes to Lee examining his usual themes of culture and tradition. Nothing spectacular but a good early feature with not much to get in the way of the experience.

She was a ballerina, and then became a beauty queen, later one of the biggest stars of Asian cinema and finally a legend. For over 30 years, Michelle Yeoh delivers iconic work in movies all over the world. Some might say, she has been literally and figuratively kicking ass since the 1980s.

Born in Malaysia to a local Chinese family of Hokkien and Cantonese ancestry, Yeoh started to learn ballet at the age of four. She eventually earned a bachelor of arts at the Royal Academy of Dance in London. In 1983, at the age of 20, she won the Miss Malaysia World contest. Then she starred in television commercials, caught the attention of Hong Kong film producers, and established an action film career. Thanks to her being eager to perform dangerous stunts, her incredibly magnetic, commanding screen presence, and bringing so much personality to her characters, she was hailed as a kung-fu goddess everywhere but soon later she was also proven to be a versatile actress who can pull off any type of role in any kind of film as she admitted that she tries to find a “balance” to not bore her audiences.

For sure, she never does. From dramatic films like “Memoirs of Geisha” to even Marvel movies like “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 2” or “Shang-Chi”, Yeoh always surprises. She just can do it all and always stays relevant, always finds a project to introduce herself to the younger generation of filmgoers.

This year more than ever. Not just because she’s getting wide attention for her amazing turn in “Everything Everywhere All at Once “ but also she’s in an “Avatar” sequel, Paul Feig’s new fantasy film, and “The Witcher” origin miniseries which happens to be her return to television after “Star Trek: Discovery”. Years like this are not only great for her but also for us, the movie lovers and pop-culture nerds who never get tired of seeing her in movies. It’s time to look at some of her (many) iconic roles in a legendary career.

10. Tai Chi Master (1993)

Most people love referring to Michelle as “female Jackie Chan” mainly because she performs many of her stunts, Asia’s top female action star, and also because she had excellent chemistry with Chan when they worked together. However, Michelle has worked with other martial arts stars of Hong Kong and Chinese cinema and has found great chemistry with them too, such as with Donnie Yen in the underrated “Wing Chun”. “Tai Chi Master” sees her starring opposite another major action star Jet Li, with whom she’ll collaborate years later in the disappointing Hollywood fantasy “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor’. There’s nothing underwhelming here in “Tai Chi Master” though.

The movie is about two kung-fu fighters who grew up in a Buddhist monastery but were expelled from the monastic community now fighting on opposite fronts and becoming bitter enemies, one of them is working for the army, while the other one is a rebel. Yeoh plays Siu-Lin, a young woman searching for her lost husband, during which she supports herself by playing on a sanxian that said husband gave to her as a wedding gift. Yeoh bust out some comedy chops and is genuinely funny. She also once again proves that even in a supporting role, she comes close to stealing the show.

9. Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

The first film by a major Hollywood studio to feature a majority cast of Chinese descent in a modern setting since The Joy Luck Club in 1993, “Crazy Rich Asians” is the most recent film that brought Yeoh awards consideration. She has been never nominated for an Oscar and you might argue that “Crazy Rich Asians” is a light film and it was obvious that she was not getting one but no.

First of all, there was a lot of hype around this film since it grossed over $238 million on a budget of $30 million, making it the highest-grossing romantic comedy of the 2010s. It also got a SAG nomination for its ensemble, so yeah; it was a good opportunity to give an overdue legend her due. But whatever, at least it’s yet another major accomplishment for Yeoh. Sure, outside of its cultural importance, the film is mostly a light romantic comedy and it doesn’t have too much depth like some other of Yeoh’s films but her performance as a matriarch steeped in tradition and duty gained widespread acclaim because she’s once again stealing the show, bringing so many layers to the role elevates the script.

Yeoh refuses to make her one-dimensional and brings so much complexity to the part and turns it into a show-stopping performance. She even turned down the script for the first time when she thought the character wasn’t interesting enough, but then they worked on it. That also shows how much she cares for the quality, how much is she eager to explore well-written characters, and how selective she is.

8. Yes, Madam! (1985)

What an outstanding intro to the cinema. It’s not Michelle Yeoh’s first film but this Hong Kong action film is basically the first film of the subgenre “girls with guns”, a type of action film that portrays a female protagonist engaged in shootouts. It’s directed by Corey Yuen who’s a well-known, amazing choreographer which means you can expect great fighting and action scenes here. Yeoh and another martial arts film star of the era Cynthia Rothrock plays a pair of cops looking for microfilm, so they can take down some of Hong Kong’s most dangerous criminals.

The plot here is mostly secondary; you’re here for the old-school Hong Kong action fun. The villains are over-the-top and the story is not necessarily very intelligently written but again, who cares. It has amazing fight sequences and Yeoh, as you can expect from her, just delivers in action scenes. The scene where Michelle Yeoh jumps backward over a rail and through a plate glass was particularly noted by reviewers.

This was her first intro to the action cinema and even right from the start, she became an instant icon. Yeoh says she brought the energy she had from her dancing skills to action choreography, saying “I just needed to learn to transfer the energy, because a lot of times in dance it’s very inward and contained. Action is more about how you deliver that energy, pushing it forward.” And it worked amazingly well. The movie is nowadays a bit underrated but back in its time, was a notable success that it launched its own series “In the Line of Duty”.

7. Royal Warriors (1986)

The second film of “In the Line of Duty” films finds Michelle Yeoh in yet another action heroine role. Yeoh says “I’m very proud of myself for what I’ve done, creating a niche for myself in action films because I’ve worked very hard to achieve this. I really treasure this status and do not take it lightly.” And indeed she should be proud. The film is about a group of war veterans carrying out a terrorist attempt that ends up being foiled by Yeoh’s cop character. One can say the film is even improvement on slightly better than the previous installment “Yes, Madam!” with a better story, better villains, and more impressive production design.

Yeoh is once again in top form, you can see that she’s also even more confident in herself than in her previous action role and displays so much of what made her such a special star. This is a great star performance and it helps that film mixes action with some drama and a little bit of humor, even romance! So, Yeoh already gets a chance to shine with her versatility if you look closely enough. Sure, the tone of the film slightly borders on sentimentality but Yeoh’s performance gives the material more honesty. As for the action, it has some of Yeoh’s finest scenes. The nightclub scene, while might be a little too violent for some, is iconic. If you enjoy 80s action films, “Royal Warriors” is great entertainment and one of Yeoh’s bests.

6. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

By the mid-1990s, Hollywood took notice of Yeoh’s charisma, graceful screen presence, beauty, action skills, and acting talent. How they couldn’t anyway? Once you see her, it’s impossible to not take notice. Yeoh was eventually cast in the James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies”, where she played “a woman who was on a par with James Bond” because she didn’t want to play a typical Bond girl. Indeed, even Pierce Brosnan referred to the character as “the female Bond”. She plays Wai Lin, a Chinese secret agent who teams up with Bond to fight an evil media mogul who sets off wars by reporting phony conflicts on his TV stations.

Famed film critic Roger Ebert said, “her presence in the movie is so effective that she’d be a natural to add to the other regulars, like M, Q, and Miss Moneypenny”. While unfortunately, we didn’t get to see her in any other Bond installments, still she left her mark. Her chemistry with Brosnan is wonderful as well. Vogue UK picked her performance as one of the “Bond Girls Who Overshadowed 007”. This was also an important part for Yeoh because, with this role, she made a big transition from East to West, impressing the English-language world with her spell.

It is surprisingly difficult to find examples of science-fiction films which you could call optimistic. There are several reasons for this. One is that it is harder to tell stories about futuristic worlds in which everybody is happy. It also tends to be a symptom of how the popular imagination reflects the world shaping it. The current abundance of dystopian or post-apocalyptic films and shows is likely due to viewers finding the possibility of worlds even bleaker than ours to be more comforting than imagining a brighter one.

The popular culture benchmark for optimistic visions of the future is probably still Star Trek, a franchise which ran parallel with the present on the big and small screens for more than thirty years, but now consists mostly of prequels, suggesting that, at some point recently, it stopped being a story of the future and became a fantasy from the past.

There are other factors determining how uplifting science-fiction can be. The cyberpunk aesthetic of Blade Runner (1982) has practically become shorthand for a dystopian city of the future, and yet the film makes this world brutally beautiful and inspiring. Similarly, in Terry Gilliam’s retro-futurist Brazil (1985), which examined the present through the prism of a baleful future imagined in the past (by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four), the dystopia is a technocratic fantasy world that the viewer would love to explore, if not for too long.

In contrast, the hopefulness of a particular sci-fi film’s outlook is no guarantee that it will not leave a sour taste in the mouth. Jindrich Polák’s Ikarie XB1 (1963) paints an ultimately triumphal portrait of interstellar travel, but its most powerful images are of desolation and terror. Doris Wishman’s kitsch classic Nude on the Moon (1961) is arguably one of the most optimistic films ever made about first contact with aliens, but its exploitation griminess makes it so depressing that this is practically nullified.

Here are ten works of science-fiction that celebrate a hopeful outlook, most of them now several decades old. Given that the future will probably look very different to what was widely imagined half a century ago, it is likely these will only continue to grow in popularity as objects of nostalgia.

1. Just Imagine (1930)

Like so much of Pre-Code Hollywood cinema, Just Imagine (1930) has to be seen to be believed. This one is a good example of how utopian ideas often age faster than dystopian ones, creating a future-world that would sound conventionally bleak were it not a lighthearted musical comedy.

In New York of 1980, where marriages are approved by the state, Aviator J-21 (John Garrick) is in love with LN-18 (Maureen O’Sullivan), but she will be forced to wed wealthy stuff-shirt Z-4 (Hobart Bosworth) unless J-21 can distinguish himself in some other way. The opportunity arises when he is offered the chance to lead Earth’s first mission to Mars. In the meantime, there’s a Rip Van Winkle subplot in which J-21 becomes custodian of Single O (El Brendel), a man from 1930 who ends up stowing away aboard the spaceship.

Just Imagine is impressive in its opening scenes, with a Hugh Ferriss-style futurist cityscape, traversed by propellor-driven aircraft, giving an idea of what a screen adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) produced in the 30s might have looked like. Beyond this the film shows its age, both as an early talkie and a Depression-era satire, particularly in drawing a dubious comparison between Prohibition laws and the state-control of women’s bodies. Despite this, Single O’s refrain “I dunno boys, give me the good ‘ol days!” would probably have sounded more encouraging than retrogressive at the time, and the film is enjoyable at least for the first half. The budget seems to run out once they leave Earth, like a bad episode of classic Doctor Who.

2. They Came to a City (1944)

In the mid-1940s, Britain’s Ealing Studios produced a number of wartime fantasy films in which displaced groups of people are thrown together in improbable situations. They Came to a City (1944) is the only one of these that could be classed as science-fiction. Directed by Basil Dearden, the story is framed as a thought experiment, with screenwriter J.B. Priestly, playing himself, transporting nine people from different walks of life to a nameless, ‘ideal’ city. Some of them choose to stay. The rest, for different reasons, walk away.

Like many British films of the era, this one pushes the war into the background, proposing that the greatest impediment to postwar utopianism will not be ideologies but the prejudices of ordinary people. Its cross-section of society does not look very diverse now (one third of the group are aristocrats), and the clipped accents risk making its heavy-handed message sound even more grating, but the characters mostly avoid coming across as caricatured, partly since it is optimistic enough to suggest not all of them are set in their ways.

The film was based on a play, which would explain why the city is never shown. The most we see is a svelte, modernist waiting area, but this is enough to touch upon the sense of visionary boldness it is striving for, though much of the work is done by Googie Withers as a breezy London bartender who tries to make us see the future as she envisions it, simply using her eyes. The film at least seems aware of its own didacticism, even ending with Priestly saying “thanks for listening” to the audience.

3. Forbidden Planet (1956)

A military space crew, led by Commander Adams (Leslie Nielsen), arrives on the distant world of Altair IV to search for survivors of an earlier landing party. They soon learn the only inhabitants are scientist Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis), and Robby the Robot. Things get complicated when the crew ignores Morbius’ warnings to leave the planet, and his daughter, alone, soon finding themselves attacked by an invisible creature.

Directed by Fred M. Wilcox, Forbidden Planet (1956) is perhaps the sci-fi film that best encapsulates the postwar futurist style, becoming a key influence on Lost in Space (1965-68) and Star Trek (1966-69). Its title and poster art made it out to be a fashionable monster movie, whilst its mention in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), and the jukebox musical sequel Return to the Forbidden Planet, helped turn it into a camp classic, but it remains a gorgeous and cerebral attempt at what would soon be called hard sci-fi.

Although much of the plot was derived from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, it ends up much closer to a Jules Verne story. The optimism of its fabulous designs is tempered by the final, cautionary message against hubris (and nuclear war), using the era’s obsession with psychoanalysis to suggest that the human intellect could never be trusted with technology powerful enough to create or destroy worlds. However, the narrator’s opening line declares that men and women were walking on the moon “By the end of the twenty-first century,” meaning that it is still, so far, ahead of the curve.

4. Road to the Stars (1957)

“First, inevitably, the idea, the fantasy, the fairytale, then scientific calculation. Ultimately, fulfilment.”

Released in 1957, Road to the Stars is a short Soviet docudrama on the emergent technologies of spaceflight, directed by Pavel Klushantsev. Beginning with pastoral village scenes reconstructing the life of pioneering rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (Giorgy Solovyov), it then leaps forward to the future, forecasting manned space orbits, people living on space stations, travelling to the moon, and ultimately living on it.

The film is an interesting artefact, without the clamorous propagandism that typified many films of its kind during the Space Race, featuring cheerful animations illustrating rocket propulsion, futurist rocket designs, and special effects that, while mostly quaint-looking, include impressive approximations of zero gravity. It also makes life in orbit look far more appealing than George Pal’s claustrophobic Conquest of Space (1955), showing a space station filled with books and cats.

5. Thunderbirds Are Go (1966)

The 1960s was an era of untrammelled optimism, and puppet series Thunderbirds (1965-66), perhaps more so even than Star Trek, may be the television premise that captured this perfectly. Practically every episode involved big, extraordinary machines going wrong, requiring even more extraordinary machines to solve the problem, and equilibrium is always restored without the technophilic arrangement of this future world ever being brought into question. This simple scenario was carried over to its first big-screen adaptation, Thunderbirds Are Go (1966).

Fittingly, the plot is a string of episodes: a spaceship bound for Mars takes off, crashes, then takes off again two years later, then someone has a nightmare about Cliff Richard, then six weeks later the ship lands on Mars and finds some martian snakes, and then, after another few weeks, it crashes again (it is nice to wonder if these martians are what the Mysterons of Captain Scarlet actually looked like).

This one is more of a guilty pleasure, particularly as it is perhaps the most ill-considered widescreen film ever made, consisting largely of tight closeups on marionettes’ heads, but Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s realisation in miniature of a post-scarcity future, filled with vast, shining feats of engineering, is difficult to resist, and Barry Gray’s celebratory score lends it a real sense of big screen solemnity. After this, the optimism of Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi quickly soured as the Space Race ended and middle-age approached, culminating in his comparatively pessimistic series Space: 1999 (1975-77).

Here are two names that need no introduction: Joel and Ethan Coen. The spectrum of adulation that has enfolded their work is practically unmatched by any American director in the past forty years. Across that time, they have forged a reputation as genuine trendsetters in the industry, not least for their unapologetic flouting of genre convention. In order to analyze and take a deep dive into their collection of veritable classics, one must forego any hope of pigeonholing them under one label, because the Coens’ virtuoso dexterity always seems to toy with our familiarity with any given genre and turn it into something that feels thoroughly new and refreshing.

Ranking the works of one of the greatest partnerships in cinematic history feels like a fraught exercise on its own. After all, how is one supposed to choose between ‘Raising Arizona’ and ‘No Country for Old Men’? Sure, there are many recurring motifs and overarching themes running through their entire body of work, but for the most part, every entry is sui generis. And yet, nothing is meant to last forever, and the Minnesotan-based brothers seem to be going their separate ways after more than three decades of collaboration. Joel flew solo for the first time in ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’, while Ethan is set to follow suit with a long-gestating road movie of his own. While there’s still a chance we haven’t seen their last hurrah together, now’s as good a time as any to take a look back and celebrate their legendary career.

19. The Ladykillers (2004)

Art is subjective. That being said, you’d be hard-pressed to find many diehard fans who have this anywhere near their favorite Coen films. A remake of the eponymous ’50s British classic, ‘The Ladykillers’ follows a gang of mischievous goons who masquerade as a music band in order to fool their naïve, elderly landlord and use her root cellar to drill their way into a nearby casino’s vault.

Now, at first glance, that might seem just the kind of outlandish premise the Coen brothers feast on — you have inept crooks with thick Southern accents, gullible bystanders and double-crosses galore that would make ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ blush. All the ingredients are there. But precisely where ‘O Brother Where Art Thou?’, ‘Fargo’, ‘The Big Lebowski’ and so many other Coen staples triumph — that is, in counterbalancing the high-stakes drama with a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek humor — ‘The Ladykillers’ emphatically falls apart. It’s not without reason that the film holds the dubious honor of being their worst directorial effort to date, an unmitigated disaster in an otherwise impeccable filmography.

18. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

Let me preface this somewhat controversial ranking by saying that the quality gap separating this film with the previous entry is wider than the one separating it from the following six or seven combined. That’s how downright bad ‘The Ladykillers’ is. Sure, ‘Buster Scruggs’ still feels a bit like a perfunctory effort going by Coen standards, but it’s far from being a total write-off. If there’s a pair of filmmakers with enough skill and dexterity to pull off a six-part anthology film that doesn’t feel uneven, it’s them. And on many fronts, ‘Buster Scruggs’ delivers in spades with a mellow blend of classic Coen tropes and themes we’ve grown to love.

The film presents itself as a deceptively fluffy frontier epic before showing its true colors as a somber meditation on mortality. From a singing gunslinger to a phantasmagorical stagecoach, it has a little something for everyone: if you fancy the cheerfulness on the lines of ‘Hail Caesar!’ and ‘O Brother Where Art Thou!’, ‘Buster Scruggs’ and ‘Near Algodones’ will scratch that itch. But lest you lower your guard, the Coens quickly veer toward the bitter nihilism of ‘No Country for Old Men’ in all three of its closing chapters. And yet, for a film filled with some of their best moments in the past decade, the parts are greater than the sum.

17. Hail, Caesar! (2016)

In this political farce, the Coens put their own spin on the Red Scare by offering us a glimpse of 1950’s Hollywood through the eyes of Josh Brolin, who’s constantly putting out fires as a head honcho at Capitol Studios. From Biblical epics, classic Westerns and Gene Kelly-esque musical numbers, the film brings all the showbiz pizzazz one would expect in a period piece of this nature, but if it manages to resurrect the heydays of the studio system, it does so with palpable disdain.

The central plot concerns a group of disgruntled Communist screenwriters who upon being blackmailed by the studio have kidnapped the star lead of their brand-new biblical epic (George Clooney) to really stick it up to those capitalist pigs. This makes for a hilarious gag where Clooney’s character is lectured in the tenets of Das Kapital while he’s held for ransom in their beach mansion. The irony writes itself, though one could argue the film bites off more than it can chew, and when it comes to taking a jab at Hollywood, ‘Hail, Caesar!’ doesn’t reach the heights of, say, ‘Barton Fink’. It’s a fine watch, but such is the burden of success — anything less than great is bound to sink under the radar.

16. Intolerable Cruelty (2003)

Our next film is something of an odd duck in the Coen’s back-catalog, one that was infamously panned and instantly dismissed as a disposable entry but which is now more than ripe for reevaluation. If ‘The Big Lebowski’ and ‘No Country for Old Men’ are the directors’ anti-noir and anti-western respectively, then ‘Intolerable Cruelty’ is their ultimate anti-romance. In classic Coen fashion, the film presents every generic trapping we’ve grown to expect in saccharine rom coms of the same ilk only to flip them all over their head. It’s only fitting that our two lovebirds are a womanizing divorce attorney (George Clooney) and a high-society gold-digger (Catherine Zeta Jones), both of whom try to one-up each other in a restless rollercoaster of love, deceit and betrayal.

Granted, there are plenty of Coen films with meatier subtext than this, but one can’t shake the feeling that the directors are having a quiet chuckle beneath it all. ‘Intolerable Cruelty’ is like a long con intended for those expecting a pulpy tear-jerker (though the joke might have gone all over their heads). But if there’s anything we’ve learned about the Coens in the past half-century, is that they seldom play it straight.

15. The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)

Joel’s latest Shakespearean adaptation might be the biggest outlier in this list, based not only in its visual and tonal shift compared to his past work but, most importantly, because it marked his first solo outing without the aid of his brother Ethan.

Surprising though it may be, ‘Macbeth’ is certainly a welcomed detour. Faced with the lofty challenge of living up to its towering material — let alone the cinematic legacy attached to it — Joel managed to deliver a timeless and revamped rendition that thoroughly stands on its own. Bolstered by elegant production sets, monochrome cinematography and two standout performances by seasoned veterans Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, his ‘Macbeth’ somehow feels refreshing for a familiar story we’ve all been spoonfed ad nauseam.

Admittedly, there might not be much of a connective tissue between this Scottish medieval drama and the Coen’s irreverent style, however, its scathing portrait of greed, misplaced ambition and moral decay nicely echoes the thematic fabric of past films. By virtue of its nature, ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’ is primed to be judged and remembered largely for its technical prowess. As to where it exactly lands in the pantheon of Shakespeare’s on-screen adaptations, only time will tell. But if it ultimately proves to be Joel’s last rodeo, it’s a lofty encore worthy of his stature.

14. True Grit (2010)

Much of our grievances with ‘Macbeth’ extend to ‘True Grit’ too as two works for hire that toned down the Coens’ eccentricities for the sake of faithfulness. That’s not a knock on either — there’s a reason why this gritty Western earned them a string of Oscar nominations and ranks as their biggest box office hit by a large margin.

The story sees a resourceful teenage girl (Hailee Steinfeld in a real scene-stealer debut role) join forces with a grizzled U.S. Marshall (Jeff Bridges) as they hunt down the elusive criminal who claimed her father’s life. The Minnesotan-based duo invoke a vision of the Wild West that’s full of mud and muck, a lawless and unforgiving society ruled by survival of the fittest.

In a vacuum, ‘True Grit’ should be lauded as an insightful revisionist Western that probes the folly of vengeance and the essence of mythmaking in American history. But on account of bearing the Coens name, it’s inevitably pitted against the rest of their oeuvre. And antithetical to their brand of filmmaking, for the most part, ’True Grit’ seems to play by the rules. There’s no shortage of gore, twists and thrills, yes, but never to the point of upending its own formula, treading closer to conventional schmaltz than any other of their joints. But make no mistake — even a film that keeps the Coens on a short leash makes for better entertainment than 99% of Hollywood’s mass-produced schlock.

13. A Serious Man (2009)

The Coen brothers have often been accused of misanthropy for how they seem to scorn their characters. After all, what are their films if not a series of hapless losers living in perpetual ignorance and misery? The same accusation could be leveled against ‘A Serious Man’, a fan favorite that gifted us with the quintessential Coenesque average Joe. Cribbing from their own childhood and the Book of Job, the story is set in a midwestern suburban Jewish community where physics professor Larry Gopnik watches his entire life crashing down in front of his eyes.

Is our suffering meaningless or a case of divine wrath? Does it matter either way? These are some of the lofty questions that the Coen forces us to ponder through the parade of misfortunes and cruel twists of fate that befall Larry. Though unabashedly a comedy, ‘A Serious Man’ might very well be the most terrifying movie churned out by the Minnesota-based duo, one that stares into the abyss and isn’t afraid of what it might find staring right back.

12. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

The Coens conjured up all the wackiness and zany humor of Frank Capra’s films in this lighthearted homage to screwball comedies of old that tells the rags-to-riches story of a dim-witted clerk (Tim Robbins) who tumbles his way to success and is appointed as chairman of a ’50s manufacturing company as part of an elaborate stock scam.

Upon its release, audiences mistook the film’s cheerful spirit for frivolousness, greeting it with a lukewarm reception and making it the biggest box office bomb in the Coens’ young career. Fortunately, many viewers have come around to it ever since, perhaps realizing that ‘Hudsucker’ is more of a sly satire than it is an earnest re-creation. Your mileage may vary, but there’s plenty to love here, from standout performances across the board (especially Jennifer Jason-Leigh as a silver-tongued reporter) to cutting commentary on corporate America by way of some of the most hilarious gags the Minnesotan-based duo have ever churned out.

11. Blood Simple (1984)

The one that started it all. Though history has repeatedly taught us that even the best directors need some time to find their footing, the Coens made their presence felt right out of the gate with a slick debut that breathed new life into the film noir and laid out the groundwork for the rest of their career. In hindsight, ’Blood Simple’ sketches so many elements that later became signatures: adulterous lovers, a pileup of reckless misconceptions, a big stash of money and schemers undone by their carelessness.

The film centers around a sleazy bar owner who hires a private eye to murder his wife and back-stabbing employee. Trapped in a net of petty betrayal, greed and paranoia, every character behaves as rationally and selfishly as they can, only to dig themselves deeper into trouble. Much like many of their subsequent crime thrillers, miscommunication is deadly — allowing the Coens to illustrate just how bitterly ironic fate can be. As a great indicator of their many strengths and long-running artistic obsessions, ‘Blood Simple’ is an essential watch for any diehard Coen fan worth his salt.

“She is interested in the ways her characters live dangerously for philosophical reasons.”

– Roger Ebert on Bigelow’s films.

California-born Kathryn Bigelow began as an artist, before transitioning in to making short films. In the ‘80s, she directed two cult neo-noir pictures, before establishing herself as cinema’s finest author of action movies. More recently, she’s crafted a series of epic, timely, meaningful films that address issues stretching from racism to terrorism. In 2008, she became the first woman to receive the Academy Award for Best Director, for The Hurt Locker. Since her first short, Bigelow’s work has maintained a fascination with violence. On this, she comments: “[Movie violence], if it allows you to get out certain tendencies and certain elements of aggression in a vicarious, voyeuristic manner, [can] be therapeutic.”

Her films are mainly male-centric, highly-suspenseful, always humane and often both artistic victories and commercial successes. Throughout her forty year career, Bigelow has consistently made gritty, technically triumphant pictures, which usually carry a significant message, as well as succeeding in entertaining audiences. Her best work proves that she’s one of the most formidable talents in contemporary filmmaking, often excelling in all areas of the process.

10. Strange Days (1995)

Co-written by Bigelow’s former husband, Titanic director James Cameron, this tech-noir stars Ralph Fiennes as Lenny Nero, a peddler of pornographic virtual reality films that are transmitted through the brain. When his friend is murdered, he and his best pal Macie (Angela Bassett) attempt to uncover the mystery whilst escaping a pair who try to kill them. It’s set on New Year’s Eve 1999, against the backdrop of race riots and the impending Y2K rapture in Los Angeles.

Strange Days is a film as abysmal as Ralph Fiennes’ attempt at an American accent. It feels like something Philip K. Dick might have penned if he had nothing to say, didn’t know how to write and didn’t care at all about his material. Bewilderingly-plotted, hammy, sloth-paced, thinly-storied and unjustifiably long, it’s boggling that it’s credited to a director who’s made some of the best films in recent history. The film’s desultory ‘statement’ about racial discrimination in L.A. is frankly insulting to the cause of African-American civil rights because it’s so half-hearted, brief and serves primarily as a narrative mechanism.

This is only exacerbated by the film’s flippant rape scenes, which feel exploitative and unnecessary. Strange Days’ only redeeming features are its Blade Runner-esque production design, Ellen Mirojnik’s generation X costumes and the characteristically-compelling and believable acting work from Juliette Lewis. In summation, Strange Days is an unbelievable waste of time that fully deserved being a major box office bomb upon its release. A movie to endure rather than to enjoy, it warrants as much attention as the writers put in to crafting an interesting story: none. It fails to leave any impression on the audience beyond immense boredom and disappointment. Even films that are so bad they’re good have appeal, however this one is unbearable. A catastrophic misstep for Bigelow and one that almost destroyed her career.

9. K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)

In 1961, amidst the intensifying threat of atomic warfare with the U.S.A., the Soviet Union launches its premiere nuclear submarine: the K-19, ignoring the presage of multiple bad omens. Captained by the austere, stubborn Alexei Vostrikov, the sub embarks upon its maiden voyage in to the arctic circle, in order to test a nuclear ballistic missile. Soon, the K-19 is confronted with a grave technical issue that threatens to eradicate the entire crew and ignite a major international conflict.

In spite of the participation of Hollywood legends Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, this film was another box office failure for Bigelow, returning a fraction of its bloated 90 million dollar budget. It remains one of the most expensive independent films ever made. Prominently, there is a puzzling deficit of actual Russian performers in the cast. The western actors do not deliver any convincing Russian accents and their original accents are starkly-discernible beneath their attempts. They do not exhibit an understanding of Russian cultural traits and mannerisms, their characters coming across as embarrassingly western. Unfortunately, this denotes a lack of detail and research to Bigelow’s direction in this instance and an overall misjudgement in casting.

Moreover, at the film’s beginning, the screenplay does not clearly establish the purpose of the plot, nor the motivations of the characters, resulting in confusion for the audience. There’s also a failure to attain sympathy for the characters, in a medium where the primary currency is emotion and empathy. Additionally, in disparity to the intentions of the screenplay, K-19: The Widowmaker is absent of the same suspense propagated in Bigelow’s other work; a constituent imperative for a film of this type’s success. Where it feels there should be one, there’s a lack of a conventional climax, making the audience feel awkwardly dissatisfied and robbed of the two hours they spent tolerating the film.

Aside from the impressive set, the underwater cinematography, the vocational prowess concurrent in all Bigelow’s films, and an enhancing turn by Shakespearian thespian John Shrapnel, this is an unremarkable, formulaic, uneven, maudlin, tedious and at times dull film that pales in comparison to superior submarine movies like Das Boot. It may be passable, but K-19: The Widowmaker is a disappointingly lacklustre entry in to a chiefly stunning filmography.

8. The Weight of Water (2000)

The movie is ambitiously split over two timelines. Its present day story follows two brothers and their partners as they voyage by yacht to the Isles of Shoals off New Hampshire. As her poet husband Thomas (Sean Penn) shamelessly flirts with his brother’s wife, Adaline (Elizabeth Hurley), photojournalist Jean Janes (Catherine McCormack), investigates a set of gruesome events which occurred in the area in 1873. During that period, Norwegians Maren and John Hontvedt immigrate to the islands. When a pair of family murders take place, their lonely helper, Louis Wagner (Ciarán Hinds), is accused, but a far deeper complexity is later revealed. Soon, the two eras begin to uncomfortably mirror one another.

The story set in 1873 (based on true events) is far more interesting than the one set in the present day, which is uneventful, vapid and not as well-written. One gets the impression that the former story should have been the only timeline in the film. It features an intricate web of fascinating relationship dynamics, beautiful period costumes and revelatory twists. The brooding tone is ameliorated by Adrian Biddle’s cinematography: dramatic landscape time lapses and a peppering of German Expressionist-style black and white shots. Likewise, Bigelow’s appurtenant use of pathetic fallacy also helps to convey the character’s underlying emotions and builds to the ecstatic, abstract climax.

Sean Penn’s flawed, bohemian, fully-rounded characterisation of Thomas is imbued with great acuity, solidifying his status as one of cinema’s most erudite actors. Sarah Polley’s role as the piece. That said, Elizabeth Hurley’s vacuous character does not leave the same impact. Due to the writing and direction, Adaline is overly sexualised and appears to function merely as a plot device.

The Weight of Water may be at times muddled and doesn’t accumulate the same momentum as greater mysteries, but is overall an effective, absorbing dramatisation of an important piece of local history. It discusses the power words have over the perception of truth and the ramifications this has upon the legal system and our mortality. It’s also unique for exploring jealousy and sexual rivalry between females, rather than males. It’s not one of Bigelow’s finest features, but is worth watching for its thrilling entertainment value and superb acting.

7. Point Break (1991)

Keanu Reeves is Johnny Utah, a young FBI agent who goes undercover in the California surfing community to unravel the mystery of a gang of prolific bank robbers disguising themselves in masks of United States presidents. Originally intended to be directed by Ridley Scott, this cult action-heist flick was the first significant box office hit for Bigelow, gaining her mainstream attention.

Bestowed with the drawling cool of the surfers that populate it, the film’s legendary high-octane set pieces persist in unavoidably inspiring contemporary action filmmaking. Bigelow judiciously employs rough handheld camerawork to viscerally enhance the chaotic feeling of the bank robberies and chases; a style she would later perfect in The Hurt Locker. The film’s ‘shooting a pistol in the air’ scene has reached an iconic status within pop culture; it was later parodied by Edgar Wright in Hot Fuzz. The sky-diving confrontation sequence remains one of the tensest and most ambitious scenes ever committed to the screen.

It is clear in Point Break that Keanu Reeves still has a lot to learn as an actor. His acting is forced, unskilled and cringingly corny, making the film awkward at points, though it’s rescued by the support of professionals Gary Busey and John C. McGinley. Patrick Swayze’s studied performance as the shamanic, Byronic Bodhi, a master surfer Johnny grows acquainted with, is so well created, each time he’s on screen is like another page from a voluminous novel of this larger-than-life character’s colourful exploits. Swayze expresses a poetically-textured mien within his three-dimensional characterisation. He insists we appreciate Bodhi’s spiritual, mystical view of surfing, which captures one’s imagination. Bodhi is a memorable, larger-than-life, mythological figure with philosophical motivations, denotive of Bigelow’s continued merit in eliciting phenomenal performances from her actors.

Point Break lacks the depth, meaning and mechanical fluidity of Bigelow’s other work. Furthermore, its plot is unoriginal Hollywood fare and its structure is predictable. Johnny’s lover, Tyler, is not a likeable enough character to justify being as important in the plot as she is. But ultimately, all this is of little consequence. Point Break is very entertaining in its success as a classic, riveting popcorn blockbuster, satisfying all of one’s expectations of a great action film. It’s an ideal fun Friday night movie to watch with friends and pizza, and it seems, that’s precisely what Bigelow intended it to be.

6. The Loveless (1981)

“A bridge between the art world and mainstream movie-making.”

– Kathryn Bigelow.

Set in 1959, Bigelow’s directorial debut, (co-written and directed with Monty Montgomery), a stylish bikespolitation B movie, stars Willem Dafoe in his very first leading role and only his second film. He plays leather-clad Vance – the hip, menacing leader of an outlaw biker gang. They roll in to a sleepy town, where Vance dates a local girl. The gang soon face an altercation with the puritanical redneck inhabitants, led by the girl’s father. The film’s pace is as slow and sultry as its rural midsummer Dixieland setting. Most of it concerns the bikers hanging out at a petrol station, fixing one of their motorcycles and looking cool. Along with the cinema of Jim Jarmusch, this was one of the titles that bore the American independent film movement in the ‘80s, which later blossomed in the ‘90s.

What makes this film intriguing is its indulgence in the poetry, style and atmosphere of a time, a place and an aesthetic, with little to no concession to attempting a traditional narrative. Doyle Smith’s bubblegum pop art cinematography is a visual sweet shop: containing close-ups of jukeboxes, neon signs, Coke machines and greaser culture, building a cinematic collage of Americana, in evident homage to Kenneth Anger, (one of Bigelow’s formative influences). One great moment in the film depicts a biker lighting a match by firing a revolver at its tip. The film contains a multitude of moments imbued with a wild rockabilly spirit of rebellion and boiling youth revolution, engendered by its soundtrack, featuring Brenda Lee and The Diamonds. The parodic beat-era dialogue, like the mise-en-scène, is farcically tongue-in-cheek, contributing to Bigelow’s postmodern pastiche of a heightened, idealised ‘50s America of lonely diner waitresses dreaming of tinseltown.

Thematically, The Loveless magnifies the cultural conflict between young and old in the mid-20th century, whilst depicting lawless Nihilism. Moreover, the theme of guilt plays an unexpected yet crucial role. As with all his subsequent performances, Willem Dafoe is obviously a startlingly-talented actor in full bloom, apparent even at the birth of his career. His sunglasses-wearing entry in to the film as he roars down the asphalt on his motorcycle is iconic. His performance as Vance is certainly the figurehead of the film. He hasn’t collaborated with Bigelow since, but this was the film that launched Dafoe’s remarkable acting career.

However, The Loveless almost entirely ignores plot, action or characterisation beyond stock characters, all of whom are unlikable. Much of the story is unexciting, uneventful and forgettable. It feels as though it only exists as a vessel of glossy visuals, blending B movie tropes and 50s nostalgia with an art house sensibility. Regardless, it seems that this is exactly the type of movie Bigelow desired to make. Bigelow comes from a background in conceptual art, and here, she demonstrates an encouraging creative freedom of expression, ostensibly unadulterated by outside pressures. There is a tremendous structural elegance to the stark minimalism of this narrative, a beauty to its slowness and down-played manner. This film will be valuable for aspiring writers and filmmakers to watch as it demonstrates that one can create any type of film one desires, however one wants. Bigelow proves that a film doesn’t have to be strictly a classical narrative dictated by Hollywood formulae. It can function more like a poem, for instance, and focus on atmosphere and style rather than plot; unhindered, and highly-idiosyncratic to the hand of the artist.

Though The Loveless may not be interested in story and doesn’t fulfil its potential, ultimately, it is a liberating film, as Bigelow shows us what else is possible within the parameters of cinema, inspiring other unusual and original approaches. Whilst the writing is underdeveloped, this is an enjoyable film for its style and mood alone, that will satisfy fans of Willem Dafoe and biker movies. Already, Bigelow’s direction and technical execution in all departments is flawless. She is swiftly developing dominion over her tools and sculpting the piece in to her own singular, sophisticated vision. The Loveless foretokens the enormous potential for Bigelow’s skill as a filmmaker as she embarks upon her career.

Surrealism, as defined by the movement’s founder André Breton, seeks to express the real functioning of consciousness, of thought. Such expressions are dreamlike and are absent of logic, stylization, and linearity. Normal objects and activities become displayed in abnormal or distorted ways that sever the traditional associations we have to them. Common themes explored in surrealist works include salvation and liberation of the mind, love and art, and deriding social and political institutions.

The films in this list utilize surrealism to unsettle the viewer and merge reality and dreams, rendering any logic useless. Surrealism is also shown to be an effective way to approach themes of trauma, isolation, and ailments to memory or mental functioning. When logic is suspended, a great opportunity arises to confront some very haunting things without the bounds that real life places on us, whether that be for the good or the bad. In all these films, the protagonist is essentially haunted by something they can’t escape: another person, a group of people, the sins of their past, their otherness, or maybe something completely indescribable. The only thing that is certain is that these images will stick around with you for a long time.

1. The Wolf House (2018)

The Wolf House, an animated horror concoction and debut feature of collaborators Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, tells the story of a little girl named María who runs away from a strict religious commune that is based on real-life Colonia Dignidad in Chile. The story is framed as a cautionary tale, told by the leaders of the commune to discourage other children from leaving. When María finds a home in the woods, she finds two pigs inside. While the house constantly transforms, the pigs transform into humans and eventually turn on her. The “wolf”, which is more a part of the house than a creature lurking outside of it, permeates the walls with his cunning voice. Objects, walls, even María and the pigs, are constantly being destroyed and rebuilt with different colors, materials, and shapes, making the entire film very dream-like and sort of a visual representation of the trauma María is experiencing.

Impressively, the stop-motion was captured in exhibits in multiple museums around the world, and the sets were life-sized. The camera moves in every single shot, and the film never cuts to black, the effect is a single continuous shot. The viewer is effectively stuck inside the house with María, and with all the horrors it contains.

2. Under the Skin (2013)

Under the Skin, directed by Johnathan Glazer, stands in stark contrast to The Wolf House stylistically but presents a similarly alienating tale. The minimalist sci-fi thriller stars Scarlett Johansson as she drives a suspicious van around, picking up male hitchhikers. Once she seduces them, she brings them back to a run-down building and into a pitch-black room, where they sink into a black indefinite space and their life force (or something along those lines) is harvested – there is no explanation given for this in the film. The woman does her job apathetically, but after certain interactions, begins to question her role and identity. While it’s already suggested that she is an inhuman creature that’s posing as a woman, it becomes increasingly clear when she abandons her usual tasks and begins to look at herself differently and attempt to do things that she sees those around her doing.

Scarlett Johansson is unrecognizable as the alien woman, and gives a striking and cold performance. The film also has an impressive soundtrack composed by Mica Levi, which enhances the feeling of “otherness” surrounding the images on screen. What’s surreal about Under the Skin is the alien view of things that are normal to us as humans living in developed societies, which uncovers a darkness we don’t typically see. The actions that are unusual to us are presented as normal, so they are not elaborated on, which makes for quite an unsettling experience.

3. Inland Empire (2006)

David Lynch’s latest feature film Inland Empire is a terrifying and distorted thriller starring Laura Dern in her most powerful and shocking role. While she primarily plays an actress she also takes on different personas and characters that experience varying levels of confusion, horror, sadness, and pain. It starts when a new neighbor visits the actress and tells her about what she believes will happen in the new role the actress is waiting to hear back about, along with an “old tale”. Once she gets the role, the neighbor’s predictions begin to fall into place, and the actress’ world begins to fracture into different realities/dreams. Doors lead to unexpected places, people appear in different roles, humanoid rabbits mimic a television sitcom… the film is about as close to an actual nightmare as any filmmaker could get.

What really drives the surrealism and horror home is the sound design and the use of a hand-held digital video camera, which allowed Lynch to shoot significantly more footage and to create a more intimate and fast-moving environment to shoot in. The DV camera also provides a more “found footage” and gritty look, and the constant movement contributes to unsettling the viewer. With its three hour runtime, this is a film designed to make you go mad.

4. Demonlover (2002)

In Olivier Assayas’ 2002 cyber-thriller Demonlover, the body and mind are blended with the internet. Two internet companies are fighting to win a distribution deal for a Japanese hentai studio, which was just acquired by the Volf Corporation. It’s soon discovered that the Volf executive assigned to negotiate the deal, Diane de Monx, is working undercover for one of the internet companies, while her business partner and assistant are also working undercover but for the competition. Information is uncovered about Diane’s competition: the company secretly runs an interactive extreme kink site called Hellfire that has a live feed of people submitting to user requests. The competition for the rights to the studio becomes a deadly one; Diane loses control and becomes trapped in Hellfire’s grip.

In her desperate fight for power, Diane loses her sense of what’s real. She wakes up in unexpected places making her question her memory, and she experiences flashbacks of violence that happened long ago. Not only does this disorient Diane, but the viewer is also thrown off as to if what they’re seeing is reliable or some sort of dream. The whole film also follows a theme of desensitization to extreme sex and violence which is mainly influenced by the commodification of fetishes – the only thing that breaks this indifference towards the content is actually becoming a part of it.

5. Perfect Blue (1997)

Perfect Blue, another film that is heavily influenced by the rise of the internet, follows pop icon Mima as she retires from her J-pop group and pursues a career as an actress – a decision that will impact how she perceives her own identity. The decision also upsets a dedicated fan of Mima’s, who stalks her and eventually commits violence against her. The most frightening thing Mima finds after her transition into an actress is an online blog called “Mima’s Room”, where someone posing as Mima writes extremely detailed and personal diary entries. Uncertainty builds when scenes Mima is filming begin to blend with real life, and she has difficulty distinguishing between memories and hallucinations. She sees visions of her past self, which fans want to believe is the real and ideal Mima, since she is more innocent-seeming, cheerful, and submissive to their demands. She starts to witness the murders of people around her, and evidence suggests that Mima might be responsible.

What makes Perfect Blue the most haunting is that the audience is brought to Mima’s level and understanding, so that they aren’t aware of what is real any more than Mima is. This voyeuristic and unreliable perspective invokes paranoia and doubt makes the thrills all the more thrilling.

Paul Verhoeven is undoubtedly one of the most transgressive artists ever to have been a major Hollywood player; a genius satirist and a master craftsman of spectacle; a pervert with never-ending interest in sexual mores and a populist who makes grand action extravaganzas designed to be enjoyed by all; a funny man who deals with the most serious of social subjects.

This contradiction in his style are exactly what makes him such an essential filmmaker, a perpetually controversial and misunderstood director that’s always ahead of his time – is there anyone else whose work has so often been derided upon release only to be reappraised years later when the world finally catches up?

16. Business is Business (1971)

The level of interest one might have in “Business is Business,” Verhoeven’s feature debut, depends entirely on perspective. Taken on its own, it’s admittedly far from a great movie, but if seen as an hors d’oeuvres to this director’s style, it’s fascinating.

Some of the major themes Verhoeven would spend the rest of his career obsessing over are already present here, mainly sexual desire and its intersection with capitalist exploitation; all filtered through his sardonic sense of humour, which was also noticeable from the get go. In fact, “Business is Business” is one of the few outright, straight comedies he ever made, and while it is a frequently funny movie, it never comes close to reaching the heights of the acidic satire that defines his best efforts.

It’s precisely in that way that the movie is both frustrating and exciting; the former because it doesn’t manage to coalesce to become more than the sum of its good individual parts, the latter because, despite that, it does offer glimpses of the birth of a major cinematic voice.

15. Hollow Man (2000)

Verhoeven’s last American film before his creatively invigorating return to Europe, “Hollow Man” is easily the worst of his Hollywood phase; which is not to say that it’s a bad movie by any stretch – it just pales in comparison to the brilliance of his other features of the era.

It’s easy to point out what is wrong here, why this movie in particular is so inferior to Verhoeven’s previous output, since the director himself has explained it. “I felt like I was doing the bidding of the studio. I couldn’t even put a personal touch to it. I fell into that trap,” he stated in a 2016 interview with Vulture. The filmmaker went on to say: “I felt that I did Hollow Man without making it personal. The studio wanted it this way. The freedom was gone.”

The experience was so clearly personally painful for Verhoeven that it colors his view of the final movie, which he hates and claims it’s the only one of his own pictures that he cannot defend. Thankfully, “Hollow Man” is not as bad as he seems to think, precisely because of how Verhoeven manages to push the classic “invisible man” premise into it’s filthiest, most violent possibilities; in it’s best moments the film becomes a nasty, vicious piece that the filmmaker is made for.

Unfortunately, those moments are mostly buried amid bland Hollywood cliches and tropes, so Verhoeven’s distaste is quite understandable.

14. Spetters (1980)

It’d be essentially impossible to be a squeamish, prude or overly moralistic person and be a fan of Paul Verhoeven; the joy and pleasure of his work lies precisely in the filthy extremes he’s willing to indulge; his shameless passion for the taboo and the unrelenting cynicism of his vision of humanity.

Verhoeven’s best movies combine their fun, pulpy sleaziness with a layered sense of self-awareness; he’s a provocateur, sure, but his finest work rises above mere juvenile titillation to provide thoughtful, complex commentary.

Which is why “Spetters” feels so frustrating; it’s the one film in which Verhoeven’s provocations feel completely empty, meant solely to shock, devoid of a larger satirical outlook. Transgression for it’s own sake has value, of course, but some sequences here (as a gay man raping a homophobic one, who apparently “likes” it) go beyond the usual “bad taste” of his work (that is ironic and self-reflexive), they’re genuinely ugly, juvenile stuff.

13. Katie Tippel (1975)

Verhoeven’s early Dutch phase is essential for understanding the tone, style and intentions of his later, more famous American films. Case in point: “Katie Tippel,” which deals in a more respectable, straightforward (albeit still very Verhoevian) way with many of the same themes the director would return to in the misunderstood “Showgirls.”

The way misogyny and class warfare intersects; the selling of a woman’s body being just another transaction in the capitalist world; the commodification of desire – it’s all here, as is the crude violence and sexual content. And yet, this film lacks something essential – ultimately, it’s just too polite, too clean in its style to fully drive home the point Verhoeven is trying to make.

The garish nature of his later American films is brilliant because it transforms the theme into form – the very aesthetic of the movies reflect the twisted worlds and warped morals portrayed in the stories. “Katie Tippel,” by contrast, while well-made and entertaining enough, lacks the full power of that satirical bite.

12. Turkish Delight (1973)

Released just two years after his underwhelming debut, “Turkish Delight,” Verhoeven’s second ever feature, marks a huge leap for the director in terms of personality, voice and strength of style – two movies in and he already starts to feel like an auteur.

But even in Verhoeven’s own oeuvre this film is unique, not necessarily in it’s kinkiness and blunt sexual content (a given in any Verhoeven film); but how it uses it’s gross explicitness (including extended sequences involving maggots, worms and rape) in order to create a genuinely sweet love story – a very eschatological one, for sure, but just as emotionally engaging as the finest screen romances.

“Turkish Delight” also marks Verhoeven’s first foray into camp (though not as fully fledged as his later movies) and already demonstrates his proclivity for wild tonal balancing – the film essentially plays like a romantic comedy until it’s harrowing final part. It doesn’t fully work yet as a whole, but it’s an excellent early indicator of a major voice.

11. Flesh + Blood (1985)

Verhoeven’s first English-language movie is as perfect a prelude to his Hollywood period as one could hope for; it basically encapsulates every single one of his thematic obsessions: stylistic predilections and auteurist traits in one supremely savage package.

It’s ironic, however, that “Flesh + Blood” is the film that ushered Verhoeven’s most successful era, considering it had a notoriously troubled production and was, upon release, a massive commercial disaster. That failure is both unfair and completely understandable; unfair because it’s a great movie that deserved recognition in it’s own time, but understandable because the picture’s upending of medieval adventure tropes is far too bleak and cynical to ever be broadly appealing.

“Flesh + Blood” is a film in which lovers plea eternal devotion beneath rotting corpses; innocent maidens get brutally raped; noble warriors give nuns lasting brain damage; mercenaries are considered prophets by priests and everyone eventually succumbs in the most gruesome, graphic ways to the plague. It is, in summary, an acidic portrayal of the Dark Ages that completely rebuts traditional morality and easy dichotomies of good and evil – in Verhoeven’s world the only imperative is survival and everyone is willing to do anything to stay alive and prosperous. Cynical but honest; and never anything less than engrossing drama.

10. Soldier Of Orange (1977)

In many ways Verhoeven’s most respectable, prestige film (so much so that it attracted the attention of Spielberg and George Lucas, even prompting the latter to offer him “Return Of The Jedi”), “Soldier of Orange” is a war epic that bridges the gap between the genre’s typical beats and uniquely Verhoevian quirks.

On one hand, the film delivers on the expected scope and pathos of a war picture, telling a sprawling story full of characters, spanning many years, and packing an emotional punch in its tragic developments. What makes the “Soldier Of Orange” distinct and memorable, however, are the ways in which Verhoeven sneaks his sensibilities in what is otherwise a very good but fairly standard film, the way he stages certain sequences for maximum violence and even humour (as the scene in which a man is killed while in the toilet).

And more than that, the movie is also one of the earliest testaments to Verhoeven’s technical mastery; then the most expensive Dutch film ever made, “Soldier Of Orange” displays every cent of that budget in its exquisite cinematography and sense of grandeur.

9. The 4th Man (1983)

At first sight, “The 4th Man,” Verhoeven’s last Dutch movie before venturing into English-language work, looks like just another one of the director’s quintessential sleazy erotic thrillers – and while it does work marvelously as that, the film is also a unique entry in his filmography.

While Verhoeven’s style is extremely heightened (both formally and dramatically), his work almost never reaches into outright surreal territory – even his most absurd premises and moments are grounded in some kind of internal logic and in the tangible reality of the worlds of the stories.

“The 4th Man,” by contrast, is a complete fever (wet) dream; disregarding any sense of realism for a dream logic that perfectly tracks the protagonist’s descent into madness.

That sense of surrealism also works magnificently in tandem with Verhoeven’s treatment of noir atmosphere – here, every trope and archetype is pushed to its extreme, making what once was subtext explicit (in more ways than one). “The 4th Man” is a Hitchcockian thriller with any inhibitions taken off – a blast, from beginning to end.

Robert Pattinson, like his Twilight co-star Kristen Stewart, has unfortunately developed a negative reputation based solely on one series of movies. No matter how many critically acclaimed movies he stars in, he will always be associated with a mediocre series of young adult vampire flicks. Thankfully, this is mostly just the opinion of the general public. More observant moviegoers have witnessed him evolve as an actor.

Even so, there are plenty of people who understand Pattinson’s appeal without actually knowing what makes him such a hot commodity. That’s why this list was written. Below, you’ll find Pattinson’s ten best movies.

It should be noted that this list ranks the quality of the films rather than the performances. In other words, a movie is eligible if Pattinson at least appears in a support role. While his performance will be noted, it is not the deciding factor for the placement of each film.

10. The Devil All the Time (2020)

The Devil All the Time is so relentlessly bleak that it almost feels wrong to recommend it. It’s like asking someone to be miserable for two-and-a-half hours. There’s no humor, no likable characters; it’s just melancholic drama from beginning to end. Because of this, our recommendation comes with a giant asterisk. Basically, you’ll find something worthwhile only if you’re able to embrace the film’s downcast tone.

The film is a sprawling crime drama about a young man named Arvin Russell. We watch as Russell grows from a small child to a young adult. We see him grow and change as one life-altering event piles onto another. It’s harrowing, nightmare-inducing stuff, but it’s also positively captivating.

Generally speaking, the most extraordinary moments come as a result of the cast. Tom Holland, Sebastian Stan, Riley Keough, and of course, Robert Pattinson make the grimmest scenes worth watching. It’s not like the cast is the only redeeming quality, but when it comes down to it, these actors absolutely deserve recognition. They play off each other in daring, often explosive, ways, resulting in a flawed movie that’s nevertheless worth watching.

9. Tenet (2020)

Tenet is one of the weaker films in Christopher Nolan’s ambitious filmography. It’s filled with convoluted ideas, and although some of them work, a lot of them sour an otherwise well-executed heist thriller. If this sounds overly negative, that’s just because of the quality of Nolan’s work. A weak Nolan movie is still a solid piece of entertainment, and Tenet proves that.

“Solid piece of entertainment” is the best way to describe Tenet. It’s far more focused on blockbuster thrills than heady ideas. It has things that make it more intellectually stimulating, but it’s at its best when it’s a big loud action flick. There are thrilling, often awe-inspiring, scenes scattered throughout Nolan’s latest blockbuster. For the most part, these make the overstuffed narrative worth watching.

The cast also does some of the heavy lifting. Pattinson, Debicki, and Washington understand the high stakes and roll with it. At the end of the day, they understand the importance of creating something entertaining. Tenet is consistently entertaining, even if the ideas don’t always click.

8. The Rover (2014)

David Michôd’s dystopian neo-western focuses on a soft-spoken loner who attempts to get revenge on the lawless criminals who stole his car. Throughout the 104-minute runtime, viewers are presented with a methodically paced revenge story that only stumbles when it loses focus. When this happens, viewers are liable to see the cracks in the foundation. These missteps are, thankfully, easy to forgive when you focus on the big picture.

The Rover is a grim, often brutal slice of science fiction heaven that’s bolstered by a stellar pair of lead performers. The slow pacing, which is par for the course with these types of sci-fi movies, feels like an obstacle to overcome. However, the various pieces come together in a satisfying way, resulting in a movie well worth your time.

7. Maps to the Stars (2014)

Cronenberg’s second collaboration with Robert Pattinson is just as unwieldy as his first. It’s crammed with obtuse plot points and conflicting tones, but in spite of this, it manages to put a hypnotic spell on viewers.

Maps to the Stars is a satirical look at the chaos that is Hollywood. It revolves around a family of insufferable upper-class know-it-alls who become entangled in some type of psychological warfare. Once the pace picks up, the numerous characters must make gargantuan decisions in order to come out on top, and in some cases, come out alive.

While the film suffers from several frustrating issues, it nevertheless succeeds because most of the ideas work. To be fair, there are a few too many ideas, but the fact of the matter is that there’s more good than bad. Bruce Wagner’s script is as sharp as ever, and Cronenberg has fun with the material. Even when the film falters, it manages to regain its footing rather quickly.

Since this is a list about Robert Pattinson films, it should be stated that Pattinson only plays a supporting role. While he doesn’t stick around for the entirety of the runtime, his appearance is nevertheless deserving of praise. There’s a whole lot of subtly going on with Pattinson’s character because he’s not as outwardly villainous as some of the other characters. This adds some nuance to a movie that often chooses to be very upfront with its intentions.

Maps to the Stars lacks the approachability of some of the other films on the list. It’s a little too chaotic to watch on a lazy Sunday afternoon. That being said, there’s plenty of value here. You might just need a little patience.

6. The Childhood of a Leader (2015)

Brady Corbet, star of Funny Games and Simon Killer, brought out the big guns with his directorial debut. The Childhood of a Leader is a haunting historical drama that aims for the stars and often succeeds. The film, which chronicles the life of a post-WWI facist leader, intricately dives into characters’ psyches, giving us a motion picture with unparalleled depth.

Corbet’s film does an excellent job of exploring the brainwashing techniques that pushed people into facism. Obviously society has advanced since the early twentieth century, but there are universal themes present throughout The Childhood of a Leader. The modern-day relevance pairs well with a multifaceted script, giving us a movie that stands tall amongst Pattison’s greatest hits.

Nowadays, everyone seems to bemoan the current state of cinema, where even the best directors struggle to secure financing and the theatrical landscape is increasingly dominated by focus-tested films based on pre-existing IPs. Enter Robert Eggers, a 38-year-old maverick who’s taken the world by storm in the past decade by spearheading a unique brand of filmmaking that seems deliberately designed to sabotage every notion we had about conventional storytelling.

His one-two punch of New England tales, the 2015’s ‘The Witch’ and his 2019 follow-up ‘The Lighthouse’, instantly solidified him as a force to be reckoned with and earned him a reputation for his sharp attention to detail and historical accuracy. The fact that a swing-for-the-fences director with a penchant for mythological esoterica, religious fervor and macabre rituals has gone mainstream is telling proof that the demise of auteur cinema has been greatly exaggerated. ‘The Northman’, Eggers’ brand-new, $90-million-dollar Viking epic, should dispel any lingering doubts in that regard as his most ambitious production to date not to mention one of the tentpole releases of the year.

While the director is once again on everyone’s lips and we patiently bide our time until he knocks our socks off with his next instant classic, we have assembled ten great films that should strike a chord with any Robert Eggers’ hardcore enthusiast. From muddy Medieval epics, unsettling folk tales, bone-chilling witchcraft staples and immersive psychological thrillers — take the following list as a helpful aid that should come in handy once you’ve binged all three of his spell-binding period pieces.

1. Nosferatu (1922)

Any Eggers’ fan worth their salt owes it to themselves to watch not only the director’s favorite movie of all time but the one that triggered his fascination with the occult and the supernatural, two themes burrowed deep into his work.

For what is worth, you could take any given horror film in the past century and be able to trace it all the way back to F.W. Murnau’s iconic vampirical adaptation. Having reached the 100-year milestone this year, ‘Nosferatu’ not only pushed the boundaries of the genre to new heights, but according to Eggers, invented cinema as we know it. The director first discovered the German silent film after stumbling upon an image of lead actor Max Schreck in a book about vampires in elementary school, which prompted him to search far and wide for a VHS copy.

To say it was love at first sight would be selling it short. When he was 17, Eggers adapted it into a silent, Gothic theater play in high school, an experience that allegedly changed his life and laid out the groundwork to pursue his filmmaking aspirations. And ever since his breakout film back in 2015, the director has been doing his best to make his long-gestating remake a reality. And though the sight of his potential rendition makes our mouths water, it has been an uphill battle to get it off the ground. “I’ve been trying so hard,” Eggers concedes. “And I just wonder if Murnau’s ghost is telling me to stop barking that tree. It feels like that.” Here’s hoping the project eventually sees the light of day.

2. Andrei Rublev (1966)

Eggers recently explained that growing up in a secular society where “the sacred and the sublime aren’t anywhere to be found” may perhaps be the reason behind his penchant for bygone eras where myth, folklore and religion used to be the bedrocks of civilization. The same would apply to Andrei Tarkovsky, a frequent target of censorship crusades by the atheist Soviet regime who steeped in Christianity and spirituality to tell the story of the most venerated icon painter in Russian history.

Much like Eggers’ period pieces, ‘Andrei Rublev’ feels astoundingly transportive; like a genuine snapshot of the Middle Ages that somehow slithered into our present time. Set against a period of civil unrest, the story drifts through foreign invasions and otherworldly Pagan rituals as seen through the artist’s eyes, who finds his faith tested by his plight as he struggles to find solace in his work.

This should be required viewing not only for Eggers’ enthusiasts but any film buff period. But if a 205-minute-long black-and-white historical drama still seems a bit intimidating, take it from the man himself: “This movie is so beautiful, stunning and inspiring. The last act is probably just the best thing in cinema history. It’s completely mind-blowing, it really knocks you out.” The director had it in mind recently, citing the film’s violent realism as a key reference point for his new Viking epic.

3. Day of Wrath (1943)

Eggers’ reputation as film’s chief excavator of the past began with his folkloric debut, ‘The Witch’, a movie billed at the time as one of the most historically accurate period pieces in recent memory. During his strenuous research, the director drew from thousands of Jacobean-era witchcraft accounts to deliver a scathing portrait of religious fervor through the story of a grief-stricken family that turns on each other.

On the subject of puritan conviction, the folly of superstition and the dangers of mob mentality, Danish director Carl Dreyer still remains the highest authority. While ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc’ is widely celebrated as his magnum opus, it’s his less-known ‘Days of Wrath’ that exists on a similar wavelength to Eggers’ New England tale. Loosely based on a real 16th-century case, witchcraft is once again the crux of the narrative, casting a long shadow over the life of a young woman who’s accused of catalyzing his elder husband’s death. Much like Eggers, Dreyer conjures a hauntingly unbridled vision of the past, refusing to sugarcoat the dark realities of a superstitious society that scapegoated countless innocent women with jarring indifference.

4. The Wailing (2016)

“Nothing happens”, “it’s too slow”, “it isn’t scary” — these are some of the contrived observations that greeted ‘The Witch’ upon release. Granted, the passage of time has rendered most of these moot while solidifying the film as a trendsetter not least for its unapologetic flouting of genre convention. Cut from the same cloth we find this two-and-a-half-hour folk horror courtesy of Na Hong-jin, a South-Korean director who doesn’t get mentioned in the same breath as Bong Joon-ho or Park Chan-wook but is no less accomplished himself.

‘The Wailing’ presents a deceptively simple set-up: one lousy cop is called to duty to try to solve a double murder that has taken hold of a small, secluded rural village. Much like ‘The Witch’, the film paces itself leisurely, weaving through a disorientating set of trails, false leads and smokescreens en route to a bone-chilling — and eerily reminiscent — climax that will haunt you long after credits have rolled. If you get a kick out of an old-school good-versus-evil folk tale that rewards patience, picking up ‘The Wailing’ is a complete no-brainer.

5. Hereditary (2018)

Chances are if you’re a big fan of Robert Eggers, Ari Aster will be right up your street if you haven’t binged his brace of films already. Not without reason have these two A24-backed directors been simultaneously anointed as the two new poster boys for independent cinema. Besides sharing a similar brand of horror and career trajectory (both set to release their third feature-length film this year), there’s a noticeable overlap between their thematic fabrics. Self-fulfilling prophecies, inherited trauma, sacred familial bonds… There’s a refreshing novelty in the way Aster and Eggers navigate these classic tropes while dodging all the worn-out clichés we’ve come to dread in mainstream horror.

Part intimate psychodrama, part paranormal thriller, ‘Hereditary’ covers similar ground to ‘The Witch’ and ‘The Northman’ by thrusting us in the middle of a dysfunctional household that implodes from within after being struck by an unforeseen tragedy. In the same vein as the former, an evil force lurks in the shadows and threatens to tear them apart piece by piece. It goes without saying that this is not a film for the faint of heart and conceals plenty of disturbing moments that can lodge in one’s memory banks. But if you do have the stomach for it, ‘Hereditary’ will give you the best bang for your buck.