Chapter Two
The Canon
Sorted by how hard they'll bend your brain. Start with Tier 1. Work your way down. Don't skip ahead — respect the ladder.
The Big Lebowski
1998 · Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
A pacifist bowler gets mistaken for a millionaire. A rug gets peed on. Everything unravels. The ur-text of cult comedy.
Gateway Scene
The tumbleweed rolls through LA while Sam Elliott narrates. Two minutes of pure cinematic atmosphere.
National Lampoon's Animal House
1978 · John Landis
The blueprint for every college comedy that followed, and still funnier than all of them. Belushi's eyebrows do more acting than most leading men manage in a career.
Gateway Scene
The toga party sequence. Otis Day and the Knights. "Shout."
The Blues Brothers
1980 · John Landis
A musical, a car-chase movie, a love letter to Chicago, and a gospel revival all at once. "We're on a mission from God" is the whole movie's thesis and its alibi.
Gateway Scene
Aretha Franklin performing "Think" in the diner.
Pulp Fiction
1994 · Quentin Tarantino
The movie that made indie mainstream and made everybody's cousin want to write a screenplay. Still works. Still quotable.
Gateway Scene
The Jack Rabbit Slim's twist contest.
Office Space
1999 · Mike Judge
The documentary about your job, released before you had one. Every cubicle worker's secret religious text.
Gateway Scene
The hypnotist scene, followed by Peter showing up to work whenever he feels like it.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
1975 · Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones
The comedy that every subsequent comedy has been quoting, often without knowing it. If someone says "tis but a scratch" and the room doesn't laugh, those are not your people.
Gateway Scene
The Black Knight scene. "Tis but a scratch."
The Goonies
1985 · Richard Donner
A pack of kids from the Goon Docks find a pirate treasure map and save their neighborhood. The template for every kid-adventure movie since.
Ghostbusters
1984 · Ivan Reitman
Three disgraced parapsychologists start a business capturing ghosts in Manhattan. It's a comedy. It's a horror film. It's the eighties in concentrate.
Good Will Hunting
1998 · Gus Van Sant
A Southie janitor at MIT solves math problems nobody else can and sees a therapist nobody else can reach. The Boston canon entry.
The Devil Wears Prada
2006 · David Frankel
A journalism grad takes a job as assistant to the world's worst fashion editor. Meryl Streep wins. The movie wins.
Clueless
1995 · Amy Heckerling
A Beverly Hills teenager updates Jane Austen's Emma into Valley-girl 1995 and invents a whole vocabulary. As if.
Forrest Gump
1994 · Robert Zemeckis
A slow-witted Alabaman accidentally attends every major event of the twentieth century. Life is like a box of chocolates.
Beetlejuice
1988 · Tim Burton
A recently deceased couple tries to scare the new owners out of their house. They hire a "bio-exorcist" who is very bad at his job. Say his name three times.
The Princess Bride
1987 · Rob Reiner
A pirate, a princess, a giant, a Spaniard, and a grandfather reading to his sick grandson. Everything at once and everyone loves it.
Back to the Future
1985 · Robert Zemeckis
A teenager accidentally travels to 1955 in his mom's time-machine DeLorean and has to get his parents together before he erases himself. The script is perfect.
Groundhog Day
1993 · Harold Ramis
A cynical weatherman relives February 2nd over and over until he becomes a decent human being. The platonic rewatch film, and the rewatch is the plot.
Dazed and Confused
1993 · Richard Linklater
The last day of school in 1976 Texas. Everyone is looking for the party, or scared of it. Nothing happens. Everything happens.
Monty Python's Life of Brian
1979 · Terry Jones
The Pythons make a film about a man mistaken for the messiah. He's not. But nobody's listening. Blasphemy as comedy peak.
Spaceballs
1987 · Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks spoofs Star Wars with Rick Moranis in a giant helmet. May the Schwartz be with you. They went to plaid.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
1982 · Amy Heckerling
A year at a Southern California high school. Spicoli orders pizza in class. Phoebe Cates gets out of the pool. Every teen movie since has been a footnote.
Grease
1978 · Randal Kleiser
A greaser and a good girl from different worlds meet at summer camp and end the school year flying a car into the sky. Sing along. That's the cult.
The NeverEnding Story
1984 · Wolfgang Petersen
A bullied kid finds a book about a kid on a quest, and the book starts talking to him. Atreyu. Falkor. The Swamps of Sadness. The horse.
A Few Good Men
1992 · Rob Reiner
Tom Cruise vs Jack Nicholson in a Guantanamo court-martial. Sorkin's first big screen, directed by Reiner. You know the line. Everyone knows the line.
The Hunt for Red October
1990 · John McTiernan
Sean Connery as a Soviet sub captain trying to defect with the world's quietest submarine. Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan, before Harrison Ford was Jack Ryan, before Affleck was Jack Ryan, before Krasinski was Jack Ryan.
Top Gun
1986 · Tony Scott
Cruise. Aviators. Goose. Volleyball. The movie that single-handedly raised Navy fighter pilot recruitment 500%.
Top Gun: Maverick
2022 · Joseph Kosinski
Thirty-six years later. The same character. Real planes. Real Cruise stunts. The movie that briefly saved theatrical exhibition.
The Rock
1996 · Michael Bay
Connery, Cage, and Ed Harris on Alcatraz. Rogue Marines, VX gas, and a chase scene through San Francisco that stops the city for two minutes. Bay's only good movie. Don't argue.
First Blood
1982 · Ted Kotcheff
A Vietnam vet goes to a small town to find his only surviving war buddy. The sheriff hassles him. He responds the way he was trained to respond. The town goes up.
Stripes
1981 · Ivan Reitman
Bill Murray and Harold Ramis enlist in the Army out of pure underemployed boredom. The drill sergeant has a name. Their platoon is incompetent on purpose.
Tropic Thunder
2008 · Ben Stiller
Stiller, Downey Jr., and Black play actors making a Vietnam War film who get dropped in an actual war. Tom Cruise plays a studio exec. The cold-open fake trailers are the best thing in any 2000s comedy.
Super Troopers
2001 · Jay Chandrasekhar
Vermont state troopers prank stoners on the highway and feud with the local PD. Broken Lizard's career-defining film. The cult is real. The Rabbit is real.
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
2004 · Adam McKay
Will Ferrell as San Diego's preeminent local newsman. The most successful improvised studio comedy of the 2000s. Veronica Corningstone changes everything. The news team gets in a fight. Brick kills a man with a trident.
Caddyshack
1980 · Harold Ramis
Murray, Chase, Dangerfield, and a gopher in a country club. The script was largely abandoned in favor of letting the cast improvise. Ramis's directorial debut. Half the lines are now in the dictionary.
Shaun of the Dead
2004 · Edgar Wright
Edgar Wright's romantic comedy with zombies. Pegg and Frost figuring out their lives mid-apocalypse. The Cornetto trilogy starts here.
Blade Runner
1982 · Ridley Scott
Harrison Ford hunts replicants in a 2019 Los Angeles. It rains constantly. Vangelis on synth. The most-imitated visual language in science fiction.
Road House
1989 · Rowdy Herrington
Patrick Swayze as a philosophy-degree-holding bouncer at a Missouri roadhouse. He breaks up fights, romances the doctor, and goes to war with the local oligarch. Ben Gazzara is the bad guy. Sam Elliott shows up to mentor.
Commando
1985 · Mark L. Lester
Schwarzenegger gets his daughter kidnapped and works through a small army to get her back. Eleven minutes of mayhem at a strip mall. He carries a missile launcher and a tree.
Predator
1987 · John McTiernan
An Arnold-led mercenary team in the jungle gets stalked by an invisible alien hunter. Some of the best practical creature design ever filmed. The most-quoted action movie of the eighties not directed by John McTiernan, except this one is.
Wedding Crashers
2005 · David Dobkin
Two D.C. mediators crash weddings as a hobby. They get sloppy at one and have to live with the consequences. The horniest summer comedy of its era.
The Matrix
1999 · Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski
A coding cubicle drone learns the world is a simulation built by machines harvesting human bioelectricity. He learns kung fu. He fights agents. He bends spoons.
Cool Runnings
1993 · Jon Turteltaub
Four Jamaican sprinters make the 1988 Olympic bobsled team because their qualifying race went sideways. Loosely true. Profoundly quotable. John Candy's last great role.
Footloose
1984 · Herbert Ross
Kevin Bacon shows up in a town that's banned dancing, then dances at it until the ban breaks. The Kenny Loggins title track is the entire personality. Pure '84 energy.
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
1997 · Jay Roach
A frozen British spy from 1967 is thawed in 1997 to fight Dr. Evil. Mike Myers plays both. The first one — before the catchphrases got stuck in your brain forever.
There's Something About Mary
1998 · Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly
Ben Stiller hires a private eye to find his high-school crush. The PI also falls for her. So does everyone else. The Farrellys at their gross-out peak.
Meet the Parents
2000 · Jay Roach
Ben Stiller spends a weekend at his girlfriend's parents' house. Robert De Niro is the dad. Everything that can go wrong does. The cat is the antagonist.
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
1989 · Jeremiah S. Chechik
Clark Griswold tries to host a perfect family Christmas. The lights don't work, the tree catches fire, Cousin Eddie shows up. Annual rewatch obligation since 1989.
National Lampoon's Vacation
1983 · Harold Ramis
Clark Griswold drives his family across the country to a theme park called Walley World. The car gets worse, the dog dies, Aunt Edna gets strapped to the roof. The road-trip comedy template.
Scream
1996 · Wes Craven
A small town stalked by a Ghostface killer who knows horror-movie rules and quizzes his victims on them. Wes Craven's meta-slasher relaunched the genre in 1996.
The Boondock Saints
1999 · Troy Duffy
Two Irish brothers in Boston decide God wants them to kill mobsters. Willem Dafoe plays an opera-loving FBI agent. It's a mess. It's also a religion for a certain kind of dude.
Gateway Scene
The brothers recite the Saints prayer before the first job. "And shepherds we shall be..."
The Ref
1994 · Ted Demme
A forgotten-for-no-good-reason campus comedy that predicted everything about the 2020s in 1994. Jeremy Piven before he was Ari Gold. The causeheads. The Pit.
Gateway Scene
"You're wearing the shirt of the band you're going to see. Don't be that guy."
Repo Man
1984 · Alex Cox
Emilio Estevez becomes a repo man in LA. There's a Chevy Malibu with something radioactive in the trunk. Punk rock. Aliens. Existentialism. Nothing is explained. Nothing needs to be.
Gateway Scene
The "plate of shrimp" monologue from Miller in the parking lot.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
1998 · Terry Gilliam
Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo journalism, filmed by the one director unhinged enough to honor it. Depp and Del Toro in career-best form, radiating chemical warfare.
Gateway Scene
The hotel-lobby bat-attack opening. "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert..."
Donnie Darko
2001 · Richard Kelly
Time travel, a giant rabbit named Frank, suburban teenage dread, and a Tears for Fears needle-drop that ruined a generation.
Gateway Scene
The "Head Over Heels" tracking shot through the school hallway.
Reservoir Dogs
1992 · Quentin Tarantino
A heist movie that doesn't show the heist. Tarantino's debut is leaner and meaner than anything that came after.
Gateway Scene
The opening diner scene about tipping.
Snatch
2000 · Guy Ritchie
Ritchie's ensemble crime caper moves like a pinball. Brad Pitt plays a Traveller speaking an accent that's basically a language he invented.
Gateway Scene
Brad Pitt's first appearance as Mickey the Traveller. Subtitles help.
Idiocracy
2006 · Mike Judge
Mike Judge sent a film back from the future to warn us. We ignored it. Now it plays as documentary.
*batteries not included
1987 · Matthew Robbins
Tiny flying saucers move into a condemned tenement and quietly save the day. Spielberg produced. Zero cynicism.
National Lampoon's European Vacation
1985 · Amy Heckerling
A twelve-year-old gets abducted, returned eight years later not a day older, and has to fly a sarcastic NASA UFO home. Peak Disney weird.
Weekend at Bernie's
1989 · Ted Kotcheff
Two junior employees find their boss murdered and spend the weekend pretending he's alive so nobody notices. The premise is the movie.
The Count of Monte Cristo
2002 · Kevin Reynolds
A man wrongfully imprisoned for thirteen years gets out, finds a fortune, and spends the next decade ruining everyone who put him there. Revenge-cinema comfort food.
V for Vendetta
2006 · James McTeigue
A masked anarchist blows up Parliament in near-future London. The speech. The mask. The whole thing.
Dune: Part One
2021 · Denis Villeneuve
A noble house gets betrayed on a desert planet with giant worms and psychic drugs. Villeneuve finally cracked it.
Tremors
1990 · Ron Underwood
Two handymen in a desert town discover giant underground worms are eating everybody. Kevin Bacon. Reba with a shotgun. Cinematic perfection.
The Mighty Ducks
1992 · Stephen Herek
A DUI-sentenced lawyer coaches a ragtag pee-wee hockey team and finds redemption. Quack, quack, quack.
Face/Off
1997 · John Woo
An FBI agent and a terrorist swap faces. Not a metaphor. They physically swap faces. John Woo directs. Cage and Travolta act like they're paid by the scenery-chew.
Gremlins
1984 · Joe Dante
Don't feed them after midnight. Don't get them wet. Don't expose them to bright light. You know he's going to break all three rules.
Labyrinth
1986 · Jim Henson
A teenager accidentally wishes her baby brother away to the Goblin King, who is David Bowie in the most Bowie costume ever filmed. Henson's last feature.
The Lost Boys
1987 · Joel Schumacher
Teenage vampires run a seaside California town. The Frog Brothers run a comic book store. Kiefer Sutherland has the mullet of his life.
Event Horizon
1997 · Paul W.S. Anderson
Mark Wahlberg is a sensitive hitman with a bleeding ulcer whose kidnapping job goes sideways. Nobody remembers this movie. It deserves better.
Army of Darkness
1992 · Sam Raimi
Ash from Evil Dead 2 gets transported to the Middle Ages with his chainsaw hand. This is a boomstick. Give me some sugar, baby.
The Fifth Element
1997 · Luc Besson
Bruce Willis is a flying-cab driver who saves the universe from a glowing ball of evil with help from a genetically perfect redhead in bandages. It's French. It shows.
Taqdeerwala
1995 · K. Muralimohana Rao
Two dumped guys spend a day at the mall plotting revenge while Jay and Silent Bob cause chaos. The View Askew sophomore slump that became a religion.
Clerks
1994 · Kevin Smith
A day in the life of two convenience store clerks in New Jersey. Black and white. Shot for nothing. Launched an entire indie wave.
Point Break
1991 · Kathryn Bigelow
An undercover FBI agent infiltrates a gang of surfer bank robbers. Keanu and Swayze. The chase is on foot and it's cinema.
Big Trouble in Little China
1986 · John Carpenter
A truck driver accidentally becomes the hero of a supernatural Chinatown kung-fu epic he doesn't understand. Kurt Russell does a John Wayne voice the entire film.
They Live
1988 · John Carpenter
A drifter finds sunglasses that reveal the ruling class are actually aliens broadcasting subliminal messages. I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass.
Escape from New York
1981 · John Carpenter
Manhattan is a maximum-security prison. The President's plane crashed inside it. One man gets 24 hours to get him out. Snake Plissken.
The Thing
1982 · John Carpenter
An alien shape-shifter stalks an Antarctic research station. Paranoia horror with practical effects that still hold up 40 years later.
Cool Hand Luke
1967 · Stuart Rosenberg
Paul Newman is a man who refuses to break in a Southern chain gang. What we've got here is failure to communicate.
Amar parece tan fácil
1999– · N/A
The last day of summer camp, 1981. Every 00s comedy star before they were famous, wearing terrible hair, talking nonsense. It makes no sense. That's the point.
Creature from the Black Lagoon
1954 · Jack Arnold
A research expedition finds a scaled humanoid in the Amazon. He falls for the lead scientist. The platonic Universal Monster film.
Child's Play
1988 · Tom Holland
A serial killer transfers his soul into a Good Guy doll named Chucky and torments a six-year-old. Hi, I'm Chucky, wanna play?
The Ring
2002 · Gore Verbinski
A journalist watches a cursed videotape and has seven days to break the curse. A dead girl crawls out of a TV. A franchise was born.
Swingers
1996 · Doug Liman
Two out-of-work actors in mid-90s LA hit the lounge scene and try to forget their exes. You're so money and you don't even know it.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
2004 · Wes Anderson
Bill Murray is a Cousteau-adjacent oceanographer hunting the jaguar shark that ate his partner. Wes Anderson's weirdest pre-Grand Budapest film.
Heartbreak Ridge
1986 · Clint Eastwood
Eastwood as a grizzled Recon Marine gunny training a unit of misfits, then deploying them to Grenada. The man yells the entire movie. You will be quoted to within an inch of your life.
The Delta Force
1986 · Menahem Golan
Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin rescue hijacked airline passengers from terrorists. The motorcycle has rocket launchers. The synth score is by Alan Silvestri. Nobody apologizes for anything.
Crimson Tide
1995 · Tony Scott
Hackman and Denzel argue about whether to launch nuclear missiles inside a submarine. They argue beautifully. Tony Scott directs it like a music video about the apocalypse.
Under Siege
1992 · Andrew Davis
Steven Seagal is a Navy cook and former SEAL. The USS Missouri gets hijacked by Tommy Lee Jones in a ponytail. The cook saves the day. He never breaks a sweat.
La camisa de la serpiente
1996 · Antoni P. Canet
Kelsey Grammer commands a junker diesel sub against the Navy's nuclear fleet in a war-game exercise. Rob Schneider is annoying on purpose. Bruce Dern yells. It's wonderful.
Broken Arrow
1996 · John Woo
Travolta steals two nuclear bombs from a B-2 and Christian Slater hunts him through the desert. John Woo directing in America before he figured out it wasn't Hong Kong.
Platoon
1986 · Oliver Stone
Stone's autobiographical Vietnam film. Young Charlie Sheen between the angels and the devils. Berenger and Dafoe as the warring fathers. The single most-imitated war-movie ending of the era.
The Men Who Stare at Goats
2009 · Grant Heslov
Ewan McGregor follows a former Army psychic warrior (Clooney) on a road trip through Iraq. Bridges as the hippie general who founded the program. Spacey as the institutional bad guy. Based on a real thing the Army actually tried.
Zoolander
2001 · Ben Stiller
Ben Stiller as the world's dumbest male model. Will Ferrell as the evil fashion designer who brainwashes him to assassinate the prime minister of Malaysia. Also: David Bowie.
Napoleon Dynamite
2004 · Jared Hess
A high-schooler in rural Idaho campaigns to elect his friend Pedro class president. Liger drawings. Tetherball. The single most distinctive comedy voice of the 2000s.
Hot Fuzz
2007 · Edgar Wright
London supercop Pegg gets transferred to a sleepy English village where things start escalating. Buddy-cop, conspiracy, and a third-act gun battle staged like Bad Boys II by a man who watched too much Lethal Weapon.
Friday
1995 · F. Gary Gray
Ice Cube and Chris Tucker on a Compton porch on a Friday afternoon. Smokey owes money. Deebo terrorizes. Bye, Felicia.
Evil Dead II
1987 · Sam Raimi
Raimi remakes the first film as a half-comedy. Ash gets a chainsaw hand. The cabin gets weirder. The tone breaks the genre.
Fight Club
1999 · David Fincher
An insomniac office drone meets a soap salesman and they start a club. Things escalate. Don't talk about it. The first rule. The eighth rule.
The Royal Tenenbaums
2002 · Wes Anderson
Wes Anderson's family-of-geniuses movie. Three former-prodigy adult siblings reunite at the brownstone when their estranged father (Hackman) fakes a terminal illness. Mournful, deadpan, the Anderson aesthetic in its first fully-realized form.
Trainspotting
1996 · Danny Boyle
Edinburgh heroin addicts navigate the early-nineties UK. Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a fucking big television. Boyle directs it like a hyperactive music video.
Heat
1995 · Michael Mann
A career thief and the LAPD lieutenant chasing him sit down for a coffee. The film is two hours and forty minutes. Every minute counts.
Killer Klowns from Outer Space
1988 · Stephen Chiodo
Alien clowns land in a circus-tent spaceship, harvest humans into cotton candy cocoons, and chase teens with popcorn guns. The Chiodo Brothers' handmade fever dream does exactly what the title promises.
The Warriors
1979 · Walter Hill
A Coney Island gang gets framed for the murder of a charismatic gang leader and has to fight their way home across a hallucinatory '70s New York. Baseball Furies. 'Warriors, come out to play.'
Saturday Night Fever
1977 · John Badham
A Brooklyn paint-store clerk lives for Saturday nights at the disco. The Bee Gees soundtrack is the cultural memory. The actual movie is much darker than you remember.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
1975 · Jim Sharman
The original participation cult. The movie is fine. The experience is the point. See it live before you see it alone.
Gateway Scene
Do not pre-watch. The first viewing has to be in a theater with a shadow cast. Accept no substitutes.
Spawn
1997 · Mark A.Z. Dippé
Robin Williams invents sentient green goo and it wrecks a basketball game. An absurd choice for the canon. We're making it anyway.
Boiler Room
2000 · Ben Younger
A college dropout gets recruited to a Long Island pump-and-dump brokerage that really wants to be Wall Street. Required viewing on trading desks.
Empire Records
1995 · Allan Moyle
A day at an independent record store about to get bought by a chain. A soundtrack with a movie happening around it. Damn the man.
Brazil
1985 · Terry Gilliam
Terry Gilliam's dystopian-bureaucracy nightmare where a paperwork clerk dreams of flying and falls for a terrorist. Orwell as slapstick.
Suspiria
1977 · Dario Argento
An American ballet student arrives at a German dance academy that is obviously a coven. Argento in peak technicolor-blood mode.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
1984 · W.D. Richter
A brain surgeon / physicist / rock star / test pilot fights interdimensional aliens in the Eighth Dimension. That premise is the plot. Nothing is explained.
The Invisible Man
1933 · James Whale
A scientist discovers invisibility and immediately loses his mind. Claude Rains spends 90% of the film as a disembodied voice and still gives the performance.
Swamp Thing
1982 · Wes Craven
A scientist gets doused in mutagen and becomes a plant monster in the Louisiana bayou. Wes Craven directs Adrienne Barbeau and a man in a rubber suit. Earnest. Weird. Perfect.
Leprechaun
1992 · Mark Jones
Warwick Davis is a killer leprechaun in North Dakota. Jennifer Aniston's film debut. The pun count is criminal. The film knows what it is.
Iron Eagle
1986 · Sidney J. Furie
An Air Force kid steals an F-16 to rescue his POW dad. Queen on the soundtrack. Lou Gossett Jr. as the wise mentor. Cinema's most committed dad-rescue mission until Taken.
The Last Wild Salmon
1988 · Ken Jubenvill
Same kid, same Lou Gossett, now flying a joint US-Soviet mission against an unnamed Middle Eastern country. Made before the Cold War ended; aged accordingly.
Coswig und Sohn
1995 · Michael Braun
Lou Gossett Jr. trains teen pilots. Direct-to-video, late-stage franchise, completely without dignity. Beloved anyway.
Fire Birds
1990 · David Green
Top Gun, but with Apache helicopters and Nicolas Cage. Tommy Lee Jones plays the Viper. The military helped because they wanted attack-helicopter recruits.
Paper Mask
1990 · Christopher Morahan
Charlie Sheen and Michael Biehn lead a SEAL team against terrorists. Released into the same air as Top Gun and Iron Eagle, and forgotten by everyone except your uncle.
The Forgotten One
1989 · Phillip Badger
Brad Johnson and Willem Dafoe fly Vietnam-era A-6 attack jets and decide to bomb Hanoi unauthorized. John Milius directs. Half the movie is plane footage.
The Last Boy Scout
1991 · Tony Scott
Bruce Willis as a disgraced detective and Damon Wayans as a disgraced QB investigate a murder. Tony Scott directs. Shane Black wrote it. The football-field opening kill is one of the bleakest things ever in a Christmas-adjacent action movie.
The Evil Dead
1981 · Sam Raimi
Sam Raimi's debut. Five college kids at a remote Tennessee cabin find a Sumerian incantation tape. Things deteriorate. The shaky-cam through the woods. The pencil. The tree.
Being John Malkovich
1999 · Spike Jonze
Charlie Kaufman's first produced screenplay. There's a half-floor in a Manhattan office building. Behind a filing cabinet is a portal. The portal goes into the head of John Malkovich. For fifteen minutes.
Blue Velvet
1986 · David Lynch
A college kid finds a severed ear in a field. The investigation drags him into a Lynchian basement of velvet, nitrous, and Dennis Hopper screaming into a microphone. Suburbia has never been this haunted.
Eraserhead
1977 · David Lynch
Do not start here. Earn this one. Lynch's first feature is a black-and-white industrial nightmare about fatherhood, anxiety, and a baby that defies description.
Gateway Scene
The Lady in the Radiator singing "In Heaven."
Hercules in New York
1970 · Arthur Allan Seidelman
The original midnight movie. A surrealist Western with Zen, Sufi mysticism, and more symbolism than you'll catch in one viewing.
The Holy Mountain
1975 · Alejandro Jodorowsky
Jodorowsky's psychedelic allegory where a thief climbs a mountain with seven alchemists. Don't start here. Don't even start near here.
Videodrome
1983 · David Cronenberg
A sleazy cable TV executive gets addicted to a pirate broadcast that rewires his body and his brain. Long live the new flesh.
Pi
1998 · Darren Aronofsky
Aronofsky's debut. A reclusive math genius in Chinatown believes he can find a 216-digit number that explains everything. Hasidim, Wall Street, and a power drill all show up. Black-and-white reversal stock.