Moonlight is a beautifully filmed coming-of-age story of a gay black boy growing up in a housing project in Miami. The many-layered film sheds light on aspects of Black identity that are rarely spotlighted on film. In her Golden Globe-winning role, Awkwafina plays Billi, a woman on a trip to China for a “family wedding” that’s actually a final goodbye to her grandmother.
Because the only thing better than watching movies is arguing over them. Jack Nicholson is on this list a few times, but this classic horror movie is probably his most well-known role. The Torrance family—husband Jack, wife Wendy, and son Danny—are staying in the Overlook Hotel during the winter. Then, the hotel begins to come alive with a terrible, terrifying evil. Stephen King famously hated this adaptation, because Stanley Kubrick takes out all the empathy from the patriarch (Nicholson, playing crazy like he was born to do it).
Amid obstacles in the form of Anna’s deeply religious family and a local community that distrusts her, Lib’s watch descends into a tense, terrifying experience. Based on a book of the same name by Emma Donoghue, The Wonder is a beautiful yet bleakly shot period piece that explores the all-too-mortal horrors that unquestioning religious fervor and family secrets can wreak. In a world already ravaged by a zombie-like plague, Andy Rose (Martin Freeman) only wants to keep his family safe, sticking to Australia’s rural back roads to avoid infection.
Borgli, whose short films hit a similar caustic tone and clinical aesthetic, is a master of threading the line between body humor and body horror, between grotesquery and beauty, a cringe and a cackle. It’s hard to flat-out love a movie as bleak and tragic as the Dardenne brothers’ latest, but it’s even harder not to be deeply affected by it. Tori and Lokita follows a pair of African migrant children trying to survive and stick together, in modern Belgium. It’s about how they are failed by bureaucracy, taken advantage of by the underworld, and ignored by everyone else (implicating viewers, including all those who will skip this film because of its heaviness). The 11 year-old Tori and 17-year-old Lokita are forced to operate well beyond their years. In playing them, Pablo Schils (Tori) and Joely Mbundu (Lokita) achieve the same feat.
Yes, it’s all a bit Wicker Man in places, but Apostle balances its gore and scares with slow-burn tension and a terror borne of its isolated setting that will have you thinking twice before you next venture into the countryside. Even given the darker tones of a few Key And Peele sketches, no one could have predicted that Jordan Peele would place himself on track to become a modern master of horror. And it all started with this, the Oscar-winning kick-off to his film career in which Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris meets his girlfriend Rose’s (Allison Williams) parents and discovers some truly shocking secrets. White guilt, specific racism, slavery and more blend into a socially conscious terror tale that rings every note with pitch-perfect accuracy. Richard Kelly’s time-looping, sci-fi-horror-blending high-school movie is the very definition of a cult classic. It was a struggle to get made, it flopped on release, then found its crowd via word-of-mouth and a palpable sense that its creator really, you know, gets it.
We invite you to find out how many films from the list you’ve seen on this poll. Kosuke and Natsume are childhood friends whose relationship has grown strained as they approach their teenage years. When the apartment complex where they first met is scheduled for demolition, they sneak in one last time, seeking emotional closure.
We don’t just mean different genres; we don’t just mean highbrow and lowbrow (and everything in between). The very spirit of cinema is that it has long been a landscape of spine-tingling eclecticism, and we wanted our list to reflect that — to honor the movies we love most, whatever categories they happen to fall into. The modern master of the macabre brings the wooden would-be boy to life like never before in this exquisitely animated take on Pinocchio. It’s the decision to transplant the tale to World War II that’s most affecting though. Cast against the rise of fascism, with Gepetto mourning the loss of his son, the film is packed with complex themes of mortality and morality that will haunt audiences long after the credits roll.
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With James Stewart’s detective stalking Kim Novak’s mysterious woman, witnessing her suicide, then becoming obsessed with her double, it’s certainly disturbing and most definitely (as the title suggests) disorientating. Guillermo Del Toro’s fairy tale for grown-ups, as pull-no-punches brutal as it is gorgeously, baroquely fantastical. There’s an earthy, primal feel to his fairy-world here, alien and threatening rather than gasp-inducing and ‘magical’, thanks in no small part to the truly cheese-dream nightmarish demon-things Del Toro conjures up, sans CGI, with the assistance of performer Doug Jones.
It was the biggest crossover event in cinematic history, and the biggest cliffhanger we never saw coming. After ten years and eighteen movies, Marvel took superhero filmmaking to a new level when they united all of Earth’s mightiest heroes (and several more) against The Mad Titan himself – and incredibly, devastatingly, they lost. Infinity War crashed much-loved characters into each other’s orbits, flitting between planets at breakneck speed as the Avengers desperately tried to stop Thanos from clicking his fingers and wiping out half the universe. Spectacular action, punch-the-air moments and big-scale battles are perfectly balanced, as all things should be, with hilarious interplays and aching emotion.
After her brother dies, Debby Ocean takes his place as the con artist of the family. She leaves prison with a revenge plot that involves robbing the famous Met Gala. With an all-female team (that includes Rihanna, btw), she pulls off an unbelievably free movie sites clever heist. Bridesmaids is one of the best chick flicks of all time – I will not be taking questions about this. You will literally cry from laughter when you watch the comedians try to make it through a wedding without killing each other.
Looking to escape her arranged marriage, Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi) steals a 400-year-old sword from Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-fat) under the guidance of her resentful tutor Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-pei). It only gets more complicated from there when Mu Bai and his friend Yu Shu Lien (THE Michelle Yeoh) go after Jen and try to get her to return the sword. The movie touches on themes of revenge, redemption, and gender roles with three incredible female characters.