We aren't just talking about movies in which someone is seduced. There are lots and lots of movies about seduction that are not, in themselves, seductive. A seductive movie is subtle.

Seductive movies draw you in like a warm bath... then changes the temperature. By the times it's gotten too hot (or too cold) you're in, and find yourself unable to get out. The movie has seduced you.

Some of these movies are about seduction, sure. But some aren't. You'll see what we mean in this list of the most seductive movies we've ever seen.

Double Indemnity (1944)

The most seductive movie ever made about insurance, Double Indemnity starts absolutely cracking from the moment Fred MacMurray queries Barbara Stanwyck about her anklet — and gets a lecture about local traffic laws.

It's one of those magical moments where one characters seduces another and the movie seduces its audience. We wonder if anyone wonders if he'd do anything for her after that point.

Notorious (1946)

One of Alfred Hitchcock's best (and shortest) films, Notorious is the story of Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the daughter of a German spy. When American agent Devlin (Cary Grant) asks her to go undercover, he — and we — must constantly question her loyalties.

What makes the movie so seductive is that all the plot machinations depend on Alicia's character, and Hitchcock and Bergman don't make her easy to love. Which only makes us love her more, and terrified of the heartbreak that feels inevitable.

Start watching Notorious and you won't leave it until it leaves you.

Contempt (1963)

Contempt is about seduction, but also about falling out of love. Its visuals, and especially its music, are so engrossing that it's a very hard movie to stop watching once you've started.

Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) is invited by a swaggering American movie producer Jeremiah Prokosch (Jack Palance) to write a new adaptation of the Odyssey for a German director (Fritz Lang, playing himself).

But Prokosch has his eye on Javal's stunning wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot), who is quickly losing interest in her husband. Georges Delerue's "Theme de Camille" is so passionate and engrossing that Martin Scorsese used it in Casino, where it provides a kind of cinematic shorthand for the crumbling marriage of Robert De Niro's Sam "Ace" Rothstein and his wife, Ginger (Sharon Stone).

American Gigolo (1980)

Richard Gere's Julian is undoubtedly seductive — he's the gigolo of the title, after all — but what's even more seductive is the movie's bracing, early '80s SoCal aesthetic. Giorgio Moroder's score tells us to unclutch our pearls and get with the program as writer-director Paul Schrader masterfully speeds us through the moral desert.

The movie hooks us completely, makes us question all our loyalties, shames us, and then turns all sincere at the end. Or is it just another of Julian's lines?

In the Mood for Love (2000)

One of the most gorgeously shot movies ever made, Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love isn't so much a love story as an out-of-love story between two people — played by Tony Leung and (Maggie Cheung — who realize their spouses are having an affair.

The setting alone — 1962 Hong Kong — feels impossibly romantic. And the melancholic misery of the leads is strangely intoxicating.

Lost in Translation (2003)

Sofia Coppola's hypnotic Lost in Translation should not work. Very little happens, the plot is slight, and even the instigating incident — the first meeting of Scarlett Johansson's Charlotte and Bill Murray's Bob — is murky. (Do they first meet in the bar? Or the elevator? They aren't sure.) Also, are we really supposed to sympathize with two people who can't find anything to do while staying in a luxury hotel in magical Tokyo?

And yet it all works. Every tiny gesture takes on heartstopping importance, and the exquisite soundtrack imbues every moment with hope, passion or loss, often all at the same time. What feels like a seduction story turns out to be a much better story about the small comfort of friendship in a foreign land. You're overwhelmed with feeling at the end, even wondering what just happened.

It's not only on this list of the most seductive movies we've seen, but is also on our list of Excellent Movies Where Not Much Happens.

Match Point (2005)

A Woody Allen movie that feels different from every other Woody Allen movie, Match Point invites you to embrace the coolly amoral worldview of its protagonist, Chris (Jonathan Rhys Myers), an ex-tennis pro who marries into a wealthy family but finds his new status threatened by an affair with his brother-in-law's girlfriend, Nola (Scarlett Johansson, who had had an excellent run of seductive movies about seduction).

You feel every temptation Chris does, even as you know he's objectively wrong. And knowing all the things you know about Allen, you wonder if Chris' worldview in any way reflects the filmmakers, especially since Allen is too great a director to let you off the hook with cheap moralizing.

Last Days of Disco (1998)

During the difficult shoot for his excellent 1994 film Barcelona, director Whit Stillman found rare joy in a scene of young women dancing at a disco, and wondered: Why can't this be a whole movie?

The result was Last Days of Disco, which turns out to be about much more. It's about the dance between dreams and commerce, who you want to date versus who you do, and what kind of dog you want to be.

The totally beguiling cast (let by Chloe Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale and the wildly underrated Chris Eigeman) are transfixing, and the soundtrack is as pleasing to the ear as Whitman's pitch-perfect dialogue.

Red Rocket (2021)

The sad, seedy, very funny story of Mikey Sabre, a man on the outs from the adult entertainment industry who sees a 17-year-old named Strawberry (Suzannah Son, actually 26) as his ticket back in.

While Mikey tries to win over Strawberry, director Sean Baker's stellar DIY filmmaking wins us over, too. We know that since Mikey is the boyishly handsome lead character of the movie, facing incredible odds, we're supposed to root for him. Can he be redeemed?

We slowly realize that almost any outcome is going to be incredibly destructive for someone... but by then Red Rocket has hooked us.

The Worst Person in the World (2021)

What seems like a story of Millennial malaise turns into a Gen X reckoning in this at-first apparently confectionary story of a talented by adrift young woman named Julie (Renate Reinsve, excellent) who suddenly finds herself very much over her head.

It's a sheer pleasure, until it becomes something much deeper — and director Joachim Trier and his co-writer, Eskil Vogt, have a light, deft hand in navigating a very surprising journey.

If you enjoy The Worst Person in the World, you might also like Trier's Oscar winning latest, Sentimental Value.

Hit Man (2024)

Director Richard Linklater does romance better than almost anyone — watch Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and/or Before Midnight. And Glen Powell is wildly adept at leading-man charm. They combine their talents as co-writers of this Netflix knockout, based on the true story of Gary Johnson, a professor who moonlights as a fake hit man to help cops catch people looking to have someone killed.

Gary's job is seducing people into thinking he's a real hit man — so cops can catch them on tape. It's all fun and games until he meets Maddy (Ariana Arjona), a woman who wants her controlling husband dead. Soon he's the one being seduced.

And so are we. The movie is relentlessly charming and agreeable, always staying a step or two ahead of us. It has the remarkable quality of being totally escapist and deeply philosophical.

Wild Things (1998)

We love the unrelenting, unapologetic pulpiness of Wild Things, about two high schoolers (Neve Campbell and Denise Richards, above) who accuse a teacher (Matt Dillon) of graphic misconduct — but only as part of a complicated con.

Wild Things almost encourages the audience to feel smugly superior to its tabloid subject matter — then outsmarts you again and again, in the best seductive noir tradition.

It has so many twists and turns you find yourself Everglades-deep in its world of unrepentant, glorious tawdriness. It's a lot of fun. Kevin Bacon is outstanding as a complicated cop, and Bill Murray has one of his most fun roles as a sleazy lawyer.

Like This List of the Most Seductive Movies We've Ever Seen?

Think we forgot one? Let us know in the comments.

And you might also like this list of the Strangest Movies We've Ever Seen.

Main image: Red Rocket. A24

Editor's Note: Updates main image and text.

Perhaps you may wonder what we mean by a post-apocalyptic movie. We're referring to any film that takes place after the fall of civilization, whether due to a nuclear war, or any other cataclysmic event.

There are different flavors of post-apocalyptic movies, from sci-fi horror stories to silly comedies. Many are darkly entertaining, though the best tend to be philosophical — and perhaps even to inspire us to avoid destroying ourselves.

And with that, here are the 12 best post-apocalyptic movies we've ever seen.

The Matrix (1999)

The premise of The Matrix feels realer every day: Robots have created a fantasy world to distract humans from the real world. (Our only quibble with that notion is that the robots are using humans as power sources, and... why? Wouldn't electricity work better?)

Be it the bullet-time special effects or the reinvention of Keanu Reeves, The Matrix was monumental. A lot of the action stuff still holds up, and there are fun moments to be found in the computer simulation of it all.

One of the coolest things about The Matrix, like a few other films on this list, is that it doesn't immediately reveal itself to be a post-apocalyptic movie. Neo's world looks a lot like our own... at first.

12 Monkeys (1995)

It’s impressive to turn an adaptation of an experimental French short film into a hit sci-fi movie, but Terry Gilliam did it. You might say, “Sure, but he had Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt!” Yes, but this was just at the beginning of Pitt’s prominence. This is one of the films that broke him through into the mainstream.

In 12 Monkeys, a widespread pandemic has wiped out most of human civilization. Humans have access to time travel, though, so they send a convict back in time. Crucially, they don't try to change the future — that’s not possible. They simply want to be able to mitigate the death going forward.

Sadly, then they send Willis’ prisoner back too early, and everything gets messed up.

Also Read: The 12 Most Voyeuristic Movies We've Ever Watched

A Quiet Place (2018)

A Quiet Place takes the unique frame of just focusing on a family, and notes that children are, well, the only hope for the future.

John Krasinski starred alongside his wife Emily Blunt, and also directed. This is the first full-on horror film on this list, but horror and the apocalypse go hand in hand.

Aliens have come to Earth with a taste for humans. However, their senses are poor, including being effectively blind, but have a tremendous sense of hearing. Survival means being quiet. Silent even. Sure, that makes it easy to ratchet up the tension, but you have to execute. A Quiet Place definitely does that.

Children of Men (2006)

What if the apocalyptic event was anodyne and slow moving? It’s not a shark biting you in half, but a boa constrictor slowly squeezing the life out of you. For two decades, no new children have been born. This has caused society to slowly unravel. The youngest humans have become celebrities. The world is ceasing to function, and falling into war.

Clive Owen plays a man who, you’ll never believe this, has grown cynical. Then, he finds out something remarkable. There is a pregnant woman.

Now, there is almost nothing he won’t do to save her and her unborn child. Directed by the acclaimed, Oscar-winning Alfonso Cuaron, Children of Men is high-quality filmmaking.

Night of the Comet (1984)

We figured a cult classic should be in the mix, and Night of the Comet is our choice. It’s the kind of movie that has Mary Woronov in a supporting role. If that sentence means anything to you, well, you’ve probably already seen Night of the Comet, or at the very least are running out to watch it. It’s kind of comedic in the way it winks at sci-fi disaster movies of yore.

A comet’s fly-by proves fatal, turning the vast majority of people into dust. Some are left dying more slowly, becoming almost crazed zombies. Thanks to the protection of solid steel, though, two Valley girl sisters survive, as does a truck driver.

Now they have to try and survive. What’s impressive is that Night of the Comet manages to wink without feeling wink-y, you know? Also, Catherine Mary Stewart is a delight as one of the leads.

Also Read: 10 Movie Sex Scenes Somebody Should Have Stopped

WALL-E (2008)

A masterpiece of show-don't-tell filmmaking. WALL-E is also the gentlest movie on this list by a wide margin. WALL-E is a sweet movie about a couple of lonesome robots who just might be able to resurrect a long-trash planet Earth.

It starts simply, with no dialogue: Humans have abandoned Earth because it has been polluted to the point of being uninhabitable. WALL-E has been left behind to clean up all the garbage. Then another robot, EVE, arrives. Thus begins a robotic love story, animated majestically.

When we finally meet the humans, fairly late in the film, they're not entirely impressive. But WALL-E and EVE rescue them anyway.

The Omega Man (1971)

Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend has been turned into a movie three times, and parodied in a Simpsons episode as well. Vincent Price was in The Last Man on Earth in 1964, and Will Smith starred in a 2007 version called I Am Legend, but The Omega Man is the best of the bunch.

This is the first Charlton Heston movie on our list, and he was no stranger to post-apocalyptic movies. His character has spent years believing he is alone. Well, alone other than some violent mutated plague survivors.

But what if he's not the last man on Earth? What if there is more left for him than isolation and killing mutants?

Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Tie) (1984)

Hear us out: We'll grant you that much of the action in the Terminator movies takes place before the apocalypse. But the films also give us glimpses of Skynet’s assault on humankind, and the charred world that results from said attack.

We would be remiss not to include at least one Terminator film, given how often people worry about the possibility of a Skynet-like entity wiping out life on our planet.

Also Read: 11 Bad Sequels That Should Never Have Been Made

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Two film icons joined forces to make A.I. a reality. Stanley Kubrick worked on adapting “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” into a film for years. He felt like he needed technology to advance enough to make it.

Eventually, Kubrick realized he had gotten too old to work on it any longer, and in 1995 handed the project over to Steven Spielberg. When Kubrick died in 1999, Spielberg finally was able to get the project rolling.

Haley Joel Osment plays an android programmed to love who is acquired to replace a dead child. Unaccepted, he finds himself on a journey alongside other androids. Eventually it takes us far, far into a future beyond the existence of humanity.

At the time, A.I. was accepted a little tepidly. Now, many consider it a sci-fi classic.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Pretty much every zombie movie is a post-apocalyptic movie, and the modern conception of the zombie movie began with Night of the Living Dead, which depicts the first hours of the end of civilization as we know it.

George A. Romero took a budget a little over $100,000 and skills learned working on industrial films and made a horror movie in his hometown of Pittsburgh. While the movie doesn’t use the word “zombie,” it so clearly is the progenitor of the zombie genre.

At the time, people didn’t know what to make of Night of the Living Dead. Now, it’s considered a seminal horror movie. Of course, it helped that due to an error in submitting the copyright it ended up in the public domain. Hey, that helped make it a cult classic, and Romero a horror movie icon.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Fury Road is perhaps the antithesis of Night of the Living Dead. The latter is low-budget and simple. The former is one of the most bananas movies ever made, in a good way?

George Miller got his start with Mad Max, about a world barely clinging to civilization. By the events of Fury Road, most remnants of our world are long gone, save for a few salvaged weapons and vehicles. The result is perhaps the most-thrilling action extravaganza…ever?

Sure, there is some silliness to Miller’s Mad Max world, with some truly dark dystopian elements undercut by names like “Doof Warrior.” There’s nothing silly about the action, though. Relying largely on practical effects, Fury Road has to be seen to be believed. The car chases, the action, it’s all so riveting. By the way, not only was Fury Road a hit, but it won six Oscars.

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Planet of the Apes was not the first movie to have a twist ending. It certainly was not the last. But almost none have nailed it like Planet of the Apes. The film's final shot reveals why is belongs on this list.

Until that moment, you think Charlton Heston’s astronaut, George Taylor, has traveled through time and space to a planet where apelike creatures have advanced to human levels of intellect.

Then, well, it turns our the truth is much worse.

If you liked this list, you might also like this list of A.I. Movie Villains Ranked.

And we invite you to follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: Planet of the Apes. 20th Century Fox

But here are some 2000s movies only cool kids remember.

Let's roll.

Not Another Teen Movie (2001)

Before he was Captain America, Chris Evans starred in this cheeky comedy drama as a high school football star who makes a bet that he can turn an awkward girl into a prom queen.

Directed by Joel Gallen, Not Another Teen Movie is a spoof on the teen movie genre as a whole, which is full of tropes like makeovers, last-minute airport scenes, and fairy tale romances.

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005)

Based on the book by Ann Brashares, This beloved teen movie follows four best friends who are each going through challenging periods in their lives.

Separated over the summer for the first time in their lives, they discover a magical pair of pants that somehow fits each of them perfectly. So, they decide to mail them to each other throughout the summer for good luck.

Starring America Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn, Alexis Bledel, and Blake Lively, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is a comfort movie that has aged extremely well and never gets old.

Josie and the Pussycats (2001)

Based on the Archie comics series and the 1970 Hanna-Barbera cartoon television series, this 2001 live action satirical musical comedy starred Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid, and Rosario Dawson as a girl band called the Pussycats.

Skyrocketed to fame overnight, they soon get embroiled in an evil scheme between the U.S. government and the music industry to implant subliminal messaging in pop music to convince teenagers to buy trendy products.

It's frothy on the surface, but also quite astute.

Tuck Everlasting (2002)

Walt Disney

Based on the beloved novel by Natalie Babbit, Tuck Everlasting stars Alexis Bledel as Winnie, a teenage girl who meets the Tucks, a family that have become immortal after drinking water from a magical spring. Jonathan Jackson plays Jesse Tuck, who Winnie falls in love with.

It's sort of similar to Edward and Bella from Twilight, considering that Jesse is actually 100 years older than Winnie but looks the same age as her.

But of course, the fountain of youth attracts some bad people who want to sell the water for a big profit, causing the Tucks to go on the run.

A Cinderella Story (2004)

In this romantic teen drama, Hilary Duff plays Sam, a Valley girl who works in a diner run by her mean stepmother played iconically by Jennifer Coolidge.

Chad Michael Murray plays Austin, the popular football player at their school who is unhappy with his father's choices for his future.

Secretly, Sam and Austin are pen pals, sharing the same dreams of going to Princeton — but they don't know each other in real life. Everything changes after prom night.

Jennifer's Body (2009)

In this iconic horror comedy — perhaps Megan Fox's most iconic role — Fox plays high schooler Jennifer who is possessed by a demon.

The demon in Jennifer starts killing and eating boys who mistakenly think she's interested in them romantically.

Meanwhile, Jennifer's friend played by Amanda Seyfried tries to stop her murderous spree.

Thirteen (2003)

Evan Rachel Wood and Nikki Reed star in Thirteen, a drama directed by Catherine Hardwicke and co-written by she and Reed. Wood plays Tracy, a young honors student who has a tough home life and turns to drugs due to the influence of her new friend Evie, played by Reed.

Tracy's mom is played by Holly Hunter, who tries to save Tracy from falling into a life of drugs and petty thievery.

Accepted (2006)

Accepted stars Justin Long as Bartleby Gaines, a high schooler who gets rejected from every college he applies to. So he creates a fake college called South Harmon Institute of Technology (S. H. I. T.) to convince his parents he's continuing his education — but he doesn't expect other kids to apply to it.

So, alongside his friend Sherman Schrader (Jonah Hill), he starts running it like an actual university.

In the words of Jonah Hill's character Sherman Schrader: "I hope you guys have hobo stab insurance."

Sydney White (2007)

We all know Easy A and She's the Man, but only cool kids remember Amanda Bynes' movie Sydney White. In this rom-com, she plays a college freshman with a dream to join her late mother's sorority.

But, alas, she is quickly targeted and outcast by the mean girls who run it.

In retaliation, Sydney and six friends in similar social positions take over the student government to have equal rights for nerds.

The Cheetah Girls (2003)

This was very first Disney Channel Original Movie that was also a musical. So in a way, you could say there's no High School Musical without The Cheetah Girls.

Starring Raven-Symoné as Galleria "Bubbles" Garibaldi (the pink one), Adrienne Bailon as Chanel "Chuchie" Simmons (the purple one), Kiely Williams as Aquanette "Aqua" Walker (the blue one), and Sabrina Bryan as Dorinda "Do" Thomas (the yellow one), the film series follows four teenage girls who become pop stars in a girl group known as The Cheetah Girls.

Who among us didn't pretend to be their favorite Cheetah Girl at recess in grade school? Tag yourself, I'm Chuchie.

Bend It Like Beckham (2002)

In this wonderful and heartwarming movie, Parminder Nagra plays Jess, who comes from a strict Indian family that doesn't let her play soccer.

Kiera Knightly plays Jules, a soccer player who sees Jess playing by herself one day and convinces her to join her local team.

Jess must hide from her parents both the fact that she's on a soccer team — and that she's falling in love with her coach, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

Aquamarine (2006)

Sarah Paxton plays a real-life mermaid named, you guessed it, Aquamarine, who gets washed up on shore after a storm. In the human world, she encounters two young girls — played by Emma Roberts and Joanna "JoJo" Levesque — who are fascinated by her.

With the goal of convincing her father that true love exists, Aquamarine asks the girls for help with winning the heart of the cute lifeguard, Raymond, played by Jake McDorman.

To this day, I still wish I had a pair of starfish earrings that whisper compliments to me.

If you like this list, you might also like this list of 12 Rad ’80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.

And we invite you to follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: Josie and the Pussycats. Universal

As Saturday Night Live celebrates its 51st season, we look back on what the current cast is trying to live up to.

Here we go.

But First

Of course, these things are subjective. Comedy, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. So if you think we missed someone, let us know in the comments. Same thing if you think we got the rankings wrong.

Also: When we're talking about characters who are part of a duo or group, like the Bronx Beat ladies, we're only counting them once. And we're counting original characters, not impersonations.

OK, let's go with this list of the best SNL characters ranked, from very funny to extremely funny.

13 — Gumby (Eddie Murphy)

Eddie Murphy is one of the most singularly talented people ever to star on SNL, but he did so much it's hard to choose one character. For its sheer absurdity and originality, we're going with Gumby.

Murphy didn't invent Gumby — children of the 1950s remember him as a beloved clay TV character — but Murphy did have a brilliant take, playing him as a cynical, cigar-chomping showbiz washout with endless resentments.

Gumby (along with Buckwheat) was one of his many brilliant, meta riffs on the dark side of the entertainment industry.

12 — Lionel Osbourne (Tim Meadows)

We know, not many people would put Lionel Osbourne on a list of the best SNL characters. But as played to bone-dry perfection by Tim Meadows, we find him to be one of the most fascinating of all SNL figures, because we just imagine what's going on behind the surface.

Lionel Osbourne is a man phoning in his job hosting a public affairs talk show called Perspectives. It airs at about 4:50 in the a.m., and serves to barely fulfill a local New York station's "community programming requirement." Lionel seems to barely listen to his guests as he recites useless details to fill time.

And yet: Is this a quiet act of protest? He must know he's fulfilling a quota. His cool, low-effort performance seems like a quietly brilliant protest of the station's lack of real commitment to authentic public affairs programming.

Or he may be playing the game, giving the network what it wants. Or — or! — Lionel may just be barely awake. We'll never know, and it's hypnotic.

11 — The Wild and Crazy Guys (Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin)

The hard-boogieing Czech-born Festruck brothers, Yortuk (Dan Aykroyd) and Georg (Steve Martin), had a wide-eyed Bicentennial-era love of America, and their awkward attempts to assimilate into a disco-driven culture are impossibly endearing.

So are their malapropisms, catch phrases, and oddly gentlemanly approaching to inviting "foxes" back to their "swinging bachelor pad."

One thing that makes them some of the best SNL characters is that they aren't making fun of Czech expatriates — they're making fun of the trendy vanities of 1970s New Yorkers.

It's from an era of many SNL sketches they wouldn't do today, but holds up beautifully.

10 — The Bronx Beat Ladies (Maya Rudolph and Amy Poehler)

Gossipy, cynical, but ultimately good-hearted, Maya Rudolph and Amy Poehler's salt-of-the-earth Bronx Beat characters Jodi and Betty are two of the most human-seeming characters ever to pass through Saturday Night Live.

Through motherhood, complicated marriages, complaints, and gentle counseling for local library volunteer Maureen Diccico (Katy Perry), the ladies get through their harried lives with wisdom, friendship, and realistic expecations, because what are you gonna do.

9 — Sally O'Malley (Molly Shannon)

The older we get, the funnier Sally O'Malley is.

A lot of Molly Shannon characters could be on this list of the best SNL characters, but the irrepressible Sally O'Malley is our favorite. Fifty years old, as she likes people to know, she still has the grace and grit of an athlete-dancer half her age.

One thing we love about the Sally O'Malley sketches is that she's not the butt of the joke — all her boasts are proven to be true.

8 — The Californians

How often does someone effectively satirizing an entire state?

The Californians is a masterful soap opera parody with recurring stars Stuart (Fred Armisen), Karina (Kristen Wiig), Devin (Bill Hader), with pop ins by Trey (Kenan Thompson) and Rosa (Vanessa Bayer).

It's actually mocking a very specific type of Californian — mostly from San Diego through Santa Barbara — who poses as laid back and relaxed but spends an inordinate amount of time talking about freeway interchanges. We think about this one every time someone says "jammed."

7 — Emily Latella (Gilda Radner)

We think about this character every day, decades later, so that has to stand for something.

Gilda Radner was the heart of the early Saturday Night Live, and misguided concerned citizen Emily Latella was one of her most endearing characters.

Her routine feels like it would have worked as well on a vaudeville stage in the 1920s or today as it did in the 1970s: She latches on to some upsetting piece of news while visiting the Weekend Update desk, launches into a heartfelt rant — and soon realizes she's misheard some crucial piece of information fundamental to her point.

But what's most impressive is how relevant the character feels in the 2020s, as people rush to comment on things they didn't watch or read carefully.

6 — Hans and Franz (Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon)

What we love about these characters is how they're almost making fun of arrogance itself – and how it slowly becomes clear that their big talk masks a lot of insecurities. They have a surprising amount of depth.

Kevin Nealon has said the Hans and Franz originated while he was watching an Arnold Schwarzenegger interview on TV and called Dana Carvey to tune in. They nailed the characters when they realized that despite their commitment to avoiding flab, they would never, ever touch a piece of fitness equipment.

Conan O'Brien, Robert Smigel, Carvey and Nealon once had plans for a Hans and Franz movie that would have prominently featured Schwarzenegger, but the action star's packed schedule made it impossible. Fortunately, they gathered together to re-enact it for the Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast.

5 — Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar (Mike Myers and Dana Carvey)

Hard-rocking Aurora, Illinois teens Wayne (Mike Myers) and Garth (Dana Carvey) may be the most profitable of all SNL characters — the first Wayne World film was a massive hit, and follow-up Wayne's World 2 also did quite respectful business. The characters kept going because Wayne and Garth, goofy as they seemed on the surface, had such surprisingly deep reservoirs of emotional and intellectual depth.

Wayne was the quick wit of the duo, but Garth had a soulfulness and wisdom that made him ultimately the more lovable. (Carvey based him in part on his brother, Brad.)

For our money, Wayne's World was at its most Wayne's World when Wayne interrogated the members of Aerosmith about the state of communism in Eastern Europe.

4 — Keyrock, Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer (Phil Hartman)

Phil Hartman, nicknamed "the glue" by cast mates for his ability to coolly play just about anyone or anything, usually went for reliably nuanced acting. But with Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer he got to play someone big and absurd, and the result is one of the weirdest and best SNL characters.

In a truly nuanced and well-observed twist on what could have been a basic fish-out-of-water routine, Keyrock cynically exploits his unfrozen identity to convince jurors that he's just "a simple caveman." The joke isn't on cavemen, it's on manipulators.

3 — Debbie Downer (Rachel Dratch)

Rachel Dratch's Debbie Downer has one joke — but what a joke. Her perfect commitment to Debbie Downer, who can find the gray behind any silver lining, makes her one of the most timeless of all best SNL characters of all. In many ways we've becomes a society of Debbie Downers — people who must always remind us of the perils of existence — and Debbie Downer deniers who just want to enjoy life.

If there's anyone who made castmates break more than Chris Farley, it's Rachel Dratch as Debbie Downer.

2 — Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker (Chris Farley)

Chris Farley's hoarse motivational speaker, who famously lives in a van down by the river, is one of the most buckle-in, frenetic, fully committed of all SNL characters. He was created by Farley and the great Bob Odenkirk when both worked at Second City in Chicago, and made his way over to Saturday Night Live, where he became, for our money, one of the two best SNL characters.

No one on the history of the show could pull a laugh from nothing like Chris Farley, and with a full-throated, magnificent character like Matt Foley, he was unstoppable. One of the pleasure of the Matt Foley sketches is watching Farley's co-stars try, just try, not to break up.

But the best thing about Foley was how somehow, Farley managed to wring out our sympathy and begrudging respect for Foley, a relentless hustler who never quit.

1 — The Church Lady (Dana Carvey)

For our money, Dana Carvey is the best all-around SNL player, and his Church Lady the best of the best SNL characters. She's a perfect, weird vehicle for Dana Carvey's quick, insightful, observational character work. Whether we go to church or not, we know a Church Lady — a person who lives to scold and does it with a surprising amount of wit and verve.

She makes us feel guilty for things it would never occur to us to feel guilty about, and yet we have an odd respect for her. Carvey imbues her with a powerful, unearned authority, and she's one of the most enduring and flexible of all SNL characters — drop her into any scenario, and she's funny.

And we loved seeing Carvey return as the Church Lady this season — with David Spade as Hunter Biden, no less. Hit it, Pearl.

Liked Our List of the 15 Best SNL Characters Ranked?

Again, please take to the comments to share your list of the best SNL characters ranked.

You might also like this list of Rad '80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember. And lots of great SNL routines not on this list are on our list of the 13 Best SNL Sketches.

All images from NBC's Saturday Night Live.

Before you run to the comments section to complain that we left out your favorite movie, please note, again, that this isn't a list of our favorite 1970s horror movies — they're ranked in ascending order by box office. So this list was created by real audiences, voting with their wallets.

That said: In our humble opinion, the number one movie ranked by box office is also the number one movie in terms of quality. Sometimes the people get it exactly right.

10. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Total Gross Worldwide: $30,902,270 (The source for all box office numbers in this story is BoxOfficeMojo.com.)

Tobe Hooper's classic horror movie just turned 50 this year. Following the unfortunate story of a group of young people who take an innocent trip to a remote house in Texas, they have no idea what's coming to them when they encounter a strange hitchhiker.

This movie marks the beginning of one of the most iconic horror villains ever — Leatherface, who wields a chainsaw in order to murder his victims along with his cannibalistic family.

9. Carrie (1976)

Total Gross Worldwide: $33,801,936

Sissy Spacek stars in this unforgettable Stephen King adaptation about a teenage girl who gets pushed to the edge by high school bullies and her abusive, hyper-religious mother.

When she gets invited to the prom by a boy she likes, Carrie gets once last chance at a happy adolescent moment — until someone decides to play a mean trick on her. What they don't know is that Carrie has supernatural telekinetic powers and she's about to snap.

8. Halloween (1978)

Total Gross Worldwide: $47,160,941

Jamie Lee Curtis stars in this classic horror movie featuring iconic villain Mike Myers. Wearing a creepy mask, Myers has a penchant for murdering teenagers, and when he escapes from prison after murdering his sister 15 years earlier, he seeks more blood.

Curtis plays Laurie Strode, whom Myers starts stalking while looking for his next victim.

7. The Omen (1976)

Total Gross Worldwide: $60,922,980

In this classic horror film, a mother's baby dies suddenly after birth and her husband replaces him with another baby without telling her. They name him Damien, and unfortunately for them, it turns out that baby is the antichrist.

Things get sticky when baby Damien scares animals and violently resists entering a church.

Also, it inspired the name of Damien Leone, whose Terrifier films are among the most successful recent horror franchises.

6. Young Frankenstein (1974)

Total Gross Worldwide: $86,274,794

There could be some debate as to whether Young Frankenstein belongs on this list, since its primarily a comedy. But it is considered a comedy-horror film, since it's a parody of the horror genre, so we argue that it counts. It may not be as scary as the other films on this list, but it is certainly a genre film.

Starring Gene Wilder, this one is as funny as it is spooky.

Also! Please walk this way to 10 Behind the Scenes Stories of Young Frankenstein.

5. The Amityville Horror (1979)

Total Gross Worldwide: $86,432,000

Based on the experiences of the Lutz family in a house in Amityville, New York that they claim is haunted, The Amityville Horror stars James Brolin and Margot Kidder as a couple whose home is haunted by a demonic entity.

The validity of the story of the haunting at 112 Ocean Avenue has been debated over the years, but there really was a murder spree that took place there in 1974 when Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot and killed his of his family members there. He was convicted of second-degree murder and died in prison in 2021. Whether the haunting part is true or not is unknown, but the Amityville Horror movies are still a lot of fun.

4. Alien (1979)

Total Gross Worldwide: $108,591,169

This classic sci-fi horror film is so popular that it spawned a whole franchise. Starring Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, a member of the crew of the space ship Nostromo, it follows what happens when they discover an alien presence on board their ship.

It was followed by Aliens in 1986, along with several other Alien films, including the most recent installment, Alien: Romulus this year.

3. Jaws 2 (1978)

Total Gross Worldwide: $187,884,007

The sequel to the original Jaws may not have been as good as the original, but it still made a lot of money.

Like in the first movie, Sheriff Brody (Roy Scheider) tries to warn Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) that there's a shark in the waters off of the touristed beach community of Amity Island.

And, having learned nothing from the horrors of the original movie, Mayor Vaughn again does not listen and innocent people are killed once again by a shark. Surprise, surprise. But this time, as you can see above, the shark catches on fire.

2. The Exorcist (1973)

Total Gross Worldwide: $430,872,776

One of the most iconic horror films of all time is The Exorcist, and it's also loosely based on a true story. It follows an unfortunate young girl named Regan who gets possessed by the demon Pazuzu.

Much horror transpires as priests try to exorcise the demon out of poor Regan.

1. Jaws (1975)

Total Gross Worldwide: $477,220,580

Of course, topping our list of the highest grossing horror movies of the 1970s is Steven Spielberg's 1975 horror classic, Jaws. It follows, as mentioned above, the fictional events of the beach town of Amity (also fictional) in which a giant Great White shark torments the waters, eating swimmers and beach goers.

Come for the surprisingly realistic looking shark, stay for Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw, who play scientist Hooper and shark hunter Quint, respectively.

Like This List of Highest Grossing Horror Movies of the 1970s?

You might also like this list of The 10 Highest Grossing Horror Movies of the 1980s.

Main image: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Bryanston Distribution Company.

The star of Casablanca, Notorious and other masterpieces — and three-time Oscar winner — was born in 1915 in Stockholm to a Swedish father and German mother. She went on to become one of the most iconic actors of all time, starring in many films that still feel as relevant today as they were decades ago.

Let's look back at just five of them.

Casablanca (1942)

Stunningly time when it was released at the height of World War II, Casablanca has somehow never gone out of style — because of its celebration of freedom and resistance, yes, but also because of its crackling dialogue and the unmatched chemistry between its leads, Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart.

She plays Ilsa Lund, who one night in Casablanca enters the Rick's Cafe, which just so happens to be owned by her ex-lover, Rick Blaine. The problem: She's now with Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) a Czech Resistance leader battling the Nazis.

Rick and Ilsa still have strong feelings for each other, but must ultimately decide whether to act on them or sublimate them for the greater good. Bergman and Bogart make it feel like a very difficult choice — which makes the film's final outcome all the more heroic.

A Best Picture winner, Casablanca has only gone up since in the appraisal of most film lovers.

Notorious (1946)

Another film tied to World War II, Notorious finds Ingrid Bergman playing Alicia Huberman, the daughter of a German war criminal who is enlisted by U.S. agent T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) to help infiltrate a group of Nazis who fled to Brazil after World War II.

Things become complicated when she's asked to seduce one of the targets — even after she and Devlin have apparently fallen for each other.

For much of the film, Alicia — and Bergman — keep her loyalties very much in question. Bergman and director Alfred Hitchcock walk an impressive narrative tightrope in a fast-moving, elegant thriller featuring one of the most complex female leads in cinematic history. Notorious is one of her three collaborations with Hitchcock, the others being 1945's Spellbound (1945), and 1949's Under Capricorn.

Gaslight (1944)

Adapted from Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play Gas Light — and remaking the British film Gaslight — this American version finds Bergman playing Paula Alquist Anton, whose husband (played by Charles Boyer) manipulates her into believing she may be insane.

It's another demanding role for Bergman, who must maintain the audiences sympathies through a state of manipulated confusion, and Oscar voters rewarded her with the first of her two Oscars for Best Actress. (She won again in 1956 for Anastasia, and won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Murder on the Orient Express in 1974.)

Like Casablanca — scenes of which still turn up frequently as memes — Gaslight remains so influential in modern expression that "gaslight" remains a modern term for people accused of manipulating reality.

Stromboli (1950)

The neorealist drama Stromboli is a pleasure to watch at a surface level: It tells the story of a Lithuanian woman (Bergman) who meets an Italian man (Mario Vitale) at an internment camp, and journeys with him to his home island, which is very different than she expects.

Stromboli is even more fascinating when you keep in mind the behind the scenes story of the film. It was born from Ingrid Bergman writing a letter to director Roberto Rossellini, saying she wanted to work with him. They set up a production company and funding through RKO and its owner, Howard Hughes.

But their collaboration went much further — they began a romance during the film that led to the birth of their daughter, actress Isabella Rossellini.

Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

The Agatha Christie adaptation Murder on the Orient Express would be captivating for the casting alone, and Bergman is a standout. She won an Oscar — her third — for Best Supporting Actress.

The rest of the cast included another woman famously paired with Bogart onscreen, Lauren Bacall — Bogart and Bacall were also married for more than a decade — as well as a who's who of stellar actors, including Sean Connery, just emerging from his run of James Bond films; Jacqueline Bissett, Michael York, Albert Finney, Vanessa Redgrave, Anothony Perkins, and many more. It's fascinating to see so many screen icons mix it up.

Bergman died eight years later, of breast cancer on her 67th birthday in 1982. But she continued to work, and shine, until the end.

If you liked this list, you might also like this list of Classic 1940s Movies That Are Still a Pleasure to Watch.

And we invite you to follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. Warner Bros

Editor's Note: Corrects main image.

If you're a Back to the Future fan (that's Michael J. Fox, above, as Marty McFly in Back to the Future II, with a flying DeLorean) you're well aware of the DeLorean and the nostalgia it induces.

Either way, read on.

DeLorean Background

John DeLorean famously dreamed up the DMC DeLorean, also known as the super-1980s sports car that Marty McFly and Doc Brown use for a time machine in Back to the Future.

Netflix's docuseries Myth & Mogul: John DeLorean brings to light some little-known facts about the founder of the DeLorean Motor Company. In the span of just 10 years, the businessman went from an automotive mogul on a meteoric rise to fame, to walking out of a courthouse, his company bankrupt, asking, "Would you buy a used car from me?"

Besides his famous cocaine trafficking trial (in which he was acquitted) and his signature car creation that will forever induce '80s nostalgia, here are seven other things you probably didn't know about DeLorean, courtesy of Myth & Mogul

He Had a Difficult Childhood

DeLorean was the son of Romanian immigrants who moved to Detroit and began working in factories in the then-burgeoning automobile industry.

“My father, he was the youngest of like 13 kids, a farming family in the middle of Europe. [He] came to this country all by himself at age 15 or 16, he fought his way through a variety of jobs including being a cowboy, a factory worker,” DeLorean himself says in a voiceover from an interview featured in the docuseries. “The way the world cast its lot, my father was destined to be a common laborer all his life. He also led a frustrated life because he felt he had a contribution to make, but nobody would listen when you’re just a little guy.”

But the future mogul's childhood was fraught with domestic violence.

“His father and mother — apparently, they had a hard time getting along," says auto business reporter J. Patrick Wright. "Things got rough and [his mother would] pick up the kids and move to California for a while and then come back. That was kind of his life.”

His Dad's Drinking Was a Problem for the Family

According to auto-enthusiast website DriveTribe.com, DeLorean's father's “poor English and problems with alcohol prevented him from ever progressing beyond the factory floor.”

DeLorean's son, Zachary DeLorean, recalls his father telling him similar stories about his upbringing.

"We would sometimes talk about his family or the way he grew up. He had talked about how, like, his dad was and his buddies on payday on a Friday night would go get their paycheck, go to a local bar, get into fights, beat the crap out of cops… these big brawls would spill out on the street and my dad had said that his father kind of enjoyed that," he said. "I think he said his dad was an alcoholic. There was some physical abuse going on in the household.”

He Had Plastic Surgery on His Jaw

If you look at pictures of how DeLorean looked when he worked at General Motors in the late 1950s and 1960s, compared to the way he looked when he moved to Hollywood and started DMC in the 1970s, the difference is stark.

"He was transformed," writer Gail Sheehy, who interviewed DeLorean for her 1974 book Passages, says in the first episode of the docuseries.

"He almost embraced the youth movement quite literally," adds investigative reporter Hillel Leven. "At this point, he starts to reinvent himself physically, getting plastic surgery. The plastic surgery, in particular, is his jaw — building out his jaw."

The DMC Was Born of a Midlife Crisis

Sheehy says in the doc that DeLorean was in a midlife crisis when he started DMC and began designing his namesake car.

By 1970, DeLorean, who was born in 1925, was 45 years old. He got into fitness and began dating his third wife, model Cristina Ferrare.

As Ivan Fallon, author of John DeLorean: The Rise and Fall of a Dream Maker, puts it, he also "went Hollywood."

“John DeLorean went to Hollywood, he got connected to that world out there. He used to find excuses to go out there and travel, and he made friends out there. It became a hip existence," Ed Lapham, editor of Automotive News, says in the docuseries.

He Struggled With His Sense of Self-Worth

Sheehy recalls interviewing DeLorean and asking him about his childhood and his relationship with his father, from which she gleaned that the outwardly successful businessman still carried that childhood trauma with him.

“He [his father] died and left the family with nothing, and John with no emotional sense of love or belonging or self-worth," Sheehy says. "You could tell from the way he told it in a halting way that there was a lot of pain there. There was a lot of loss. There was a lot of sense of never being anything or anybody... That certainly never went with the image that the public had once he began rolling. So you knew that underneath, he would probably always have a sense of inner powerlessness and fear of being nobody, so he had to become really somebody to keep that at bay.”

He Took Cues From Younger Generations

The docuseries says that when DeLorean was first designing the concept for the DeLorean sports car, he was influenced by the gas shortages of the '70s and the younger generation's subsequent interest in environmental preservation. To take advantage of the times, he designed the DeLorean to be fuel-efficient.

"The oil crisis increased the price of gasoline, and after John DeLorean left General Motors in 1973, everybody knew that he saw a marketing opportunity for an American-built car that was fuel-efficient," said consumer activist Ralph Nader.

"We're doing a sports-racing car here. Very light-weight, excellent fuel economy," DeLorean says in a voiceover played in the docuseries. "It's going to be very beautiful aesthetically, and it's going to be designed in materials to have an eternal life. It's designed to last."

He Pretended to Be an Ad Salesman for the Yellow Pages in College

The doc says that decades before DeLorean was charged with cocaine trafficking in 1982 — again, he was acquitted — he tried out an ill-fated business scheme when he was in college at the Lawrence Institute of Technology in the 1940s.

“He went out thinking he could pretend to be the Yellow Pages, he could sell ads and just print up a few books on his own and distribute them," Leven says in the series. "Obviously, he wasn’t going to be able to distribute them to every home like the real Yellow Pages. Anyway, he was caught, and he was evidently facing serious charges of fraud, and it took a college professor to intervene and say, ‘I’ll get you out of this.’ What he learned from this experience was that a little charm and a quick wit could get you off the hook in the worst of circumstances.”

John DeLorean died in 2005 at the age of 80. Though DeLorean ultimately failed to achieve his aim of creating an automobile company to rival the likes of Ford and General Motors, his son Zachary says he hopes people remember that his father strived to make his wildest dreams come true.

“15 years after my father’s death, there’s still this following of the car. I think that’s really what should be acknowledged,” Zachary DeLorean says in Episode 3 of the docuseries. “He did something. And he was trying to make a difference, I think. That’s really the legacy that’s left behind, and I think that’s what that car should represent."

Liked This List of John DeLorean Facts We Bet You Didn't Know?

You might also like this list of Stars of the 1980s Who Are Still Going Strong or this list of the Top 10 Highest-Grossing Films With a Zero on Rotten Tomatoes.

Episodes of Myth & Mogul are now streaming on Netflix.

At a time when we're all putting on our ears and fuzzy tails and stuffing our baskets with goodies, let's look back on these great movie bunny suits.

Some are great, some are less great. But all have bunny costumes.

Legally Blonde (2001)

Let's start with one of the best movies with somebody in a bunny costume.

Legally Blonde, a basically perfect comedy, stars Reese Witherspoon as a chronically underestimated law student.

When she shows up to a party, smartly dressed in a bunny suit, her horrible boyfriend informs her that he doesn't think she's all that smart, and urges her to focus on her other values.

"I'll show you how valuable Elle Woods can be," she declares, storming out with her ears flopping.

She goes on to prove everybody wrong.

Night of the Lepus (1972)

Night of the Lepus is one of the most entertaining movies we've ever seen, thoughperhaps not for the reasons the filmmakers intended.

A sci-fi film about a desert town infested by giant killer rabbits, it tried to scare audiences in two ways: With people dressed as bunnies, and with real bunnies, their cute faces smeared with ketchup, hopping around minitature sets.

It had a good cast, includingStar Trek veteran DeForest Kelley and Psycho star Janet Leigh. There was just one problem, as Leigh later explained to Starlog:

“How can you make a bunny rabbit menacing?”

The House Bunny (2008)

Another story of an underestimated young woman, The House Bunny stars Anna Faris as Shelley Darlingson, who ages out of playboy bunnydom by turning 27.

As one character informs her that that's "59 in bunny years."

Soon she becomes the house mother for a sorority and helps make over her young charges, who are played by, among others, Emma Stone.

The Man With Two Brains (1983)

At one point in the bonkers Steve Martin comedy The Man With Two Brains, Martin's brain surgeon character, Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr, is walking tensely down a hospital corridor in scrubs when he catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror.

He realizes he's in bunny ears.

With no explanation, he whips them off, throwing them at a colleague.

"I don't find this amusing, Guerrero!" he shouts. And the film continues.

Bridget Jones' Diary (2001)

One of the funniest moments in the very funny Bridget Jones' Diary arrives when Bridget (Renée Zellweger) arrives at a fancy garden party she thought was a costume party.

She's in the least appropriate attire possible, of course: A bunny costume.

Stil, she handles things with remarkable aplomb, sneaking a smoke with a local clergyman.

Donnie Darko (2001)

Easily the scariest movie on this list.

Throughout Donnie Darko, Jake Gyllenhaal's possibly schizophrenic, or possibly prophetic lead character is haunted by a character in a bunny costume named Frank.

"Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?" Donnie asks Frank.

Frank whispers: "Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?"

Mean Girls (2004)

In a cute inversion of the Bridget Jones bunny costume mixup, all the Plastics (played by Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, and Amanda Seyfried) dress up as animals for Halloween. As their leader, Regina George scores the bunny costume.

But Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) hasn't gotten the memo that Halloween is the one day you can dress however you want, and opts for the most grotesque fright mask possible.

Regina later kisses the boy Cady likes, for good measure.

The film also holds a proud place on our list of 12 Movies With People Dressed as Cats.

The Bunnyman (2012)

Slightly less scary than Frank is the Bunnyman, the titular villain of the 2011 horror film based on Virginia’s urban legend, the Bunny Man.

Oh, you haven't heard of the Bunny Man? He's a man in a bunny costume who chases people with an axe. In the movie, the Bunny Man uses a chainsaw instead.

If the chainsaw bunny costume doesn't scare you, maybe this will: The Bunnyman eats people instead of carrots.

A Christmas Story (1983)

Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) suffers many indignities in A Christmas Story, but none is worse than having to wear bunny costume pajamas, a Christmas gift from his Aunt Clara.

Adding to the humiliation: It's not just a bunny costume, but a bunny costume with two little bunnies for feet.

"Immediately my feet began to sweat as those two fluffy little bunnies with the blue-button eyes stared sappily up at me," he intones in a voiceover.

"He looks like a deranged Easter Bunny," his father observes, before allowing him to change back to his regular clothes.

Star 80 (1980)

The saddest movie on this list, Bob Fosse's Star 80 tells the true story of Playboy model Dorothy Stratten (played by Mariel Hemingway), who was murdered by her husband Paul Snider in 1980.

Adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning Village Voice article "Death of a Playmate" by Teresa Carpenter, it recounts Snider's sinister obsessiveness, which leads to horrendous violence. Eric Roberts is terrifying as Snider.

If you liked this list, you might also like this list of 13 Deadly Animal Movies That Used Real Animals.

And we invite you to follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: Mean Girls. Paramount

Editor's Note: Corrects image.

While George Lucas is best known as the creator of Star Wars, he also created Dr. Henry "Indiana" Jones, the academic archaeologist and part-time adventurer who spends his life traveling the globe in search of artifacts that belong in a museum.

He's tough, he's cantankerous, he's whip smart — and he's smart with a whip. Played by Harrison Ford (and River Phoenix, for a few minutes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), he may be the greatest action-adventure star Hollywood has ever produced.

In a gift from the movie gods, Lucas paired up with his good friend Steven Spielberg on the franchise, with Spielberg directing all but one of the Indiana Jones movies. When they're good, they're great. When they're not, well... they make the others look even greater.

Here are our ranking of all five Indiana Jones movies, from worst to best.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Just to be clear, we love Indiana Jones movies — in fact, we love them so much that we wish they'd stopped at three. Spielberg didn't direct 2023's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, but we imagine it would have been only slightly better if he had.

James Mangold, a top-tier director whose films include Logan and Walk the Line, took over for Spielberg, who only executive produced this one.

The problem with this film was just time, which comes for us all. Harrison Ford — one of the all-time best actors and movie stars — was pushing 80 during the production.

One of the charms of Indiana Jones movies is that he's always the underdog, getting beaten and battered while hilariously outnumbered. But Dial of Destiny just asked for too much suspension of disbelief, especially during an ill-advised CGI-heavy opening with Ford de-aged by decades (above).

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was the lowest-grossing Indiana Jones movie, earning about $384 million on a massive budget — Forbes estimated that it lost more than $100 million.

We also felt like the ending was just too much. This unfortunately made our list of sequels nobody needs to see.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

This movie is fine, but we expect from Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones should mean soaring highs, seemingly effortless deadpan humor, and introductions to fascinating mythologies, heavily tweaked for multiplex (or better yet, drive-in) consumption.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had a cool setting — we loved the homage to 1950s sci-fi movies and atomic age B films, best epitomized by the so-silly-it's-great scene in which a refrigerator helps Indy survive an atomic bomb.

We also like the cast. Cate Blanchett had the thankless task of being the main baddie, a KGB agent competing with Indy to get a telepathic crystal skull, located somewhere in Peru — a nice callback to the Peru-set first scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Harrison Ford was in fine form, and we were thrilled at the return of Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood. Shia LaBeouf was acceptable as Mutt Williams, though we wish he'd never joined the franchise at all given his grim outcome, revealed in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. And we liked the film's flirtation with handing the whole Indy legacy over to Mutt — before Indy himself nullifies that notion.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

As we mentioned above, we wish this film really had been the last crusade — the Indy franchise could have been a magnificent trilogy.

After a wild departure in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Last Crusade brought the franchise back to its core mission: Indiana Jones punching Nazis. We love it, and the addition of Sean Connery as Indy's dad, Henry, ratcheted things up to instant classic level.

Twists and surprises abound, and the conclusion — Indiana solving a series of deadly puzzles to find the Holy Grail — was masterful, and allowed the audience to play along instead of just watching Indy jump, roll, and crack his whip.

We absolutely love this movie, and the remaining two movies on our list.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

That's right: We think Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is better than Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We love them both, mind you, but have a feeling a lot of people will grouse over our choice here, so let us explain.

More than almost any other movie ever, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a thrill ride from start to finish. Even when it lets up for a little bit of exposition in the dinner scene, there's some classic Indiana Jones movie distraction — namely the hideous food served at Pankot Palace.

That scene has drawn some criticism for suggesting that the people of fictional Pankot — and by extension, people who look like them — are in some way backward. But consider, if you will, the possibility that the savvy people of the palace are in fact messing with their Western guests and their cultural biases. It gives the movie another layer of fun.

The PG-rated movie was so scary it helped inspire the PG-13 rating, and even Raiders screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan found it to be excessive, once calling the film "very ugly and mean-spirited."

Oh well. Also, that climactic Temple of Doom bridge sequence, above? Incredibly good.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Again, this is one of the best movies ever made — a classic that never gets old. In fact, its adherence to the adventuring serials of the 1930s and '40s made it feel steeped in film history from the start, giving it a mix of kitsch and Golden Age Hollywood charm that no other movie has ever replicated.

It breaks rules from the beginning — for the first few minutes, you might think Alfred Molina is the star of the film — and the romance between Indy and Marion is convincing, entrancing, and very easy to root for.

The action sequences are as good as those in any movie, especially when you consider that in 1981, all the effects were practical — but the coolest fight in the movie is the one Indy avoids by simply shooting a master swordsman.

The film also has a wonderful exploration of science versus faith, and has, for our money, maybe the best ending of any movie. The fate of the Ark is dry, understated, and a great joke about government bureaucracy.

If you liked this list of Indiana Jones movies ranked, you may also like our list of All 11 Star Wars Movies Ranked.

And please follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: Kate Capshaw and Harrison Ford in a publicity image for Indiana Jones and The Temple Of Doom. Paramount.

Beware that spoilers follow, and may the force be with you, always.

Here we go.

But First

We love Star Wars. But part of Star Wars is loving and defending your version of Star Wars — and defending it again versions of the saga that feels like cash-ins, or otherwise unworthy of the legacy.

Rogue One, above, is for us a good example of a project that brings together the best of Star Wars.

Below are all 11 Star Wars movies ranked worst to best.

The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

Look, we love Star Wars. But the sequel trilogy that started with The Force Awakens sometimes felt like new kids playing with old toys. The costumes and space ships looked right, even if the CGI backgrounds were a little distracting. But the characters just felt flat or underdeveloped. You had to ask: Why are we here? Hasn't the Skywalker saga been told?

The Rise of Skywalker felt like the most desperate film of the sequel trilogy, as it (spoilers ahead, final warning) revived Emperor Palpatine for no reason and settled the mystery of Rey's parentage (also: who cares?) by revealing that he was her granddad.

We just didn't feel the usual magic.

The Force Awakens (2015)

An unpleasant movie for all the reasons listed previously, but we have some other gripes, too: The movie brought back Han Solo just to have his son kill him, which served no purpose other than to make the whiny Ben Solo/Kylo Ren seem like a viable threat. It isn't actor Adam Driver's fault that Ren never had Darth Vader or the Emperor's sense of malice: He's written as a brat.

New lead characters Rey, Poe and Finn never caught fire — they just didn't have enough to do. And the movie made its craziest miscalculation by casting Lupita Nyong'o, a magnetic, Oscar-winning actor, as a forgettable CGI character named Maz Kanata. She should have been one of the leads — in human form. We regretfully placed both The Rise of Skywalker and The Force Awakens on our list of Sequels Nobody Needs to See.

It was nice to see the original stars back, though.

The Phantom Menace (1999)

We have never had a more disappointing movie theater experience that the opening of The Phantom Menace: Weird aliens with stereotypical voices talking about... trade routes? We waited 16 years since Return of the Jedi, then lined up for a midnight first showing... for this?

There are other bad things about The Phantom Menace — its CGI never looked as cool as the practical effects in the original trilogy, Jar Jar, the confusing and unnecessary stuff about midichlorians — but also some good things.

Natalie Portman was quite good as Padme Amidala, Liam Neeson provided a steady hand as Qui-Gon Jinn, and Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi did a remarkable job of channeling Sir Alec Guinness while making his own mark. Darth Maul, played by Ray Park, was a fabulous villain and disappeared far too soon. More on that soon.

Attack of the Clones (2002)

It was fine. We like the title, and it was cool to meet Jango Fett.

Natalie Portman, again, was very good — one of the most empathetic of all Star Wars characters, and the heart of the prequels.

And we wish her chemistry with Hayden Christensen had been better. It wasn't the fault of either actor — they just had some clunky dialogue.

Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Revenge of the Sith drove home the sad conclusion that, even at their best, the prequels maybe shouldn't have been made.

Like Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger, and countless other movie villains, Darth Vader becomes less interesting the more you know about him.

Still: Vader is one of the coolest parts of the Star Wars world, and it was cool to see him again, 22 years after his demise in Return of the Jedi. We just wish it didn't take three sometimes tedious prequel movies to get to this point.

The Last Jedi (2017)

This movie has plenty of detractors, but let's give credit to writer-director Rian Johnson for taking big swings.

Unlike the films that bookend it in the sequel trilogy, The Force Awakens and Revenge of the Sith, The Last Jedi tries to break some new ground by examining how average spacefolks view the war between the Rebels and the Empire (or the Resistance and the First Order, as the new films rebrand them).

It's fine. It's the best movie for Poe in the new trilogy. And it was nice to see Mark Hamill get to shine again as Luke Skywalker. He's grown into a great warrior who has replaced youthful vigor with Yoda-like wisdom. And we know, we know: Wars not make one great.

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

This movie doesn't add much to the legend of Han Solo, and instead fills in details of stories that were perfectly covered by brief mentions in the original trilogy, with our imaginations filling in the details. (Somehow hearing that the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs is cooler than seeing it happen.)

But Solo doesn't do any damage to the legacy of Star Wars: Alden Ehrenreich survives the near-impossible mission of filling Harrison Ford's boots as the coolest smuggler in space, and the movie introduces enough new elements to feel fresh. It has nothing to be ashamed of, and it was fun to watch, especially as it picked up steam.

We do regret that it revived the most underused character of the prequels, Darth Maul — only to relegate him to a cameo. We hope he's revived again.

The film was being led by the directorial team of Phil Lord and Chris Miller before creative differences led to their being replaced by Ron Howard. The smash success of Lord and Miller's new sci-fi film Project Hail Mary makes us even more curious about how they would have handled Han Solo.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

The first Star Wars movie released after George Lucas sold his empire to Disney, Rogue One was a truly gutsy enterprise.

Rather than rehash old material, Rogue One answers one of the great mysterious of the original Star Wars: Could Luke really blow up the Death Star with a single shot? While explaining the origin and details of the plans Leia is shepherding at the start of A New Hope, Rogue One also gives us a grittier take on Star Wars than we'd ever seen before — but its honesty about the grim sacrifices made by people everyone forgets adds poignancy to the entire Star Wars universe.

Felicity Jones is an excellent lead as Jyn Erso, and Diego Luna as Cassian Andor shines brightly enough to justify his own much-praised Disney+ prequel series, Andor, from Rogue One co-screenwriter Tony Gilroy.

And the way it leads directly into the second movie in this list — with two unexpected, thrilling cameos from a father and daughter — is pure cinematic joy.

Return of the Jedi (1983)

Remember when we said the opening of The Phantom Menace was our most disappointing experience in a movie theater? Let us tell you about our best. It was the moment Luke Skywalker stepped off the plank of Jabba's execution skiff, about to fall into the Sarlacc pit, then spun around, and caught the edge of the plank — and — and — just watch it.

And pretend you're seven years old, sitting in a dark theater, going from the despair of thinking your hero is going to die, only to see him completely turn it around, with the help of all his friends — it still gets us.

There are many other excellent things in Return of the Jedi, including Luke's reunion with his father, the Ewok fight, Han and Leia — we love this movie. A perfect ending to the greatest of all movie trilogies.

A New Hope (1977)

Watch Star Wars: A New Hope again, and it's impossible not to be in awe. George Lucas pays tribute to the Flash Gordon sci-fi serials that inspired him, but also to the films of Akira Kurosawa and Joseph Campbell's studies of the hero's journey.

In the first 48 minutes of the movie, Lucas also introduces at least seven iconic, unforgettable characters: C-3PO, R2-D2, Darth Vader, Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and — near the 50-minute mark — Han Solo and Chewbacca. Everything that seems too coincidental on early viewings turns out to make perfect sense. (Why does Luke just happen to live near Obi-Wan? Becuase Obi-Wan has been keeping watch over him, all his life.)

The storytelling is also impeccable from the opening shot: a very big ship chases a very small ship. A two-year-old can see this movie and know who to root for.

By the Way

In Sam Wasson's excellent new book about Lucas' friend and supporter Francis Ford Coppola, The Path to Paradise, one of the producers of A New Hope, Gary Kurtz, notes that the opening scene took eight months of painstaking, analog effects.

It was worth it. And the opening scene establishes a rule about size that carries across all the Star Wars movies.

And now, on to the greatest of all Star Wars movies.

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

The Empire Strikes Back is a film about growing up: The easiest decisions are the hardest, the hardest are the easiest. Do you finish your training or save your friends? Do you betray your friend to save your city in the clouds?

Just when things start to seem simple, everything you thought you knew turns out to be wrong. Obi-Wan... never told you... what happened to your father.

It's been said that The Empire Strikes Back made Generation X. Star Wars gave us a good guys vs. bad guys space fantasy, and then The Empire Strikes Back revealed that the galaxy is more complex than we ever could have imagined. With Coppola's The Godfather Part 2, it's one of the greatest sequels ever made, with crackling Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan dialogue that recalls Casablanca, heart-stopping action sequences, and surprises at every turn — including the big one. About what happened to Luke's father.

Can you imagine seeing the Star Wars films in the wrong order — prequels first, then the original trilogy — and being denied the greatest reveal in the history of cinema? The Empire Strikes Back has it, and much more.

It tops this list of Star Wars movies ranked, and would rank very highly in our list of the best movies, period. It's not just the best Star Wars movie but the best Star Wars period, including shows, books, comics, and everything else.

Liked This List of Star Wars Movies Ranked Worst to Best?

We understand these things are subjective. Let us know in the comments if you disagree with anything we say here — what do you think is the best Star Wars movie?

You may also like this list of All 5 Indiana Jones Movies, given that George Lucas also created Indy when he wasn't creating the majesty of Star Wars.

Main image: Rogue One. Lucasfilm.

While cats may not be “man’s best friend," everyone would agree that cat costumes tend to look better than dog costumes. Which may explain why there have been so many cat costumes in cinema, from the slinky to the silly.

Here are 12 movies featuring people costumed as cats. Grab your saucer of milk and read on.

Batman Returns (1992)

Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman helped revitalize the superhero movie, so he had a lot of freedom for the sequel.

This time he went with two great villains from the Caped Crusader’s rogues gallery: Danny DeVito's Penguin, and Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman.

As is often the case in onscreen portrayals of Catwoman, Pfeiffer's Selina Kyle was villanious at times, but wanted, in the end, to be good.

The costume design for Catwoman, highlighted by heavily visible stitching, is one of many artistic highlights of Burton's goth Christmas action film. While Batman Returns is weirder than Batman, and decidedly less interested in Batman, it has some devoted defenders.

Catwoman (2004)

Finding defenders for Catwoman is harder. As the protagonist of this movie, Catwoman is much more of an antihero. Yes, she dresses up in a cat costume, and she commits crimes, but she’s also trying to take down the villainous cosmetics mogul played by Sharon Stone.

In this film, Patience Phillips, aka Catwoman, takes on feline traits. The film goes further down that road than even the campy, comedic ’60 Batman TV show. Unfortunately, Catwoman wasn’t received as campy fun, and the film flopped.

Still, the timing of Halle Berry playing Catwoman led to a memorable award show moment. Fresh off her Best Actress Oscar for Monster’s Ball, Berry won Worst Actress at the Golden Raspberry Awards, aka the Razzies, for Catwoman.

She had enough of a sense of humor to accept her Razzie award in person.

The Cat in the Hat (2003)

The Cat in the Hat is perhaps the quintessential Dr. Seuss story, and in this live-action adaptation, Mike Myers donned quite a cat costume to play the titular hero.

How did this happen? Myers had nixed a film based on his Saturday Night Live sketch “Sprockets,” and to settle that and to avoid legal issues, it was agreed he’d star in The Cat in the Hat.

Intriguingly, there's a new Cat in the Hat movie coming soon, with a different SNL alum as the cat: Bill Hader will voice the mischievous feline, though this version will be animated, not live-action.

Josie and the Pussycats (2001)

This one features not one but three people dressed like cats. An underrated comedy about selling out, Josie and the Pussycats stars Rosario Dawson, Tara Reid and Rachael Leigh Cook as bandmates balancing art and commerce.

Based on the Archie Comics series, it could have gone the cute and silly route, but opted to Trojan Horse in witty messages about staying true to yourself and resisting the corporate overlords. That ambition lands the film a place on our list of Smart Movies Disguised as Dumb Movies.

All that, and the songs are power pop masterpieces – notably "3 Small Words," which features Letters to Cleo vocalist Kay Hanley on lead and Cook, Reid and Dawson singing backup.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)

Sure, this is an animated film. However, a human character does dress as a cat. This may be the most successful film ever to feature a human dressed as a cat: The Super Mario Bros. Movie made $1.361 billion dollars worldwide and was the second-highest-grossing film of the year.

At one point in the film, our favorite Italian plumber is battling Donkey Kong. To try and help him best his foe, Mario dons the Cat Suit found in the 2013 game Super Mario 3D World.

While the Cat Suit did help Mario defeat Donkey, it also was central to a comedic set piece within the film. Many certainly enjoyed the Cat Suit shout out, and the upcoming The Super Mario Galaxy Movie is even more packed to the brim with Easter eggs.

Night of the Demons (2009)

We shall start at the beginning. In 1988, the pulpy teen-centered horror movie Night of the Demons came out. It’s cheap looking, and it features questionable acting across the board, but it has emerged as a cult classic. The film got a couple of sequels, and then eventually Hollywood got around to remaking Night of the Demons in 2009.

Once again, the film centered on teenagers having a libidinous party to celebrate Halloween that is, you know, impeded by demons. Characters are costumed, naturally, and that includes one of the female characters, played by former Guess? model Diora Baird, above, dressed as a cat.

The film, also starring Shannon Elizabeth and Edward Furlong, is a remake of a 1998 cult classic.

Cat People (1942)

A seminal work of strange, early horror filmmaking, Cat People is focused on a woman who is certain she is descended from, well, a tribe of Cat People who are able to transform into panthers when sufficiently charged emotionally. That belief, of course, has complications for our protagonist.

Cat People is now considered an important work of the horror genre in the 1940s. A sequel, Curse of the Cat People, came out in 1944. Paul Schrader remade the film in 1982. It stars Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell and you know it’s just so incredibly chill and normal. Schrader’s film gets more into the people-as-cats thing in his subtle way.

Now, Cat People is not as overly a movie about people dressing as cats, either in costume or by playing anthropomorphic cats. However, we are talking about a movie literally called Cat People, so it is very much part of this equation.

Mean Girls (2004)

Much of the humor of Mean Girls comes from Cady Heron, played by Lindsay Lohan in her defining role, discovering the logistical realities of being in an American high school. Once she falls in with “The Plastics,” it’s only a matter of time until she learns the ways of the high school Halloween party. 

While Cady opts for a proper, inventive Halloween costume, her Plastics compatriots go for different animal- themed outfits. Karen is a mouse. Duh. Regina is a bunny.

Then, there’s the oh-so fetch Gretchen Wieners, who shows up as a cat.

This scene scored Mean Girls the profound honor of being on both this list and our list of the Best Movies With People Dressed Up in Bunny Costumes. Happy Easter.

Rent (2005)

Well, at least the film version of Rent went better than the film version of Cats. There are fewer humans dressed as cats in Rent, though. The musical, based on the opera La Boheme, is about life in New York for a handful of friends trying to navigate the world. Spoiler: They have issues with their rent.

The musical has devoted fans, though it also went in for some mockery in Team America: World Police. That doesn't detract from its sheer star power and panache.

To wit: There is a Halloween funeral in Rent in which the wickedly talented Idina Menzel’s Maureen wears a cat costume. A lot of people who love a musical don’t necessarily love adaptations to the screen, but Rent seems to have done just fine by the musical’s fans (cat costume included).

Idina Menzel may be best known, these days, for providing the voice of Elsa in the Frozen films and especially her stunning delivery of "Let It Go."

Madam Satan (1930)

We’re going old school, and pre-Production Code. Plus, any chance to talk about a movie called Madam Satan is worth taking. No relation to the character from Archie Comics, for the record. Also, would you believe that Madam Satan is a musical comedy?

The film was directed by none other than Cecil B. DeMille. At a certain point, the action on the movie centers on a massive masquerade ball aboard a zeppelin. Now that’s so very 1930! One of the characters, Angela (Kay Johnson), hopes to win over her husband, who she fears is straying. Thus, she puts on a mask and a slinky outfit and becomes “Madam Satan.”

Now, there is a witchiness to the costume, to be sure. However, there is also a feline touch to Angela’s outfit. This, of course, makes sense. Black cats and witches, and thus black cats and Satan, are tied together in popular sentiment.

In 1930, a witchy feline costume would be an easy way to get the point across to filmgoers.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007)

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is a perhaps dated story about heterosexual firefighters who get married to each other in order to get insurance benefits.

At one point, Jessica Biel's lawyer character dresses up in a cat costume and dances around at a costume party to fundraise for same-sex protections.

Look, it's for charity.

Cats (2019)

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats was a smash success. It was also very polarizing. There has never been a point in time where Cats, which is effectively a bunch of cats singing silly songs about themselves, hasn’t had vocal detractors. That being said, it was not surprising that Cats was adapted into a big-budget film, one with an impressive cast.

What unfolded with Tom Hooper’s Cats was a fiasco. This proved to be the consensus opinion. Quickly, “rowdy screenings” of Cats, wherein laughing and cracking jokes were encouraged, sprung up. Even Taylor Swift didn’t emerge from Cats unscathed.

The problem was how the film looked, and specifically how the cats looked. Visual effects were used to try and make the likes of Judi Dench and Idris Elba look like cats, but the whole thing lived in the Uncanny Valley. Truly, a sight to behold, even for those who absolutely loathed it.

Honorable Mention: Irma Vep (1996)

Going from the massive, I.P.-mining Super Mario Bros. Movie to the small, moody indie Irma Vep might give you whiplash. Olivier Assayas’ French dramedy is odd, specific, and quite meta. It is, after all, a movie about making a movie.

Actress Maggie Cheung plays herself in Irma Vep. She agrees to star in a new film by a temperamental French director who, seemingly, is on his last strike when it comes to the French film industry. His film is an adaptation of a silent French film serial called Les Vampire, with “Irma Vep” being an anagram of vampire.

Cheung’s character, as with the character in Les Vampire, is a stylized cat burglar. She also wears a cat suit, befitting the nature of the crime. Assayas would later adapt Irma Vep into an HBO miniseries himself. This time, Alicia Vikander was the star.

Why is this an honorable mention? Because dressing up in a catsuit and dressing up as a cat aren't exactly the same. Which also explains the next film on this list.

Honorable Mention: The Avengers (1998)

No, not that Avengers. This is the Avengers based on the hit British TV show, not the Marvel comics superheroes.

Although: Uma Thurman's Emma Peel catsuit is awfully similar to the one Avengers star Scarlett Johansson would wear a decade later to play The Black Widow.

Of course, catsuits are a mainstay of film and TV. And perhaps it all goes back to

Many a famous female character has worn a catsuit that is almost as famous. One of the greatest popularizers of the catsuit, especially for badass female characters, was the British TV show The Avengers. Both Cathy Gale and Emma Peel (played by Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg, respectively) on The Avengers.

Is Thuman literally dressed like a cat? No, you've got us there.

Main image: Night of the Demons. Seven Arts Pictures

Editor's Note: Corrects typo in intro.

We aren't talking about movies with an X rating, which are their own category. And we aren't talking about movies like Serpico, The French Connection and Mean Streets that depict sleaze but are, you know, classy about it.

We're talking about movies that ruthlessly shock and pander for the sake of good clean — or not so clean — thrills. So here we go.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

A gloriously shameless movie (starting with that title) that uses ickiness to its great advantage.

It's one of the most effective and captivating horror movies ever made thanks to its atmosphere, oozing with sex and violence.

Filled with the sounds of animals and buzzing flies, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre makes clear from the start that it has no limits, even before we hear the first rev of Leatherface's chainsaw.

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975)

lsa, She Wolf of the S.S. affects high-minded ideals with a ridiculous opening card (see above), but it's all just an excuse to tell the story of Ilsa, an evil Nazi warden who wants to prove women are better at suffering than men, and should therefore be allowed to fight for Hitler.

Of course, she proves this through a series of "experiments" on women who are scantily clad, at best. Let's all say it together now: "They couldn't make this today."

A Canadian film by director Don Edmonds, it managed to get reviewed by Gene Siskel, who called it "the most degenerate picture I have seen to play downtown." We can't tell if that's a thumbs up or thumbs down.

The Driller Killer (1979)

Abel Ferrara has made some straight-up classics — including King of New York and Bad Lieutenant — but the Bronx-born director cut his teeth with The Driller Killer. (His debut was an adult motion picture in which he also performed.)

Ferrara also appeared in The Driller Killer (above) about a New York City artist who deals with his urban angst by going on a killing spree with a power tool.

The film made it onto the United Kingdom's list of "video nasties" criticized for their extreme content.

Dolemite (1975)

Look, we love Dolemite, but when the hero of the movie is a pimp, you're watching a sleazy movie.

Rudy Ray Moore's endlessly entertaining Blaxploitation icon sprang from his filthy standup comedy routines: He passed on stories of a streetwise hustler named Dolemite who explained, "Dolemite is my name and f---ing up motherf---ers is my game."

Dolemite was also a triumph of DIY, indie moviemaking — as spelled out in the recent Dolemite Is My Name, starring Eddie Murphy.

Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973)

Widely regarded as one of the best exploitation movies ever made, this Swedish film by director Bo Arne Vibenius stars Christina Lindberg as as a mute woman who endures a series of unbelievable traumas — which Vibenius isn't shy about showing onscreen.

She eventually finds herself a double-barrel shotgun and goes on a revenge mission that she — and her targets — very much deserve.

It's a gem.

The Last House on the Left (1972)

We hate this movie, because it's so incredible effective. One of the most shameless 1970s movies of all, it has a handmade quality that makes it violence and cruelty feel all the more real.

Director Wes Craven made his debut with Last House on the Left — a story of abduction, brutality and vengeance, scored by eerie hippie music — before going on to create the classic Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream horror franchises.

With all due respect to those films, they aren't remotely as scary as Last House on the Left. It's on our list of the Scariest Movies We've Ever Seen.

Salo (1975)

Inspired by the writings of Marquis de Sade, this film by Pier Paolo Pasolini is about a group of fascists who round up a group of adolescents and do horrible things to them for 120 days. Just make a list of things that gross you out, and we promise they're in Salo.

Interestingly, Abel Ferrara, who you may remember from our Driller Killer entry, made a movie about Pasolini in 2014 about his life around the time he was making Salo.

It stars the great Willem Dafoe, a good friend and frequent collaborator of Ferrara's.

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

You probably remember the disco, but not the desperation.

Saturday Night Fever is a nuanced and gritty character study of Tony Manero (John Travolta, above) that unflinchingly depicts racism and sexual violence. Tony is deeply flawed, and no hero by today's standards, but the movie tries to win back our affection for him by the end.

For such a successful film, it's a very sleazy movie and a rough watch — but the dancing is fantastic, at least.

Piranha (1978)

One of many killer-animals movies rushed to the screen after the blockbuster success of Jaws, Piranha — unlike, say, Orca, to use one example — made no pretense of respectability. And we respect that.

A Roger Corman production through and through, this movie existed to show swimmers get attacked by toothy fish, and we love that. It's the epitome of a B movie.

But it was also important to the careers of some great filmmakers, including Corman: Six years after Piranha, Joe Dante went on to direct the massive hit Gremlins. And Piranha co-writer John Sayles would go on to make films including Eight Men Out and The Secret of Roan Inish.

The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

A movie we both love and respect, The Kentucky Fried Movie is a sendup of grindhouse and sleaze that is also, itself, pretty sleazy — but in a good way.

It leaves no joke unturned, and parody-movie sendups go waaay further than necessary to satirize the things they're satirizing.

The Kentucky Fried Movie is one of funniest of all sleazy movies, and it led to more mainstream, less sleazy success for director John Landis and writers David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, who would later go on to make Airplane.

Caligula (1979)

When Penthouse founder Bob Guccione set out to make a mainstream movie, the result was Caligula — a story of the indulgent Roman emperor with big names attached.

Led by rather fearless Clockwork Orange veteran Malcolm McDowell, the film stars Teresa Ann Savoy (above), as well as Helen Mirren and Peter O'Toole. But what it's best known for is its over-the-top sex scenes.

It was written by the very respected Gore Vidal, who disavowed it after director Tinto Brass substantially altered his script.

If you liked this list, you might also like this behind the scenes look at The Kentucky Fried Movie.

And we invite you to please follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: The Kentucky Fried Movie. United Film Distribution Company

We aren't passing judgment on the people of the past or the present — just reading the room.

Here we go.

But First, Caveats and Clarifications

We also aren't here to gripe about "cancel culture" or "wokeism," or to hold the past accountable to the standards of the present. But we see movies as time capsules of their eras, and love learning more about the past — and present — by paying attention to how stories play differently at different times.

Lots of Best Picture winners are movies that would never be made today because their directors have come to be regarded as problematic, and we aren't including those. And we aren't including brilliant movies like Casablanca that include some dicey moments that could be easily ignored without derailing the message of the movie.

For this list we're focusing on movies that have innate plot elements egregious enough to give risk-averse studio executives pause. (They're a cautious lot, not fond of social media backlash.) These plot elements are integral enough that removing them would make for a totally different movie.

So with that, here are seven movies that would never be made today despite winning Best Picture Oscars in their time.

Gigi (1958)

Our modern culture, very conscious of the threat of groomers, would quickly reject the concept of Gigi, a film about a 16-year-old being literally groomed to become a courtesan. Its main song is "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," which we can't really imagine would get a big studio sign-off today.

Yes, Gigi is set at the turn of the 20th Century, when the behavior depicted onscreen wasn't shocking, and it was released in the 1950s, when teenage weddings were far more common. But today? Non-starter.

Though it won Best Picture and eight other Oscars — and for many years held the record for the highest clean sweep of nominations — Gigi easily leads the list of movies that would never be made today, by today's Hollywood executives.

Crash (2004)

Sometimes the movies that age the most poorly are those that pat themselves on the back for seemingly topical or progressive statements that quickly feel obvious — especially as common sense evolves.

Among the most eye-rolling are those with a "racism is bad" message, because of course it is. No one wants to spend two hours hearing Hollywood types teach a lesson every human being should have learned as a small child.

Modern critics have it in for Crash — the AV Club and Film Comment are among those who have named it the worst best picture winner, and IndieWire ranked it dead last among the Best Picture winners of this century.

More on Crash

Why are modern critics so anti-Crash? It's hard to generalize, but the main problem seems to be a ham-fisted redemption arc in which a white cop (Matt Dillon) saves the life of a Black driver (Thandiwe Newton) he has previously sexually assaulted during a traffic stop.

That's just one of the glaring issues in a movie full of cartoonish twists.

Modern executives would be wise enough to know that critics — both professional and self-appointed on social media — would have their knives out for a movie like Crash, and that it would doom the film's dreams of awards show glory.

Another Caveat

Also, sure: Technically, any of these movies could be made today by some friends with an iPhone.

But they wouldn't be the same movies without the resources of a major studio.

And now, back to our list.

Gone With the Wind (1939)

Even if you can get past the broad, stereotypical Black characters, Gone With the Wind asks us to spend nearly four hours lamenting the fortunes of Scarlett O'Hara, a woman who holds other people as property.

There's just no way to make her sympathetic to modern audiences.

Yes, she gets her comeuppance in the end. But those are four very long hours to spend with someone so unpleasant.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

Lots of things about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest have aged well. It's anti-authoritarian streak is universal.

But one thing about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest would never fly in the post #MeToo era: Protagonist Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) is the statutory rapist of a 15-year-old victim. (He pretends to be insane because he thinks it will be easier to serve his time in a mental hospital.)

When you consider McMurphy's criminally bad judgment when it comes to sexual boundaries, the fact that the movie's main antagonist is a strong woman — Nurse Ratched — takes on a strange subtext.

It's notable that when Hollywood returned to the Cuckooverse a few years ago with the Netflix series Ratched, she was the protagonist (or at least antihero) rather than the villain.

Driving Miss Daisy (1989)

When rap group Public Enemy took aim at stereotypical, servile Black roles in 1990's "Burn Hollywood Burn," one of their main targets was Driving Miss Daisy, the 1989 Best Picture winner starring Jessica Tandy as a wealthy white woman and Morgan Freeman as her chauffeur, Hoke.

When he endures her surliness, they become best friends and she teaches him to read.

Alfred Uhry, who wrote the stage and screen versions of Driving Miss Daisy, based it on his own grandmother and her driver. But however well-intentioned the movie is, few Hollywood producers in this era are excited about yet another film about Black servants and the white people who help them.

Yes, Miss Daisy learns from Hoke, too, and Morgan Freeman brings dignity to the role, but modern-day social media that doesn't have time for that kind of nuance.

More on Driving Miss Daisy (1989)

As Big Daddy Kane explained in "Burn Hollywood Burn":

"As I walk the streets of Hollywood Boulevard/
Thinking how hard it was to those that starred/In the movies portraying the roles/Of butlers and maids, slaves and h--s/Many intelligent Black men seemed/To look uncivilized when on the screen...And Black women in this profession/As for playing a lawyer, out of the question/For what they play Aunt Jemima is the perfect term/Even if now she got a perm."

Thirty-four years later, Hollywood seems to at least understand the complaint.

Dances With Wolves (1990)

Look, we like Dances With Wolves. Kevin Costner's film is a gorgeous, sweeping epic, and is a genuinely affecting story of transformation and coming to respect a different way of life. It was advanced for its time, flipping the old Hollywood Cowboys-and-Indians stereotypes. All good!

But it's also a perfect example of the kind of movie modern-day Hollywood claims it doesn't want to make any more: Films ostensibly about Native Americans that feature white people front and center. And it plays into white savior criticisms as well.

But: You have to crawl before you walk, and Dances With Wolves had its heart in the right place.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Full disclosure: This is your humble correspondent's favorite movie. It is often criticized today for allegedly featuring a transgender serial killer, Buffalo Bill. The realization that Buffalo Bill is "making a women's suit" is a key and crucial reveal in the film. But Buffalo Bill is not transgender, as the movie clearly explains.

In fact, Buffalo Bill is a misogynist who wants to become a mockery of a woman — note his cruel impersonation of one of his victims, in which he tugs at his shirt to mimic breasts and screams in a grotesque voice.

Gender is a very important part of Silence of the Lambs — Clarice ultimately catches Bill by empathizing with one of his female victims in a way that none of her male colleagues can. But take out Bill — a man who hates women — and the movie loses much of this theme.

Still, just the accusation of transphobia would be enough to keep Silence of the Lambs out of the Best Picture race today, given the lack of nuance in many social media protests.

More on The Silence of the Lambs

How does The Silence of the Lambs make clear that Bill is not transgender? In a quick exchange between Clarice Starling and the criminal genius Hannibal Lecter. Both characters use the outdated (but not offensive at the time) phrase "transsexual" instead of the modern "transgender."

"There's no correlation in the literature between transsexualism and violence. Transsexuals are very passive," Clarice explains.

Seconds later, Lecter comes right out and says: "Billy is not a real transsexual. But he thinks he is. He tries to be. He's tried to be a lot of things, I expect." Lecter also surmises that Buffalo Bill likely sought out sexual reassignment surgery — and was rejected.

Why would a transphobic movie bother to include such an exchange? It wouldn't. It actually slows things down. But director Jonathan Demme was sensitive enough to take care to ensure that audience not see Buffalo Bill as representative of transgender people. And he obviously isn't.

If you liked this list, you may also like this list of Shameless Comedies That Just Don't Care If You're Offended.

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Main image: A publicity image for Gone With the Wind. Warner Bros.

Sugar & Spice (2001)

Like a little crime with your cheers? The subversive Sugar & Spice, from director Francine McDougall, is about a high school cheerleader who gets pregnant by the star quarterback and, naturally, enlists her fellow cheerleaders to go commit robberies to support her and the baby.

It features a who's who of early 2000s breakout stars, including Marley Shelton, James Marsden, Marla Sokoloff, Melissa George and Mena Suvari.

It may not be the best-remembered cheerleader movie, but it captures a fun and subversive moment.

Bring It On (1999)

The gold standard of cheerleader movies, Bring It On stars Kirsten Dunst as Torrance, a cheerleader at an upscale San Diego high school who discovers that the school's previous captain stole all their best routines from a school in East Compton. Gabrielle Union plays her arch nemesis who is... kind of totally in the right?

Eliza Dushku and Jesse Bradford are among those rounding out the cast in this often-imitated but never duplicated early hit by future Ant-Man director Peyton Reid.

The film's writer, Jessica Bendinger, says she became interested in the idea of cultural appropriation as a music journalist and music video director, specifically as a white creator with a strong love of hip-hop. And she wittily slipped her ideas into a cheerleader movie.

The Replacements (2000)

The Replacements is a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of a bunch of replacement players who fill in when an NFL football team goes on strike.

Keanu Reeves plays the quarterback, and strikes up a connection with head cheerleader Annabelle Farrell (Brooke Langton), who runs an inexperienced (at least at cheerleading) squad.

You can argue that this is more of a football movie than a cheerleader movie, but the cheerleaders steal the film.

Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal (2008)

Lifetime

A made-for-TV cheerlader movie, (thanks Lifetime!) this ripped-from the headlines story follows Jenna Dewan as a cheerleading coach who tries to rein in an unruly band of mean-girl cheerleaders led by Brooke (Ashley Benson).

The reviews were better than you might expect.

Bottoms (2023)

Bottoms director Emma Seligman tells MovieMaker that her film is simply about "teen girls who start a fight club so they can try to impress and hook up with cheerleaders." It's a shamelessly funny, keep-you-guessing, anything-for-a-laugh answer to the 200 million movies about teenage boys who make a bet to do such-and-such by the end of the school year, and has a ridiculous amount of fun dismantling expectations.

It's also packed with rising stars, including Ayo Edebiri (The Bear), co-writer Rachel Sennott (Shiva Baby), and Kaia Gerber, Cindy Crawford's daughter, as the nonplused head cheerleader.

But I'm a Cheerleader (1999)

Lions Gate Films

Jamie Babbit's But I'm a Cheerleader is a masterpiece of camp, and feels far ahead of its time in its smart mockery of gay conversion therapy. The film follows future Russian Doll and Pokerface star Natasha Lyonne in a fabulously deadpan role as a cheerleader who has no interest in her boyfriend, for some reason.

She's soon carted off to a Stepford Wives-style home for gay teens, where she ends up, of course, embracing her love of women. It's smart, knowing and delightful.

Bottoms gives it a very prominent, very well-deserved shoutout.

Not Another Teen Movie (2001)

If you like raucous, bawdy, absurdist teen comedies that couldn't be less worried about offending people, Not Another Teen Movie was made for you.

Among the many movies it parodies — with obvious love — is Bring It On, as the cheerleading team led by Jaime Pressly can't even be bothered to change the words of the cheers they're stealing.

Bottoms has a similarly reality-altering silliness to Not Another Teen Movie, and pays it direct homage.

Fired Up! (2009)

Cheerleader movies are supposed to be fun, and Fired Up! embraces silliness at every turn. It's about two high school jocks who decide to skip football camp to go to cheerleader camp and hit on girls.

Lessons are learned. It's actually pretty similar to the plot of Bottoms, except the Bottoms protagonists aren't jocks. Or guys.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)

Before the TV show with Sarah Michelle Gellar, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a rather strange movie in with Valley girl cheerleader Buffy (Kristy Swanson) battles vampires.

The cast of this cheerleader movie alone makes it worth a watch: It features Luke Perry, Rutger Hauer, Donald Sutherland, and Paul Reubens in a defiantly different role than the Pee-wee Herman persona for which the late, great actor was best known.

The TV version of Buffy was creator Joss Whedon's attempt to redo an idea he felt went a little off-track in execution, but give everyone involved an A for effort.

Jennifer's Body (2009)

This very witty Karyn Kusama-directed treasure, written by Diablo Cody, follows Megan Fox as a demonically possessed cheerleader who goes on a killing spree.

Can good-girl best friend Amanda Seyfried save the day? Or at least her male classmates?

Transgressive and surprising at every turn, Jennifer's Body is sensational fun. If you like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you'll almost definitely like Jennifer's Body, too.

All Cheerleaders Die (2013)

Another supernatural cheerleader movie, All Cheerleaders Die takes seriously the physical perils of cheerleading, but changes the game by reviving a team of dead cheerleaders vis-a-vis Wiccan magic.

Of course, they also carry out a grisly revenge on the football players.

If this one sounds familiar, it's because the 2013 All Cheerleaders Die is a remake of a lower-budget 2001 film of the same name by same writer-directors, Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson.

Also, the tagline is perfect: "You can't kill their spirit."

A Woman's Work: The NFL's Cheerleader Problem (2021)

One serious addition: This 2019 documentary by Yu Gu examines the the gender pay gap that is very much a part of the National Football League, and the NFL team's practice of expecting cheerleaders to be in peak physical condition and meet extreme beauty standards for as little as minimum wage.

A Woman’s Work follows cheerleaders from the Oakland Raiders and the Buffalo Bills, each of whom put their careers on the line to take legal action and fight for fair pay.

It's not the most fun of the cheerleader movies, but it is the most enlightening.

Thanks for Reading Our List of the Best Cheerleader Movies

You might also like this list of Rad '80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember — though it doesn't include a single cheerleader movie.

Or you might like this list of the Most Beautiful Movie Cars.

And we'd love for you to follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 20th Century Studios

Editor's Note: Adds credit and MSN link.

These movies lull you into a false sense of superiority to catch you off guard with their — dare we say it? — brilliance.

So with that, here are 13 smart movies disguised as dumb movies.

Starship Troopers (1997)

One could argue that most of the movies Paul Verhoeven directed in the '80s and '90s were smart movies disguised as dumb movies. The Dutch filmmaker blends high and low culture more successfully than almost anyone.

Case in point: At the time of its release, critics dismissed Starship Troopers as a witless sci-fi flick, missing the fact that it's actually a satire of jingoistic warmongering.

The New York Times Janet Maslin, for example, dismissively wrote, "Where exactly are the hordes of moviegoers who will exclaim: ''Great idea! Let's go see the one about the cute young co-ed army and the big bugs from space.'"

You could maybe understand them not understanding that Verhoeven was making a satire — if not for the fact that almost all of his movies, going back to Robocop, contain large doses of satire and social commentary. (Even the widely reviled Showgirls.)

If you watch it right — meaning, if you realize everyone involved in the movie is in on the joke — Starship Troopers is the best dumb movies ever made about a cute co-ed army and big bugs from space. But it's also a solid movie about militarism and patriotism, in the vein of Dr. Strangelove.

The Terminator (1984)

James Cameron set out to combine high-minded sci-fi with the cheap thrills and DIY ethos of a Roger Corman movie, and ended up creating a classic.

The Terminator holds your attention with violence and shocks, but leaves you thinking, long after it's over, about whether the robots could really take over. And its theory of time travel — in which everything is a loop — is one of the coolest of any movie.

Anyone who started the '80s thinking Arnold Schwarzenegger was all brawn and no brains had to stand corrected by the end of the decade: He had a true gift for selecting seemingly dumb movies that gave you something to think about long after the catch phrases faded.

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)

Another magnificent dumb movie setup: a swingin' 60s secret agent is thawed-out in the more reserved '90s. But one of writer-star Mike Myers' greatest tricks is finding comedy in the gap between what you expect his characters to know, and what they actually do know.

The Austin Powers movies have a lot of fun lovingly mocking the tropes of Bond films — the villain who gives away his whole plan, the double entendres, the disposable henchmen — but then Austin knocks you out with his surprising sensitivity and decency.

Once, around the height of #MeToo, we saw this movie at a huge outdoor screening with a crowd of mostly millennials. When Vanessa (Elizabeth Hurley) tries to initiate sex with Austin, and he objects that she's too drunk, Austin "Danger" Powers scored himself a long applause break.

Top Secret (1984)

Top Secret — from the folks who brought you Airplane! — was a bomb that felt almost like an exercise in silliness: It's like a parody of an Elvis movie, crossed with a parody of war movie, with an extended Blue Lagoon parody thrown in. We know, it looks like a very dumb movie.

But it's also a loving homage to decades of movie camera tricks, and some of its set pieces are sheer cinematic genius, including a scene that is shot perfectly backwards, before the movie deliberately undercuts its own very impressive blocking.

We'd also call attention to a ludicrously great underwater saloon brawl that required the actors to hold their breath for extended periods of time.

But the camera tricks are just part of its wit. It also finds room for left-field jokes like this one: "My uncle was born in America. But he was one of the lucky ones. He managed to escape in a balloon during the Jimmy Carter presidency."

The Running Man (1987)

Another example of Arnold Schwarzenegger choosing a role perfectly.

The Running Man, based on a Stephen King story, wisely predicted the rise of TV reality competitions. Schwarzenegger stars as Ben Richards, a scapegoated helicopter pilot forced to compete in a series of very violent face-offs with cartoonish enemies in order to win a dystopian game show called The Running Man.

There are many nice touches here — including the casting of real-life family feud host Richard Dawson as the host of the show, Damon Killian — but the smartest thing about the movie is how Ben has to not only vanquish his foes, but also win a media war with the totalitarian government behind the game.

If you love The Running Man, you might also like the new reboot directed by Edgar Wright and starring Glen Powell.

Robocop (1987)

If you think Paul Verhoeven's Robocop is a dumb movie about a robotic cop who gets revenge on the bad guys, please give it another shot? It's shockingly prescient in its presentation of a grotesque utopia in which corporations allow artificial intelligence to make life and death decisions.

We can't think of a better summary of how drone law enforcement could go awry than the scene when the ED-209 orders a corporate drone to drop his weapon — then kills him for failing to comply, long after he complies. (In fact, we think about it every time the self-checkout at the grocery store refuses to acknowledge we placed out can of beans in the bagging area.)

One of the coolest things about Robocop is that it works as a top-notch sci-fi adventure, or as a critique of the mindless violence in some of the movies that came out at the same time.

White Chicks (2004)

This looks, on the suface, like one of the dumbest of dumb movies.: Two Black FBI agents (Marlon and Shawn Wayans) have to go undercover as a pair of privileged young white women in the Hamptons to lure a kidnapper.

But White Chicks is good! Not just for its total commitment to comedy, without caring if anyone's offended, but also for its insights into code-switching, stereotyping, and how certain white people talk when they think no one of color is around.

Like most Wayans projects, this one works best when you embrace the silliness and let yourself be surprised by the occasional drops of wisdom.

Friday (1995)

Yes, Friday is filled with jokes about women and weed, but it also sneaks in a potent message about de-escalating violence, while still standing up for yourself.

Coming as it did after a wave of early 90s gang violence — much of it duly catalogued by Friday star and co-writer Ice Cube during his years with NWA and as a solo rapper — it offered a refreshing but thrilling conclusion in which everyone stood their ground, but no one had to die.

And it somehow did it all without ever going preachy.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

Mixing smart and stupid is the bread and butter of Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay. So while Anchorman is jam-packed with great dumb jokes — like the whole "sex panther" section ("60 percent of the time, it works every time") — Anchorman is also a pretty great satire of bad journalism and casual workplace sexism.

The many, many great jokes clear the path for McKay and Ferrell to present a portrait of go-along-get-along mediocrity in the San Diego news scene's old boys networks.

In Anchorman 2, they take the mediocrity national. To the point that every time we see a preening, overconfident, self-important news anchor, we think of Ron Burgundy. Time to musk up.

Josie and the Pussycats (2001)

We were pretty surprised to see this one recently on the Criterion Channel, since we remembered it as a frothy, poppy, disposable confection based on a hazily remembered Archie Comics series.

We remembered it wrong. Very wrong. The film, about a girl group unwittingly enlisted in a consumerist conspiracy, is a very Gen X, very entertaining time capsule about selling out. It used a cartoon from Gen Xers youth to help them explore questions they had seen play out again and again in grunge and hip-hop music — and perhaps in their own lives as they entered the job world.

The film arrived around the same time Napster foisted streaming onto the world, and made it a necessity for many artists to sell their songs to advertisers to stay afloat. So its messages seems a little dated today. But the film is a beautiful dream about what might have been if the world had stayed analog a little longer, and still works as a fun metaphor about art and commerce.

Josie and the Pussycats isn't a cheap cash-in. It's a well-made movie making fun of cheap cash-ins.

Also, the songs, especially "3 Small Words," are cranking pop masterpieces (with Letters to Cleo vocalist Kay Hanley singing lead and stars Rachel Leigh Cook, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson on the mic as well.) The film came from Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, the duo also behind the terrific Can't Hardly Wait.

Legally Blonde (2001)

We love a Trojan Horse movie, and Legally Blonde is a perfect example — on the surface it's a silly, frothy comedy, but it sneaks in a Sun Tzu-style message about never underestimating anybody.

Reese Witherspoon is impossibly endearing as Elle Woods,  a sorority girl who tries to win back her ex-boyfriend by attending Harvard Law School. It's impossible not to love a legal movie that climaxes in a big reveal about a perm.

Best of all, the film is inspired by the real experiences of Amanda Brown, who wrote the novel upon which the film is based after attending Stanford Law School and finding that her love of fashion and beauty trends put her out of step with many of her classmates.

Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

Borat is filled with dumb jokes, but they're a distraction from the film's main thesis: If you act dumb enough to make people feel superior to you, they'll let down their guard and show you who they really are.

Some people turn out to be great: a deleted scene shows the Job-like patience of a man forced to give Sacha Baron Cohen's fake foreign journalist a supermarket tour. But the movie isn't especially interested in showing people being patient: It delights in revealing the suspicions and prejudice of many of the people Borat meets in post-9/11 America.

But what takes the movie into genius territory is its fierce internal logic, held together by Sacha Baron Cohen's jaw-dropping improvisation and timing. Every spontaneous interaction, with real-life people who don't realize Borat is a joke, is somehow manipulated by director Larry Charles and the rest of the team into a cohesive and moving narrative.

If you liked this list of smart movies disguised as dumb movies, you might also like this list of Rad '80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember, including multiple smart movies disguised as dumb movies,

And we'd love for you to follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: Josie and the Pussycats. MGM

Of course, it's hard to generalize about a multibillion-dollar industry that has existed nearly as long as film itself, headquartered for decades in the San Fernando Valley over the Hollywood Hills from the mainstream Hollywood studios.

When Hollywood looks to its Valley neighbors, it often does so by sugarcoating things — treating the industry as silly and amusing — or playing it for horror, with the implication that the adult entertainment industry leads inevitably to violence.

The following films are noteworthy for their blunt presentation of the industry. For the most part, they present it as an underground, unregulated economy where some people get along just fine — but others find themselves disappointed or worse.

Hardcore (1979)

Hardcore — recently part of a Paul Schrader retrospective on the Criterion Channel — is a fascinating but not completely successful film. George C. Scott plays Jake Van Dorn, a very religious Midwestern dad who has to travel to seedy Los Angeles when he learns his daughter, Kristen (Ilah Davis) has entered the adult film industry.

The film is a fascinating look at how the adult entertainment business functioned in the late 1970s. But Scott's transformation from everyman to shrewd undercover avenger isn't totally convincing. And it feels a bit melodramatic that Kristen descends so quickly into very violent films.

Still, Season Hubley is excellent as Niki, Jake's guide into the seedy underworld. it's fun to imagine an older and more accomplished Schrader remaking this film with someone like Liam Neeson, the master of dad-on-a-rampage movies.

Videodrome (1983)

David Cronenberg's 1983 film fairly brilliantly presages the rise of the internet and our willingness to surrender some of our humanity in the service of technology, but it starts with a journey into old-fashioned adult entertainment.

Max Renn (James Woods), president of a small UHF station, stumbles upon a broadcast signal of very alarming videos. This leads him to Nicki Brand (Debbie Harry) an explicit radio host with dark predilections.

Max's investigation of her disappearance leads to him having a Betamax cassette inserted into his torso, and his eventual effort to transcend our sick sad world and "leave the old flesh." It's all very metaphorical, but feels especially relevant in the age of artificial intelligence.

Boogie Nights (1997)

You knew this would be here. For about the first half of Paul Thomas Anderson's masterful second film, Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg, in his best role) finds a chosen family under the tutelage of Valley filmmaker Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds). Jack's partner Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) and rising starlet Rollergirl (Heather Graham) even have kind of a mother-daughter dynamic.

But as drugs and — gasp! — video take hold, Dirk descends into darker and darker stuff, and it quickly becomes apparent that the romanticized good times of the '70s aren't sustainable in the '80s.

Lots of people would love to live Dirk's high-flying '70s life, but no one would want his wretched existence in the '80s.

This is an especially interesting watch to see how Anderson's career built toward his Best Picture and Best Director wins for One Battle After Another.

Demonlover (2002)

This French neo-noir corporate drama by Oliver Assayas stars Connie Nielsen as a sneaky, ice-cold executive involved in a French company's acquisition of a Japanese company that makes very gross anime.

The film is surprisingly frank in its presentation of said anime, but all the executives involved in the negotiations seem to see the material merely as a product, not a thing to be judged. There's a great metaphor here about transactional relationships.

As is often the case in dramatic portrayals of the industry, the more mainstream films portrayed in Demonlover (we use the phrase "mainstream" very loosely here) are a gateway into violent content in which people really get hurt. Or worse.

After P--- Ends (2012)

Documentarian Bryce Waggoner released three volumes of this excellent series with a simple but arresting concept: Adult industry performers simply explain what they've been doing since leaving the industry. (Waggoner directed the first two, and the third was directed by former adult performer Brittany Andrews.)

The series removes artifice and fantasy to reveal the people of the industry as just people — some of whom are thriving, and some of whom are mightily struggling.

It raises questions about stigma, exploitation and reinvention, without telling anyone how to think or feel.

Lovelace (2013)

Amanda Seyfried (above) is excellent as Linda Lovelace, one of the most contentious figures in the history of the adult film industry.

She became famous for starring in what became one of the most mainstream and profitable of all adult films. But years later she wrote in her memoir, Ordeal, that she was violently forced into the business and all sorts of animalistic degradations.

Lovelace handles her story sensitively and sympathetically, never crossing the line into the kind of exploitation the real Linda Lovelace tried to escape.

King Cobra (2016)

One of the most common criticisms of the industry is that it exploits women. King Cobra is all about gay adult product, so the gender component is removed.

But that brings into more stark relief other potential forms of exploitation: namely older people exploiting younger people, and people with money exploiting those without it. (These are also problems, of course, in supposedly respectable fields.)

King Cobra is based on a true story — the source material is the book Cobra Killer by Andrew E. Stoner and Peter A. Conway, about the the life and early career of former adult actor Sean Paul Lockhart (Garrett Clayton, above).

Written and directed by Justin Kelly, it's a little-seen but captivating film with a top-notch cast that also includes Christian Slater, Molly Ringwald and James Franco, who is also a producer on King Cobra.

American P--- (2002)

Journalism doesn't get more serious than PBS's Frontline, and in 2002 the Oscar and Emmy winning documentary program investigated the business of adult entertainment, charting its rise and the reason for the demand.

If Hardcore provides a fascinating but melodramatic look at the industry in the late 1970s, this Frontline doc is a fascinating investigation of the state of the industry in the early 2000s, when the internet was radically shifting the dynamics of the business and making adult product more accessible than ever before.

You can watch the entire documentary — and every episode of Frontline — for free online via your local PBS station.

Red Rocket (2021)

One of the best films on this list, Sean Baker's Red Rocket is a judgment-free portrait of Mikey Saber (Simon Rex) an adult semi-star forced to return to his Texas hometown while on the outs from the industry.

Mikey believes he can wheedle his way back in by convincing Raylee (Suzanna Son), a 17-year-old donut shop employee who goes by the name Strawberry, to join him. He also strings along his ex, Lexi (Bree Elrod) and her mom Lil (Brenda Deiss), so he can live with them while he gets back on his feet.

Packed with excellent first-time actors, the film feel visceral and alive, adroitly blending comedy and sadness. It avoids moralizing, yet you'll probably come to hold some strong opinions about Mikey.

Baker is one of our greatest filmmakers, who uses stories about sex work to make broader points about hard work in general. His latest, Anora, won five Oscars, including Best Picture.

Starlet (2012)

Almost every Sean Baker film involves some element of investigating sex work, always empathetically and evenhandedly.

Baker and co-writer Chris Bergoch came up with the concept for the Mikey Saber character in Red Rocket while doing research for Starlet, when they realized how many male actors live off of female talent.

Starlet follows Jane (Dree Hemingway), a 21-year-old rising star who strikes up an unlikely friendship with 85-year-old Sadie (Besedka Johnson).

Money S--- (2023)

Director Suzanne Hillinger's documentary about one of the most prominent websites for adults isn't interested in anything salacious. It just sets out to normalize — and humanize — the people who just happen to make adult content for a living.

"To me, it was really important the way that we shot the interviews, for example — that the environment around each interview subject is very much a part of the frame, that these are people in their homes, with details and lives and plants and pets and shoes in the background," Hillinger told MovieMaker.

Again, about the dashes — we know there's nothing wrong with the word "shot," but algorithms don't, particularly when it's paired with the word "money," and we want people to be able to see these articles rather than having them buried by robots.

Pleasure (2021)

A Sundance darling that gained lots of initial attention for its blunt depictions, director Ninja Thyberg's Pleasure is the story of Linnéa, a small-town Swede played by Sofia Kappel (pictured) who travels to Los Angeles to try to break into the industry.

The film is notable for its multifaceted presentation of the adult world. Some of Linnéa's experiences are good, but others are horrible, including a scene in which she technically consents to a violent scenario but does so only under considerable coercion and pressure.

She soon finds herself contributing to the abuses.

Bonus: X (2022)

All three films in Ti West's X trilogy — the other two are 2022's Pearl and 2024's Maxxxine — seek to demystify the adult entertainment industry while exploring the stigma around both sex and violence.

X is the most blunt about it. The film takes place on a very DIY adult film location — a Texas farm — where the older couple who own the place seem to disapprove of the young people's shenanigans. But things are more complex than they seem.

In all three X films, the main protagonist is a young woman — always played by Mia Goth — trying to use her sex appeal to get ahead. It doesn't usually work out as she planned.

If you liked this list, you might also like this list of movies about the world's oldest profession that sugarcoat things quite a bit.

Main image: Pleasure. SF-Produktion

Editor's Note: Corrects phrasing throughout.

As we look forward to the release of Toy Story 5 this summer, we're braced for potentially profound moments.

Here are eight Pixar movie scenes that got pretty serious.

Hopper Is Eaten Alive in A Bug's Life

Hopper the bully grasshopper is the main antagonist in A Bug's Life, one of the earliest Pixar hits.

He's not likable: He demands food from the sweet residents of Ant Valley, and is generally bullying and cruel.

But even he doesn't deserve his grim fate — being fed to baby birds.

The Me Too Moment in Toy Story 2 (1999)

Toy Story 2 is an all-around classic, full of lovely observations about childhood and friendship.

But it also has a very grown-up joke that the powers-that-be eventually decided was too grown up.

A “blooper reel” that originally played during the end credits of Toy Story 2 was edited in the #MeToo era to remove a joke in which Stinky Pete (Kelsey Grammar) tries to seduce two twin Barbies by promising, “Y’know, I’m sure I could get you a part in Toy Story 3.”  

The Scream Extractor in Monsters Inc. (2001)

The setup for Monsters Inc. is a little dark to begin with: The monsters' entire way of life is powered by the screams of the children they scare. The scares are lightened by the twist that the monsters are more scared of the kids than the kids are of the monsters.

But things get a little too high stakes when Boo is strapped into something called a Scream Extractor to optimize the amount of terrified volume she projects.

Luckily Sully (John Goodman) saves her, in one of the most cathartic rescues of the Pixar movies.

The Barracuda Attack in Finding Nemo (2003)

We'll give a pass to any parent who skips the intense opening of Finding Nemo, in which Nemo's mother, Coral, and all of Nemo's soon-to-be-hatched brothers and sisters, are devoured by a barracuda. Yow.

This awful event sets the stage for the rest of the movie, in which Nemo's dad, Marlin, tries to overcome his many (understandable) oceanic fears.

The opening of Finding Nemo continues a time-honored, dubious tradition of kicking off Disney and/or Pixar movies with a mother's death.

Finding Nemo, Again (2003)

At one point Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) wanders into a 12-step meeting for sharks trying to curb their bloodthirsty addictions.

There's nothing grim about getting help, of course. Kudos to the sharks.

But things do get grim when the sharks relapse and go on a feeding frenzy.

The Jumper Rescue in The Incredibles (2004)

Mr. Incredible gets out of the superhero business — for a while — after he saves a man trying to end his life by jumping from a building... and the man then sues him for it. "You didn't save my life, you ruined my death!" the ungrateful survivor tells Mr. Incredible.

The grim newsreel-type footage contributes to making this one of the grittiest sequences in the Pixar movies.

And that's separate from the insurance company where Mr. Incredible works ripping off the elderly. Dark.

The Incinerator in Toy Story 3 (2010)

Toy Story 3 finds Buzz, Woody and the gang grappling with the end of Andy's childhood, and what will become of them.

But things hit a nadir when they wind up in an incinerator, and doom seems certain. They're saved, thank goodness, but the incinerator scene is as successful at eliciting shrieks as any Monsters Inc. Scream Extractor.

If you think that Toy Story 3 is just a lighthearted kid's movie, consider that Quentin Tarantino considers it the second-best film of this century.

The Terrible Loss in Up (2009)

The opening moments of Up include a sensitive and devastating depiction of Ellie losing her pregnancy.  

“I remember seeing it for the first time and, of course, crying," Up director of photography Patrick Lin has said of the film's opening. "Actually, three times throughout production.”

This is a moment that kids probably missed, but would certainly hit hard for parents.

If you enjoyed this post, may we also suggest our list of 12 Jaw-Dropping Pixar Movie Jokes That Are 100% for Adults.

And we also invite you to follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: Toy Story 3. All images by Pixar.

Obviously, these things are subjective. So if you think we missed one, let us know in the comments.

And now, the best SNL sketches, in our estimation, ever.

The Olympia Restaurant (1978)

Early Saturday Night Live sketches often felt seat-of-your pants and tended to lag at times as everyone tried to find the same pace. Not this one: A typical morning in the life of a Greek diner that refuses to adapt, it has a simple, recognizable hook and sweet slice-of-life simplicity. The rhythm is as pleasing as a morning routine.

SNL is sometimes known for big characters, but almost everyone in this sketch plays it straight and real, which adds to its charm. Gilda Radner is especially good as the one customer who seems to understand the place, and Bill Murray gets the funniest moment with his panicked nodding, using only a single word.

The sketch is a little more poignant when you know that star John Belushi's immigrant dad operated a struggling restaurant when Belushi was growing up in Wheaton, Illinois.

Key line: "Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, four Pepsi, two chip."

Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute (1979)

The great Margot Kidder, playing a bank vice president on a business trip, receives a visit from a profoundly Midwestern, profoundly decent, assuredly unsexy sex worker: Fred Garvin, male prostitute.

Dan Aykroyd brings big dad energy to the role of a kindly, folksy gigolo, and Kidder is a perfect straightwoman. The setup is absurd, but everyone plays it with endearing vulnerability. Like many Aykroyd characters, Fred Garvin would provide the template for many played-straight ridiculous characters to come.

This one doesn't always turn up on lists of the best SNL sketches, but it should. It also gets referenced throughout the terrific new movie Saturday Night, in which Aykroyd is played, impressively, by Dylan O'Brien.

Key line: "Ma'am, you're dealing here with with a fully qualified male strumpet."

Buckwheat Dead and America Mourns (1983)

A high-flying, edgy satire of breathless coverage of President Reagan's attempted assassination in 1981.

This sketch is the clear highlight of the years after the departure of the original Not Ready for Primetime Players. Eddie Murphy is brilliant not only as Buckwheat, but also as the man who shot him, John David Stutts.

It also foreshadowed decades of round-the-clock news coverage with just as little self-awareness as Joe Piscopo's take on Ted Koppel.

Key line: "It's good to see you all. Hi! I killed Buckwheat."

First CityWide Change Bank

With maybe the simplest concept of any Saturday Night Live sketch, this piece by legendary writer Jim Downey (above) — who also stars as an eager-to-please service representative — masterfully ridicules seemingly sincere corporate ad campaigns.

The execution of a very basic idea is perfect. Downey can currently be seen in a key role in One Battle After Another.

Key line: "We will give you the change, equal to... the amount of money that you want change for."

Chippendales Audition (1990)

A sketch where everyone else plays it straight so Chris Farley can give it 2,000 percent as Barney, a young man determined to be a Chippendales dancer.

Some — including the brilliant former SNL writer Bob Odenkirk — believe that the sketch was cruel to Farley. But listen to his many friends in interviews on Dana Carvey and David Spade's Fly on the Wall podcast and you'll hear that Farley was very much on board with the premise of the sketch — and no one has ever been more committed to a sketch.

The sketch works not because of the jokes about Farley's weight, but because of how sweetly and sincerely everyone plays the situation.

Key line: "I wish I could just flip a coin and be done with it, but we can't. We're Chippendales."

Matt Foley: Van Down by the River (1993)

Everyone else — from Julia Sweeney to Phil Hartman to David Spade to Christina Applegate — just tries not to hold it together as Matt Foley, played by Chris Farley at his best, absolutely takes over.

The original Matt Foley sketch was a carryover from Farley's time working with writer-performer Bob Odenkirk at Chicago's Second City. By the time it came to SNL, it was at its full frenetic brilliance. It's also a sketch with heart — we end up sympathizing with everyone involved.

Key line: "He's been down in the basement drinking coffee for about the last four hours so he should be ready to go."

Dillon-Edwards Investments (1999)

Another sketch you probably won't fall on many lists of the best SNL sketches, but this is the perfect mix of stupid and smart. Chris Parnell plays it straight as a father concerned with his financial future.

It's also perfectly timed at less than 90 seconds, which makes us love it even more.

Key line: "A lot of investments companies rushed onto the internet. But Dillon-Edwards took their time."

More Cowbell (2000)

Passions run high in August 1976 as The Blue Oyster Cult records their hit song "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" under the watchful eye of rock legend Bruce Dickinson (Christopher Walken). Also, let's save you a Google: Gene Frenkle, the percussionist played by Will Ferrell, is not a real person.

This one turns up on almost every list of the best SNL sketches for a reason. Lots of reasons, actually.

Key line: "I got a fever. And the only prescription is more cowbell."

Debbie Downer: Disney World (2004)

Debbie Downer (Rachel Dratch, always outstanding) proves that she can even ruin breakfast at Disney World.

It's a flawlessly written sketch that only gets funnier as everyone involved understandably falls apart with laughter. At one point, host Lindsay Lohan has no choice but to flee the sketch altogether. We're not fans of people breaking on camera, but this one is the gold standard of breaking on camera.

Every Debbie Downer sketch on SNL is great, but this is our favorite. It's one of the best SNL sketches and best SNL moments.

Key line: "It's official: I can't have children."

Meet Your Second Wife (2015)

A brutal jab at men who marry much younger women, "Meet Your Second Wife" is a very dark, very funny sketch with a solid premise and plenty of perfect small jokes packed in throughout. The unstoppable Tina Fey and Amy Poehler anchor a basically perfect, sharp-elbowed sketch. Bobby Moynihan and Aidy Bryant especially stand out with subtle, skillfull turns.

Fey and Poehler are responsible for many of the best SNL sketches and performances, but this one's our favorite.

Key line: "Actually it's seven."

Black Jeopardy With Tom Hanks (2016)

A lovingly detailed, laughs-in-the-specifics sketch that suggests maybe isn't America isn't so racially divided, after all. Exquisitely acted by everyone — Kenan Thompson (pictured), the longest-serving SNL castmember ever, is superb.

But Tom Hanks is especially surprising as a MAGA-hat wearing conspiracy theorist who comes off as a pretty good guy. This is one of those best SNL sketches where you catch sharp new insights every time you watch.

Key line: "What is: I don't think so. That's how they get ya."

Live Report (2016)

Saturday Night Live has done multiple sketches in which a local news anchors get caught up in a very curious detail seemingly irrelevant to the major breaking story they're covering. This is the best.

Newscasters Beck Bennett and Cecily Strong – as well as reporter on the scene Kenan Thompson — are ostensibly covering a Tampa sinkhole, but also can't understand why a local shopper played by Margot Robbie is married to a regular-guy Matt Schatt (Mikey Day).

One of the best SNL sketches of recent times and all time, this one is a perfectly written and acted game of change-the-subject.

Key line: "So... you two are married to each other."

If you enjoyed this list of the best SNL sketches, you might also like these 12 Wild Stories From Behind the Scenes of Saturday Night Live.

Also: We understand these things are subjective. So again, please share your own list of the best SNL sketches in the comments.

And please follow us for more stories like this.

All images from NBC's Saturday Night Live.

Editor's Note: Corrects main image.

There aren't a lot of car chases, murders, sex scenes, or explosions.

But lives are quietly changed.

Lost in Translation (2003)

Newlywed Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and burned-out married actor Bob (Bill Murray) meet at a Tokyo hotel, talk, and sing some karaoke. Everything is melancholy and luminously beautiful.

We keep thinking maybe they'll leave their spouses — and yet we're somehow grateful when they don't. Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation is a celebration of small, intense interactions we'll never recapture, and maybe shouldn't.

At the end, Bob finds Charlotte in a crowd. They look in each other's eyes, embrace, and he whispers something we can't hear. They kiss in a way that feels not at all sexual. They're friends.

The Power of the Dog (2021)

Jane Campion's drama looked like a likely Best Picture winner in 2022 before CODA scored the honor in an unusual, Covid-tainted year.

It is, on its surface, a slow, ponderous story about a widow (Kirsten Dunst), her kindly suitor and eventual husband (Jesse Plemons), her effeminate, intellectual son, (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and her brutal brother-in-law (Benedict Cumberbatch).

For most of the movie, we think we're watching a sensitive Western, perhaps with a revisionist take on the very 2020s theme of "toxic masculinity." But by the end, we realize it's been a different kind of movie all along — and a more ruthless one than we realized. It makes a hard, shrewd shift in genre, and we respect it.

Dazed and Confused (1993)

The ultimate hangout movie, Dazed and Confused follows a group of high schoolers on graduation night as they cruise around and make plans to go to a party at the Moontower. There's some fighting and bullying and flirting, and some mailboxes get battered. Football star Randall "Pink" Floyd (Jason London) has to decide whether to sign a pledge. not to do drugs.

And that's it. No one dies, nothing explodes, no one pulls off the heist of the century. And yet it's a pure joy, helped launch the careers of Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, and Matthew McConaughey, and is the best hangout movie ever. Quentin Tarantino has called his favorite movie of the 90s.

Dazed and Confused is one of several deceptively simple Richard Linklater movies, where very normal days and nights turn out to be the most memorable of our lives.

And, since we mentioned Tarantino...

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

A slice of life story about real-life actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), her burnout actor neighbor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), and Dalton's pal-stuntman-assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt).

The film takes us on a pleasant meander through three days of their lives — at one point we join Sharon on a solo trip to the movies — but writer-director Quentin Tarantino knows he doesn't need to do much to move the plot along...

... Because we're on the edge of our seats the entire time, thinking about the hellish thing we know happened to the real Sharon Tate. Waiting for it to happen onscreen. Horrified.

There are little smatterings of violence before the big finale as Cliff fights both Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) and Tex Watson (Austin Butler).

And when the grim ending comes... it turns out to be not what we expected.

Perfect Days (2023)

The newest film on our list, Perfect Days follows a Tokyo bathroom custodian named Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) as he goes about his simple days, fueled by mix tapes, good books, and his love of photography.

It's a curious, transfixing film about making the most of a seemingly simple existence. People enter his life who seem poised to change it dramatically, but he takes comfort in his routines.

Its excellent movie credentials include premiering at the the 76th Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d'Or and won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the Best Actor Award for Yakusho. It was also nominated for the Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards,.

Before Sunset (2004)

Another Linklater movie, and the sequel to his lovely Before Sunrise, which could also be on this list. Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who co-write the movie with Linklater and Kim Krizan) reunite in Paris, nearly a decade after the night they spent together in Vienna in Before Sunrise.

Jesse has written a book about that night, and he and Celina reminisce about what could have been and what can never be. Or can it?

The biggest event in Before Sunset comes at the very end, when instead of doing something, Jesse doesn't do something — and it changes his and Celine's lives. It also sets up the third film in the series, the beguiling Before Midnight.

Last Days of Disco (1999)

Writer-director Whit Stillman has said that during the tough days of filming his 1994 Barcelona, a rare moment of joy came while shooting a disco scene. He wondered why he couldn't just make a whole movie of young women loving the nightlife and dancing. So he made Last Days of Disco.

Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale star as aspiring book editors who eke out small salaries while looking for love or connection or something on dance floors and the sexy banquettes at their edges. At least one character considers them overprivileged and insipid, and the big climax is a debate about Lady and the Tramp.

But there's a lot happening in the subtext, including a richly detailed, nearly invisible subplot about tax fraud. And — much more importantly, from the movie's perspective — people find real meaning in the most seemingly superficial of settings. This might be your humble correspondent's favorite movie — and it's one of the most seductive movies we've ever seen.

The Brutalist (2024)

The newest film on this list, and a leading Oscar contender, Brady Corbet's The Brutalist moves as a patient, often hypnotic pace, inviting you to enjoy and appreciate its anthemic score, nuanced performances, and the brutally beautiful architecture of protagonist László Tóth (Adrien Brody).

It unfolds over 3 hours and 35 minutes that do not fly by: One of its leads, Felicity Jones as Erzsébet Tóth — doesn't really show up until after the midpoint intermission. Strikingly, for a movie with plenty of time, The Brutalist never over-explains, often waiting until years after events in the film to have occurred before the characters discuss them at any length.

Arguably the most devastating moment in the film — it occurs between László and his benefactor/antagonist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce) — unfolds with such understatement that you may not immediately understand the trauma unfolding unless you catch the sound of an unbuckling belt.

Contempt (1963)

French writer Paul (Michel Piccoli) is enlisted to work with Fritz Lang (played by the real Fritz Lang) on an adaptation of The Iliad.

When Paul and his wife Camille (the recently departed Brigitte Bardot) are invited to the home of cocky American producer Jeremy Proko (Jack Palance), Proko's car only has room for one passenger. And so begins a period of intense agony for Paul.

It's all very slow — yet you wish it were even slower. Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt is one of the most gorgeous movies ever made. The visuals are sumptuous, including of Casa Malaparte, the seaside home on Capri, Italy where key scenes occur. And "Camille's Theme," by Georges Delerue, is so stirring that Martin Scorsese borrowed it for Casino.

Contempt has two very violent deaths, but they're almost an afterthought. The emotional carnage comes first.

La Piscine (1969)

TimeOut perfectly describes this one as "a deliciously languid, slinkily unsettling affair."

Director Jacques Deray spends lots of time on the uncluttered elegance of la piscine of the title (la piscine is French for "the swimming pool") and the magnetism of its four central inhabitants, played by Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet, and Jane Birkin.

There's lust and jealousy, sure, though we're never sure how seriously to take it all until, about midway through the film, someone commits a rompishly casual murder. When it happens, you're almost sad to see the movie take a break from shots of people just lying around.

The Father (2020)

The setup for Florian Zeller's magnificent debut is so simple it barely seems sufficient for a movie: A daughter (Olivia Colman) is trying to move her dementia-struck father (Anthony Hopkins) from his flat and into a nursing home.

But the scenes that result are both aching and mesmerizing. Zeller designed the film, he told MovieMaker, "to make the audience feel as if they were going through a labyrinth." He envelops the audience in Anthony's confusion by moving the proportions of the apartment, changing the locations of items, and even changing the colors of a wall.

We see and feel a man losing his mind, and the film makes us share in his alternating peace and terror. Zeller was so certain that Hopkins was the only actor for the job that he named his main character Anthony and wrote the script for the Silence of the Lambs Oscar winner without ever having met him.

All worked out: Hopkins won his second Best Actor Oscar for The Father, one of the most excellent movies of recent years.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)

The gold standard of movies where not much happens, Jeanne Dielman follows a widowed housewife (Delphine Seyrig) as she goes about her domestic routines over three days: cooking, cleaning, taking care of her son, and having sex with a different client each afternoon.

Yes, she has sex three times, and there is one pointed act of violence, which may sound like a lot is happening. But consider that the movie is three hours and twenty minutes long. At one point it devotes four minutes to a static shot of Jeanne making veal cutlets.

Released when writer-director Chantal Akerman was just 25, Jeanne Dielman initially drew a mixed response, but steadily gained respect. In 2020, the Sight + Sound poll named it the greatest movie ever made. It replaced Vertigo at the top of the list.

If you like this list of excellent movies where not much happens, you might also enjoy this list of 10 Great Documentaries About Making Movies That You Can Stream Now.

And we invite you to follow us for more stories like this.

Editor's Note: Corrects main image and credit.

Main image: Contempt. Marceau-Cocinor 

They didn't worry about good taste — they just wanted to make you laugh.

Here are some '80s movies that might not fly now.

Porky's (1981)

It will never stop amusing us that the guy who made Porky's, the great director Bob Clark, also made A Christmas Story. (He also made the horror movie Black Christmas and the kids movie Baby Geniuses. Talk about range.)

Porky's is one of those '80s movies that kids were often shielded from, which in retrospect makes sense: Though it was presented as a freewheeling comedy, it's filled with weird humiliations, and of course peeping that doesn't meet modern standards of consent.

But to call back A Christmas Story, Bob Clark didn't give a fuuuuuuuuuuudge.

Trading Places (1983)

At one point, Dan Aykroyd disguises himself as a Jamaican. That isn't great. And some people have objected to the scene where a gorilla takes a bad guy as his mate. Maybe that isn't so funny in retrospect.

But other elements ofTrading Places are incredibly good, including the film's very smart take on nature vs. nurture, and its smart observations about all the assumptions our society makes about who deserves to be rich.

We love it's then-modern update on the screwball comedies of the 1930s, and Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy and Jamie Lee Curtis are all extremely good. It's one of our favorite '80s movies.

Better Off Dead (1985)

John Cusack plays Lane Meyer, a teenager who attempts, repeatedly, to remove himself from this earth after he's dumped by his girlfriend, Beth Truss (Amanda Wyss) for cocky blonde guy Roy Stalin (Aaron Dozier).

The whole plot would never fly today, nor the slapstick jokes around a teenage boy trying to end himself. But the entire movie is such masterful absurdist comedy that no thinking person could possibly take it seriously.

Also, like many of the movies of the time, it features some dicey Asian characters, but at least they're good at racing and have girlfriends. We'd say they're much cooler, at least by high school standards, than poor Lane is.

Finally, Diane Franklin (above, with Cusack) is excellent as Monique, a notably smart, capable and cool dream girl. So there's that. This is maybe the most '80s of all '80s movie comedies.

The Man With Two Brains (1983)

The whole setup of this dark screwball comedy will feel a tad misogynistic to some: Steve Martin plays a mad neurosurgeon, Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr, who falls in love with femme fatale Dolores Benedict (Kathleen Turner), then builds up resentment as she declines to consummate their marriage.

Meanwhile, he falls in love with a disembodied brain, Anne (voiced by Sissy Spacek) and begins searching for a body in which to house her. Along the way, he roots for one attractive woman to die, and ponders killing another. It all crescendoes in a joke at the expense of compulsive eaters.

It's not in the same league as The Jerk, a previous collaboration between Steve Martin and director Carl Reiner, but it has some very funny scenes.

Heathers (1988)

Heathers is the most pitch black of '80s movies, and embodies fatalistic Gen X cool. It was written by Daniel Waters as a kind of counter-point to the generally sunnier John Hughes comedies of the day.

The film stars Christian Slater as a charismatic teen lunatic who enlists popular girl Veronica in his plot to start offing popular kids, and staging things to make it look like they did themselves in — enlisting nefarious props like mineral water to makethe crime scenes more convincing.

Remember, this was the '80s, when the idea of deadly suburban high-school kids seemed hilariously absurd. A recent attempt to revive Heathers as a TV series was delayed and derailed by multiple incidents of real-life school violence that may the idea seem very unfunny to modern viewers.

Coming to America (1988)

There's something to offend everyone in the brilliant comic grotesquerie of Coming to America, a movie that goes after almost every demographic but respects all variety of hustles. Eddie Murphy takes the Richard Pryor trick of playing several characters in the same scene and, with the help of make-up, perfects it.

Coming to America has countless jokes that young, modern audiences may find shocking, but hey: They were also shocking when the movie came out. Eddie Murphy and his collaborators just didn't care. They wanted hard laughs, and they got them.

Airplane (1980)

Airplane is loaded with questionable jokes, including June Cleaver herself speaking jive. It's deeply inappropriate — and also one of the funniest things that has ever happened in a movie.

Kudos to David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker — synonymous with '80s comedies — for coming up with the idea of Barbara Billingsley delivering the line, "Oh stewardess? I speak jive." And also for the 7,000 other great jokes in Airplane, one of the all-time greatest comedies that don't care if you're offended.

The ZAZ team also came up with two more of the all-time great comedies on this list.

More on Airplane (and the Next Two Movies on This List)

"When we do screenings of Airplane! we get the question if we could do Airplane! today,” David Zucker, one-third of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker trio, recently said in an interview with PragerU. “The first thing I could think of was, ‘Sure, just without the jokes.’"

He also complained that modern Hollywood is "destroying comedy because of nine percent of the people who don’t have a sense of humor.”

That wasn't the case for '80s movies.

Top Secret (1984)

This film, the second Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker classic on our list, features muscle-bound, gun-totin' Black French character named Chocolate Mousse. At one point a bad guy is mounted by a bull. An extreme facial disfigurement gets one of the movie's biggest laughs.

Top Secret is also, for our money, maybe the funniest movie ever made: It's an absurdist caper that crosses a Cold War spy thriller with an Elvis movie, with perfectly orchestrated sight gags that get better with ever watch. The backward bookshop scene? Mesmerizing.

Top Secret also includes one of the all-time best jokes of '80s movies: "My uncle was born in America. But he was one of the lucky ones. He managed to escape in a balloon during the Jimmy Carter presidency." That's a great setup and payoff, whatever your politics.

The Naked Gun (1988)

The final Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker film on our list, The Naked Gun features a dizzying, hilarious array of risque jokes, all of which are terrific. The building statues sequence is a standout.

It's also the only film on this list to co-star a man once accused of double homicide — a rarity among '80s comedies.

No one is apologizing. We enjoyed the recent relaunch, too, but prefer the original.

Sixteen Candles (1984)

John Hughes' Sixteen Candles has gotten a lot of criticism, in retrospect, for the stereotypical Long Duk Dong character (played by Gedde Watanabe) and a scene that makes Anthony Michael Hall's character seem predatory, in retrospect.

Watanabe told NPR in 2008 that he was a "a bit naive" about taking on the role of Long Duk, though he still has affection for him.

As for the other thing: Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), who is presented as the dream guy of our heroine, Samantha (Molly Ringwald), passes off his unconscious girlfriend, Caroline (Haviland Morris), to another guy, Ted (Anthony Michael Hall, with Morris, above). Jake tells Ted, “Have fun.”

The next day, Caroline and the Ted conclude that they had sex. He asks if she enjoyed herself, and she says, “You know, I have this weird feeling I did,” which is the movie’s way of justifying the guys’ behavior.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)

Fast Times is the one of those '80s movies that is may be more offensive to religious conservatives than people on the left, because it takes the side of a high school student, Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh, above right, with Phoebe Cates), who has an abortion after a smooth talker gets her pregnant and then turns out to be a worthless deadbeat.

Like the next film on this list, this was one of those movies that kids in school yards spoke of in whispers — as one of those '80s comedies that parents definitely didn't want them to see.

It may have just been because of the famous Phoebe Cates pool sequence, but we don't think so. The movie's presentation of teen realities was a much bigger threat to the Moral Majority, the religious fundamentalists who thrived through the 1980s.

If you like this list, you might also like this list of Rad '80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.

Main image: Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Editor's Note: Corrects main image.

As you'll see, we tend to prefer plot twists that change a movie over plot twists that end a movie.

But we love plot twists of all kinds.

But First

There are lots of surprises that aren't really twists. A twist is something that completely changes the way we've been interpreting the story. A reveal is just a surprise.

We love surprises — Silence of the Lambs is full of them, for example, but its surprises don't make us rethink everything that's happened so far. The Crying Game also has a famous reveal, but it doesn't really make a huge difference. Citizen Kane also has a famous surprise ending, but it doesn't change the movie much. It's almost a grace note.

So with that said, here are the 12 Best Movie Plot Twists, Ranked. Many spoilers are ahead. If you don't want to know the twist, just read the section of each entry labeled "The Plot" and skip the rest. We'd much rather you see these films than have them spoiled here.

These are ranked from least to most great.

Number 12: Primal Fear

The Plot: Fame-seeking defense attorney Martin Vail (Richard Gere) fights to defend the docile Aaron Stampler (Ed Norton) an altar boy accused of murdering a Catholic archbishop. Vail comes to believe that his client developed a dissociative personality disorder because of years of abuse, including by the archbishop, which led him to take on the violent identity of Roy.

The Plot Twist (Spoiler): The film ends with Aaron admitting to his lawyer that he faked his dissociative personality disorder — and that in reality he more resembles the violent Roy than the docile Aaron.

Why It's Good: Because Ed Norton pulls it off, even if it seems, on paper, ridiculous. This movie plot twist is lowest on our list because we like a twist that comes early enough in the film for everyone to feel its ramifications. While we love a twist ending, we love and early or mid-movie plot twist even more.

Number 11: Frozen

The Plot: Frustrated by her sister Anna (voiced by Kristen Bell) wanting to marry Prince Hans (voiced by Santino Fontana), a young man she's just met, Princess Elsa (Idina Menzel) accidentally unleashes the ice powers she's been concealing since they were children.

The Plot Twist: As we learn fairly late in the game, Hans doesn't really love Anna. He's cold-hearted. Even frozen, if you will. So the kiss we think is going to end the movie in typical fairy tale fashion doesn't happen.

Why It Works: There's nothing we love more than a perfectly executed twist in a kids movie — especially a cool twist that teaches kids to be wary of strangers. Frozen flawlessly sets up the big twist with clever misdirection — in a soaring musical number, no less — as Hans and Anna seem to connect (but do they really?) in their duet "Love is an Open Door."

Number 10: Chinatown

The Plot: in this 1930s-set neo-noir, which won a Best Screenplay Oscar for Robert Towne, private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is lured by Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway, above) into an investigation of a complex scheme involving the Los Angeles water supply and the wealthy Noah Cross.

The Plot Twist (Spoiler): While getting smacked by Gittes, the tragic Evelyn reveals that Cross, her father, raped her when she was 15, which let to the birth of Katherine, who she grimly describes as "my sister and my daughter."

Why It's Good: It joltingly emphasizes the evils of Cross, who rapes not only the land, but his own daughter, and raises the stakes of what might otherwise be a relatively dry story about water rights. Best of all, it comes early enough in the film to resonate throughout, casting a darker pallor on everything that comes before, even as it fills us with rage at the villain.

Number 9: Fight Club

The Plot: An unnamed protagonist (Edward Norton), seeking a more meaningful life, starts a fight club with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a charismatic stranger he meets on one of his countless, soulless business trips. They begin a campaign of mischief that evolves into an anti-consumerist revolution.

The Plot Twist (Spoiler): The Norton character has been Tyler Durden the whole time! He's like a cooler imaginary friend.

Why It's Good: If you didn't see it coming (and I sure didn't when I saw Fight Club in a theater in 1999), it was a total knockout punch. Yes, it came a little late in the game, but it worked. And once you saw it, the first rule of Fight Club was not talking about the surprise in Fight Club.

Number 8: The Wizard of Oz

The Plot: Dorothy (Judy Garland) crash-lands in Oz after a tornado whisks her and her little dog, Toto, from Kansas. She joins the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion on a twisting, thill-filled, sing-song journey down the Yellow Brick Road to see the Wizard, whom they all hope will make their dreams come true.

The Plot Twist (Spoiler): The Wizard (Frank Morgan) is a fraud — a normal man using stagecraft to appear great and powerful. Dorothy and her crew can only make their own dreams come true, through the strength and character they built up along their journey. The Wizard gives the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion symbolic gifts to illustrate this. When he tries to take Dorothy back to Kansas in a balloon, Toto isn't having it, and jumps off. Dorothy follows him, and soon learns she can tap her own way back to Kansas.

Why It's Good: Sure, in this age of the Wicked films, everyone is well aware that the Wizard of Oz was no wizard at all. But imagine being a kid in a movie theater in 1939, watching the film in all its Technicolor majesty, and realizing the whole premise of Dorothy's journey has been a lie. But then being comforted by the realization that Dorothy, like you, can find your own way home. It's an emotionally sophisticated twist.

Number 7: The Third Man

The Plot: In this British noir, shot in post-World War II Allied-occupied Vienna, struggling American writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives to take a job for his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) only to learn that Lime is dead. He investigates his friend's death while falling for his lover, Anna (Alida Valli).

The Plot Twist (Spoiler): Lime isn't dead! And he's the bad guy. In a scene on a Ferris wheel, looking down at the tiny people below, he reveals how little he cares about his fellow human beings: "Would you really feel any pity if one of those... dots stopped moving forever?"

Why It's Good: It recalibrates the entire movie in a way that is totally unexpected, but also makes perfect sense. A basically perfect plot twist. And it comes at a point when plenty of story remains. The only problem with it is that we suspect audiences suspected Welles would show up at some point, given that his name was on the poster.

Number 6: Gone Girl

The Plot: Struggling financially and in his marriage to Amy (Rosamund Pike), Nick (Ben Affleck) finds himself the chief suspect in her shocking disappearance.

The Plot Twist (Spoiler): Shades of The Third Man — she's alive!

Why It Works: No one (who hasn't read the book) will ever see it coming. And it's a true twist — a pivotal plot turn that pleasingly flips the whole story.

Our only minor complaint is that the novel Gone Girl — by Gillian Flynn — handles the mid-story twist so perfectly that no film could match it for sheer thrills, especially, obviously, for audiences who know what's coming. Still, Gone Girl the movie adds value to the book with a spectacular cast that comes to include Neil Patrick Harris, who devours scenery as Desi, Amy's creepy ex.

If you're watching Love Story: John F. Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette, you may be intrigued to learn that Pike based her character, Amy, partly on Bessette. She told Vanity Fair in 2015 that she was fascinated by what she saw as Bessette's cipher-like quality.

By the way, it's worth noting that this is the second David Fincher movie on this list, after Fight Club. Many would argue that his film The Game belongs here, too.

Number 5: The Usual Suspects

The Plot: Customs Agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) interviews Verbal Kent (Kevin Spacey), who seems to be the weak link in a criminal crew under the control of the brutal Keyser Söze.

The Plot Twist (Spoiler): Verbal is Keyser Söze!

Why It Works: Absolutely no one saw it coming, since The Usual Suspects was a brand-new script not based on previous material. (Christopher McQuarrie won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.) We've noted our preference for movies where the twist comes earlier rather than later, but this is a case where the reveal and ending arrive with shocking, perfect timing.

Number 4: Psycho

The Plot: Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) rips off her boss and races off into the desert, stopping at the Bates Motel outside of Fairvale, California en route to her lover. At the motel, she encounters the creepy Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who she overhears arguing with his mother. She is killed in the shower by a mysterious figure, and Norman hides her body.

The Plot Twist (Spoiler): There are at least two. The first is the shower murder of Marion, who until this point appears to be the protagonist of the film. Psycho director skillfully guides us to the conclusion that Norman's mother is the killer — until we learn that she's been dead for a decade — and that in fact Norman has a habit of dressing up as "Mother" to kill women.

Why It's Good: Psycho basically invented the slasher genre, and the cross-dressing killer trope, which meant that anyone who saw the film 100% did not see any of the twists coming.

Number 3: The Sixth Sense

The Plot: The third film by M. Night Shyamalan and the one that established him as "the twist guy," The Sixth Sense is a supernatural thriller that pairs child psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) with troubled boy Cole (Haley Joel Osmont), who claims he can see dead people.

The Plot Twist (Spoiler): In a reversal of The Third Man, Malcolm is dead. We saw him get shot in the opening, but just assumed he recovered. He did not.

Why It Works: Shyamalan masterfully lets us draw our own conclusions — Malcolm surived the shooting, his wife doesn't answer him because they're marriage is on the rocks — and lets us trick ourselves.

Number 2: The Planet of the Apes

The Plot: Three astronauts, including George Taylor (Charlton Heston) crash-land on a planet where apes rule. Humans, including the captive Nova (Linda Harrison, seen above with Heston), are treated like animals.

The Plot Twist: After the humans escape, with the help of the benevolent Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans), they make a horrific discovery on the beach: The Statue of Liberty. They, and we, quickly realize what's happened: Warring humans all but destroyed ourselves as apes evolved past us and took over.

Why It Works: Though it comes at the very end, it forces you to re-evaluate everything that's come before while launching the entire Apes franchise, which endures to this day. Though the film is based on the 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle, the Statue of Liberty ending came from one of the film's writers, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, a master of plot twists and twist endings.

Number 1: The Empire Strikes Back

The Plot: Luke Skywalker cuts of his Jedi training to try to rescue his friends from the fearsome Darth Vader (James Earl Jones), who has set a trap to draw him to the Dark Side of the Force.

The Plot Twist (Spoiler): "I... am your father."

Why It Works: If you saw this movie in a theater, with your parents, when you were four, you would understand how utterly world-shaking it was. The easy answers are never the right ones, there is no simple line between good and evil, nothing can be trusted. The fact that it arrived in the middle of a children's fantasy trilogy made it all the more stunning. This is the plot twist that made Generation X.

One of the coolest things about it is that it ties together so many things that seemed too convenient in the first Star Wars, like Luke just happening to live close to Obi-Wan Kenobi on Tatooine. In retrospect, it's clear that Obi-Wan has been looking after him all his life, as later Star Wars stories would confirm.

Liked This List of the 12 Best Movie Plot Twists Ever, Ranked?

You'll surely also enjoy this list of the 12 Excellent Movies Where Not Much Happens. None of which have big twists.

If you liked this list, we'd love for you to please  follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: A publicity still from The Planet of the Apes. 20th Century Fox.

Editor's Note: Corrects Gone Girl credit.

From hits of the anything goes 1970s to films that came out very recently — in our supposedly more pearl-clutching times — these are movies that put laughter above messages.

But sometimes they sneak in a cool message. too.

Not Another Teen Movie (2000)

A brutal but affectionate takedown of teen movies from Lucas to She's All That to Fast Times at Ridgemont High to The Breakfast Club, Not Another Teen Movie is a blitzkrieg of offense filled with sex, bathroom jokes, insane violence and surprisingly acute social commentary.

Where else can you see Chris Evans misusing a banana, white kids who pretend to be Asian, and football players split in half?

Not Another Teen Movie could cut every offensive joke and still be very funny, but it gets extra points for the sheer audacity of keeping them in.

White Chicks (2004)

Marlon and Shawn Wayans play Black FBI agents who impersonate rich white socialites to infiltrate a pompous Hamptons social scene — and break up a conspiracy. Along the way they learn how white people act when they think no one of other races are around, but also start to see the world from a woman's perspective.

If you're not offended by something in White Chicks, you aren't paying attention. The Wayans take down privileged white people, but also everyone else, and make points about our weird racial and sexual hangups along the way. White Chicks always keeps you guessing about how far it will go, and it goes pretty far.

Airplane (1980)

June Cleaver speaking jive is deeply inappropriate — and one of the funniest things that has ever happened in a movie.

God bless Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker for coming up with the idea of Barbara Billingsley delivering the line, "Oh stewardess? I speak jive." And also for the 7,000 other great jokes in Airplane, one of the all-time greatest comedies.

You can question its taste if you want to, but you'd be better off just going with the laughs. There are a lot of them.

Team America: World Police (2004)

It's impossible to take any self-righteous actor seriously after watching this puppet-movie spy thriller that despises Kim Jong-Il, but hates Sean Penn even more.

Puppet love scenes, projectile vomiting that goes on much too long, unapologetic jingoism — Team America, from the creators of South Park, is a mockery of gung-ho nationalism, but also a compelling defense of American foreign policy at its best.

There's also a fantastic metaphor involving three different body parts that we think about way more than we should.

Borat (2006)

Sacha Baron Cohen impersonates a sexist, anti-Semitic, generally clueless Kazakh journalist who makes Americans feel free to say things they wouldn't ordinarily say. He's gloriously ignorant, but his guilelessness brings out the worst in people who should know better. (And also, very occasionally, the best.)

Borat's behavior is wildly offensive, but he's so demented that you can't help but feel sorry for him, and Baron Cohen and his team manage to strike a perfect mix of revulsion and vulnerability. What's most impressive is how much of it Baron Cohen had to improvise on the fly, in tense and often dangerous positions.

The 2020 sequel, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, is also terrific.

The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

With wall-to-wall gratuitous flesh and racial humor, The Kentucky Fried Movie is the modern-day definition of problematic, but it's also a perfect time capsule of the freewheeling 1970s: It spots and skewers genres from kung-fu to Blaxploitation to women-in-prison movies in quick-hit, take-it-or-leave it sketches that are perfect sendups of a whole slew of grindhouse classics.

It's also an important movie, believe it or not — it was the breakthrough for its director, John Landis, and for its writers, the comedic team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, who would soon go on to make Airplane.

Kentucky Fried Movie is one of those comedies that Gen X kids spoke of in whispers because so many of their parents banned them from seeing it. It has a well-earned reputation for what we used to call a dirty movie. It really is, in a way that still feels subversive, wrong, and thrilling.

Also Read: The 12 Best Movie Plot Twists, Ranked

Coming to America (1988)

Are you Black, white, Jewish, Christian, African, American, young or old?

There's something to offend you in the cartoonish grotesquerie of Coming to America, in which Eddie Murphy plays people fitting into almost all of the demographics we just listed, mercilessly mocking them all.

Coming to America takes shots at royalty, the nouveau riche, and the scrappy underclass, but is most focused on gender dynamics. It's such a sharp judge of human behavior that the only appropriate reaction is awe.

Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979)

Monty Python takes on the ultimate sacred cow: the story of Jesus. It looks as magnificent as Hollywood's biggest Biblical epics, which makes its takedown of pomposity all the more subversive and hysterical.

A great many great bits and routines darkly culminate in the deranged cheeriness of the final musical number, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life."

It's all quite sacrilegious, and that's the whole point.

Tropic Thunder (2008)

Tropic Thunder always walks a thin line, but especially with Ben Stiller's Simple Jack character and Robert Downey Jr.'s portrayal of Kirk Lazarus, an Australian actor who really, really commits to playing a Black character.

The film mocks actors desperate for awards, and it's uncomfortable — but also funny. Stiller has admirably stuck to his guns, standing by his movie.

“I make no apologies for Tropic Thunder,” Stiller tweeted last year when someone erroneously said he had apologized for the film. “Don’t know who told you that. It’s always been a controversial movie since when we opened. Proud of it and the work everyone did on it.”

The Jerk (1979)

"I was born a poor Black child," Steve Martin's Navin Johnson explains at the start of this absurdist masterpiece, and it all builds up into a righteous kung-fu takedown at his hideously tacky mansion that features maybe the only time in history it's been totally OK for a white guy to scream the most offensive of all racial slurs.

No one else could have pulled of the balancing act except for Steve Martin, whose special purpose is to make us all laugh.

We won't pretend to be objective here: This is maybe our favorite movie out of all comedies, ever.

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (1999)

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut seeks out sympathy for the devil: We're supposed to root for Satan himself as he tries to escape an abusive relationship with Saddam Hussein.

There's also lots of violence against kids and flagrant anti-Canadian propaganda.

But of course, Canadians were too nice to get offended.

Blazing Saddles (1974)

Blazing Saddles is filled with gags big and small, some of which will work for you and some of which won't. It has quite a few race-based jokes, but the film is very much on the side of Sheriff Bart (Cleavon Little), a Black sheriff trying to bring progress to the Wild West.

The American Film Institute ranks Blazing Saddles as the sixth-funniest movie of all time, but director and co-writer Mel Brooks disagrees: "I love Some Like It Hot, but we have the funniest movie ever made," Brooks told Vanity Fair in 2016, not caring if you're offended.

The five films that landed ahead of Blazing Saddles on AFI's list were, from first to fifth, Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, Dr. Strangelove, Annie Hall, and Duck Soup.

Bottoms (2023)

We're happily including Bottoms for everyone who thinks today's comedies are afraid to be funny. In fact, it's on our spinoff list from this one — 15 Shameless New Comedies That Just Don't Care If You're Offended.

Bottoms is about "teen girls who start a fight club so they can try to impress and hook up with cheerleaders,” explains writer-director Emma Seligman. It breaks a lot of rules about what kind of violence it's considered decent to present onscreen — the girls really do fight, and don't always win — and resists recent play-it-safe rules that dictate that LGBTQ+ characters have to be saintly or victimized or both.

“I think every human deserves to see a relatable, complicated, nuanced version of themselves on screen. And I don’t think that I’ve seen it enough for me to feel recognized,” says Seligman.

Liked Our List of Shameless Comedies That Just Don't Care If You're Offended?

You might also like this list of "Based on a True Story" Movies That Are Actually Pretty True or this list of 12 Rad '80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.

Main image: The Kentucky Fried Movie.

Some of them also happen to be among the best movies of all time.

Here we go.

But First, Let's Talk About Box Office vs Return on Investment

Among the highest-grossing films of all time you’ll find megahits like Avatar and Avengers: Endgame. They movies made billions of dollars worldwide.

But those numbers are less impressive when you consider the costs to make them. Endgame, for example, reportedly cost somewhere between $350 and $400 million to make.

These very profitable movies that earned more than 100 times their budget at the box office started by thinking small.

Mad Max (1979)

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, is currently struggling at the box office despite high marks from people who've actually gone to see it. (It has earned $32 million in the worst Memorial Day Weekend box office in decades — not counting in 2020, when theaters were mostly closed.)

But the first film in the series, 1979's Mad Max, was a clear box-office triumph. Made on the cheap, for the equivalent of $250,000 in U.S. currency, the Australian dystopian action drama earned $100 million — 400 times its budget.

It not only introduced a young Mel Gibson to a mass audience, but spawned one of the most enduring of all film franchises.

Halloween (1978)

We could have done a list just of horror films that qualified for this list. Halloween is already the second, and there will be a couple more we felt we should include, but we aimed for variety. That being said, Halloween had to be included, because John Carpenter helped change horror movies. Also, it still rips as far as horror movies go.

The idea that Halloween invented the slasher film has been bandied about by some in the past, which isn’t true. Bob Clark’s Black Christmas predates it, as do some Italian horror films. Halloween did popularize the genre in America, though, and did help codify some of the elements.

Also, it made a ton of money. Carpenter’s film cost something around $300,000 to make, but it would end up making $70 million worldwide, easily making our list of movies that earned 100 times their budget at the box office. In fact, it made more than 200 times its budget. That's a profitable movie.

Super Size Me (2004)

Many hit documentaries could make this list of list of movies that made 100 times their budget, as documentaries don’t tend to cost a lot of money. To represent the genre, we’re going with one of the most-famous docs, and also one that provided particular bang for the buck. That would be Super Size Me, by Morgan Spurlock, who tragically died of cancer last year at just 53.

Helping to popularize the “stunt documentary” subgenre, Spurlock ate only McDonald’s for a month to see what it did to his health. It got a lot of people talking, changed some minds about fast food, and basically ended the Super Size option at McDonald’s, and similar options elsewhere. Oh, and it made a ton of money.

Off of a budget of $65,000, it earned $22 million.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is both a proto-slasher and a proto-found footage horror movie. It was positioned as being based on a true story, though it wasn’t, as a criticism of sensationalistic “if it bleeds, it leads” news of the era. On top of that, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is arguably a top-10 movie title of all-time, and the tagline, “Who will survive and what will be left of them?” is also an all-timer.

Tobe Hooper’s film was made on the cheap, which you can do when your biggest special effect is, you know, a chainsaw. The movie was made for less than $140,000, with some estimates as low as $80,000.

It would make $30.9 million, a huge return on that investment, and influence generations of horror directors to come. A very profitable movie that would inspire a wide range of films, from Pearl to Alien.

And it's on our list of the Top 1970s Horror Movies, Ranked by Box Office.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

These days, a phenomenon like The Blair Witch Project would be almost impossible, and the social media chatter around such a movie would be largely unbearable. It’s not the first found-footage horror film, but it helped take the concept to new heights commercially and bolstered a doubling down on the style going forward.

All the marketing posited that The Blair Witch Project was a documentary, not a work of fiction. The actors, all unknown, were posited as real missing/presumed dead. It helped that the internet was starting to grow significantly in 1999, helping to market the movie as well. In time, it would become clear that it was a work of fiction, though in truth the whole “witch” part should have been a giveaway.

Nevertheless, the phenomenon brought in $248.6 million worldwide off of a budget that came in under $1 million.

Friday the 13th (1980)

What if you took the lessons of Halloween, but turned them into something nastier and more prurient? Well, you don’t get a stone-cold classic, but you do get a bit hit — and another of those horror movies that made 100 times their budget.

Friday the 13th became the foremost slasher series in the United States, never artistically minded, but always delivering what it promised.

Kudos to director Sean S. Cunningham, who bought an ad in Variety in 1979 basically telling studios, “Hey, did you like Halloween? Then check out what I’ve got cooking!” You probably know by now that Jason Vorhees isn’t the killer in the first movie, and that a young Kevin Bacon had a role. What you may not know is that Friday the 13th was made for $550,000 and made $59.8 million.

American Graffiti (1973)

Star Wars made George Lucas an icon. That movie birthed an empire (in multiple ways) and made $775.4 million on a budget of $11 million. How did Lucas help earn the chance to bring his space opera to life, though? Because, a few years earlier, he had another big success in American Graffiti.

Laying the groundwork for Happy Days, American Graffiti is a coming-of-age tale set in 1962. It’s built upon driving around in cars, trying to get some sexual action going, and listening to Wolfman Jack. In the cast you will find, among others, Ron Howard and Richard Dreyfuss, plus a small role for a carpenter named Harrison Ford. American Graffiti struck a chord with audiences. Made for only $770,000 it made $140 million, and also earned five Oscar nominations.

So yeah, that’s how Lucas got to make Star Wars — by breaking out by making one of the rare movies that made 100 times their budget at the box office.

Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

The title Napoleon Dynamite could have turned people off. You could say that about the unusual aesthetic as well, or the cast of largely unknowns, or… a lot of data points seemed to point to Napoleon Dynamite being a total shrug.

Instead, it became one of the foremost cult classics of the 2000s — and one of the comedy movies that made 100 times their budget.

Jared Hess shot the film in his native Idaho, and cast his college buddy Jon Heder in the lead role. It made $46.1 million worldwide — astonishing for a quirky film that cost $400,000 to make.

Paranormal Activity (2009)

Alright, one last horror film. We wanted to include Paranormal Activity because it basically built the career of producer Jason Blum, and also kicked off a series of imitators trying to make a ton of money off of basically no budget. It’s with Paranormal Activity that studios seemed to really recognize that horror fans are less picky than fans of other genres, and that the movies tend to be fairly cheap to make.

It’s a found footage movie shot with a stationary home video camera. Seriously, it could not be more lo-fi. Oren Peli’s initial production cost a mere $15,000, though once Paramount signed on they asked for a bit of a glow up, and a new ending, that cost $215,000.

Even so, Paranormal Activity was a horror hit, making $194.2 million and generating several sequels. It’s like the scary poster child for movies that made 100 times their budget.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

This George Romero zombie classic is the gold standard model for other low-budget horror movies. Shot in black and white for less than $125,000 with an unknown cast — but an incredible concept, and still captivating atmospherics — it went on to earn more than $30 million.

It's one of the most-imitated of all films, both in its setup and its financial model. It's easily one of the most profitable movies. It's not just on our list of movies that made more than 100 times its budget at the box office — it could be on a list of movies that nearly 250 times its budget.

Once (2007)

The power of a song. Once became an unexpected hit thanks to the soundtrack, specifically the song “Falling Slowly.” The movie, set in Ireland, follows two unnamed musicians who meet, make music, and seemingly fall in unrequited love. Among the songs they write in the film is “Falling Slowly.”

That song would go on to win Best Original Song at the Oscars. It would rise to 61 on the Billboard Hot 100. Once only cost $150,000 to make, as it is quite a small story (with big emotions). The film made $23.3 million, but will also always have that Academy Award.

It’s falling slowly…. onto our list of profitable movies that made 100 times their budget.

Rocky (1976)

Speaking of the Academy Awards, we end with, fittingly, an underdog story. That is true of Rocky Balboa, but also the movie Rocky. Sylvester Stallone would go on to be one of the biggest movie stars in the world, and the Rocky sequels would get so over-the-top Rocky basically ends the Cold War in the fourth one. Back in the mid-1970s, though, Stallone was a struggling actor. He wrote Rocky, hoping to earn a nice role for himself, the journey there was as notable as the Italian Stallion’s.

First, ABC bought it to turn it into a made-for-TV movie, but they wanted to hire writers for rewrites, so Stallone’s Lords of Flatbush co-star Henry Winkler used his Happy Days cache to manage to get them to sell him the rights back. Stallone took it to United Artists, which wanted to make it, but as a vehicle for an established star. Stallone and his agents said he would star or nobody would.

The studio said fine, but in turn only gave the film a budget of about $1 million. Cut to Rocky winning Best Picture for 1976 while making $225 million at the box office.

Yo, Adrian: He made one of the most profitable movies of all time, and one of the most beloved. It also launched two very successful franchises: Not just the Rocky franchise, but the spinoff Creed franchise.

If you liked this list of very profitable movies that earned 100 times their budget at the box office, you might also like this list of killer animal movies that used real animals. Some of them were made on quite tight budgets.

We also invite you to follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: Friday the 13th. Paramount.

Editor's Note: Corrects main image.

It featured the stars of SXSW films, Oscar night celebrants, a spontaneous Linkin Park singalong, and much more.

Thank you to Tina Win, Jane Owen, TBK Productions, and Cinema Center. Here are scenes from the celebration.

Tina Win Sings

Tina Win takes the stage at the MovieMaker Awards celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

Welcome to Higbie's

Film lovers gather at Hibbie's in Austin for the best party of SXSW weekend, MovieMaker's Awards Night celebration.

Himesh Patel

Himesh Patel attends the MovieMaker Awards Night Celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

Prior to the party, he sat down with Riz Ahmed for a SXSW Featured Conversation to discuss the upcoming series BAIT.

Thank You to Jane Owen PR

Jane Owen and Editor-in-Chief of MovieMaker Magazine Tim Molloy attends the MovieMaker Awards celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

Self Custody

"Self Custody" filmmaker and TBK Productions owner Garrett Patten, Poopies, and "Self Custody" actor Michael Monks attend the MovieMaker Awards Night celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

"Self Custody" is now streaming on Prime, Tubi and Plex, and stars Patten, Monks, Adrien Grenier and Henry Cejudo.

You can read more about it here.

Lady Kings of Texas

Giovannie Cruz, Erin Brown Thomas and Elisabeth Ness, collaborators on the upcoming feature Lady Kings of Texas.

Thomas was also on the producing team of "The Singers," which won an Oscar just before Sunday's party for best live-action short.

You can read more about her work here.

And the Oscar Goes To...

Same Same But Different director Lauren Noll, a guest, Elisabeth Ness, and filmmaker Gregory J.M. Kasunich.

You can read more about Same Same But Different here, and about Noll and Kasunich's collaboration "Heart of Texas" here.

Miriam Olken

Miriam Olken attends the MovieMaker Awards Night Celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

She's part of the team on Mallory's Ghost, which was in the Narrative Feature Competition at SXSW.

Jimmy Akingbola and Joseph Marcell

Jimmy Akingbola and Joseph Marcell, who played Geoffrey on Bel Air and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, respectively, in a historic meeting of the Geoffreys at the MovieMaker Awards Night celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

A Meeting We Don't Want to End

Marcell and Akingbola

The Geoffrey summit continues.

For the Win

Tina Win and Editor-in-Chief of MovieMaker Magazine Tim Molloy attends the MovieMaker Awards Night Celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

More Tina Win

Tina Win wows the Hibie's crowd with her stellar live performance.

More Arrivals

Kelley Jakle

Actress and singer-songwriter Kelley Jakle attends the MovieMaker Awards Night Celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

Medalion Rahimi

Same Same But Different star Medalion Rahimi attends the MovieMaker Awards Night celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

Jaime King

Actress and model Jaime King arrives on the red carpet at MovieMaker's Awards Night celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

Jaime King and Pammy Hilton

Logan Miller and Layla Mohammadi

Photo by Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images for Jane Owen Public Relations

Same Same But Different stars Logan Miller and Layla Mohammadi attend the MovieMaker Awards celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

Jason Parks

Producer-actor Jason Parks attends the MovieMaker Awards celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

Bayan Joonam

Phoenix Jones: The Rise and Fall of a Real-Life Superhero director Bayan Joonam attends the MovieMaker Awards celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

You can read more about Phoenix Jones here.

Them That's Not

"Them That's Not" team Jalen Washington, Sade Ndya, Kadijah Raquel, Jo Siri, CJ Duncan, Mekhai Lee and Brit West attend the MovieMaker Awards Night celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

Thank You CinemaCenter

A guest, Jaylen Moore, Jimmy Akingbola, Joseph Marcell, guests and Tanya Khani attend the MovieMaker Awards Night celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

Jessika Van

Grind star Jessika Van attends the MovieMaker Awards Night celebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

Tina Win on the Red Carpet

Tina Win on the red carpet.

Tina Win and Ricardo Rojas

Tina Win and Ricardo Rojas on the red carpet.

Louisiana Film Prize Reunion

Editor-in-Chief of MovieMaker Magazine Tim Molloy, producer Milan Chakraborty and Louisiana Film Prize executive director Gregory Kallenberg attend the MovieMaker Awards Night Xcelebration at Higbie's on March 15, 2026 in Austin, Texas.

You can read more about Chakraborty here...

... and more about Kallenberg here.

Molloy and Chakraborty met at Film Prize years ago.

Speech

A few words of appreciation for Jane Owen PR, Higbie's, Hendrick’s Gin & Peroni USA, Cinema Center, TBK Productions, and Tina Win.

Of course, almost all TV shows eventually become cancelled TV shows — all good things must come to an end, right? So we're focusing on shows that lasted less than a season.

Ready? Here we go.

Michelle Pfeiffer

One of the more intriguing cancelled TV shows in sitcom history is the Animal House spinoff, Delta House.

It should have worked. Besides the obvious advantage of having Pfeiffer in the cast, it came from the Animal House writers and also had future teen movie icon John Hughes on the writing staff. Additionally, the actors who played Dean Wormer, Flounder, Hoover, and D-Day in Animal House reprised their roles as well.

Delta House couldn’t get John Belushi, so Bluto was replaced by his heretofore unmentioned brother Blotto, played by Josh Mostel.

Pfeiffer, of course, went on to become one of the biggest movie stars in the world, with a run of successes that has included Scarface, Married to the Mob, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Batman Returns, Age of Innocence, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and many more films. She's a three-time Oscar nominee,

Halle Berry

Halle Berry started her career as a pageant contestant and model, so she brought life experience to the role of Emily Franklin in the sitcom Living Dolls (above), a spinoff of Who’s the Boss that aired for 13 episodes in 1989.

Of course, she didn't spend too much timing sweating the cancellation: She broke out as a film star in 1991’s Boomerang and had very strong ’90s, appearing in hit films and winning an Emmy and Golden Globe for the TV film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge.

But the next decade was even better: She won her Best Actress Oscar for starring in 2001’s Monster’s Ball as a struggling widow.

Her recent films include John Wick 3: Parabellum. And the X-Men alum made her directorial debut with 2020’s Bruised, in which she also starred.

Dave Chappelle

Chappelle and Jim Breuer caught the eye of network executives when they guest starred on a 1995 episode of Home Improvement as two guys who appear together on Tool Time to ask Tim Taylor (Tim Allen) for some advice about their girlfriends.

They were rewarded with a spinoff series, Buddies. But after rehearsals, the show replaced Breuer with Christopher Gartin, and the vibe was off — the chemistry between real-life friends Chappelle and Breuer was nowhere to be found. Buddies lasted 13 episodes in 1996.

Chappelle and Breuer, by then a Saturday Night Live cast member, reunited in the 1998 comedy Half-Baked, and Chappelle went on to star on Chappelle's Show (co-created by Half Baked co-writer and real-life buddy Neal Brennan) and to become one of the biggest standup comedians of all time.

And Buddies joined the ranks of cancelled TV shows that perhaps didn't realize they had a future superstar on their hands.

Hilary Swank

Hilary Swank appeared on the sitcoms Evening Shade and Growing Pains before starring on her own sitcom, Camp Wilder, which ran for 20 episodes on ABC in the 1992-93 season.

Swank moved on fast from the cancellation: In 1992, she had made her film debut in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and she followed that up with a starring role in 1994's The Next Karate Kid and Beverly Hills, 90210.

But she was just getting started. She soon won her first Best Actress Oscar for 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry, which she followed up with another Best Actress Oscar for 2004’s Million Dollar Baby.

Her recent films include Ordinary Angels.

As cancelled TV shows go, Camp Wilder had a great eye for talent: The cast also included Jay Mohr and Jerry O'Connell, who, like Swank, have done quite well for themselves.

Margot Robbie

The 2011 season brought several 1960s-set TV shows, thanks to the success of Mad Men on AMC. Networks tried to get their own version of the smart, sexy and sophisticated cable phenomenon.

ABC shot its shot with Pan Am, centered around a team of flight attendants. The biggest name in the cast was Christina Ricci. But a lesser-known cast member was Margot Robbie, already a veteran of Australian TV.

Pan-Am lasted for 14 episodes. But Robbie soon became a movie star with her role in 2014's The Wolf of Wall Street, and went on to three Academy Award nominations and became one of the most successful actors and producers in Hollywood. Her greatest success so far is producing and starring in Barbie, the biggest hit of 2023.

We don't know why Pan Am failed to take off with audiences, but you can't blame the cast.

Amber Heard

Network TV's other big swing at a Mad Men-style '60s drama in the 2011 season was The Playboy Club, centered on a group of waitresses, or "Bunnies," at one of Playboy Enterprises' once-popular Playboy Clubs.

Long before she was known for an acrimonious parting with Johnny Depp, Amber Heard wore bunny ears to offer drinks and cigarettes — with a side of intrigue. The NBC show also starred Eddie Ciprian as a Don Draper-esque Playboy Club key-holder with shady connections, and Laura Benanti, Jenna Dewan and Naturi Naughton as Bunnies.

The Playboy Club lasted just seven episodes, but Heard went on to appear in films including Pineapple Express, Machete Kills, Magic Mike XXL and The Danish Girl, as well as the DC films Justice League, Aquaman, and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.

John Mulaney

John Mulaney's career is soaring now — he's one of our greatest comedians and the host of Netflix's Everybody's Live With John Mulaney.

But he hit a rare career setback with the Fox sitcom Mulaney, in which the comedian and former Saturday Night Live writer — not yet a household name — played a version of himself alongside an impressive supporting cast that included Elliott Gould and fellow SNL vets Martin Short and Nasim Pedrad.

The show was negatively compared to Seinfeld, but the real Mulaney obviously turned out OK, succeeding not just in standup and numerous television television shows, but also on Broadway, where he starred with friend Nick Kroll in Oh, Hello.

If you liked this list, you might also like this list of Classic Rock Songs Inspired by Movies We Love.

And we invite you to please follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: Amber Heard in The Playboy Club.NBC

Spoilers follow, of course.

Here we go.

Frank Underwood on House of Cards (Played by Kevin Spacey)

House of Cards killed off Frank Underwood because of the off-screen accusations against Kevin Spacey, which the actor denies. But you know who's definitely guilty?

That would be President Underwood, who killed the two most likable people on the show — Zoe and Peter (Kate Mara and Corey Stoll) in the very first season of House of Cards and never looked back.

The show's final season even revealed that Frank plotted to kill his partner-in-crime, Claire (Robin Wright). Irredeemable.

The Trinity Killer on Dexter (Played by John Lithgow)

The Trinity Killer, aka Arthur Mitchell, poses as a family man to hide a despicable, murderous cruel streak that ends only when Dexter (Michael C. Hall) finally puts him down.

But Dexter is too late: He arrives home to find that Trinity's final murder was of Rita (Julie Benz), who — besides being completely innocent and good — was Dexter's last shot at happiness and a normal life.

The Trinity Killer certainly deserved to die, but also went out as one of the best TV villains ever, played to perfection by Lithgow.

Ramsay Bolton on Game of Thrones (Played by Iwan Rheon)

A psychopathic sadist who loves torturing adversaries, often in repugnant ways. He isn't even loyal to his own father.

He finally gets his due when Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) turns his own hunting dogs on him — and they turn out to be about as loyal as he is. Good riddance.

Game of Thrones was perhaps the greatest show of all time at introducing TV characters who deserved to die, as the rest of this list will grimly illustrate.

The Governor on The Walking Dead (Played by David Morrissey)

Besides beheading Hershel Greene, who never wanted to hurt anyone, the Governor (David Morrissey) dispensed brutal discipline on the people of his town, Woodbury, and bedeviled Rick Grimes and his crew.

Worst of all, he called himself The Governor when he should have only been the mayor.

We weren't sad to see him go, by Michonne's blade and Lilly's gun.

Walter White on Breaking Bad (Played by Bryan Cranston)

Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan always said the show would turn Walter White from Mr. Chips to Scarface, and boy did he deliver.

We were rooting hard for Walt at the beginning, when he was a struggling dad with a cancer diagnosis who turned to drug manufacturing to provide for his family. But then he turned into the power-mad Heisenberg, killing countless people in addition to those who became hooked on his meth.

Walt deserved to die, and knew it, but still went out on top: He killed his enemies, freed Jesse, left his family set for life, and got fun revenge on his friends-turned-betrayers Elliott and Gretchen. He died peacefully bleeding from a gunshot wound suffered in an attack he himself orchestrated.

He was reprehensible, but we kept hoping he would somehow win, and he sort of did — which makes him one of the all-time most compelling TV characters.

Todd Alquist on Breaking Bad (Played by Jesse Plemons)

Todd seemed so affable at the beginning, but then he went and shot the boy witness with a tarantula. There was no coming back from that, so Todd just kept getting worse, even keeping Jesse in a cage like the boy did his arachnid pet.

We don't fault Jesse (Aaron Paul) for strangling him.

But wow: What acting by Jesse Plemons. This, along with Friday Night Lights, made us realize he's one of Hollywood's best actors, especially when playing seemingly harmless guys with secrets.

Ralph Cifaretto on The Sopranos (Played by Joe Pantaliano)

The Sopranos was packed with TV characters who deserved to die, but let's start with Ralph Cifaretto. He was a good earner and a terrible guy.

Look, we're not saying Ralph didn't have his charms, but he lost us completely with the utterly pointless murder of his dancer girlfriend, Tracee (Ariel Kiley, with Ralph, above), who was pregnant, to boot.

We've never been so happy to see Tony Soprano take someone out. And there was some poetic justice in Tony killing Ralph with his bare hands, just as Ralph killed Tracee. We still despise this guy.

Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos (Played by Michael Imperioli)

Besides being petty, murderous, and once killing a dog by sitting on it, Christophuh crossed the point of no return when he had his chance to run off with Adriana (Drea de Matteo) and instead went along with the decision to have her murdered for talking to the feds.

We tried to like him, and he was funny, for sure. But Chrissy's unreliability made it impossible for Tony not to whack him, and after what he allowed with Adriana, we were fine with that.

Tony Soprano on The Sopranos (Played by James Gandolfini)

You knew this was coming. Tony Soprano killed or orchestrated the killings of more people than we can count, sometimes for good reasons, and often for bad. He knew what he was getting into: Live by the sword and gun, die by the sword and the gun.

If you're reading this and saying, "Wait! Tony didn't die at Holsten's!," well, grow up. Of course he did.

Sopranos creator David Chase basically confirmed Tony Soprano died in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, 15 years after the Sopranos finale. Read it here if you like.

Barry Berkman on Barry (Played by Bill Hader)

We certainly sympathized with Barry at many times throughout the four seasons of Barry — he was a veteran dealing with PTSD, led astray by his role models, who really wanted to go straight.

But ultimately killed so many people — many of whom didn't deserve it — that there was almost no way the show could have ended except with his death. Barry is a comedy, sure, but also tragic in every sense.

Joffrey Baratheon on Game of Thrones (Played by Jack Gleeson)

We know, we know: Joffrey is a child. But he was a king, more powerful than any adult, and we didn't see any chance of him reforming. Hence our inclusion of him on this list of TV characters who deserved to die.

In his brief reign he ordered the execution of the benevolent Ned Stark, abused his wife, Sansa, humiliated members of his own family, and killed countless people, often for the sake of his own amusement.

We were happy to see him die and happy that Margaery (Natalie Dormer) didn't have to go through with marrying him. Kudos to her aunt Lady Olenna Tyrell (Diana Rigg) for orchestrating his well-deserved assassination.

Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones (Played by Emilia Clarke)

We know, you may disagree. But the whole point of Game of Thrones is that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that even well-meaning people can do evil with the intent of doing good.

No character exemplified this more than the Mother of Dragons, who went from breaking chains to going waaaaaaay overboard in her dragon-riding, flame-breathing quest for conquest.

We were sorry to see her die because of the person she used to be, but relieved to see the end of the person she became. She's the person we're saddest about including on this list of TV characters who deserved to die.

Viserys Targaryen (Played by Harry Lloyd)

While we mixed feelings about poor Daenerys, we're not crying for her late brother, Harry Lloyd. Of the many, many awful Game of Thrones characters who we won't mourn, he stands out for his ruthless desire for power, lack of loyalty to anyone — especially his sister — and most of all, his obnoxious sense of entitlement.

The Dothraki finally gave him a crown of gold — very hot gold — to fulfill his dreams in classic monkey's paw fashion.

Kudos to actor Harry Lloyd (above left) for really embracing the characters awfulness and never shilling for audience sympathy.

Liked Our List of TV Characters Who Deserved to Die?

You may also like this list of the 12 Smart Movies Disguised as Dumb Movies, or this list of Gen X Icons Gone Too Soon.

Main image: Game of Thrones. HBO

The next Bond film in the long-running series will be directed by Denis Villenueve, who also has his hands full with the upcoming Dune: Part Three.

As we wait to see where he'll take the franchise — and who will play Bond next — let's look back at some unforgettable photos from the very first James Bond movie.

Welcome to Jamaica

Dr. No wasn't the first of Ian Fleming's novels about James Bond — that was 1953's Casino Royale — but Dr. No was the first to be made into a feature film.

Set in London, Jamaica and the fictional island of Crab Kay, it shot on location in Jamaica in 1962.

The plot concerns Agent 007 traveling to Jamaica to investigate the death of MI6 station chief John Strangways. But that's just an excuse to bring together Bond (Sean Connery) and Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress), above.

Take 007

Sean Connery (above) earned the role of 007 in part because of his walk, according to the new Nicholas Shakespeare book Ian Fleming: The Complete Man.

He quotes producer Albert Brocolli saying of Connery, "He walked like the most arrogant son of a gun you’ve ever seen," which led him to realize: "That’s our Bond."

Shakespeare's book follows the life of Fleming, whose novels inspired the series of 27 Bond films that started with Dr. No.

Ursula Andress and Ian Fleming

Above: Ursula Andress on set with Bond creator Ian Fleming. As Nicholas Shakespeare's book recounts, Bond was based in part on Fleming, who dramatized and heightened his own experiences with love and spycraft.

Andress' character, Honey Ryder, is often considered the first "Bond girl," although she doesn't make her iconic bikini-clad entrance until about halfway through Dr. No.

She is preceded onscreen by Sylvia Trench and Miss Taro.

Enter Bearing Shells

Honey Ryder's job is shell diving, and appropriately she enters Dr. No bearing shells. If her opening costume in the film — a white swimsuit and belt — seems a little revealing, consider that in the novel upon which Dr. No is based, she wears only the belt.

The shells sequence turned around the expectations for the film, according to Ian Fleming: The Complete Man.

“‘It was going to be a low-budget flop,’” says Blanche’s son Chris Blackwell, son of Ian Fleming’s muse and love, Blanche Blackwell, in the book. “It all changed when we watched the rushes of Ursula Andress emerging from the sea.”

He added: “It was electrifying. We suddenly felt, ‘Gosh, we’ve got a movie.’”

Bad Boys

According to Shakespeare’s book, Fleming almost spoiled a take of the iconic beach scene. He was leading two friends on a walk along Laughing Waters — the name of the beach where the scene was filmed — and almost walked into the shot.

Director Terence Young yelled at them to “Lie down!” which they did. Shakespeare writes: “The composer Monty Norman had arrived in Jamaica to write the music and he watched Young shout at them — ‘They were shooed off like little boys.’

"Ian and his friends were left lying behind a dune, forgotten, until someone remembered to release them an hour later.”

That's Fleming, right, with Andress and Connery.

Chemistry, Raw Chemistry

What comes through most of all in the publicity photos for Dr. No is the radiant, transcendent chemistry between Connery and Andress. Which, we suppose, was exactly the idea.

"He was very protective towards me, he was adorable, fantastic," Andress said in a 2020 interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera after Connery's death at 90. "He adored women, He was undoubtedly very much a man.''

She added: “We spent many evenings together and he would invite me everywhere, Monte Carlo, London, New York, from when we met until now we always remained friends. Friends, friends.'"

At Sea

Andress and Connery are all smiles, relaxing on a boat offshore.

Connery brought plenty of life experience to the job of being Bond.

Among other jobs prior to taking on his most famous role, Connery was a naval boxer, lifeguard, and art class model, according to Shakespeare's Ian Fleming: The Complete Man.

Director Terence Young at Work

Making the film wasn't all fun in the sun — here are Connery and Andress discussing a scene with director Terence Young.

Young not only brought Bond to the screen for the first time with Dr. No, but directed the second 007 film, From Russia With Love, released a year after the first film, in 1963.

Guy Hamilton directed the third film, Goldfinger, but Young returned for his third and final Bond film, Thunderball, in 1965. It's safe to say that no director did more to shape the aesthetic of the early franchise.

Keep Your Friends Close

Sean Connery as Bond and John Kitzmiller as Quarrel.

When 007 arrives in Jamaica to investigate the murder of M16 Station Chief John Strangways, he is tailed by Quarrel — but Quarrel soon turns out to be aiding the CIA.

He soon introduces Bond to Felix Leiter, a CIA operative who becomes one of James' closest friends. The first actor to play him was future Hawaii Five-O star Jack Lord.

Sean Connery and Ursula Andress

The actors show off their athleticism and chemistry while frolicking on a Jamaican beach during filming.

Nice work if you can get it.

Andress told Corriere della Sera that when she joined the film, “I didn't know Sean, and I thought it would be my first film and maybe my last.

"But instead it took off, the chemistry between us worked and it was the perfect combination.”

Ursula Andress and Sean Connery

Did they have any idea people would be watching their movie and writing about them, more than 60 years later?

Or did it just seem like a fun, beachy spy thriller? You have to wonder.

 ''It was a very small budget production and I agreed to do it thinking not many people would see it," Andress told Corriere della Sera.

More Connery and Andress

Here's another picture of Sean Connery and Ursula Andress.

Too many? We're sorry.

If you liked this story, you might also like this gallery of Bond Girls Behind the Scenes.

And we'd love for you to follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: Ursula Andress on the set of Dr. No. United Artists

Editor's Note: Corrects main image and links.

Cinema's obsession with time travel makes perfect sense, given that movies may be the closest most of us will ever get to it: The filmmakers of the past told stories for the audiences of the future. As the gap between creation and audience grows, so does every film's value as an artifact of its time.

As people and places disappear, films can become our best ways to remember them, and experience something like immersion in times we may remember only faintly, if at all.

So in a way, all movies are time travel movies. But the following films are explicitly about people starting in one time, and traveling to another.

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

If you think It's a Wonderful Life isn't a time travel movie, we would ask: How is it not? The dark Christmas classic from Frank Capra follows George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart at his best) revisiting his past — or rather an alternate version of his life in which he was never born.

Rather than going back and changing the past, George has to endure the present — and in doing so, shape the future. Just like all of us do every day.

As popular as the multiverse concept is today, it's notable that It's a Wonderful Life hit on it long, long ago. Credit goes to Capra and co-writers Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, as well as Philip Van Doren Stern, who wrote the story upon which It's a Wonderful Life was based.

The Time Machine (1960)

No discussion of time travel is complete without bowing to H.G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine, one of the most influential stories of all.

George Pal's adaptation of the novel presents a two-caste future in which humans have evolved into Eloi and Morlocks. The passive, vegetarian Eloi seem to have it good: They live a pleasant, idyllic existence — above ground, no less.

It all seems very nice until we realize the Eloi (including Yvette Mimieaux as Weena, above) are basically veal for the Morlocks, the scrappy, resentful subterraneans who emerge occasionally from their caves to feed on their pampered cousins.

The Time Machine is a great time travel movie, and inspired many others on this list., sometimes quite overtly. But it's also a provocative, still-relevant piece of social commentary.

La Jetée (1962)

Chris Marker's La Jetée explains to audiences that it is "the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood" — a violent image he witnessed "sometime before the outbreak of World War III."

He comes to understand it only by experiencing it again and again, in a time loop that the short film illustrates almost entirely illustrated in still photos. His link to the past is a memory of a woman (played by Hélène Châtelain, above) he once encountered on the observation platform, or jetty, of Paris' Orly Airport.

Between its deliberate repetition, black-and-white photography and unsettling setting — we are watching the past's vision of our own possible future, which feels simultaneously dated and far beyond us — La Jetée is hypnotic.

Time After Time (1979)

Nicholas Meyers' Time After Time has one of the best setups of any film. Pointedly inspired by The Time Machine, it begins in Victorian London, where Jack the Ripper (aka Dr. John Leslie Stevenson, played by David Warner) has just struck again.

He joins a gathering at the home of his friend H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell), who unveils a time machine he's a bit apprehensive about using.

When the police close in, Stevenson flees to the future in the time machine — and H.G. follows him. They end up in 1979 San Francisco, where fish-out-of-water Stevenson adapts swimmingly to the violence of the (then) modern age, while gentle H.G. tries to stop him from killing again.

He's aided by bank employee Amy (Mary Steenburgen), who becomes Jack's target. Things build to kind of a disappointing climax, but there's so much thoughtfulness and delight along the way that it's silly to linger on it.

And in a sweet behind-the-scenes ending, Steenburgen and McDowell fell in love and were married for a decade.

The Terminator (1984)

When the low-budget Terminator emerged in 1984, some people dismissed it as a dumb, violent shoot-'em-up about a killer robot.

While it's undeniably one of the best killer robot movies ever made, it also offers one of the coolest takes on how time travel works.

In the world of The Terminator, time travel is like an inevitable loop that transgresses calendar years: Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) is sent back in time to save Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) so she can give birth to her son John, the savior of humankind in a dark, robot-infested future. But he also ends up fathering John — who, in turn, is the one who sends him back in time.

Brilliant.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Yes, we're going with two Terminator movies, because the inevitable-loop concept ramps up to another level when we learn in T2 that the arrival of Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 in the first Terminator was the cause of the Judgment Day that sparks the A.I. takeover.

In short, the last remaining piece of technology from the T-800's final battle against Sarah and John becomes crucial to Cyberdyne, the company that creates SkyNet, which quickly makes things very tough for humanity.

The past creates the future which creates the past which creates the future. At least, that's how it goes in The Terminator.

The next time travel movie on our list has a different theory about it all works.

Back to the Future (1985)

One of the most flat-out entertaining movies ever, Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future embraces the geekiness of time travel and makes it as goofily cool as possible — while grounding everything in a very human story.

1980s teen Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) travels back to the 1950s thanks to a time traveling DeLorean built by his mentor, Doc Brown (Christopher LLoyd). But upon arrival, Marty prevents a crucial meeting of his young parents (Crispin Glover and Lea Thompson).

Worse, his mom develops a crush on him — which is a huge problem for many reasons. But it's arguably most troubling because in the Back to the Future school of time travel, nothing is inevitable, even Marty's existence. If he can't get his parents together, he and his siblings will never be born.

Things get more complicated (and occasionally even more fun) in Back to the Future 2, in which Marty is propelled into the future, and back to the past — and has to avoid running into himself. And Back to the Future 3 goes for pure Western thrills.

Diehard fans of time travel movies will note that in the latter, Mary Steenbergen plays a character in a similar situation to the one her character faced in the aforementioned Time After Time.

Groundhog Day (1993)

Harold Ramis' masterpiece stars his Ghostbusters castmate Bill Murray as a weatherman cursed to repeat the same holiday again and again. It enlivened the time travel movie genre and popularized the time-loop format. It's also another of the best movies ever made.

Screenwriter Danny Rubin, who was steeped in Anne Rice's vampire novels, became interested in the idea of immortality, and of repeating the same day over and over again. He and Ramis turned his original script into a meditation on life itself, and how all of us have the choice, each time the alarm goes off, to make each day a grinding re-enactment of the one before, or to take it in an entirely new direction.

Assemble enough of those decisions together, and you've completed a lifetime.

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)

In the first Austin Powers film, 1997's Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Mike Myers' swinging '60s spy is frozen in 1967 and thawed out in the '90s.

In the sequel, Austin must travel back — this time to 1969 — to match wits with Dr. Evil (also Myers) who has stolen Austin's mojo. The ramifications of crossing paths with his (frozen) past self causes Austin to go cross-eyed — but the wise Basil Exposition gives him some advice.

"I suggest you don't worry about this sort of thing and just enjoy yourself," he says.

Then he and Myers turn smilingly to the audience, as Basil adds, "That goes for you all, too."

Thus freed from thinking about the space-time continuum, we're able to just enjoy Austin returning to the past to dance and fight alongside Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham.)

Midnight in Paris (2011)

Woody Allen's beguiling Midnight in Paris skips any concern about how time travel works in favor of charm. Owen Wilson's character, who is having trouble with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams), travels back in time simply by stepping inside a 1920s car each night at midnight.

It transports him to glorious 1920s Paris, where he mingles with the likes of Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston), Zelda Fitzgerald (Alison Pill), Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody) and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates). He also becomes captivated by Adriana, Picasso's mistress, played by Marion Cotillard.

Instead of a new take on how time travel works, Midnight in Paris lays out a universal truth: Some people will always prefer to live in the past.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

This Tom Cruise-Emily Blunt gem takes the Groundhog Day concept into the realm of action and sci-fi. But it's also funny, in a different way than Groundhog Day.

Cruise plays against type as a man who, like Murray in Groundhog Day, must re-live the same day again and again. But Cruise, known for playing ultra-competent heroes like Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible films and Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in Top Gun, goes against type by portraying a bit of a bumbler.

He's a PR man who dies in a series of darkly amusing ways under the tutelage of Blunt's experienced super soldier, Sergeant Rita Vrataski.

The film was a box office disappointment, but has gained much respect since its initial release. Based on the Hiroshi Sakurazaka novel All You Need Is Kill, it was almost given director Doug Liman's preferred title, Live Die Repeat, which became the film's tagline.

Spoiler Warning: The next and final film on this list isn't obviously a time travel movie until its incredible ending.

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Like we said, the presence of this film on this list is a spoiler — we're sorry. Then again, the original Planet of the Apes has been out for 57 years, so you've had time to see it.

What's coolest about Planet of the Apes is that for almost its entire running time, you don't realize you're watching a time travel movie. It just seems like a nightmarish sci-fi film in which a trio of astronauts led by Charlton Heston's George Taylor crash-land on a planet ruled by apes. They treat humans — including Nova (Linda Harrison) — like animals.

Then we get to one of the greatest movie twist endings of all time, and realize the astronauts never left the planet earth.

And we ask you to please follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: The Time Machine. MGM

Editor's Note: Corrects category code.

These movies of the 1950s are both great and fun.

All About Eve (1950)

Bette Davis plays a Broadway star who won't give up the spotlight, and Anne Baxter is Eve Harrington, a shrewd manipulator ready to take her place. It's a dynamic we've seen a million times since, from The Devil Wears Prada to Showgirls, but no one's done it better than All About Eve.

It also features an early appearance by Marilyn Monroe. And consider for a second how cool it is that the line, "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night!" came just a few years into commercial air travel becoming a thing.

It won Best Picture at the Oscars, but it isn't one of those exhausting Best Picture winners that takes itself too seriously — it's a charmer from the first frames and one of the most beloved movies of the 1950s and of all time.

Singing in the Rain (1952)

A perfect vehicle for Gene Kelly's immense talents — and those of Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds (above, from left to right, are O'Connor, Reynolds and Kelly saying "Good Mornin'").

If you just remember a bunch of plucky songs and perfect dance numbers, that's fine. But Singing in the Rain is also a timeless sendup of Hollywood trend-chasing and vapidity. Lina Lamont's clueless declaration, "I gave an exclusive to every newspaper in town!" is arguably even funnier in 2023, when seemingly every news story is both "breaking" and "exclusive."

It's great to stay up late watching a movie this delightful. Maybe our favorite of all the movies of the 1950s, and that's saying something.

High Noon (1952)

In a tight 85 minutes, this classic movie — one of the all-time best Westerns — delivers a perfectly paced, utterly engrossing story of courage.

Gary Cooper plays lawman Will Kane (above left), newly married to the pacifistic Quaker Amy Fowler (above right).

When he learns that a vicious outlaw he once put away will soon return to town, looking for revenge, he'd be well within his rights to ride off into the sunset with his beautiful new bride.

But that's not what he does.

The Quiet Man (1952)

The Quiet Man is a very old-fashioned classic movie — the plot revolves largely around a dowry — but just turn off your brain and enjoy the Technicolor beauty of the unspoiled Irish countryside as John Wayne's Sean Thornton and Maureen O'Hara's Mary Kate Danaher fall madly in love.

It was filmed around the charming village of Cong, which still has a statue of Wayne. It's fun to see him a straight romantic lead instead of a grizzled cowboy, but don't worry manly men: His character's still plenty tough.

Roman Holiday (1953)

Another 1950s travelogue, Roman Holiday stars Audrey Hepburn as a princess who wants to see the world and Gregory Peck as a reporter who wants to show it to her. This is a movie fueled by happy accidents, cheerful deceptions and boundless charm.

Dalton Trumbo, often known for darker fare, was one of the writers, though the Blacklist — a scourge of the movies of the 1950s — cost him his rightful credit at the time.

But still, this classic movie endures as a testament to his greatness.

Rear Window (1954)

A Hitchcock masterpiece, and the second film on our list to star future princess Grace Kelly. This classic movie also has one of the most imitated setups of all time.

Rear Window is a fascinating, fast-moving film is about our natural inclination to pry — whether online, or, back in the day, into our neighbor's windows. Jimmy Stewart plays a news photographer sidelined by a broken leg who doesn't appreciate what a seemingly perfect thing he has going with Lisa (Kelly, above).

He ponders single life, represented by the ballet dancer Miss Torso (Georgine Darcy) and the sometimes grim compromises of co-habitation. There's a point in the film when it's absolutely impossible to guess what will happen next. And then things get really good.

It's now available on the Criterion Channel.

Vertigo (1958)

Another pairing of Alfred Hitchcock and Jimmy Stewart, Vertigo is among the best classic movies ever made: In 2012, in fact, it topped the Sight and Sound list of the greatest films of all time, before it was bumped in 2022 by Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, in a major upset.

But back to Vertigo: Well worth watching just to see San Francisco in the 1950s, its the story of a former detective who has to retire early due to, well, vertigo. He falls for a captivating woman named Madeleine (Kim Novak), but she takes a fall, too — to her death.

Or so it seems. Soon he meets a woman named Judy... who looks an awful lot like Madeline. Then things get very interesting.

Godzilla (1954)

Godzilla has a very heavy, powerful messages that probably resonated more with Japanese audiences than American ones — it's about the evils of the atomic bomb, and how some weapons are too powerful to ever be used.

But even if you ignore that message, this is a crackerjack monster movie, beautifully crafted. If you associate Godzilla with a guy in a cheap-looking lizard suit, you aren't thinking of the original Godzilla.

In black and white, with ominous sound design and terrific effects (by 1954 standards), Godzilla is a 70 year-old thriller that lands harder than many of the kitschy and CGI-marred versions that followed. Of all the movies of the 1950s, it may be the most scarily resonant.

It might even be a good double feature with Oppenheimer.

Lady and the Tramp (1955)

Look, if you aren't charmed by dogs eating spaghetti, we're not sure you can be charmed. Lady and the Tramp tells a simple, always delightful story of a proper lady falling for a dog from the wrong side of the tracks who becomes a better man — um, we mean dog — in the process.

It's painterly animation is far superior to most of the cheap-looking computer animation of today — this is a true feast for the eyes.

And it inspired our favorite bit of film criticism within a movie, the roundtable debate of the meaning of Lady and the Tramp that serves as the unlikely climax of Whit Stillman's 1998 Last Days of Disco, another film that is a total delight. It's from four decades after these movies of the 1950s, but don't hold that against it.

This is our favorite of all the Disney movies of the 1950s.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

We know, war movies aren't typically delightful, but most aren't as deft and transfixing as The Bridge on the River Kwai, a movie that never follows the course you expect.

The war of wills between captured British P.O.W. Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guiness) and his honorable captor, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) is fascinating enough — both men are masterfully written and acted characters, and director David Lean shows stellar show-don't-tell restraint that is, well, captivating.

But then the film layers on the story of the charming Shears, William Holden, and you have one of the most layered yet elegant war movies of all, with a theme you'll be whistling for weeks. For our money this is the best of the war movies of the 1950s.

The Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

This story of powerful columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and ruthless press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis, above right) is as juicy as a gossip column — because it revolves around one.

Hunsecker is a powerful columnist covering nightlife around Broadway, who can make or break careers with a few words. But he's also a controlling older brother who tries to break up little sister Susan (Susan Harrison, above left) and a jazz guitarist, without leaving any fingerprints. Sidney Falco sees a sleazy opportunity and seizes it. He's a creep, sure, but a smart one, who shows us the ins and outs of a 24-7 media landscape that seems to move even faster than the one today.

This is a completely intoxicating movie, beautifully shot and magnificently acted. It's one of the greatest movies of the 1950s, but it's also timeless.

An American in Paris (1951)

Another charmer from the very start — thanks to the George Gershwin score and Gene Kelly's winning voiceover — an American in Paris, directed by directed by Vincente Minelli and written by Alan Jay Lerner — won Best Picture the year after All About Eve. But again, it's anything but pompous.

You realize how light on its feet the film will be even before you even see Kelly and Leslie Caron dance (above).

Just watching Kelly get ready in the morning — by switching his miniscule studio apartment from evening to morning mode — you know you're in incredibly good hands.

Some Like It Hot (1959)

The American Film Institute named Some Like It Hot the funniest American movie of all time, and who are we to argue with AFI?

One of the most imitated movies of the 1950s, it stars Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis, making their second appearances on this list, as well as the always great Jack Lemmon, who will certainly turn up when we make our list of delightful films of the 1960s.

And yes, we're pretty sure the Tom Hanks sitcom Bosom Buddies borrowed a few jokes from Some Like It Hot, starting with the wordplay on the poster. Plenty of other TV shows and movies have taken lessons from the Billy Wilder classic, too.

If you liked this list, you might also like this list of some of Stars of the 1960s Who Are Still Going Strong, or this list of Rad '80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.

And we'd love for you to follow us for more stories like this.

Main image: Rear Window. Paramount.

Editor's note: Adds link to follow page.

They make fun of a genre, while also doing a great job of capturing the nuances of that genre.

So they work on both a surface level, and as a subversive critique.

Here are 12 movie satires that have it both ways.

Kentucky Fried Movie

Kentucky Fried Movie is the film that that started it all for Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker, the team behind Airplane and The Naked Gun films. It consists of a string of dead-on movie parodies — basically making fun of every popular genre in the 1970s.

The most over the top is a parody of sexploitation films that was, at the young age when we saw it, probably the dirtiest thing we'd ever seen. It includes all variety of shocking perversions, and gets fairly explicit. It's funny, sure, but also quite salacious.

It continues to make us confused.

Robocop (1987)

Paul Verhoeven is the master of movie satires that have it both ways. The Dutch filmmaker arrived in the United States in the '80s and quickly committed to outdoing the excessive sex and violence he saw on American screens.

Robocop is a masterpiece, as satire goes — it appeals to audiences tough-on-crime wish-fulfillment fantasies while also noting that corporate, mechanized crimefighting may be more dangerous than crime itself.

It successfully anticipated the potential flaws of AI-based law enforcement — does anyone really want to be pulled over by a drone? — and arguably also anticipated the rise of the for-profit prison system.

At the same time, though, it's a wonderfully silly movie about a half-man half-robot trying to clean the scum off the streets of New Detroit. And one of our favorite movies ever.

Scream (1996)

Written by Kevin Williamson and directed by master of horror Wes Craven, Scream deconstructs slasher movies even while serving up supremely competent chills and kills.

It also changed horror forever, and for the better: It was almost impossible to make an unironic slasher movie after Scream made it a requirement to include at least one character in every group of slasher movie friends to point out tropes they had better not fall into.

Even movies that play it very straight are now in a kind of pact with the audience: We all know these tropes. Now here's how this movie will undermine them.

Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

Though Scream did the have-it-both ways slasher movie satire the best, Slumber Party Massacre got there first. The first of the four films in the franchise (including two sequels and a revamp) was written by lesbian feminist author Rita Mae Brown, who set out to satirize slasher movies, not celebrate them.

But under the astute direction of Amy Holden Jones, Slumber Party Massacre turned out to be one of the best slasher movies ever made, as well as a knowing satire of other films popular at the time, like Friday the 13th.

It also captures early '80s Southern California — where we grew up watching movies we weren't supposed to — with a keenly accurate eye.

The next film in the series, Slumber Party II, goes even further into satire with a villain (Atanas Ilitch) who dances like a cross between Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson and kills with a drill-shaped red electric guitar.

American Psycho (2000)

Another of our all-time favorite movies, American Psycho is a sharp satire of '80s yuppiedom that also makes '80s yuppiedom seem... pretty glamorous, actually. Aside from all the chainsaw murders, of course.

Christian Bale played Wall Street serial killer Patrick Bateman as anything but cool — "We looked at him as an alien who landed in the unabashedly capitalist New York of the ’80s, and looked around and said, ‘How do I perform like a successful male in this world?,’" Bale once told MovieMaker.

And while his behavior is reprehensible, he has really good abs. And taste in business cards. We don't root for him, but he's hypnotically amusing to watch.

Tropic Thunder (2008)

Tropic Thunder isn't so much a satire of war movies as a satire of actors who take on showy, ludicrous roles in pursuit of acclaim. One of the joys of the movie is that it allows to take on a variety of showy, ludicrous roles while playing actors playing showy, ludicrous roles.

The most extreme example is Robert Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus, an Australian Oscar winner who undergoes "pigmentation alteration: surgery in order to play a Black character, Staff Sergeant Lincoln Osiris.

But Ben Stiller also gets to shine as Tugg Speedman, who has made the mistake of committing too hard to his role as "Simple Jack."

Starship Troopers (1997)

Starship Troopers, another Verhoeven film, nailed its satire so successfully that some critics didn't even catch the satire.

The New York Times Janet Maslin, for example, dismissively wrote, "Where exactly are the hordes of moviegoers who will exclaim: ''Great idea! Let's go see the one about the cute young co-ed army and the big bugs from space.'"

Yes, Starship Troopers is the best movie ever made about a cute co-ed army and big bugs from space. But it's also relentlessly mocks jingoistic, fake patriotism and our tendency to dehumanize anyone with whom we disagree.

Wild Things (1998)

Starship Troopers star Denise Richards (with Neve Campbell, above) had a real eye for satires that do the same thing they satirize.

The thoroughly entertaining Wild Things hits a lot of genres — high school movie, crime thriller, mystery — but we'd say it's fundementally a noir satire that also stands on its own as a straight-up noir.

It leans so hard into noir fixtures like double crossers and scheming seductresses that it's almost campy, but it totally works. By the time Bill Murray shows up as a sleazy lawyer you're in guilty-pleasure heaven.

Austin Powers (1997)

The James Bond movies are so full of characters with names like Xenia Onatopp and Holly Goodhead that they're basically self-satires.

But Mike Myers sixties spy spoof classic makes fun of the excessive sexualization of female characters by surrounding Myers' defiantly average Austin "Danger" Powers with scantily-clad "fembots" and Elizabeth Hurley.

It holds up remarkably well. And it remains high on our list of the funniest comedies we've ever seen.

Thanksgiving (2023)

Another comical sendup of slasher movies that is also a very effective slasher, with creative methods of dispatching cast members and a quite solid twist.

The ensemble cast in the Eli Roth film includes Patrick Dempsey as a sheriff in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where a Black Friday riot at a local big box story inspires a mystery man to dress up as Puritan town founder John Carver... and start carving.

Carver does a little cooking, too. It's all overdone, but deliberately so.

Planet Terror (2007)

We got our first look at Thanksgiving in a trailer that appeared in Grindhouse, a curious and very cool 2007 release that paired Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror with Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof.

Let's start with Planet Terror, which makes fun of grotesque, violent B-movies while outdoing most of them in terms of violence and grotesquerie. It centers on a biochemical outbreak that creates zombielike hordes, and its heroine is a machine-gun-legged go-go dancer named Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan).

Are the gross-outs effective? Funny you should ask. We saw this one hungover, on opening day, and had to run out of the theater to throw up, several times. That seems to go beyond satire.

Death Proof (2007)

Quentin Tarantino opens this one with a shot of a woman's feet, which is the first sign that nothing — even his own suspected predilections — will be off-limits.

It works as an excellent satire of those movies where bad men terrorize young women, or just as an excellent movie about a bad men terrorizing young women.

It also has its fun with various gearhead '70s movies, including Gone in Sixty Seconds, and dozens of other underground pop-cultural references Tarantino knows like the back of a video store.

Machete (2010)

Are you picking up on our fondness for Grindhouse? Like Thanksgiving, this film originated as one of the film's in-movie trailers.

Anchored by Danny Trejo as the titular Mexican cop-turned-avenger, it has a B-movie spirit and A-list cast, including Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba and Don Johnston.

It's gloriously silly — especially a scene where a character explains the length of intestines before we see his point graphically illustrated — but it also contains sharp social commentary about race-baiting and scapegoating. We love it, and also lined up for 2013's Machete Kills.

Companion (2025)

We don't want to reveal anything about Companion, starring Sophie Thatcher (above) and Jack Quaid.

We'll just say that it starts off seeming like a rom-com — it's about a newish couple going to meet the guy's friends at a lake house — but then turns into something else.

It's a note-for-note perfect parody of rom-coms, but then starts satirizing other genres as well. To even list them here would spoil the movie for you.

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Main image: Wild Things. Sony