Sarah Snook spends much of Predestination telling a bartender her character’s life story, and somehow that conversation rivals the time travel for sheer fascination. The Spierig brothers build their science-fiction thriller around people before revealing how ingeniously the pieces connect. Ethan Hawke supplies the weary authority; Snook supplies the ache. Describing much beyond their encounter risks dismantling the whole experience, so this recommendation usually ends with an irritating but justified “please just trust me.” | © Blacklab Entertainment
An alchemist turning excrement into gold barely qualifies as an unusual afternoon in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. Religious spectacle, grotesque commerce, and a search for immortality collide in compositions that could occupy an art gallery or get you escorted out of church. Its visual imagination is astonishing, even when the symbolism becomes exhausting. Anyone waiting for the surrealism to settle into a reassuring explanation should probably stop negotiating and surrender to the madness. | © ABKCO Films
Hugh Jackman makes parental devotion frightening in Prisoners, playing a father whose search for his missing daughter becomes permission to do almost anything. Opposite him, Jake Gyllenhaal’s tightly wound detective pursues a case that keeps resisting certainty. Denis Villeneuve makes the suspense inseparable from the moral ugliness: you understand the desperation even as you recoil from its consequences. Excellent filmmaking, absolutely, although nobody should mistake the familiar stars for a promise of comfortable entertainment. | © Alcon Entertainment
Keeping track of Tom Hanks’s faces is practically a side quest in Cloud Atlas, which sends its ensemble through six interconnected stories spanning centuries. The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer cut between genres with tremendous conviction, finding echoes of exploitation, rebellion, and kindness across wildly different lives. Some makeup choices are distracting, and the sentiment occasionally arrives carrying a megaphone. Still, watching a film commit this wholeheartedly to its own enormous, ungainly vision is exhilarating. | © Cloud Atlas Productions
The opening airport sequence in Midnight Express can make you nervous about luggage you packed yourself. Alan Parker directs Brad Davis through a terrifying account of an American’s imprisonment in Turkey, with Giorgio Moroder’s electronic score amplifying the panic. Its dramatic force remains considerable, but the film’s distortions of Billy Hayes’s experiences and dehumanizing treatment of Turkish characters complicate that achievement. You can admire the craftsmanship while wishing its pursuit of intensity had left room for fairness. | © Casablanca FilmWorks
Spaghetti in a filthy bathtub is the relatively approachable end of Gummo, which should tell you something about Harmony Korine’s debut. Its fragmented portrait of neglected lives in small-town Ohio includes cruelty, boredom, and sudden flashes of tenderness without organizing them into a comforting lesson. The rough images make ordinary surroundings feel almost extraterrestrial. Whether Korine is finding beauty in people usually ignored or inviting us to stare remains a productive, deeply uncomfortable argument. | © Independent Pictures
Knowing that Irreversible unfolds backward does little to prepare you for watching it. Gaspar Noé places unbearable violence before the tenderness that preceded it, changing what those ordinary moments mean without offering the relief of preventing anything. The prolonged rape sequence is an especially serious barrier, compounded by disorienting camerawork and oppressive sound. Its formal intelligence is undeniable; whether experiencing that intelligence is worth the distress is a decision no enthusiastic film buff can make for somebody else. | © StudioCanal
Patience gets a strenuous workout in Dragged Across Concrete: S. Craig Zahler lets conversations, surveillance, and even eating consume time that another crime film would spend firing bullets. That duration gives its eventual violence a sickening weight. Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn play suspended cops pursuing a criminal payday, but their grievances never make them comfortable company. The racial hostility and abrasive politics are integral to the experience, making “good heist movie” a spectacularly incomplete description. | © Unified Pictures
Tom Cruise spends Eyes Wide Shut discovering that being handsome, wealthy, and a doctor does not make him particularly perceptive. Stanley Kubrick sends his character through a nocturnal maze after his wife’s confession punctures his confidence about their marriage. The masked ritual gets the attention, but the awkward conversations and wounded vanity do much of the damage. Come expecting an erotic thriller and you may instead find yourself watching an expensive, exquisitely controlled humiliation. | © Stanley Kubrick Productions
A difficult relationship with Dad apparently requires examining the origins of existence in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. That sounds like a joke until the film’s cosmic passages make one Texas childhood feel both infinitesimal and immeasurably important. Brad Pitt’s stern father anchors the floating memories in recognizable family tension. The whispered questions and associative editing demand receptiveness, though: trying to force this into a conventional plot is an efficient way to have a miserable evening. | © River Road Entertainment
Christina Ricci’s bowling-alley tap dance offers a lovely interruption to the hostility of Buffalo ’66. Vincent Gallo’s ex-convict has kidnapped her character to pose as his wife, a premise that makes the film’s eventual tenderness difficult to accept without reservations. Yet the cramped family encounters and fractured imagery convey an unmistakable loneliness beneath his bullying. Ricci gives the movie room to breathe; without her, spending this much time with Billy would feel considerably closer to serving his sentence. | © Cinépix Film Properties
For a glorious stretch, Climax lets you enjoy a dance troupe being absurdly good at its job. Then the spiked sangria starts working, and the same bodies that moved together so precisely become unpredictable threats to one another. Gaspar Noé turns corridors, lighting, and pounding music into instruments of panic. The choreography remains central even as coordination collapses, creating a horror film whose greatest asset is also its problem: it makes leaving that party feel impossible. | © Wild Bunch
Björk hears music in factory machinery, giving Dancer in the Dark moments of escape that feel invented out of sheer necessity. Her Selma is losing her sight and saving to protect her son from the same fate, while Lars von Trier steadily strips away her options. The contrast between musical fantasy and drab reality is extraordinary. So is Björk’s exposed, vulnerable performance, which makes the relentless suffering harder to dismiss—and considerably harder to endure. | © Zentropa Entertainments
Calling Happiness a comedy is accurate, but it leaves an alarming amount unsaid. Todd Solondz follows suburban lives through rejection, sexual shame, and abuse, allowing banal conversations to become almost unbearable. Dylan Baker’s performance is especially disturbing because the character’s respectable manner never conveniently announces the monster underneath. The humor exposes the gap between how people present themselves and what they conceal; laughing does not release that tension so much as implicate you in it. | © Killer Films
Traffic has rarely justified this much screen time. In Koyaanisqatsi, Godfrey Reggio uses landscapes, crowds, machinery, and accelerated movement to examine a civilization increasingly organized around its own systems. Philip Glass’s score gives the images momentum without a narrator explaining what to think. The result can make a freeway look beautiful and deeply alarming within the same sequence. It does require putting aside the expectation of characters, dialogue, or anyone arriving to clarify the assignment. | © IRE Productions
Caden Cotard receives the resources to create his ultimate theatrical work and proceeds to turn artistic freedom into an administrative nightmare. As his production expands, Synecdoche, New York lets rehearsals consume the life they were supposed to illuminate. Philip Seymour Hoffman makes Charlie Kaufman’s increasingly impossible construction painfully human. It is funny about vanity and devastating about wasted time, particularly if you have ever postponed doing something meaningful until you finally felt ready to begin. | © Sidney Kimmel Entertainment
Scarlett Johansson’s familiar face becomes unsettlingly unreadable in Under the Skin, where an alien moves through Scotland picking up men. Jonathan Glazer withholds the usual science-fiction explanations and asks us to study gestures, bodies, and social routines from the outside. Mica Levi’s score makes even apparent stillness feel predatory. The horror grows stranger as vulnerability enters the picture, but anyone expecting a clear account of the creature’s mission will receive very little customer support. | © Film4
Getting past “he has a sex doll for a girlfriend” is the main obstacle facing Lars and the Real Girl. Ryan Gosling plays Lars with such sincerity that the premise soon stops functioning as a punch line, while the people around him struggle to respond kindly to his delusion. Nancy Oliver’s screenplay makes their awkward accommodation both funny and moving. The surprising attraction is watching a community choose patience when mockery would have been much easier. | © Sidney Kimmel Entertainment
A sequel to Blade Runner already comes with homework; Denis Villeneuve then adds 163 minutes of silence, rain, dust, memory, and philosophical detective work. The reward is immense: Roger Deakins’s Oscar-winning cinematography, Ryan Gosling’s beautifully restrained performance, and a story that expands the meaning of personhood without merely photocopying the original. Still, Blade Runner 2049 moves at the speed of a very sad glacier. Recommending it to someone who wants “something fun tonight” is a reliable way to lose future programming privileges. | © Alcon Entertainment
Assassination is outsourced directly into other people’s bodies in Possessor, a corporate arrangement with predictably appalling employee benefits. Andrea Riseborough plays an operative whose latest assignment threatens the boundary between her identity and her host’s. Brandon Cronenberg makes that instability tactile through distorted faces, invasive technology, and startling bodily damage. Beneath the gore sits a sharp question about how much of yourself a job can consume, although the film has no interest in asking it gently. | © Rhombus Media
Ellen Burstyn talking about her red dress hurts more than many horror films manage with their entire effects budget. Her longing to feel attractive and wanted gives Requiem for a Dream its most devastating emotional foundation. Darren Aronofsky connects that longing to three younger characters’ addictions through compulsive editing and Clint Mansell’s insistent score. The technique makes each apparent escape feel increasingly mechanical, until watching becomes its own endurance test. Admiration does not necessarily translate into another viewing. | © Artisan Entertainment
A videotape showing the inside of your house is a comprehensible reason to panic. Almost everything that follows in Lost Highway makes comprehension considerably less useful. David Lynch slides from domestic suspicion into fractured identities and noir desire, with Patricia Arquette providing a dangerously elusive presence across the shifting narrative. Sound and atmosphere hold the film together when ordinary causality cannot. You can spend hours proposing explanations afterward, provided nobody mistakes the discussion for repairing a broken plot. | © CiBy 2000
Kurt Russell’s sheriff and his companions spend enough time talking in Bone Tomahawk that their rescue mission develops the comfortable rhythm of an old Western. Richard Jenkins is particularly good at making apparently incidental chatter worth hearing. S. Craig Zahler then subjects those familiar personalities to violence far beyond the genre’s usual gunfight. The companionship makes the horror matter, but describing this as a Western with a few nasty moments would constitute a serious failure of friendship. | © Caliber Media Company
Gregg Araki gives Mysterious Skin a dreamy visual softness that makes its account of childhood sexual abuse even more painful. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brady Corbet play young men whose understanding of the same past has taken radically different forms, including one’s belief in alien abduction. The performances resist easy explanations of what a survivor should look like. Although the sexual violence makes this a harrowing watch, Araki’s attention stays with the damaged lives rather than the shock of disclosure. | © Antidote Films
Home movies and affectionate recollections give Dear Zachary a purpose more intimate than solving a crime: preserving Andrew Bagby for the son who will never know him. Filmmaker Kurt Kuenne’s friendship with Andrew shapes every transition, making the documentary feel urgently personal as its story develops. Andrew’s parents become its emotional center, their love inseparable from their grief. Its power deserves recognition, but treating the film as a contest to see who cries hardest misses the people entirely. | © MSNBC Films
Calling a movie brilliant is easy. Explaining why someone should spend their Friday night watching it can get awkward. These 25 great movies are hard to recommend without knowing someone’s tolerance for disturbing scenes, punishing subject matter, or a plot that refuses to explain itself. They’ve earned their place on this list, but if you pick one for movie night, you might owe your friends a little context first.
