🎧 [PLAYBACK: SOUND ON]
Cue the music. Your reading starts here. Prince’s “319” is the vibe.

🟢 Ready to commit? Open the soundtrack in Spotify, or jump to “319” and we’re off.

DRESSING IT DOWN

Showgirls is the epitome of a film that defies rating.

It’s less a misunderstood masterpiece than a misinterpreted masterprank.

Director Paul Verhoeven’s greatest provocations (Showgirls included) have always been absurdist on their face — and when his unique brand of satire doesn’t land cleanly, his films were left to rise or fall solely on the sheer strength of their spectacle.

That’s not entirely fair.

What many initially mistook for incompetence was, more often than not, overcommitment to a bit the mainstream simply wasn’t in on.

None of it was ever meant to be subtle.

That was the whole joke.

The Satire Was Always the Point

I’m not here to join the throngs of Film Bros anointing Showgirls “The Best Bad Movie Ever Made” — a take that flattens its contradictions and entirely misses the point.

I’m here to remind you that Paul Verhoeven, one of cinema’s most brilliant and underappreciated satirical provocateurs, never made a film that wasn’t also a personal dare. Except Hollow Man.

There’s a reason the debate over whether Showgirls is “bad” rages on to this day. Verhoeven’s signature subversions don’t always survive the genres they’re skewering. And this picture is no exception.

Thankfully, the naysaying crowd has shrunken over time — like those who still won’t admit that Die Hard is, and always has been, a Christmas movie. Showgirls, incidentally, is *also* a Christmas movie. But that’s a conversation for another time.

Even if you somehow wind up hating it, if you're at all serious about cinema, it's worth understanding what kind of powder keg led to this film’s coronation at the pinnacle of camp cult status. For the past quarter century, no other legendary misfire has burned so brightly.

I long held Showgirls at ★★★½ — roughly analogous to “REVELATION” on the SINemeter scale today. But it isn’t just a revelation. While not every element secretly works (though most do), despite its flaws, it’s an absolutely essential film.

I can’t think of another studio picture this simultaneously luxe, chaotic, proudly tasteless — and, somehow, still... kinda brilliant.

It’s a brazenly unique cinematic enigma.

Welcome to Vegas, Baby

To be clear, Showgirls is a gloriously spectacular trainwreck that makes nudity tedious and sex farcical.

But it's done in such a garish, vulgar, over-the-top manner that makes it impossible to look away as the film unfolds. It may be mind-blowingly absurd in every aspect imaginable, but it's never boring.

It is also not, as the poster would have you believe, a movie about a woman with no arms and one leg, nor is it the feminist masterpiece some critics revisionistically claim it to be today.

We’re first introduced to our protagonist, Nomi Malone (“No, me alone,” get it?), as she hitchhikes to Vegas, pulls a blade on her driver, hits jackpot her first time at the slots, subsequently goes broke, gets robbed of every earthly belonging, attempts suicide by traffic on the Strip, vomits in a parking lot, assaults a basket of French fries and finds a new, lifelong best friend.

And that’s just the first seven minutes of the picture.

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Berkley Didn’t Fall — Hollywood Did

Star Elizabeth Berkley, having recently graduated from both high school and TV’s Saved by the Bell, gives some of the worst line readings in the history of cinema, certainly for a major theatrical release, enough to spawn a (surprisingly good) musical stage production imitating her performance.

Shockingly, she was only paid $100k for the lead role in a $45 million picture, while director Paul Verhoeven made $6 million (two-thirds of which was withheld when the film tanked theatrically) and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas a then-record-breaking $3.7 million — all, ironically, while making a film satirizing the entertainment industry's exploitation of women.

So, the studio got from Berkley *exactly* what they paid for. And I say, "Good for her!" It's just a shame that her career was destroyed in the process.

Yes, Verhoeven knew precisely what he was doing in crafting a sleazy remake of All About Eve while casting a sharp eye of criticism at American culture — as he did with every one of his U.S.-made films throughout the ’80s and ’90s.

But even he admits that how he went about it was simply too esoteric for most audiences at the time, particularly in the face of the studio’s mis-marketing of the picture as one of the most daringly erotic ever made. (He's described the film as purposefully “anti-erotic,” and he’s right.)

Quite tellingly, MGM opted to release Showgirls, at the last minute, under its niche United Artists banner instead — the intact ‘spelling-it-backwards’ audition joke be damned — in a last-ditch attempt to shield the parent brand from what they fully knew was coming.

Verhoeven has also since taken responsibility for Berkley’s performance, noting that much of it was the direct result of his explicit instructions to her on set — deliberately pushing her line delivery beyond anything remotely resembling a natural read.

On the writing front, Eszterhas' ceaselessly inane dialogue seems as if it were created by aliens who learned our language by pointing two microphones at Earth: one toward a juvenile detention facility and the other aimed at a porn theater. They spliced the two recordings together in random order and determined that's how people actually speak to one another on this planet.

I recall reading some time ago that Eszterhas admitted to writing Showgirls holed up in his home on Maui while on a two-week cocaine-and-booze bender and doesn't remember penning a word of it. But I can't find that reference today, so take the story with a grain of salt.

In his autobiography, Hollywood Animal, his recollections of developing the script consist solely of daily journal entries, having been on an unnamed substance plied to him by a local dealer, and his wife Naomi despising it upon first read.

However, the full-on cokefest story would’ve at least offered some explanation as to what the hell happened here.

What Happens When No One Says No

Aside from Berkley, the performances in Showgirls are all over the place.

While MVPs Gina Gershon, Robert Davi, and L.A. Law's Alan Rachins (R.I.P.) seem to be having a blast leaning into the unapologetic trashiness of their characters, others like Kyle MacLachlan and Glenn Plummer rightfully just seem embarrassed.

As the main character's best friend, Gina Ravera (The Closer, Lambada) gives by far the most grounded performance in an otherwise thankless role as subject of the film's most mean-spirited and regrettable sequence.

It’s the narrative equivalent of shooting a baby seal in the head after it’s already been bludgeoned to death — so unnecessary that it nearly destroys Showgirls' candidacy as a guilty pleasure.

Most die-hard fans (myself included) understandably compartmentalize that scene out of memory. Both Verhoeven and Eszterhas have independently singled its inclusion as their biggest mistake with the picture. And that was a deep well to draw from, to be sure.

It shouldn't be lost on Verhoeven fans that the actors playing two of the picture's most memorably odious supporting characters, Ungela Brockman as verbally abusive lead understudy Annie and Greg Travis as slimeball PR agent/talent scout/pimp Phil Newkirk, were both cast in the director's follow-up film Starship Troopers two years later, only to be immediately dispatched by particularly gruesome means.

Meta commentary, perhaps? You decide.

Its Rating Broke the System

Although Verhoeven proactively self-censored his original assemblies of both the lap dance and infamous pool scene to avoid being refused a rating altogether, Showgirls never seems to make the most of its intentional NC-17.

Roger Ebert — one of the original champions behind NC-17’s 1989 creation as a legitimate adult rating (without the porn-adjacent baggage of X) — was initially excited to see the reluctant studio system finally embrace it. When Verhoeven’s project was announced, he hailed it as a chance for American filmmakers to claim the kind of freedom long afforded their international counterparts.

Until that point, NC-17 mainly had been reserved for imported arthouse fare, like Henry & June and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. So when Showgirls finally arrived in 1995 as a big-budget, high-profile, (relatively) wide-release film carrying that badge, Ebert was ready to celebrate the breakthrough.

Instead, he gave it two stars and called it “a perfectly good waste of an NC-17 rating.”

He wasn’t entirely wrong. We may disagree regarding the quality and impact of Showgirls (Ebert seldom vibed with most of Verhoeven’s satire.) But the director’s cut of his previous picture, Basic Instinct, is more explicit. Even by the standards of today’s TV-MA streaming series on services like MAX and Netflix, Showgirls seems a bit restrained— and certainly tamer than Verhoeven’s earlier Dutch-language work (save for Soldier of Orange). Ebert recognized the wasted potential.

To his mind, Hollywood had fumbled the opportunity he’d helped secure — the chance for serious U.S. filmmakers to finally create uncut, adult-oriented work without having their distribution prospects shredded.

Yet Showgirls remains the only big-budget, studio-financed film ever released as NC-17 — and it proved the rating’s undoing. Despite its ambition, it was ultimately a pressure test that the system failed.

The film’s flop didn’t just end careers — it effectively killed NC-17 as a viable rating before any other big studio film could test it. Saddled with near-universal critical derision, queasy audiences afraid to buy tickets, and widespread advertising restrictions, despite a pretty strong per-theater opening, the film was dead on arrival.

Even worse, three of the largest theater chains — AMC, Cinemark, and, most absurdly, United Artists Theaters (the same brand and a sibling to the studio releasing the film) — refused to screen it based on internal policies barring NC-17 titles.

But the supposed moral panic and pearl-clutching proved more theatrical than the film itself. At the video store, Showgirls found its audience immediately — and then some. Curiosity turned into cult obsession, lore was built, and what began as a cautionary tale became a camp classic with a redemption arc worthy of a Vegas comeback.

Cult Canonization Fully Earned

Showgirls’ ultimate legacy wasn’t built by critics or collectors — it first came first from LGBTQ+ audiences who never needed the memo. While mainstream culture recoiled, the gay community embraced Showgirls from the start as the deliciously messy spectacle it was always meant to be.

Nowhere was that more visible than in SINephile’s hometown of San Francisco, where drag icon Peaches Christ turned it into an annual tradition at the Castro Theater — screening the film accompanied by stage re-enactments of iconic scenes for sold-out crowds over two decades.

Showgirls wasn’t just reappraised. It was revived, worshipped, and imitated in costume (or lack thereof) until the rest of the world finally caught on. Call it redemption, or just recognition arriving fashionably late.

Appropriately, it’s now found a home on the streaming channel of our founder’s former stomping ground, Criterion, right where it belongs.

For fun, try tracking down a copy of the edited-for-TV version (supercut below), which it's hard to believe even exists, and from which Verhoeven removed his name.

After cutting almost 1/3 of the film deemed completely unsalvageable, they managed to retain 84 minutes by dubbing over practically every other line of remaining dialogue and digitally painting cartoon tops on all of the dancers à la Jessica Rabbit.

As a final affront fitting of the film, the studio even refused to pay Berkley a requested $5k fee to perform the massive amount of voiceover work required to patch nearly all of her dialogue for the TV edit. So they substituted an actress who sounds like she was inhaling from a helium balloon between each turn at the mic.

And, yes, that somehow makes Showgirls even more fun and uniquely precious than it already was.

OK, LET'S LINE 'EM UP

+ 2 points for showing what happens when you attempt to murder a bottle of Heinz 57

+ 2 points for introducing Nomi's new backstage station at the Stardust by pulling down the name tag "Drew.” (Drew Barrymore was first offered the role but wisely turned it down.)

+ 3 points for the original inspiration for a modern-day reboot of All About Eve being a late-80s lunchtime pitch to Eszterhas from none other than... Jane Fonda, envisioning herself in the Bette Davis/Gina Gershon role. Thanks, Jane!

+ 5 points for choreographing the main sex scene to look more like an in-pool epileptic seizure by an actress with no understanding of where human genitals are located

+ 10 points for inadvertently functioning as a sequel to Lambada

Its journey from cinematic disaster to canonized camp classic is a masterclass in how time and irony can rescue even the most broadly derided studio flop.

If Berkley was the sacrificial lamb, then the audience was the cult. And somehow, 30 years on, Showgirls has more believers singing its praises than ever before.

A cult essential. Sharp, singular, and simply irreplaceable.

SINemeter Judgment: CANONIZED

DOUBLE FEATURE DETOUR

Think Showgirls is outrageous now? Try pairing it with Powell & Pressburger’s 1947 Technicolor classic, Black Narcissus, about nuns in the Himalayas. Find out why they’re twisted siblings in the full Split Screen showdown, if you dare.

📊 [PLAYBACK: RECEPTION]

Production Budget: $45M in 1995 (~$90M now)
U.S. Theatrical Release: 1,388 theaters (wide minus AMC, Cinemark, UA)
Key Competition: Se7en, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar, Clockers

Opening Weekend: $8.1M (~$16.4M today)
Opening Rank: #2 (behind Se7en)
Worldwide Box Office: $37.8M ($76M today)

Cinema DEFCON Threat Assessment: DEFCON 4

Theatrical-to-VHS Window: 3.5 months

Verdict
Opened strong, but quick drop off, earning less than half its production budget in its domestic run — thanks in part to the stigma of its NC-17 rating and limited theatrical reach.

But on home video, it became a cult sensation, grossing over $100M in VHS rentals and becoming one of MGM’s top 20 bestsellers ever.

Because so many waited for the video drop, Showgirls gets its slight ding and lands at DEFCON 4.

“People were too shy to see it in a theater. But not too shy to rent it.” — Paul Verhoeven

🎬 [PLAYBACK: TRAILER]

The NFTG original red-band theatrical trailer — because even the MPAA said, “Good luck finding two minutes of safe footage.”

Verhoeven and Gershon reminisced in a 2017 Film Society of Lincoln Center retrospective that when they first saw this trailer (and the accompanying poster art), they just sighed in exasperation because the studio misread the entire point of the film and was marketing it instead as an example of precisely the type of Hollywood output that it was crafted to mock.

THE 7 DEADLY SINS OF SHOWGIRLS

(VISUAL EDITION)

What starts with assault by French fry and ends with a shattered femur?

Verhoeven’s seven-act Machiavellian tragedy disguised as high-gloss sleaze, that’s what.

Here are the most memorable moments, among countless.

Postscript:

If you're intrigued by Showgirls, consider exploring the film that first nearly destroyed Verhoeven’s career before he even arrived in the U.S.: the tonally akin Spetters from 1980.

It marked his first pass at many of the same provocative elements — pre-sex menstrual checks, gratuitous gang rape, and yes, humans consuming dog food — all presented more graphically than even NC-17 would allow, and with far less irony. Both Spetters and Showgirls also include harrowing suicide attempts via traffic; in Spetters, it’s tragically successful (and the actor involved would sadly later succumb to the same fate in real life), adding an alienatingly grim final note to an already volatile narrative.

Pair that with Katie Tippel, Verhoeven’s earliest satire on the exploitation of women — the only film he’s ever expressed interest in remaking — and you start to trace the thematic throughline that leads straight to Showgirls. Together, they form the blueprint for this bastard American stepchild that would, for better or worse, become synonymous with his name.

Our vote: better.

Fittingly, Spetters and Showgirls were blank-check projects Verhoeven was handed immediately after career-defining hits — war epic Soldier of Orange made him a national hero in Holland, Basic Instinct a Hollywood kingmaker.

In each case, he overplayed his hand so spectacularly that he was forced to reinvent himself in the aftermath.

But really — isn’t that exactly what makes his work so singularly great?

Share this review with your friends who own the special edition box set. And whether it sizzled or shorted out, tap like or drop your favorite line reading in the comments.

🎧 [PLAYBACK: SOUND ON]

Cue up Trevor Rabin’s playful orchestral swells for your read. A fun little aside about one of its punchier beats following the review…

🟢 For the full stream, open the score on Spotify instead.

"That's impossible! Sharks do *not* swim backward... They can't!"

Gee, ya think?

They also can’t roar like lions, either.

Jaws: The Revenge already pulled that stunt — and we all know how that turned out.

Jaws for the Blockbuster Age

A dozen years after the now-half-century-old OG shark franchise took its final, flailing bow, hilariously sending a clairvoyant great white to stalk Mrs. Brody on a Bahamian vacay, Die Hard 2 director Renny Harlin dove back into open water with a pulpy, gory thrill-ride only the ‘90s could birth.

And SINephile contends that, 26 years later, Deep Blue Sea still ranks as the second-best shark film ever made.

Now, Harlin’s preparing to dip a toe back into chum-filled waters with his long-delayed Deep Water, starring Aaron Eckhart and Sir Ben Kingsley (Gandhi), in which a trans-Pacific plane crash lands survivors squarely in voracious shark territory. Whether Harlin still has his sea legs or he’s drumming up another Cutthroat Island remains to be seen, but either way, we’re totally on board to judge the fallout.

Ironically, famed '80s/’90s erotic thriller auteur Adrian Lyne also returned from a long hiatus with his own Deep Water in 2022, a tepid Ben Affleck / Ana de Armas genre reboot attempt that fizzled on landing.

Everyone seems to want to go deep these days. Not all survive the dive.

Smarter Sharks, Dumber Science

By today’s standards, the setup of Deep Blue Sea is so boilerplate it’s practically lab-grown:

A skeleton crew of scientists at an isolated underwater lab called Aquatica are developing an Alzheimer's drug using genetically modified tiger sharks as test subjects.

When a tropical storm hits during a weekend visit from their primary investor, the power fails, the facility floods, catches fire, AND explodes. Because it’s Renny Harlin, so of course it does.

Expectedly, the sharks break free — both from the physical confines of their caged pens and with more brainpower than every human in the cast combined (except maybe, LL).

None of the shark science holds any water, obviously. But that’s half the fun. Deep Blue Sea plants its tongue so firmly in cheek it’s flirting with lockjaw.

It knows exactly what it is — and it’s here to bring the receipts.

Chew or Be Chewed

The picture’s impressive, gloriously eclectic cast commits with unapologetic self-awareness:

• Samuel L. Jackson delivering a monologue like he’s keynoting a TED Talk

• Thomas Jane, as the stoic, brooding shark whisperer with a hidden past

• Michael Rapaport, the overly talkative tech nerd

• Stellan Skarsgård, whose epic early demise is easily the film’s grisliest

• Saffron Burrows, icily pretending she’s not the villain

• And LL Cool J, as the chef who steals the whole damn movie, giving not just the “Lovely Ladies” a reason to adore him

The practical shark animatronics, shot in Jim Cameron’s custom-built Titanic tanks off Baha, Mexico, repurposed just two years after that shoot, still impress today. While the thankfully rare, yet entirely jarring, CGI shark inserts? Not so much.

But let’s be honest: we didn’t come for realism.

We came to watch sharks do the impossible. And they don’t disappoint.

Deep dive for free with SINephile — weekly film analysis, sharper takes, and original scores you didn’t know you needed.

The Shark's Real Villain?

Despite Jaws’ rightful place among the best of the horror canon (with its deserved spot on the SINephile 100), this entire waterlogged sub-genre has done undeniable damage to sharks’ public image over the past half-century.

What should be seen as a vital apex predator — essential to not just marine ecosystems, but our entire ecological chain both above and below the surface — is far too often reduced to a mindless monster.

For decades, pop culture has repeatedly fed that myth in pursuit of the almighty dollar, and shark populations have sadly paid the price.

I had my first real encounter with sharks — three tiger sharks off the Kona coast, to be exact — during my advanced scuba training 15 years ago. It was love at first sight.

Graceful, wary, mesmerizing. Nothing like the rabid killing machines portrayed onscreen. At least from 90 feet below.

Are there risks? Sure, they’re wild animals. But as long as you know the rules of engagement, the risks are both calculated and negligible.

I’ve since traveled the world to dive with and observe almost every major shark species in their natural habitat in every ocean, save the Arctic (because, brrr…). And I’ve done so with an increasing sense of urgency.

Sharks have survived five mass extinction events. They’ve outlived dinosaurs, outlasted ice ages, and stayed virtually unchanged for over 400 million years, making them one of Earth’s oldest animals (a fact that Stellan Skarsgård is here to remind you about in the film).

But they’re not likely to survive us.

Fear for Profit, Extinction as Collateral

Pre-Jaws, global shark populations were relatively stable, and the threat from human activity was minimal.

Today, we kill over 100 million sharks each year.

More than one-third of all subspecies are now threatened with extinction. Some of the most demonized on-screen — including hammerheads, makos, and great whites — are likely to disappear within a generation. Ironically, the monsters we fear most are the ones disappearing the fastest.

On average, all shark species combined kill 5-6 of us worldwide annually — nearly every incident is a case of mistaken identity from humans on the surface looking and acting a little too much like their primary food source. Almost never underwater, where they can actually see you.

Spielberg himself has repeatedly expressed regret for the unintentional ecological fallout from the success of Jaws and the entire sub-genre he invented. Still a phenomenal film — it just means there’s nuance. And in today’s discourse, nuance is viewed as enemy.

For a gut-punch of a documentary on the subject, SINephile highly recommends Eli Roth’s Fin, simply put, the best film he’s ever made (trigger warning: it's brutal).

But credit where it’s due: Deep Blue Sea at least has the decency to make its sharks genetically modified. They’re not villains. They’re science experiments gone wrong.
And that earns the movie just a few extra bonus points on the SINemeter.

If you ever felt the need to see water ballet performed to rap music, LL’s here to serve in the classic shark-themed music video of the movie theme song.

DEEP CUTS:

+ 1 point for the license plate nod to Jaws

- 1 point for cutting all of Ronny Cox’s dialogue as the Big Pharma CEO (we get one silent close-up of Captain Bogomil... seriously?)

+ 3 points for changing the ending after test audiences rightfully agreed that the wrong character survived.

+ 10 points for LL Cool J and his wise-ass talking parrot simply named “Bird”

Shark movies rarely pass even the most rudimentary of science quizzes — but it’s almost never this much fun to watch them fail.

SINemeter Judgment: REVELATION

📊 [PLAYBACK: RECEPTION]

Production Budget: $60M (~$112M adjusted)
U.S. Theatrical Release: 1,854 theaters
Key Competition: Runaway Bride, The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project & The Thomas Crown Affair

Opening Weekend: $18.6M (~$36M today)
Opening Rank: #3
Worldwide Box Office: $165M (~$290M today)

Cinema DEFCON Threat Assessment: DEFCON 4

Theatrical-to-DVD Window:
4.5 months (Jul 28 - Dec 7, 1999)

Verdict:
Released wide on a Wednesday — rare for the time — likely to beat the weekend competition and capitalize on early word-of-mouth.

The moderate theatrical-to-DVD delay was standard summer blockbuster strategy: milk the box office, then stoke anticipation for the home release.

This lands Deep Blue Sea at DEFCON 4, the level ironically already labeled, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat.”

🧠 [PLAYBACK: FUN FACTS]

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any campier: six years after Deep Blue Sea’s release, one of composer Trevor Rabin’s pulsing film score cues — originally used during the doomed helicopter rescue — was recycled by long-running TV reality series The Biggest Loser to overhype the drama of contestant weigh-in reveals.

Take a listen →

From tiger sharks to treadmill tears... now that’s range, people.

🎬 [PLAYBACK: TRAILER]

Well, here’s a throwback…

Send them this review. Then stage an intervention. Share it, sound off in the comments about your favorite non-Jaws sharksploitation, or just toss us a like — no blood in the water, we promise.

🎧 [PLAYBACK: SOUND ON]

Smash play and step into Ari Aster’s pot-boiling Southwestern dreamscape.

🟢 For the full stream, open the soundtrack on Spotify while you read.

Mirror, Mirror

Satire is apt to be broadly misinterpreted. Just ask Paul Verhoeven.

But it can be an invaluable tool to deconstruct familiar patterns and shine light upon whatever deserves a little constructive criticism.

Good satire also functions as a societal mirror. A mirror aimed at the audience, typically reflecting a version of reality that flatters their own perspective.

Truly great satire threads a near-impossible needle — widening the frame far beyond expectation, spotlighting not just our particular worldview but playfully offering a 360-degree vision that also catches our own reflection.

And we might not always like what we see.

There’s a reason why when we view photographs of ourselves, they often don’t align with our perception of what we see reflected back at us in the bathroom mirror each morning. It’s called mirror image perception bias (or the “mere-exposure effect”).

We’re used to seeing ourselves from a subtle, yet crucially different way than others do.

The mirror’s angles and inversion train us to see ourselves through a single, distorted lens. As a result, seeing ourselves through someone else’s eyes can often be a bit psychologically jarring at first.

Hence, the rise of the “mirror selfie” — a self-palatable capture of how we’ve internalized our image and grown comfortable with it, even if our friends may recognize it as a little “off.” Because to them, it is. But as visual confirmation bias for us, it holds the very same appeal as partisan news coverage, slyly manipulative podcasts, or internet echo chambers.

It’s our own reality as we want — and increasingly demand — to see it.

It’s Gonna Be a Bumpy Night

What writer/director/indie-darling Ari Aster has constructed in Eddington is simply put one of the sharpest, most fascinatingly layered, and boldly ambitious satires of the last decade.

It’s bound to upset an awful lot of people — and not just the usual suspects — by design. But that’s precisely what the art form of satire is intended to do.

Mocking society in one dimension is expected and easy. Satirizing it in full, including the target audience, is risky narratively, technically, and commercially. And therein lies both the paradoxical genius and the dare.

Watching Eddington, I was giddily reminded of peak Robert Altman or Paul Thomas Anderson.

Aster spryly takes what, on the surface, appears to be a simple tale about conflicting personalities in small-town Americana and spins it into a diatribe on practically every possible aspect of our current, shared existence as humans.

What looks like surface-level political commentary instead hides a breathtaking satirical scope.

It’s About EVERYTHING

The inspired setting is Eddington, New Mexico: May 2020.

A small-town microcosm with big-time personalities. Neither desolate nor urban. A “border town” in every conceivable aspect of the term.

Eddington, NM, is a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural community that lies on the immutable border of settler outpost and self-governing Native American territory, uncoincidentally located in a deeply purple state on the political map, on the eve of a massive tech conglomerate opening a new AI server farm on the edge of town, bringing promises of jobs and relevance — and threats of ecological pillage and generational divide.

Eddington is a town fractured along every conceivable line: politically, socio-economically, ethnically, religiously, intellectually, generationally… you name it. If there’s a societal division to be had, it’s reflected here in some way. Sometimes (perhaps too) overtly, oftentimes impressively elegantly.

Framework, Not Flashback

As nearly everyone on this planet is painfully familiar, the COVID-19 pandemic was a surreal, scarring experience that permanently marked those who lived through it, but it also exacerbated ever-growing polarizations throughout society, inadvertently fueled (at least, in part) by tech’s rise.

The confluence of COVID and social media magnified both the benevolence, kindness, and shared altruism that humanity is amazingly capable of, as well as the self-centeredness, ignorance, and arrogance that mark our deepest, darkest impulses.

It lit these inherent humanistic attributes ablaze and made us stare horrified into the conflagration. Which side did we see ourselves on? That depends on which side of the mirror we’re looking at.

So to use that framework (and that’s all it is, a framework) as a narrative device for a tale ambitious enough to take on our entire post-2020 psyche. A total pro move, Aster.

Blind Spots in Plain Sight

I strolled into Eddington largely blind and highly recommend you do the same. There’s so much to unpack — but alas, spoilers abound. We’ll save that for a future Ctrl+Alt+Decode column.

On the performance front, this is yet another nearly one-man show for Oscar-winner Joaquin Phoenix as Eddington’s headstrong sheriff. He’s expectedly terrific in what was surely a challenging role both emotionally and physically.

Pedro Pascal continues to amaze in an admittedly less showy but still highly effective turn as the town mayor and Phoenix’s lifelong arch-nemesis on multiple fronts.

Emma Stone, again (love her!), is wonderful in a surprisingly small role. That’s not remotely a spoiler, but while she only gets 10–15 minutes of screen time, they land with deliberate force and graceful restraint.

A nearly unrecognizable Austin Butler also shines in another brief, but pivotal role as an enigmatic cult leader spewing vile diatribes of conspiracy theory and disinformation to sycophantic crowds online and on tour.

But away from the cameras, he presents as silky smooth and charmingly charismatic — revealing just the levels to which his con on his audience is played. If Mickey 17 or, god forbid, Megalopolis, felt like parody by bulldozer, Eddington is satire with a scalpel, dissecting our societal cadaver in real time.

Every performance lands. Luke Grimes (Yellowstone) and British breakout star Michael Ward (Empire of Light) round out the sheriff’s trio, each increasingly out of depth as societal pressure mounts, while Deirdre O’Connell (The Penguin) brings just the right dose of paranoid delusion as Phoenix’s live-in mother-in-law.

This Town Ain’t Big Enough

Eddington is a genreless experiment mostly because it needed to be in order to cast its net so widely with success.

Think of it like Short Cuts by way of The Hunt.

As such, even the thematic framework beautifully mirrors the scope of what Aster’s assembled as an unimaginable compendium of satirical targets.

Part suspense drama, part frontier western, Eddington also manages to be incredibly funny and shockingly violent.

Cinematographer Darius Khonji (Mickey 17, Se7en) trains his camera with delightful precision, playing with angles and movements that forge meaningful contribution without emerging as showy.

The dual score by Daniel Pemberton (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) and Bobby Krlic, a.k.a. The Haxan Cloak (Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid), is a masterstroke of minimalist tonal balance.

Pemberton lays the melodic scaffolding — playful, propulsive, genre-aware. Krlic slices through it with eerie diligence, dragging tension to the surface like an exposed nerve.

The Coda Conundrum

Overall, Aster’s ambition is plainly visible but brilliantly layered in its simplicity.

Much like The Brutalist earlier this year, the quality of filmmaking on display makes the movie buzz by despite pushing 2.5 hours. That said, Eddington likely would’ve benefitted from a slight 10-15 minute trim, particularly to its final act.

While I was almost sure I knew where Aster was going to end his tale (and was 100% on board in anticipation), that moment came and went as he took us into an extended finish verging on the “didactic coda” — whereby a filmmaker unfortunately spells out what they’d already artfully shown — flirting dangerously close to overstepping the boundaries of all the smart subtlety that came before it.

It’s as if he said, “This is to spell it out for the back row who sat through all of this and yet somehow still didn’t get it.”

Like any great satire, Eddington dares you to find yourself somewhere within it.

Maybe your theater companion sees you in an entirely different character than you do. That discomfort you may feel rising up in the pit of your stomach?

That’s the entire point of great satire.

If you walk out angry at or dismissive of Eddington, congratulations, because Aster anticipated that reaction too and mocks it head-on. And if you still miss your perhaps uncomfortably inverse reflection staring you in the face, well, that’s on you.

REFLECTIONS IN BROKEN GLASS:

+ 3 points for best use of social media on film since Zola

- 2 points for not ending where it so clearly should’ve… even if he were just playing with our expectations. And good for him.

+ 5 points for a subtle, last-minute cameo that I’m sure won’t land for most. (Hint: look at the Zoom screen.)

+ 10 points for daring to piss off everyone, only to sit back and watch the fireworks display unfold

Top 10 of the year-type stuff.

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SINemeter Judgment: TESTAMENT

📊 [PLAYBACK: RECEPTION]

Production Budget: $35M (estimated)
U.S. Theatrical Release: 2,111 theaters (wide)
Key Competition: Fantastic Four: First Steps, Superman, Jurassic World Rebirth, F1: The Movie

Opening Weekend: $4.3M
Opening Rank: #6
Worldwide Box Office: $11.6M

Cinema DEFCON Threat Assessment:

Theatrical to streaming window: 25 days
July 18 - August 12

DEFCON 2

Verdict:
As predicted, despite critical acclaim, the narrative risk of forcing everyone to stare at their own reflection from every angle resulted in a massive box office flop.

No one wanted to see it (or relive COVID, for that matter).

Sad. But perhaps there’s a solve for that somehow.

🎬 [PLAYBACK: TRAILER]

Check out the original theatrical trailer. It’s thankfully pretty spoiler-free.

🎧 [PLAYBACK: SOUND ON]

Cue it up for the review and let M3GAN sashay your way with an accompanying beat.

🟢 For the full stream, open the soundtrack on Spotify while you read.

She’s Baaaack

The impressively viral touchstone of 2023 returns to grace us with her AI-enhanced presence and signature sass. And, as shocked as we are to say it, damn if she isn’t way better the second time around.

She may still look like she stepped out of a 1970s Rhoda episode, but behind the scenes, her engineers clearly worked overtime, because M3GAN is sharper and funnier than ever.

Where the original felt hobbled by slow pacing and the confines of its PG-13 rating, it still earned a qualified recommendation on cultural impact alone.

This even longer sequel proves that the bugs are finally squashed.

From Fledgling Horror to Meta Comedy

Given its lackluster trailer, showcasing an expanded universe concept that looked like it needed more time in the idea factory, I was fully primed to hate on M3GAN 2.0.

But here’s the brilliance: M3GAN 1.0 got the memo.

PG-13 horror is hard and rarely done well. As a horror flick, the first one was only slightly above average, with almost all its memeable cult candy crammed into its trailer.

The genius of 2.0 is that it isn’t a horror movie at all and, wisely, never tries to be.

M3GAN 2.0 is first and foremost a self-aware, meta comedy.

It’s part Terminator sequel, part Mission: Impossible installment, while subversively tipping its hat to countless ‘80s and ‘90s movies — Aliens, Sneakers, The Thing, The Addams Family. True cinephiles will catch most of the delightful nostalgic winks.

And therein lies another reason this sequel works.

Unlike the first movie, writer/director Gerard Johnstone, Blumhouse and producer/star Allison Williams know exactly who their audience is now and they’ve tailor-made this sequel for those of us who came for the promise of the original’s marketing, yet walked away fully unsatisfied.

If M3GAN 1.0 was an accidental camp darling, 2.0 brings the s’mores, lights the fire, and invites us to gather around for the masterclass.

Consider yourself fully served this time… and not just by the trailer.

Subscribe free for more viral icons & genre flips that actually stick the landing.

Killer Doll vs. Rogue Bot

Williams and her now 12-year-old niece relocate to San Francisco, where she runs an innovation lab, evangelizing for safe technology and warning about AI’s pitfalls.

When the U.S. military’s lethal android prototype AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno, Ahsoka) drifts off-mission and goes rogue during a covert op, suspicion falls on Williams. So, naturally the solution to combat this T2 upgrade is to bring back the original doll.

First sliding M3GAN’s revived consciousness into the recently-defunct Moxie children’s e-learning robot to make her more physically hindered and docile? Inspired.

The comedic payoff of the AI’s disgust at her cutesy, clunky new chassis is gold. But to take on military-grade tech, M3GAN needs a proper upgrade.

Yes, the plot isn’t terribly unique and leans on well-worn tropes (the evil-gloating monologues, the “As you know, Bob…” exposition dumps). But by the time those faults register, we’re giggling too hard to care.

Upgrades All Around

M3GAN’s not the only one who levels up, though. Williams and McGraw get in on the action-star fun and deliver strong performances.

Brian Jordan Alvarez (English Teacher, Will & Grace) and Jen Van Epps (No Exit, One Lane Bridge), also return with added comedic relief in significantly expanded roles as M3GAN’s engineering team.

But it’s longtime Taika Waititi colloborator Jemaine Clement (What We Do in the Shadows, Flight of the Conchords) who downright owns the screen during his stint parodying every conceivable eccentricity of Elon Musk — neuralink and all. The brutal takedown is hilariously precise in its exacting mockery.

A Sharper Take on AI

The film’s cultural commentary around tech has also evolved.

We’ve moved past the overly simplistic, binary “AI = bad” diatribes into more thoughtful, nuanced territory that acknowledges the benefits (like, say, expediting cures for diseases?), while still remaining mindful of the pitfalls and how to responsively safeguard against them.

It’s somewhat refreshing to see a popcorn flick explore our human tendency to fear that which we don’t fully understand. Sadly, that knee-jerk reaction extends far beyond the realm of tech.

But M3GAN 2.0 isn’t here to preach.

She’s here to slay.

And slay she does.

LOADING….

+ 1 point for a teenage girl’s school locker tribute to Steven Seagal

+ 3 points for those digs at everything from Windows 95 to Grammarly

- 3 points for the jarringly obvious edit of a major character’s demise (clearly reserved for the soon-to-stream unrated cut — yet again)

+ 10 points for the disembodied AI building its own underground lair Parasite-style

📊 [PLAYBACK: RECEPTION]

Budget: $25M
Worldwide Box Office: $38.7M

Cinema DEFCON Threat Assessment: DEFCON 1 🚨
Theatrical-to-Streaming Window — 18 Days
(Jun 27 - Jul 15, 2025)

Verdict:
A textbook case of theatrical sabotage.

Disappointing box office, coupled with expectations of Blumhouse’s ever-tighter theatrical windows meant those waiting to watch at home were proven right. Less than three weeks in cinemas before being hitting PVOD streaming.

Call it saving ad dollars, but whatever gains were made by building a theatrical-first franchise with M3GAN have now been completely undermined by her follow-up's even faster rush to our iPhones.

And we still stand by our assessment that it’s better than the original, if you can deal with the genre switch and a less viral-worthy trailer.

🎬 [PLAYBACK: TRAILER]

Unlike the original, this one actually undersells the picture.

Share this review with anyone who wanted more camp out of the original.
And if it hit or missed, tap like or drop your favorite memeable moment in the comments.

🎧 [PLAYBACK: SOUND ON]

First, cue up James Newton Howard’s killer score while you read.

🟢 For the full experience, open the score in Spotify, or just jump to “Three Years Later.”

Before the Fall

After the indignity of recently revisiting 2000’s Hollow Man and then seeing a Letterboxd mutual currently working their way through director Martin Campbell’s filmography, it immediately sent us scrambling back to one of our standby comfort watches to remind ourselves that the new millennium didn’t open in a salvo of cinematic disasters. At least not entirely.

Vertical Limit was the first film we ever watched on San Francisco’s Metreon IMAX screen (then second-largest in the U.S.), and that theatrical experience has long carved a permanent home in a nostalgic little corner of our hearts.

From its mesmerizing sound design, James Newton Howard’s gloriously over-the-top score (which we contend remains among his very best), and the unapologetic hamminess of it all, the picture yields consistent returns on every revisit.

It’s also the only movie a studio ever pathetically duped us into shelling out extra cash for the SuperBit DVD (ugh…).

No Notes, Just Nitroglycerine

Of course, the plot is as threadbare as to be expected of this type fare:

Estranged brother-and-sister climbers Chris O’Donnell (the most prominently nippled Robin in Batman history) and Robin Tunney (The Craft) are reunited at the base camp of K2 (really Aoraki/Mt. Cook in New Zealand + some dicey matte work) as she prepares to accompany a megalomaniacal billionaire (Bill Paxton) to the summit for a braindead publicity stunt to wave at the inaugural flight of his new airline.

Obviously, everything goes awry and we’re treated to avalanches, crevasse falls, and rescue teams incredulously schlepping canisters of nitroglycerine in their backpacks like they’re in a remake of Clouzot’s Wages of Fear — for Dummies.

No deep analysis needed here. Just a big-budget popcorn flick that delivers exactly what it promises.

It might seem like a footnote now, but the flick cleared nearly $400 million in today’s money. You heard me right: Chris O’Donnell outgrossed a Mission: Impossible sequel that year, and deservedly so.

Sure, some of the special effects don’t really hold up after a quarter century (hell, maybe they weren't even all that acceptable at the time), but Vertical Limit remains a damn fine adrenaline rush.

Trigger warning: acrophobics may want to steer well clear.

Subscribe free for more big-budget relics, comfort rewatches, and movies that peak at full volume

Peak Performances (and Some That Slip)

Paxton is clearly having the time of his life serving as the prototype for Elon Musk had he a shred of self-awareness and didn't outsource his dirty work to a personal army of Reddit sycophants. Even as a villain, we miss Bill Paxton.

Scott Glenn is also terrific in a supporting role as a weathered climber still haunted by the disappearance of his Sherpa wife years earlier.

And Aussies Ben Mendelsohn and Steve Le Marquand provide ample comedic relief as a couple of hippy climber brothers committed to serving as the mountain's resident Rosencrantz & Guildenstern.

Alas, not all the performances sing — you’ll know 'em when you see 'em — but much like Congo five years earlier, they still add a certain old-school matinee charm... without the martini-drinking, talking gorilla.

Horns at 28,000 Feet

And to double down one last time on Newton’s score, it really does deserve a special callout. The music does so much of the heavy lifting here; we’d probably have to dock this picture a full star (perhaps more) in its absence.

As melodramatic as it is, it’s perfectly attuned to the campiness of the picture, bombastic orchestral swells for sweeping helicopter shots of the severe terrain seamlessly giving way to bleeding emotional leitmotifs in the film’s more intimate earned moments. It’s genuinely worth a listen on its own (if you’re not already there).

Vertical Limit was never destined to become a cinema great, but it was wildly successful at the box office, and damn if it doesn’t claw its way to its own peaks with pure, unfiltered adrenaline.

And that ending, even with it so clearly shot as a green-screen afterthought, still manages to tug the heartstrings every time we see it.

Sure, the whole thing may look like a glorified Mountain Dew commercial at times, but it’s still miles better than cinematic brethren K2, Everest, and yes, even fan-favorite Cliffhanger.

Just hold your breath and enjoy the drop.

SUMMIT SCORES:

- 1 point for that former athlete flex in Sports Illustrated not aging particularly well

- 2 points for half the climbers smoking cigarettes at base camp

+ 3 points for immediately going there with a shockingly brutal opening in Monument Valley

- 1 point for snow that’s clearly Idahoan potato flakes, canned for your convenience

+ 5 points for Ben Mendelsohn on a helicopter determined to literally kiss his ass goodbye

It’s loud, it’s dumb, it’s awesome — and we wouldn’t change a frame of it.

📊 [PLAYBACK: PERFORMANCE]

Budget: $75M in 2000 ($132M today).
Worldwide Gross: $216M then, $380M now.
*Adujsted as of 2025

Cinema DEFCON Threat Assessment:
165 Days — Theatrical-to-DVD Window

Verdict
Defied gravity at the box office, even if logic, taste, and critical opinion were left clinging to a cliff wall. Didn’t quite make it to a six-month home video window, but drove so many people to experience it on the big screen, I’ll give it to ‘em anyway. DEFCON 5.

🎬 [PLAYBACK: TRAILER]

The original theatrical trailer dials in every corny graphics preset, overly dramatic voiceover cliché, and stock music library formula to summon peak turn-of-the-millenium Velveeta.

Send this review to your friends who miss the days when a SuperBit DVD felt like a flex. And if it brought back the rush — or made you dizzy — tap like or drop your favorite thrill or gag in the comments.

Postscript:

While Vertical Limit plays its K2 setting for high-stakes spectacle, owing to its earned reputation as the most dangerous climb in the world, real-life events sadly mirrored its tragedy not long after.

On Aug 1, 2008, eleven climbers lost their lives on the same part of the mountain, many by eerily similar means. Though K2 had long claimed lives, that single deadliest event in the mountain’s history lends the film’s final act an unexpected emotional weight that’s harder to shake in its aftermath.

🎧 [PLAYBACK: SOUND ON]

Smash play below for the soundtrack-needle-drop experience of Perkins-approved melancholy with just enough kitsch to keep it weird.

🟢 Prefer the full experience? Cue the soundtrack on Spotify as you read.

This Monkey’s Got Daddy Issues

Oz Perkins’ films tend to be uncomfortable watches for us.

Not that they’re all overtly scary, but because they so clearly function as unfiltered excavations of his own personal pain.

His dad, the iconic Anthony Perkins, died of AIDS when Oz was just 18. Nine years later, his mom was aboard the first plane to hit the World Trade Center. His movies bleed this trauma, and watching them sometimes feels like uncomfortably eavesdropping on a private therapy session.

Whereas his previous film, Longlegs, explored the sacrifices one makes to protect those they love, The Monkey fixates on the inevitability and randomness of death — just look at that poster art tagline — how, why, and elusively when it comes for us all.

But backstory aside, does The Monkey work on its own terms as a horror picture? Not really.

I’d heard in advance that the film leans more toward dark comedy than straight-up horror. Maybe it’s my inability to separate this from Perkins’ own baggage, but I just couldn’t find that much to laugh about — even if some of the kills are so gleefully absurd and wildly over-the-top that they’re begging you to chuckle along. The problem is, they play out far too rapidly, while the film’s pacing is so languid as to frustrate genre fans looking for a solid dose of tension and carnage.

Wait, Wait, Wait…. What Movie Am I In?

No shame, really — we here at SINephile could probably watch Theo James peel potatoes for twice this picture’s length and still emerge happy. (Casting agents: If a gender-reversed remake of Jeanne Dielman is ever in the cards, take note.)

But James simply feels miscast in his dual role as terminally depressed twins. One jittery and insecure, the other a mulleted, malignant narcissist rendered so profoundly unattractive that the on-set hairstylists deserve an award for their work in achieving the unthinkable.

It’s not that James isn’t a capable actor; he stretches himself here beyond his typical wheelhouse and fares mostly well. He just feels like a square peg for this particular material.

Also, delaying his actual appearance until the back two-thirds of the movie? A choice.

Subscribe free for more trauma-soaked oddities & genre swings that forget to duck.

Death, But Make It Decorative

The film’s short story roots are very much on display… and not in a good way.

On the kill front, yeah, gore hounds will get their occasional fix. But to build horror and suspense, the audience needs something — anything — to be invested in narratively. And with virtually zero character development outside of James’ dual roles and their younger counterparts, we’re left with next to nothing.

90% of the kills are of nameless characters who barely exist long enough for us even to register their faces before getting turned into crime scene decor.

So what’s at stake, exactly?

King-Sized Expectations, Short Story Stakes

It’s unfortunate because we were genuinely looking forward to The Monkey — especially given King’s well-publicized, but now puzzling, effusive praise for this adaptation of his short story.

It’s a solid concept, but feels woefully underdeveloped. Oddly, it takes an unceremonious place among the most middling of King's screen translations.

A curious tonal misfire, and unless you're a die-hard Perkins devotee, there's probably little reason to let this monkey on your back.

UNCLAIMED PERSONAL EFFECTS:

+ 2 points for the framed, embroidered sampler on the wall reading, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,” mere seconds after an unattended shotgun renders someone spaghetti sauce

+ 1 point for Perkins giving himself an onscreen exit so undignified that it feels like a personal dare

+ 3 points for the real danger at Benihana not being the flying shrimp

- 5 points for the biggest jump scare being the reveal of James’ twin’s late-stage haircut

📊 [PLAYBACK: PERFORMANCE]

Production Budget: $10 - 11M
Worldwide Box Office: $69M

Cinema DEFCON Threat Assessment:
43 Days — Theatrical-to-Streaming Window

Verdict:
Surprisingly strong box office, buoyed by baffling critical praise.

Stuck around long enough to justify the hype, if not the haircut.

Just a few days shy of earning DEFCON 3 status. Proves yet again: horror sells, even when the laughs don’t land for everyone.

DEFCON 2

🎬 [PLAYBACK: TRAILER]

Trauma has a new face. And a toy drum. The redband trailer pulls no punches, and lands a few cheap shots too.

Share this review with horror fans who prefer emotional baggage with a side of gore.
And if it hit or missed, tap like and drop your most repressed thought in the comments.

You think you know these movies. You don’t.

You’d be right to cast a skeptical eye at the mere thought of comparing a revered 1940s Technicolor masterpiece about nuns in the Himalayas to a notorious, career-killing sleaze-a-thon about Vegas strippers — the lone film that dared try to make NC-17 go mainstream.

They were made nearly a half-century apart. One was instantly canonized; the other, ruthlessly eviscerated.

And yet, Black Narcissus (1947) and Showgirls (1995) are actually the Same. Damn. Film. And we’re here to prove it to you.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Showgirls is often dubbed “All About Eve in a G-string” — and it almost was.

Originally pitched by Jane Fonda to ascendant screenwriter Joe Eszterhas in the late ’80s as a modern-day remake of the Bette Davis classic transported from Broadway to Hollywood (a proposed star vehicle for herself), the idea was later twisted into the unforgettable cinematic trainwreck forever stamped with his name. (Jane escaped unscathed.)

But Split Screen isn’t about the obvious comparisons. It’s about uncovering the hidden kinships between films that dare not be compared — until you realize they absolutely must be.

Posit

Both Black Narcissus and Showgirls ask the same brutal question:

What happens when a woman tries to define herself in a system that enables and profits off her rise, but is threatened by her humanity?

Virtue was Sister Clodagh’s armor. Skin was Nomi’s.

But the moment either woman let herself truly show, the Machine pushed back. Ambition wasn’t the problem. Being human was.

The Scenery Seduces First

From the moment they arrive, the walls are watching.

Powell and Pressburger’s harem-turned-convent clings to a Himalayan cliff — silent, ornate, precarious.

Verhoeven’s Vegas throbs with neon and chrome, every surface ready to reflect your transgressions right back at you.

One offers breathtaking views of majestic peaks. The other? Same — just garishly lit and served with bouncers and comped drinks.

Neither are passive spaces. They lure. They dare. They destroy. The Palace of Mopu and the Stardust may look nothing alike on the surface, but both are dens of iniquity built to consume the women inside them.

In each film, the setting isn’t just a backdrop. It’s a trigger. And survival depends on learning the house rules before the floor drops out from underneath you — sometimes literally.

Women in Exile

Our heroines first arrive on the scene in full-on escape mode.

While Sister Clodagh evades the shame of a failed romance back in Ireland, Nomi flees her lengthy multi-state crime spree. Both land in “prestigious” institutions dressed up as opportunity. But, unbeknownst to them, reinvention carries a price.

There’s no clean slate to be found.

As much as our protagonists may have hoped otherwise, their new environments can’t erase the past, because they’re designed to capitalize off it. Alone and exposed, both women find themselves unraveling, until their planned reinvention curdles into reckoning.

Out, Out, Damned Spot!

The spots are everywhere.

It’s the first visible sign that neither place welcomes newcomers quietly and systemic rejection will inevitably leave a mark.

At the Palace of Mopu, the Sisters of Saint Faith break out in “spots” shortly after arrival — bad water, they’re told. At the Cheetah, they appear in neon, under black lights, and with the kind of invisible ink that stains reputations.

One condition is blamed on the environment. The other? Well, let’s just say they’re brought by the customers. So, no, we’re not just talking about the name of the club.

Or are we?

The Erotics of Performance

In these films, movement becomes language.

Sister Clodagh’s rigid posture breaks only when her ghostly flashbacks of a past lover say more than her vows ever could. Nomi’s violent, high-octane routines reveal not just ambition, but rage as a defense mechanism.

Sister Ruth enjoys tugging that churchbell rope a bit more than the Lord requires. Cristal leverages her star power to gleefully tug on Nomi. And both gestures directly lead to their downfall.

What’s being sold as purity — religious or sexual — is laced with something far more volatile.

Desire exists on every axis here. It’s repressed, performed, projected. And it always comes at a cost.

The Men Are Just Props

Eight men, zero main characters.

Yes, there are males in these two movies, technically. But they’re not at all the story.

Mr. Dean and Zack Carey may flirt with centrality, but they exist solely on the periphery — accessories to female transformation, capitalizing off their attempts.

Their presence triggers tension, but it’s the women who decide the terms of engagement.

And rightfully, so.

The Fall

Clodagh and Ruth, Nomi and Cristal: these are battles fought in glances and gestures, jealousy and power.

And when those power struggles meet their climax, they do so spectacularly.

One takes a dive from a thousand-foot cliff. The other woman down the backstage version of the Exorcist Stairs.

The architecture may change, but the stakes stay the same.

Revelation in Ruin

Both films end spoiled triumph and introspective clarity. And loss.

Our heroines didn’t quite win the game they set out to conquer. They willfully walk away from it.

Clodagh descends the mountain just as the rains come. Nomi hitches out of town just before the cops do. Each is altered, exposed, yet somehow still standing. And that’s the real miracle.

In environments as harsh as these, whether you were fighting for redemption or renewal, success often comes instead in the form of survival.

And for these tough ladies, that’s still a win.

Taboo for Their Day

Although emanating from very different places, both films dealt with their fair share of censorship struggles.

Black Narcissus was famously left cut for 41 years, prior to restoration in 1988. The most egregious footage apparently was flashbacks to Sister Clodagh’s life in Ireland: scenes of fishing, caroling, and a former fiancé.

The mere suggestion that a nun once had a life before Christ was considered so offensive that the film was threatened with a Hays Code ban prior to the cuts.

Ironically, the rampant phallic and yonic palace decor — enough to make a Georgia O’Keeffe painting blush — escaped scrutiny entirely, flying over everyone’s heads.

On the other hand, while Showgirls was famously permitted its NC-17 rating from the get-go, with Verhoeven wielding final cut privileges based on his blockbuster success with Basic Instinct, the MPAA didn’t offer the same blank check the studio gave him.

In order to abide by NC-17 standards and not be refused rating altogether, Verhoeven ultimately delivered softened versions of both the pool and lapdance sequences than those he’d originally assembled.

At least NC-17 meant the film could still achieve a relatively wide theatrical release, with Verhoven noting, “We pushed the boundaries as far as we could, but we were still mindful of the MPAA. We didn’t want an unrated movie — nobody would show it.”

Ironically, even after the edits, both films were banned in Ireland. Black Narcissus for being an affront to religion. They didn’t give a reason on Showgirls, as if they needed to. But Verhoeven’s film shockingly didn’t pass certification in the country for over two decades, finally officially landing on home video for the first time there in 2017.

Behind the Curtain: The Real Drama

The parallels don’t just stop at the screen.

Black Narcissus was practically cast for tension. Kathleen Byron (Sister Ruth) was married director Michael Powell’s current mistress during filming. Deborah Kerr (Clodagh) was his recent ex — making his direction of both women simultaneously a Hitchcockian masterclass in purposefully mining offscreen melodrama.

Showgirls had its own blend of backstage drama: Eszterhas famously claimed in his autobiography that Berkley stayed in Verhoeven’s hotel room for the entire shoot, while Gina Gershon made no secret of her offscreen contempt. (To her credit, she’s still game to talk about it.)

It’s fitting. These are films built on volatile chemistry — on women sparring for visibility while men attempt to pull strings from behind the scenes.

The friction was real. The explosions, inevitable.

The Cast of Characters

For two films so wildly far apart in tone, era, and altitude, it’s frankly eerie how not just the four leads, but nearly every major character in one has a spiritual twin in the other — twisted reflections across the gender politics of their time.

From nuns and strippers to generals and gatekeepers, each is caught inside a system they believe they can outwit. And each fail.

So with nostalgic reverence — and a raised eyebrow — let’s chart the full ensemble of cinematic soulmates.

🎧 [PLAYBACK: SOUND ON]

Think of it as the opening credits of The Love Boat, just stormier. And with better lighting. So smash play on this campy disco remix of the schlocky 70s theme song and let’s set sail.

Sister Clodagh ⇄ Nomi Malone

Deborah Kerr | Elizabeth Berkeley

The Delusional Heroine

Newly anointed, fiercely ambitious, and deeply unmoored — Clodagh and Nomi both charge into unfamiliar terrain thinking they’re in control. Instead, they’re haunted by past trauma, seduced by power, and devoured by the very institutions they set out to conquer.

Each claws her way up a corrupt system built to exploit her, chasing a promised land that exists only in her imagination. Clodagh to spread God’s word through colonialist Third World infestation, Nomi to headline a topless casino musical drenched in capitalist misogyny.

Both seek reinvention in seductive, hostile environments. They begin with conviction and determination, but their headstrong self-importance unravels them.

Nomi’s hitched ride out of town directly echoes Clodagh’s descent from the mountain — forever changed, leaving tragedy in their wake. Their journeys end the same way: alone, wiser, bruised, but unbroken and left to fight another day.

What they ultimately find isn’t ascendance or transcendence. The scenery seduces them, swallows them whole, and then spits them out.

Sister Ruth ⇄ Cristal Connors

Kathleen Byron | Gina Gershon

The Woman on the Edge

Seductive, predatory, and burning with repressed desire. Ruth and Cristal are jaded women who see through the fantasy and lash out when they’re no longer centered. One casts off her habit and dares put on lipstick; the other autographs her headshots with it at Spago.

They’re magnetic, manipulative, and emotionally volatile — seductive foils and erotic rivals to our protagonists. They represent temptation, defiance, and the danger of not playing nice.

Each combusts under pressure, then falls — literally and figuratively — after challenging our lead. Ruth off a cliff. Cristal down the stairs. Just in time to realize the system has already chosen someone younger. And hungrier. For Doggie Chow.

They’re both villain and parable. Showing us what happens when power fades, when desire simmers too long, when the institution no longer has any use for you. And they go out knowing exactly why.

They’re also both *easily* the best part of either film.

Sister Philippa ⇄ Molly Abrams

Flora Robson | Gina Ravera

The Genuine Good Person

The lone gentle soul. The moral compass. The quietly gifted artisan of her world.

Philippa and Molly both care deeply, offering creativity and empathy to institutions that punish expression in favor of obedience and conformity. Whether as a gardener or a costume designer, both prove the most grounded among the whole ensemble.

Philippa is undone by the intoxicating beauty of Mopu’s surroundings. Molly is exploited and discarded in a grotesque final-act betrayal, one even Verhoeven and Eszterhas later admitted was a huge mistake. Her idea of beauty: a glammed-up rock messiah sporting a God complex with the hair to match. Both are pushed out not because they defied the system, but because they trusted it.

A reprieve from the power grabs and psychological spirals around them, Philippa and Molly represent the quiet tragedy of those who tried to nurture — and paid the price.

Sister Briony ⇄ Gay

Judith Furse | Michelle Johnston

The Rock

We know everyone wanted Briony to land as Mama Bazoom, ourselves included on first glance — but sorry, she’s Gay. And yes, with a capital “G.”

Sister Briony is the practical veteran whose brawn and no-nonsense attitude keeps the convent running. She’s not caught up in the psychodrama. Nor is she there for the spectacle. She rolls up her sleeves and gets things done.

Gay does the same backstage at the Stardust: part fixer, part den mother, all human fire extinguisher.

Neither is the star, but both are indispensable. They hold the place together while everyone else spirals. They know the machinery, respect it just enough to stay alive, but aren’t deluded by it.

And while Gay may not quite live up to her name, both Briony and the actress who played her brought unapologetic butch energy to the convent. You see it. You respect it. And you love them for it.

Sister Honey ⇄ Julie

Jenny Laird | Melissa Williams

The Sweet One …Until She Isn’t

Friendly, accommodating, and just a little bit manipulative.

Sister Honey and Julie are the sweet ones who are always watching, always waiting in the wings. They know how to weaponize likeability and reflect the illusion of sisterhood… until survival instinct kick in.

Both show that the system doesn’t just tear down the bold or defiant — it rewards quiet opportunism.

Honey’s compassion curdles under the pressure of caring for a critically ill infant. Julie’s pesky kids are verbally abused by the Mean Girl lead understudy backstage at the Stardust.

When pushed too far, both women decide someone has to go.

They’re nice. Until they’re not. And you never saw it coming — because you were too busy underestimating them.

Mr. Dean ⇄ Zach Carey

David Farrar | Kyle MacLachlan

The Men Who Thought THEY Were the Plot

Mr. Dean starts out as Tony Moss — the crass, lascivious gatekeeper — but quickly morphs into Zack: the guy with just enough charm to think he matters more than he does.

Both are objects of desire and instigators of jealousy. They see the system for what it is, yet continue to profit from it.

Zach “likes” Nomi but won’t save her. Not when there’s money to be made. Mr. Dean grows to “respect” Sister Clodagh, though can’t help but savor her unraveling. He enjoys seeing the scourge of colonialism fall from the perch it never really earned — and her along with it. Zach’s smug condescention of Nomi emerges from the shadows when he finally discovers the sexual purity she offered was also just a facade hiding behind a lengthy hooking rap sheet.

They offer the illusion of support while reinforcing the very structures that devour our heroines. They want credit for being decent without giving up power.

They’re not the story. But they clearly want us to believe they are.

Ayah ⇄ Henrietta “Mama” Bazoom

May Hallatt | Lin Tucci

The “Old Broad” Who’s Seen It All

Costumed, kooky, and impossible to forget.

They burst from the margins with outsized personalities, bearing witness to the madness with bemused detachment — and a strong dose of camp.

One’s wrapped in tattered woolen shawls and matted braids, the other in sequins and hydraulically-powered brassieres.

Both Ayah and Mama know the fate of our protagonists the moment they arrive. They’ve seen dozens just like them come and go over the years: naïve, ambitious, doomed. They watch it unfold without flinching, because they’ve long since stopped buying the fantasy being sold.

Sardonic, unfiltered, and always a step ahead, they don’t beat around the bush. They’re never fooled for a moment… and refuse to pretend otherwise.

And that’s why they outlast everyone.

Kanchi ⇄ Penny a.k.a. “Hope”

Jean Simmons | Rena Riffel

The Erotic Scapegoat

At least we Hope she Kan. Sexualized innocence — used, discarded, and resented by other women not for what they do, but for what they represent.

Recipient of perhaps the least subtle character naming in the history of the Hays Code, Kanchi is a vessel of youthful eroticism introduced in the palace courtyard surrounded by a flock of cocks, a free-spirited distraction the sisters can neither control nor fully understand.

Penny is treated as a joke from the get-go — demeaned, renamed, and reshaped by the system until she’s docile enough to humiliate.

Both become catalysts for collapse, not by defiance, but simply by existing.

They aren’t threats because they act out. They’re threats because they remind others around them exactly of what they’ve repressed inside themselves.

Both get punished for it.

Joseph Anthony ⇄ James (Smith?!?)

Eddie Whaley Jr. | Glenn Plummer

The Truth Teller

Gregarious, kind, and impossibly earnest.

Joseph Anthony and James are the rare male characters in these films who aren’t trying to control the narrative. They’re translating it.

Joseph Anthony is literally a translator, bridging colonial arrogance and local reality with more precocious grace than the nuns deserve. James is a metaphorical one, trying to pull Nomi toward something that resembles self-awareness — away from the stage lights and into authenticity.

Both are wise but emotionally stunted. Joseph Anthony because of his youth. James because, well, his problems with a certain part of the female anatomy speak louder than his “wisdom.” They don’t belong in the systems they’re stuck inside and their honesty costs them.

Whether it’s Joseph Anthony informing the nuns of a baby’s death or James shouting “Everybody got AIDS and shit!”, they speak uncomfortable truths. And in these worlds, truth doesn’t get rewarded. It gets left behind.

The Old General ⇄ Tony Moss

Desmond Knight | Alan Rachins

The Gatekeeper with a Heart of Gold

Bombastic, theatrical, and utterly in love with themselves and their entitlement.

The Old General and Tony Moss are arrogant power brokers who command attention through sheer force of personality. One presides over a mountaintop palace; the other over a backstage cattle call. Both offer access to elite spaces, but only on their terms.

They don’t just guard the gate — they are the gate. And they revel in their own mythology.

The aloof royal and the sleazeball producer each adopt aggressive, performative cruelty. Old General wielding authority through hollow threats and imperial pomp, Tony through gleeful misogyny and insult-as-audition.

But beneath all the spectacle of holding court, they both offer misguided benevolence: The General gifts the nuns sausages while staring longingly at his own reflection in that ornate, ridiculously phallic wall mirror; Tony generously offers ice for nipples and cheap validation for broken dreams.

They’re stepping stones who mistake themselves for final bosses. And once our protagonist’s arc outgrows them, they largely vanish. (Too bad, ‘cause Alan Rachins was kinda awesome. R.I.P.)

The Young General ⇄ Phil Newkirk

Sabu | Greg Travis

The Ornament

Polished, smug, and completely useless.

The Young General and Phil Newkirk are ceremonial mascots of institutions that no longer have meaning, only momentum.

The Young General is the product of colonial pageantry, dressed up and paraded around for significance he doesn’t fully understand.

Phil is a corporate lackey posing as a PR exec — equal parts sycophant and pimp — whose real job is to keep the machinery running while pretending it’s glamorous.

Neither has real power, but both are complicit in upholding it. They flirt with status, bask in its glow, and indulge the perks. But when the story sharpens, they too disappear, because there’s nothing under the surface.

They’re losers and simply decor. But at least Powell and Pressburger didn’t graphically dismember Sabu in the opening moments of their next movie, as Verhoeven did to poor Phil.

Reverend Mother ⇄ Al Torres

Nancy Roberts | Robert Davi

The Unfiltered Voice of Reason

Both lead guilds of female workers — nuns or strippers — with the same air of managerial detachment and weathered authority. Their job isn’t to nurture; it’s to maintain order. And they’re damn good at it.

Reverend Mother doesn’t believe Clodagh is ready to lead, and she’s right. Al isn’t impressed when Nomi walks out to dance in Goddess instead of on his customers’ laps, and he’s right, too.

They’re the ones who’ve seen the cycle before, know how it ends, and are tasked with keeping the doors open either way.

They present as stewards of the “services” they provide, but they’re really caretakers of the Machine, overseeing and enabling the exploitation of others, whether via chastity or debasement.

Their concern only surfaces once the damage is done — when it’s safe to feign dignity and the stains left on our protagonists are someone else’s problem.

End Credits

So, there you have it.

A full cast of doubles, echoing across decades, continents, and the full spectrum of cinematic respectability.

One film drenched in Technicolor restraint, the other in neon excess — yet both arrive at the same emotional cliffside.

Maybe the scenery really does swallow them whole.

Or maybe we just like watching them fall.

Both, essential films.

🎧 [PLAYBACK: SOUND ON]

Your musical accompaniment is Brian Easdale’s bombastic score taking us from opening majestic swells to creeping existential dread.

🟢 Start devotional. End deranged. Or just crank up the full OG Black Narcissus soundtrack on Spotify.

The Holy Grail of Technicolor

Hands down one of the most visually striking films ever committed to celluloid, Black Narcissus is the ultimate Powell & Pressburger collaboration and a spectacle that holds up remarkably well almost 80 years after release.

Jack Cardiff's sumptuous Technicolor cinematography and Alfred Junge's painstakingly inventive production design — both of which set a new industry standard—whimsically transport us from the Pinewood Studios backlot to an abandoned clifftop palace high in the Indian Himalayas, where an inexperienced group of five Anglican nuns is sent to establish a school and hospital for the villagers residing in the valley below.

Upon arrival, they learn the backstory of their imposing, windswept new home was as a harem for the prior Raja and that they are yet another in a long line of religious orders attempting to convert the palace for more respectable purposes, all other previous efforts ending in failure.

Powder Keg in a Convent

With each of the sisters soon experiencing unexpected effects attributed to their new location, their work proves increasingly challenging.

Most notably, the nascent attraction that develops between Sister Superior Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) and the local general's agent, Mr. Dean (David Farrar), spawns jealousy and resentment in Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron), who is suffering from increasing mental instability.

Ironically, the film’s unconventional love triangle was directly mirrored off-screen: Byron was married director Michael Powell’s current mistress; Kerr, a recent ex.

Sister Clodagh begins the film with poise, precision, and the illusion of control. She arrives with her orders intact and her emotions sealed off. But the palace has its own plans. The wind never stopping, the serenity turning oppressive, the memories, once manageable, start arriving uninvited.

Her earlier life in Ireland flickers in with warmth and familiarity, tethered moments that feel less like memory than dislocation, as if she’s witnessing a version of herself she no longer recognizes. As her newfound leadership becomes labor, faith turns brittle and Clodagh starts to soften.

She’s mourning the person she used to be. Her spiritual unraveling is driven by shame, loneliness, and a profound crisis of identity. So, when everything starts to slip — Ruth, the school, the mission — it’s already too late to recover the steadfast resolve that once protected her.

Follow SINephile free for more bold movie judgment and delirious color palettes. No penance required.

Sister Ruth, on the other hand, unravels operatically in fragments—beads of sweat, glances held just a moment too long, the sudden edge in her reply when Clodagh gives an order. Tension builds quietly until it starts to distort her entire presence.

Kathleen Byron moves like she’s a silent film villainess wound too tight, motion staccato while framed in firelight and shadow. By the final reel, she’s devolved into something truly elemental with eyes that sear straight through the screen as the film turns from slow-burn melodrama to full-bore horror.

Powell frames Ruth less as a monster and more like the manifestation of Clodagh’s repression, stripped of all shame and unbound by doctrine. He shoots her like a force of nature ready to burn the whole system down.

Censors Missed the Sausages

While Black Narcissus contains a startling level of eroticism for a film made in 1947, I've always been bemused that the scenes censored until its 1988 restoration and re-release were primarily to remove Sister Clodagh's innocuous flashbacks to her earlier layperson memories that dared blasphemously imply that a nun could've had a life prior to marrying Christ.

The rampant phallic and yonic decor adorning the palace walls, a local prostitute who seduces multiple male characters rocking the name "Kanshi," the nuns' diet consisting solely of sausages, and Sister Ruth casting aside her habit in favor of fire-engine red lipstick and matching f**k-me pumps, were all apparently too subtle for the braintrusts who ran the Hays Code at the time.

Color Me Faithful

Scorsese has frequently cited Black Narcissus as a key formative influence, especially in its use of color, mood, and composition. He’s called it one of the most visually stunning films ever made — and a major inspiration throughout his career.

I entirely get it. Discovering Black Narcissus in college left me so transfixed I wrote a 25-page paper on it that my professor, critic Joel Siegel, had me read in front of the class — and in many ways, that assignment became the unlikely catalyst toward working at Criterion a few years later. Some films just get under your skin and stay there.

However, I’ve always been irked by the persistent color instability — most noticeably in the nuns’ habits, which Powell described as “oatmeal” but flicker between beige and grey as if the film can’t decide what neutral means.

Even the best restorations I’ve seen (discussed in PLAYBACK: Legacy below) haven’t fully solved it, suggesting the issue may lie in the original exposure or the Technicolor separations themselves. For the love of god, can someone please give this masterpiece the color stability it finally deserves?

Of course, the true brilliance of Black Narcissus remains how it critiques colonial arrogance and overreach not just through character, but in composition. Even before the nuns fail spiritually, they’ve failed visually. Their pale habits and austere rituals are swallowed whole by a landscape that’s too vivid, too alive, too sensual for stereotypical British restraint.

The convent never stood a chance. Not against the weather. Not against memory. Not against color.

TEMPTATION TALLY:

+ 1 point for Ayah, that "faithful, dirty old bird"

- 1 point for Sister Briony’s coffee-making skills, but + 4 points for actress Judith Furse bringing unapologetic butch energy to the convent

+ 5 points for functioning as a biting anti-colonial allegory in the waning days of British rule

+ 10 points for initially getting Condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency

An essential picture and a mainstay in my Top 10.

Postscript: Don't bother with the painfully unnecessary and ill-advised 2020 BBC/FX mini-series remake. Black Narcissus is an artifact of the time in which it was made and should remain as such.

Share this review with anyone who thinks Technicolor is just an Instagram filter. And if it stunned you too, tap like or leave your favorite convent meltdown in the comments below.

DOUBLE FEATURE DETOUR:

Intoxicated by Black Narcissus? Try pairing it with Paul Verhoeven’s spectacular camp trainwreck about Vegas strippers. Find out why they’re shockingly twisted siblings in the full Split Screen showdown, if you dare.

📊 [PLAYBACK: RECEPTION]

Budget: £280K ($1.2M) in 1947. That’s $15M today.
Original UK Box Office: £85K ($340K), ~$4.2M adjusted.
*Adjusted as of 2025

Cinema DEFCON Threat Level:
37 years — Theatrical-to-Video Window

Verdict
Underperformed financially—but overdelivered on influence, legacy, and lasting aesthetic impact. The numerous restorations and revivals over the years have cemented Black Narcissus as a one of the most important and lasting celebrations of the cinematic experience. Hence, easily lands at DEFCON 5.

⏳ [PLAYBACK: LEGACY EDITION]

1988 – Janus Films U.S. Re-release with Restored Footage
Previously censored scenes—originally cut following condemnation by the Catholic Legion of Decency—were reinstated for theatrical screenings in the U.S.

1988 – Criterion Collection Debut
Criterion released Black Narcissus on LaserDisc, featuring a letterboxed transfer and supplemental materials, including audio commentary by directors Michael Powell and Martin Scorsese.

2001 – Criterion DVD
This DVD edition ported over content from the LaserDisc, offering improved accessibility for home viewers.

2008 – ITV Blu-ray Restoration
ITV Studios issued a digitally restored edition on Blu-ray in the UK, helping reintroduce the film to home audiences.

2010 – Criterion Blu-ray
Criterion released their own restoration on DVD and Blu-ray, including new supplements, with an HD transfer supervised by Powell’s widow (and Scorsese’s longtime editor) Thelma Schoonmaker.

2023 – BFI 35mm Tour: Cinema Unbound
The British Film Institute organized nationwide UK screenings of new 35mm prints as part of its “Cinema Unbound” retrospective celebrating Powell and Pressburger.

2025 – Eye Filmmuseum 4K Theatrical Showcase
A new 4K restoration was screened in Amsterdam during the Eye Filmmuseum’s Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger retrospective—apparently its most pristine version yet, though not yet released to video or streaming.

🎬 [PLAYBACK: TRAILER]

The mesmerizing modern trailer created by editor Dan McBride for his YouTube channel, DM Edit. All of his creations are bangers, but I first discovered his long-running project on the strength of this standout.

Share this review with someone who needs reminding that repression always finds its escape hatch. Does Black Narcissus stun you too? Tap like or drop your favorite aspect of the film in the comments.

🎧 [PLAYBACK: SOUND ON]

First, cue up Jung Jaeil’s score while you read.

🟢 For the full experience, open the score in Spotify.

The Bong Showdown

I couldn’t help but walk away from director Bong Joon-ho’s much-anticipated follow-up to his masterpiece Parasite thinking I’d just witnessed a sloppy amalgam of nearly all his previous features combined.

Mickey 17 is like an unthawed turducken dunked straight into a deep fryer — the kind of overstuffed mess that still mesmerizes in spectacle despite ruining the overall meal and risking burning down the house in the process.

Now, context is crucial here. I consider Parasite to have been such a towering cinematic achievement that it remains one of only two films made in the entire decade of the 2010s to earned an ASCENDED rating by SINephile — by my criteria, elevating it into the realm of the 50 best movies we’ve ever seen.

And, as Bong is well aware, attempting to one-up a picture of that quality is a fool’s game. Anything to come after it is likely to suffer in assessment due to the unintentional yet irresistible comparison. So, I’ve pushed back hard against those instincts to evaluate the picture instead as a standalone entry far more in line with his earlier work. And yet, while there’s so much to admire here, I still can’t help but be disappointed.

To its credit, Mickey 17 is a hugely ambitious undertaking, boasting the dystopian nightmare fuel of Snowpiercer, the social satire and class commentary of Parasite, the misunderstood/feared “other” from Okja, and even some of the existential dread of Mother.

But while those films threaded their ideas with razor-sharp precision, here the satire is so broadly applied that it blunts its own impact. (Full disclosure, SINephile is currently packaging a retrospective on Verhoeven who, as with Boon, is one of the greatest film satirists ever, so this hit at a rough time for comparisons.)

Expendable and Existential

People keep comparing Mickey 17 to Groundhog Day, but the real parallel is Happy Death Day, as the terminally depressed and unskilled Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) isn’t just stuck in a loop, he’s getting killed for our entertainment.

As an Expendable — an engineered underclass whose sole purpose is to serve as human cannon fodder — Mickey pathetically exists only to ensure the safety and prosperity of his space colony’s elites, dying over and over in a cycle he can’t escape.

It’s a premise that cuts deep into themes of class oppression, identity and dehumanization, teasing inherent ethical and moral dilemmas, but instead of aptly tying it to the broader societal theme of xenophobia explored elsewhere in the film, that connection remains oddly untapped.

Sledgehammer Satire

Where Parasite was a scalpel, Mickey 17 wields a sledgehammer. The film’s class and racial dynamics are unmistakable, yet they lack the layered nuance Bong typically brings to such topics.

Mark Ruffalo, as the colony’s bloated, self-important, orange-tinged leader, is practically a caricature — a grotesque fusion of Trump’s narcissism, Musk’s techno-messiah complex, and the performative piety of a televangelist. If that’s where Bong wanted the satire to land, that’s fine, but it veers so far into cartoon villainy that it tempers the bite.

When his sycophantic followers don red baseball caps, it’s impossible not to be reminded of Megalopolis’ similarly too-on-the-nose attempts at contemporary allusion last year, though Mickey 17 thankfully emerges far less bruised than FFC’s misguided endeavor.

Toni Collette, another actor I utterly adore, is painted similarly buffoonish, playing Ruffalo’s wife and confidante whose role sadly never extends beyond panicked exasperation and obsession for material gain.

The remainder of the cast fares a bit better. Steven Yeun (Burning, The Walking Dead) and Naomi Ackie (Blink Twice) turn in solid performances, despite underwritten roles, injecting much-needed depth into a world that often feels constructed more for its ideas than its people.

But Robert Pattinson does the real heavy lifting here, stretching his range across multiple versions of himself impressively, even if he seems derivative of a self-aware, post-modern Forrest Gump. It’s not easy to capture the horror of a man realizing his own uniqueness while the world around him sees his personhood as instantly replaceable — let alone mine dark humor from the absurdity of it.

Subscribe free for more ambitious misfires, stylish sci-fi satire, and cultural critiques that don’t let spectacle off the hook.

Looks That Kill

But even as Pattinson breathes life into Mickey’s existential dilemma, the world around him struggles to feel as tactile. Visually, the film is striking, if somewhat cold.

Bong and cinematographer Darius Khondji (Se7en) craft a believable off-world colony, its sterile futurism lying somewhere between the materialistic and structural hierarchy of Snowpiercer and the shadowy industrial doom of Memories of Murder.

But whereas those films felt alive, full of gravitas, Mickey 17 feels oddly weightless — its atmosphere thematically rich but strangely hollow, lacking the visceral texture that made many of Bong’s previous settings so immersive and hypnotic. And that hollowness isn’t just aesthetic — it extends to the film’s social critique, which frequently gestures at weighty ideas but struggles to ground them with the same precision or impact.

And that may be the film’s ultimate weakness.

Mickey 17 wants to be an incisive critique of class hierarchy, dehumanization, and the vile politics of unbridled aggrandizement, but instead of weaving them into a singularly focused satire, it spreads itself too thinly.

Bong has never been one for subtlety, but his best films channel that bombast into a core driving thesis. Here, the narrative strains under the weight of too many competing allegories — corporate greed, imperial entitlement, racial exploitation, existential crisis — without packaging them into a singular gut punch of a statement.

The result is a film bursting with fascinating ideas yet curiously lacking in urgency. As satire, we can see it aiming for the jugular with every weapon in its arsenal — but sadly failing ever to twist the knife.

CLASSIFIED EXPENDABLE REPORT

+ 2 points for clearly having been completed under the assumption that the 2024 presidential election would turn out quite differently than it did. (The multiple references to Ruffalo’s *two* consecutive electoral losses, anyone?)

+ 3 points for Ruffalo mocking the native population’s speech patterns while simultaneously ratcheting his own voice into a screeching, racist rant that lands with ironic perfection.

- 2 points for Ruffalo’s capped teeth making him look like Matt Dillon in There’s Something About Mary

- 3 points for my friend noting afterward that Pattison was serving MADtv’s Michael McDonald as Stuart Larkin throughout… and now I’ll never unsee it

If you walk in with tempered expectations, there’s some Bong brilliance buried in here, but Mickey 17 struggles to bring its strongest ideas to the surface, leaving its ambition more compelling than its execution.

📊 [PLAYBACK: PERFORMANCE]

Budget: $118M
Worldwide Box Office: $132M

Cinema DEFCON Threat Assessment:
56 Days — Theatrical-to-Streaming Window

Verdict
Too big to flop, too weird to hit. Just under two months to streaming means we’re still in the Danger Zone for theater survival. Critical goodwill and an open calendar bought it some time, but underwhelmed audiences meant Bong’s clone caper barely broke even.

🎬 [PLAYBACK: TRAILER]

Pattinson dies. Again. And again. And again. The trailer teases Bong Joon-ho’s clone-loop space odyssey with just enough weird to leave your molecules unsettled.

Share this review with your fellow cinephiles who appreciate ambition even when it’s messy. And if it hit or missed, tap like or leave your least expendable thought in the comments.

The Echelons of Judgment

SINephile reviews use a playful 10-tier system called the SINemeter — an upgrade to the tired old star rating.

It measures both quality and impact — because a ★★★★½ film can still be something you never want to watch again. (Hey there, Man with a Movie Camera!) While, a ★½ disaster might be objectively indefensible… but also weirdly comforting.

That’s the critcal nuance all other movie rating systems miss.

So here’s a breakdown of how each SINemeter rank loosely maps — pre-impact — to the classic 5-star scale, one heavenly ascension (or eternal damnation) at a time.

This is our measuring stick.

Ascended (10/10)

★★★★★ = Top 50 of 130 years of cinema. The pantheon. The summit. Rarefied air.

Canonized (9/10)

★★★★½ = Practically perfect. Instant vault film. Best of the year.

Testament (8/10)

★★★★ = A must-see. Top 10 of the year type stuff.

Revelation (7/10)

★★★½ = Unexpectedly great. Instant rewatch. Deserves evangelizing.

Worthy (6/10)

★★★ = A solid watch. You won’t be mad at it. Perhaps even revisit.

Purgatory (5/10)

★★½ = Has its fans. Maybe you’re one of ‘em. Or just basic.

Damn Shame (4/10)

★★ = The regret tier. Should’ve worked. Somehow didn’t.

Fallen (3/10)

★½ = The mess that keeps on giving. Can’t look away.

Heretic (2/10)

★ = Worthless. Someone saw Exorcist II and said, “Hold my beer.”

The Ninth Circle (1/10)

☆ = Reserved for the 50 worst offenses in the history of cinema.

And those random "+ 3" and "- 2" points you’ll spot at the bottom of SINephile reviews? Totally unserious.

They're just a little nod to the things movies hilariously get right — or wrong — a bonus reel for anyone who sticks around through the end credits.

In short, Judgments are dead serious. Points are just for fun.

(And the paired DEFCON scores are a little of both.)

Everyone’s got their own version of the greatest films ever made.

After finally plugging our viewing gaps from the now-infamous Sight & Sound list a few years ago, it only felt right to compile ours — not so much as a definitive canon, but as a roadmap.

These are the 100 narrative features that built us: the sacred, the profane, the incomparable. Some are revered classics. Some are personal obsessions. (Some, like Showgirls, are both.)

I skipped documentaries and experimental films for now (they deserve their own spotlight), aiming instead for a breadth of genres, decades, and countries — without losing sight of the stories that actually mean something to me.

Are the rankings precise?

Of course not, and they’re not attempting to be.

How do you weigh a Technicolor musical against New Hollywood grit or a screwball comedy against a war epic? You can’t.

So, here’s how we look at them…

Foundations of Obsession

Pictures that cracked open our imagination beyond the world of film.

Early encounters, first cinematic loves, the ones that made us realize movies could feel bigger than life — or smaller than a gasp of breath.

1. The 400 Blows (1959)

   Cinema’s greatest coming-of-age story. Full stop.
   
   Truffaut understood that rebellion could be both survival and art.
   
   He redefined movies forever, helping kickstart the French New Wave, one of the medium’s most profound and lasting movements.
   
   Its influence is absolutely everywhere today, both onscreen and off.

   ---

2. L’Avventura (1960)

   Antonioni perfects the anti-thriller.
   
   An achingly gorgeous mystery where the real disappearance is meaning itself.
   
   He deftly layers tension upon mystery only to playfully withhold the catharsis everyone expected as necessary to storytelling.
   
   Sure, it plays glacially for some, but I’ve been obsessed with this picture ever since stumbling upon it when I first landed at Criterion.
   
   (Mike White must’ve felt similarly, because the entirety of White Lotus: Season 2 was an expertly crafted homage.)
   
   It also boasts one of the most fascinating origin stories in all of film history — one that’s coming soon to SINephile.

   ---

3. Black Narcissus (1947)

   A shockingly erotic, long-censored, anti-colonial allegory rendered in the most ravishing Technicolor ever committed to film.
   
   The world-building that Powell & Pressburger crafted from the confines of the backlot at Pinewood Studios, London, in the 1940s, remains utterly astonishing and a feast for the senses.
   
   Repressed desire, unchecked ambition, and unbridled jealousy arrive cliffside at a remote mountaintop convent in the Himalayas and invite us to watch along as entire power systems fall from the edge.

   ---

4. Tokyo Story (1953)

   The simplest plot, the deepest heartbreak.
   
   Ozu’s masterpiece embodies the entirety of the human condition.
   
   Its story is universal to anyone who’s ever been either parent or child. Hugely introspective and utterly gut-wrenching.
   
   Even if you don’t nod in knowing agreement while watching, you sit still, feeling every quiet truth land like a sledgehammer to your sense of self.

   ---

5. Ikiru (1952)

   A civil servant builds a playground, and Kurosawa reminds us why life matters.
   
   This titan of world cinema hand-down invented the modern action film throughout most of his storied career, through epics like Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, and Ran.
   
   So, it’s hugely ironic that perhaps his quietest picture is also his truest masterpiece.
   
   Funny how that works.

   ---

6. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

   Falconetti delivers what many reasonably consider to be the greatest screen performance by any actor — ever.
   
   Every twitch of the eye, every contortion of agony as she stands trial awaiting her fate, feels etched into celluloid with divine fire and brimstone.
   
   Dreyer’s stark close-ups and stripped-down sets only magnify her impending martyrdom.
   
   If you watch only one silent film in your entire life, let it be this one.

   ---

7. Modern Times (1936)

   Chaplin’s sharpest commentary on the interplay between industry, technology, alienation, and resilience, wrapped in slapstick perfection.
   
   His iconic Tramp persona takes on the Machine and slyly wins simply by losing.
   
   A devastating social critique blended with a ballet of comedic genius and choreographed factory gears.
   
   Still uncomfortably relevant to today’s fears over AI.
   
   When the phrase “Does it stand the test of time?” gets thrown around, this is what they’re talking about.

   ---

8. Pather Panchali (1955)

   Rural poverty and childhood wonder collide in Satyajit Ray's devastating, lyrical debut.

   
   No first feature that I’m aware of seems more surprisingly accomplished.
   
   It glides effortlessly between naturalism and visual poetry, documenting an Indian village child's joys and losses, inviting recognition and opening minds in ways few films by even long-established masters prove capable.
   
   Quiet, rough-edged, and utterly luminous.

   ---

9. Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

   Hawks' perfect blend of adventure and chemistry.
   
   He makes fatalism feel like flirtation as Cary Grant and his rag-tag crew of flyboys entertain Jean Arthur during an overnight cruise layover in a lively, yet precarious South American port.
   
   A bar hangout film where death ominously circles like the atmospheric fog that invites it in.
   
   Grant and Arthur crackle, but it's the undercurrent of unspoken code, of men who show love through action, not confession, that lingers long after landing.
   
   A film that out-Casablancas Casablanca for me. Yes, really.

   ---

10. The Third Man (1949)

    A noir so rich it verges on operatic.
    
    Tilted frames, dripping alleyways, sewer chases, and a zither score that shouldn’t work but does.
    
    Welles looms like a myth before we even see him. And when he finally appears, it’s pure movie magic.
    
    Vienna’s ruins have never felt more alive.
    
    Director Carol Reed isn’t quite the household name today that he deserves to be (he shows up more than once on this list).
    
    The Third Man proves just how ridiculous that oversight is.

    ---

11. The Conversation (1974)

    Gene Hackman’s best performance and Francis Ford Coppola’s most meticulous film.
    
    Wiretaps, surveillance, isolation.
    
    Hackman’s haunted Harry Caul is a character who takes time to fully understand, which seems weird at first until we slowly realize that, inside, he’s actually all of us.
    
    A slow burn of paranoia, guilt, and the terrifying realization that observation inherently changes the observed, whether they’re aware of it or not.
    
    The echoes in our present-day social media surveillance state are downright eerie.

    ---

12. The Wizard of Oz (1939)

    Timeless, Technicolor escapism.
    
    Every kid's first brush with cinematic magic. And nightmare fuel.
    
    An allegory, a cautionary tale, a trauma response, and a musical, all wrapped in a ruby-slippered journey down the Yellow Brick Road.
    
    No matter how many times you watch it, the transition from sepia Kansas to Oz hits like a house falling from the sky and lands just as hard.

    ---

13. Seven Samurai (1954)

    Kurosawa’s influence still radiates through cinema everywhere today.
    
    Because he made a new blueprint for action and shared it with the world.
    
    Every team-up, every siege, every last-stand shootout owes the master an eternal debt of gratitude.
    
    Yet no imitation over the decades has approached the depth of class commentary, moral complexity, and raw cinematic momentum.
    
    Few vibe this cleanly 70 years on.

    ---

14. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

    Gregory Peck, moral compass intact.
    
    Maybe the greatest adaptation of American literature ever set to film.
    
    Robert Mulligan visually reconstructs Harper Lee’s classic novel with such restrained reverence and grace that even its purity feels quietly radical today.
    
    Peck’s performance is gravitas personified. A courtroom drama that daringly cross-examined the American conscience.

    ---

15. Rear Window (1954)

    Voyeurism never looked this stylish or sinister.

    
    A film about watching and being watched.
    
    As usual, Hitchcock makes paranoia pleasurable, then slowly, surreptitiously poisons the well.
    
    Grace Kelly in satin, James Stewart in a cast, and a courtyard full of lives we shouldn’t be seeing.
    
    The Master of Suspense turned the act of watching itself into a moral Rubik’s Cube and invited us all to have a go.

    ---

16. Breathless (1960)

    Godard rewrote the rules of cool and never looked back.
    
    The jump-cut that launched a thousand imitators, inventing a new kind of cinematic grammar.
    
    All cigarettes and swindle, it’s a film that refuses to sit still, held together by sheer gusto and Anna Karina’s eyes.
    
    Pre-Breathless, cinema was staid and mostly just conformed.
    
    Afterward, it drew renewed attention, so clearly borrowed from Jean-Paul Belmondo’s signature swagger.

    ---

17. Bicycle Thieves (1948)

    Post-war realism at its finest. A film so simple, it’s devastating.
    
    Vittorio De Sica strips away artifice to reveal the bruised dignity of survival.
    
    One man, one bike, and the weight of an entire world rebuilding in the aftermath of complete devastation.
    
    The final shot is often imitated because it redefined what cinematic heartbreak could look like.
    
    And it is, btw, called Bicycle Thieves. Not the singular, “The Bicycle Thief,” as you may at times see online. We’ll provide the whole backstory as to why in Ctrl+Alt+Decode.

    ---

18. Star Wars (1977)

    Cultural monolith and escapism in its purest form. You know why it’s here.
    
    But beyond the iconography and merchandising juggernaut is a primal story told with sincerity, scope, and just the right amount of matinee movie schlock.
    
    Lucas admittedly cribbed from Kurosawa’s feudal Japan in Hidden Fortress, the adventures of Flash Gordon, and Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, all while concocting a galaxy where good and evil were defined for entire generations.
    
    You may prefer the sequel, but this was the Foundation, and it’s indispensable.

    ---

19. The Wages of Fear (1953)

    Sweaty palms, existential dread, and the most nail-biting truck drive in film history.
    
    Clouzot aims tension like a sadist, stretching anxiety beyond its breaking point.
    
    The panic is palpable as we embed with two men hauling a payload of nitroglycerine, avatars of capitalistic exploitation, driving headfirst toward oblivion with nothing but a paycheck and their pride.

    
    A terrifying masterstroke.

    ---

20. Rebecca (1940)

    Hitchcock's debut American feature also remains one of his best, a gothic romance dripping with paranoia and menace.
    
    Joan Fontaine’s fear is practically weaponized, swallowed whole by the storied mansion of Manderlay, both in its creepy shadows and under caretaker Mrs. Danvers’ icy, penetrating gaze whenever she’s not fondling her long-dead former employer’s silk underwear.
    
    Rebecca is both a ghost story and a masterclass in how fear is invoked simply through memory, silence, and withheld affection.
    
    And it doesn’t hurt that Sir Lawrence was kinda hot.

    ---

21. The Rules of the Game (1939)

    Renoir skewers the bourgeoisie with elegance and savagery.
    
    The OG class satire, inspiring everything from La Ronde to Down and Out in Beverly Hills.
    
    He does it all knowingly, not picking a side — just lays out the hypocrisies like cards on a table and lets civilization eat itself.
    
    Understandably, generations of filmmakers continue to feast off it.

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22. Citizen Kane (1941)

    The camera tricks, the time jumps, the hubris.
    
    Not sure we have to proclaim it to be the Greatest Film of All Time (or even that there has to be just one). But, yes, it deserves its reputation.
    
    Beyond Welles’ bravura, Kane is a devastating portrait of the American ego, eroding under the weight of ambition, longing, and snow-globe nostalgia.

    ---

23. La Dolce Vita (1960)

    Fellini's glittering, melancholic portrait of modern emptiness never loses either bite or beauty.
    
    Every frame seduces, then deftly undercuts.
    
    Paparazzi, parties, and spiritual decay. Fellini poetically predicted our fame-addicted present.

    ---

24. On the Waterfront (1954)

    Brando changed screen acting forever, and his heartfelt, vulnerable performance still hits like a gut punch.
    
    Kazan’s everyman morality play surprisingly reveals its truest power in key silences like pauses and mumbles.
    
    It’s one guy fighting against a broken system, but the damage is already done.

    ---

25. Sunset Boulevard (1950)

    The blueprint for not just every Hollywood self-elegy that followed, but dare we say, almost every damn movie since.
    
    Poison-dipped dialogue, gothic wit, and Norma Desmond ready for her close-up.
    
    Wilder exposed Tinseltown’s seedy underbelly and embalmed it for our permanent viewing pleasure.
    
    An addictive noir horror show that makes it impossible to unsee its echoes in nearly everything that came after it.

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Cinematic Earthquakes

Films that rewired our understanding of what cinema could be — whether through scope, structure, subjectivity, or sheer nerve.

Some are emotional sucker punches. Others just sneak up silently yet with purpose.

All the movies that came afterward hit differently than ever before.

26. Apocalypse Now (1979)

    A descent into madness with napalm in the morning and Wagner overhead.
    
    War never looked this operatic before or since.
    
    A grueling labor of love where we see every drop of blood and bead of sweat. The jungle breathes, the river devours, and cinema emerges altered on the other side of it.

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27. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

    The purest distillation of film as symphonic experience.
    
    Kubrick encapsulates the infinite nature of space in a way no one else has before or since.
    
    Every cut, every silence is architecture.
    
    A monolith of form that changed how we process images on screen.

    ---

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

    Three hours of just daily routine and then... everything ruptures.
    
    Akerman bent time and snapped both the art form and our expectations around it in half.

    Each gesture accumulates like tectonic pressure. We begin to notice the patterns disrupted. The eventual break is shocking in its stillness and inevitability.
    
    For the full explainer of why this isn’t really the #1 Greatest Film of All Time, as Sight & Sound claims in the latest update of their famed once-per-decade poll, read Ctrl+Alt+Decode.
    
    Essential film, to be sure — just not the greatest of all time.

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29. Rashomon (1950)

    A bandit, a bride, a samurai, and four clashing testimonies.
    
    Rashomon turned a simple forest crime into a philosophical reckoning, introducing Western audiences to Japanese cinema and forever complicating the idea of objectivity on screen.
    
    In so doing, Kurosawa fractured truth and reshaped narrative storytelling forever.
    
    With each story, trust erodes, and cinema becomes less about what happened, more about who gets to say what the truth really is…
    
    Timely, huh?

    ---

30. Moonlight (2016)

    A triptych of identity, masculinity, and intimacy. Jenkins turns whispered moments into seismic shifts.

    He allows the camera only to gently caress its subjects, but smartly never dares to intrude. A film that maps its characters from the inside out.

    And the needle-drop of that final shot is the most graceful, devastating, layered homage to The 400 Blows ever. The meaning behind it elevates the picture to a whole new level, making those in the know instantly burst into tears.
    
    One of the best films of the 2010s, second only perhaps to Parasite on the road to cinematic perfection.

    ---

31. PlayTime (1967)

    Monsieur Hulot drifts through a Paris of grids and gadgetry.
    
    The film’s immersive scale and choreographed humor remain unmatched: a ballet of the banal made grand.
    
    Tati explodes modernity’s sterile perfection with a comedy of collapsing systems. Every frame is a blueprint built into an endlessly explorable funhouse.

    ---

32. Metropolis (1927)

    Fritz Lang’s towering vision of a future divided by privilege and power still feels eerily current.
    
    Its iconic robot, monumental sets, and feverish politics forged the DNA of science fiction on screen.
    
    Industrial might, class warfare, and German expressionist grandeur collide into one of cinema’s first cataclysmic precautionary warnings.

    ---

33. Pulp Fiction (1994)

    From Royale with Cheese to adrenaline shots to the Bonnie Situation, every scene became a reference point for pop culture.
    
    The indie explosion of the ’90s simply wouldn’t have happened without it. And neither does half of your Letterboxd watchlist.
    
    Tarantino reshuffled the deck *and* the timeline. Violent, verbose, and impossibly cool, it updated the stagnant manual on what movies could be.

    ---

34. The Exorcist (1973)

    The first horror film nominated for Best Picture (not to mention nine other Academy Awards).
    
    Psycho couldn’t even pull that off. And it’s still rare even today.
    
    Blending documentary-adjacent style with metaphysical terror, The Exorcist summoned both Catholic guilt and cinematic evolution.
    
    While twisting heads, Friedkin also twisted expectations.

    ---

35. Taxi Driver (1976)

    Scorsese’s Travis Bickle was an uncomfortable mirror held up to America’s post-Vietnam psyche.
    
    The film’s descent is slow, sweaty, and operatic, culminating in a crescendo of mythic violence.
    
    An urban fever dream of loneliness, rage, and delusion.

    ---

36. Network (1976)

    Sidney Lumet’s epic satire predicted the rise and dangers of infotainment with terrifying clarity, decades before his vision would be proven to everyone else.
    
    Anchored by monologues that feel ripped straight from today’s headlines, Network saw the news industry’s descent into madness before the rest of us changed the channel.
    
    He showed us the moment rage and confirmation bias would turn ratings gold.
    
    That took social media algos forever to figure out… but once they did, it ripped our social fabric to shreds.

    ---

37. The Night of the Hunter (1955)

    With its surreal compositions and morality play tone, it first presents as a bedtime story until we realize it’s told by a lunatic preacher.
    
    Robert Mitchum’s instantly recognizable “LOVE” and “HATE” tatted hands haunt cinema history and every director who’s ever tried to film a dream. Just ask Guillermo del Toro.
    
    Renowned character actor Charles Laughton only directed one film, ever.
    
    His gorgeous fever dream carved American folklore into nightmare-fuel that inspired countless contemporary auteurs.

    ---

38. Raging Bull (1980)

    Boxing is just the backdrop; the real fight is internal.
    
    Daringly shot in searing black-and-white and edited like a symphony of violence, Raging Bull turned self-destruction into religious cinema.
    
    Brutality as ballet. De Niro and Scorsese map out one man’s rage and playfully explore the limits of narrative storytelling for post-Golden Age Hollywood.

    ---

39. Vertigo (1958)

    Beneath its elegant noir surface lies a bottomless well of control, fantasy, and longing.
    
    Vertigo wasn’t terribly well-understood for its time, despite rocking glorious visuals and pedigree.
    
    But today, it’s seen as a master key to the subconscious mechanics of how the medium of film itself works.

    ---

40. M (1931)

    Fritz Lang’s ultimate masterpiece (and he had several) gave voice to the hunted and the monstrous alike, years before noir had a name.
    
    With shadows, whistles, and Peter Lorre’s haunting presence, M turned manhunt into moral inquiry.
    
    The birth of the psychological thriller — and the first film to put evil center stage.

    ---

41. Touch of Evil (1958)

    A carnival of corruption where every shadow is secretly alive.
    
    Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, and Orson Welles orbit a world where the line between law and lawlessness dissolves into cigarette smoke and oil slicks.
    
    Welles opens with one of cinema’s greatest long takes — homage beautifully paid upfront at the beginning of Altman’s Short Cuts (also on this list, only partly for that reason) — and then plunges into border-town sleaze.
    
    The noir implosion, shot in firelight and filth.
    
    Again, fascinating origin story and restoration history upcoming on SINephile.

    ---

42. Blade Runner (1982)

    The blend of neo-noir and sci-fi grandeur crafted a new template for decades of dystopian worlds to come after.
    
    Its questions — about memory, humanity, and the cost of progress — linger as heavily as the film’s seemingly never-ending atmospheric downpour.
    
    Cyberpunk prophecy soaked in rain and neon.
    
    Scott’s masterpiece made the future look like poetry, and regardless of the number of cuts made to it over the years, we still can’t look away.

    ---

43. Do the Right Thing (1989)

    With its vivid colors, kinetic camera, and prophetic dialogue, it’s every bit as much a time capsule as it is a timeless cautionary tale.
    
    The final confrontation lands like a brick through the front window of an entire nation that needed to wake the *ef* up.
    
    A powder keg of race, rage, and refusal to abide by everyday injustice, Spike Lee made the block feel like the whole world.
    
    Because it is.
    
    As an exploration of distinctly American problems, it’s brilliant. But expanding upon that to encompass our common experience as a global species? Uhhh… mind blown.

    ---

44. Psycho (1960)

    From filmdom’s most famed shower scene, even more than half a century later, to Hermann’s screeching violins, Psycho turned horror into a cultural event that commanded lore-like warnings and vomit bags.
    
    It’s the moment Hitchcock stopped toying with suspense as a repetitive, albeit highly effective trope, and started full-on weaponizing it.

    Again, an understanding of nuance is fully required here:
    
    Hitch both cruelly exploited Perkins’ closeted off-screen sexuality and simultaneously elevated him to a household name for the purpose of crafting great cinema.
    
    That’s neither entirely excusable nor completely commendable.
    
    But, when you zoom out to judge the art itself… Psycho is essential cinema.
    
    And his son, Oz, a talented horror director in his own right today, seems to agree.

    ---

45. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

    
    Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, long before they robbed Moonlight of its deserved Oscar glory with the most epic gaffe in the ceremony’s history, turned outlaw romance into countercultural mythology.
    
    The final slow-motion ambush remains one of cinema’s most brutal and beautiful farewells.

    Young, doomed, and bloodier than anything mainstream audiences had ever seen, the New Hollywood movement began in earnest with a gunshot that killed off the Hays Code.

    ---

46. The Color Purple (1985)

    Anchored by Whoopi Goldberg’s powerhouse performance and writer Alice Walker’s epic scope, it’s a gorgeously world-building, deeply empathetic film that helped reshape what prestige cinema was even allowed to pull focus upon at the time.
    
    This OG adaptation has received some criticism in later years over its slight dial back on the sexuality aspects of Walker’s novel, but that take is woefully revisionist. This was revolutionary cinema for the 1980s.
    
    Only a filmmaker of Spielberg’s unforeseen influence and repetitively proven box office clout could’ve punched through the system in ‘85 to go as far as he did with its address of sexuality to mainstream audiences under the guise of a PG-13 rating. Unthinkable at the time.
    
    The fact that Color Purple tied the all-time record for number of Oscar nominations (11) without scoring a single win is sickening in its brazen display of latent racism, misogyny, and homophobia… only to be echoed decades later in the coronation of Crash over Brokeback Mountain.
    
    A painful, sweeping, ultimately triumphant portrait of Black womanhood in America.

    ---

47. To Live (1994)

    Zhang Yimou tracks one family’s quiet devastation in 20th-century China.
    
    He’d single-handedly placed Chinese cinema on the world map with art house stunners like Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern, then surreptitiously leveraged his newfound influence to indict the very power structure under which his entire society operated.
    
    One of the most moving critiques of not just communism, but all authoritarian-imposed governance, ever committed to celluloid.
    
    Won the Grand Prix at Cannes. Won the BAFTA for Non-English Language. Nominated by the Academy.
    
    Banned in China — to this day. And yet he remains the country’s most celebrated film director for a reason. Made a ton of great films, but this is his masterpiece.

    ---

48. Schindler’s List (1993)

    Shot in stark black-and-white with the precision of a documentarian’s eye, it neither flinches nor sermonizes as Spielberg touches upon the Holocaust.
    
    It simply records. And in doing so, Schindler repositioned the moral compass of how cinema as art can be leveraged.
    
    Spielberg’s most soul-shattering achievement bears witness to a painful, shameful chapter in human history with no escape hatch to be found.

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49. The Battle of Algiers (1966)

    Colonialism cracked wide open.
    
    Shot like a newsreel, banned in multiple countries, taught in government coursework, and still studied by military tacticians around the globe, Battle of Algiers is both a historical artifact and a tinderbox of criticism unto itself.
    
    An essential political film that feels like it’s still unfolding all around us.

    ---

50. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

    David Lean’s war epic is as every bit as psychologically layered as it is dynamically explosive.
    
    What starts as an ordinary tale of survival is woven into a slow-burning study of ego, allegiance, and the absurdity of war’s moral calculus.
    
    Lean blew up way more than just a bridge.

    ---

… Until We Did.

Films that felt immediately personal… and, over time, held up the mirror to something we hadn’t been ready to see in ourselves until, suddenly, we couldn’t look away.

This is where we feel what cinema does to us when it moves beyond admiration and into identity.

51. A Room with a View (1986)

    What if the life we were told to want wasn’t the life we were built for?
    
    This film handed us a question disguised as a love story — and dared us to answer it.
    
    Btw, that pond scene? A few early realizations may have arrived alongside Rupert Graves, unannounced, but not unwelcome.

    ---

52. Brief Encounter (1945)

    The heartbreak of timing never working out.
    
    Many spend years chasing that same heartbreak portrayed throughout film history in everything from An Affair to Remember and When Harry Met Sally to Before Sunset and Moonlight.
    
    But it all traces back here: the moment you realize love arrived — just not when it was allowed to.

    ---

53. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

    We don’t need subtitles to understand the looks they got.

    
    Societal judgment on class, race, age, gender — uninvited, unavoidable, and best ignored as irrelevant.
    
    Most of us have been there before. When something real doesn’t fit the script, and suddenly it feels like you’re the only one who sees the complexity and beautiful uniqueness of identity for what it really is.
    
    This film didn’t have to overexplain life’s nuances to us. It just stayed with them, and so did we.

    ---

54. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

    Many of us look back upon childhood as safe, innocent, even ordinary.
    
    But this film made us feel otherwise.
    
    It showed how kids quietly absorb grief and unease long before they know what either concept fully is or can put a name it.
    
    And it left us wondering what else we might’ve sensed at that age, but never really understood.

    ---

55. The Life of Oharu (1952)

    This was tragedy as both plot twist and slow fade into disappearance.
    
    Oharu gets smaller and smaller until there's nothing left but silence.
    
    We’d seen pain on screen before, but never quite this kind.
    
    This was a shame you wear day after day until it just wears you down to nothing.

    ---

56. Talk to Her (2002)

    Few films simultaneously feel both this intimate and this wrong.
    
    It blurs love, control, and loneliness until tenderness and violation sit in the same frame as uncomfortable bedmates.

    
    The discomfort Almodóvar made you feel was his whole design.

    
    Most think of All About My Mother or Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown as Almodóvar’s career-defining work, but this is actually his most maturely crafted masterstroke.

    ---

57. Amadeus (1984)

    We’re all Salieri.
    
    Forman forged an elegant, addictively compelling, and sumptuously beautiful exploration of the inherent humanistic need for recognition.
    
    Salieri knew exactly what he was hearing from Mozart and that he'd never even come close.
    
    That kind of self-awareness in the proximity of genius humbles you, whether or not you’ve ever wanted it for yourself.

    ---

58. Close-Up (1990)

    Ali was neither pretending nor intending to deceive. He was simply recreating his own shame just in order to be seen.
    
    That‘s devastating on multiple layers.
    
    Not just because we can see ourselves in him, but because we can recognize exactly what he was searching for through his quiet misdeeds.
    
    To be understood, even if it’s just in the act of disappearing.

    ---

59. Short Cuts (1993)

    Altman juggles a dozen unraveling lives in modern-day Los Angeles with such apparent ease, it’s simple to miss how brutal it all is.
    
    This one made us see how damage caused by both action and inaction goes unnoticed — how often we’re hurting or being hurt, and no one’s really paying attention.
    
    Far too often, including us.

    ---

60. Caché (2005)

    Haneke’s hands-down best film sneakily backed us into a corner, turned off the lights, and asked us to confront ourselves in the darkened stillness.
    
    A quiet reckoning with the mirror: what we choose not to see and who pays the price for our comfort in looking the other way.
    
    It’s a collective, societal indictment. And it’s still happening all around us — every day and in every aspect of our lives.

    ---

61. Contact (1997)

    Both sides believe they’re right: science and faith.

    
    But Zemeckis’ greatest film put its finger on something far rarer: the ineffable human longing to search for meaning in a universe that may never answer us back.
    
    And gives us the quiet hope that maybe there’s still an off chance that it somehow will.

    ---

62. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

    We don’t have to be the anti-hero of our own narrative like Ripley is, but we can all recognize some aspect of the agony he felt.
    
    The kind that festers when being on the outside becomes an exhausting, soul-dampening, full-time performance.
    
    It’s gorgeous. It’s queasy. It’s impossibly seductive.
    
    And it’s Cate Blanchett, thinking she’s in the love story — when sadly, she’s just the alibi.

    ---

63. Rope (1948)

    Audiences were drawn in by the camera gimmick, but weirdly hooked by something most couldn’t put their fingers on yet.
    
    It’s a stylish stunt, to be sure, but under all that elite smugness and moral gamesmanship, we felt something else.
    
    It was queerness cloaked in shadows and perfect posture, all weaponized by an impish Hitchcock cruelly mining the closeted sexuality of his two lead actors.
    
    And yeah, we may’ve had a thing for Farley Granger, whether he actually choked that chicken or not.

    ---

64. The Fallen Idol (1948)

    Perhaps Carol Reed’s most unsung masterstroke.
    
    His quiet mystery about innocence lost was just a narrative wrapper for exposing a universal truth.
    
    A child watches adults lie, and in the process, their entire world falls apart.

    
    Reed highlights that trust is neither immutable nor guaranteed — unguarded, it can easily slip away.
    
    And getting it back once lost can prove impossible.

    ---

65. Defending Your Life (1991)

    It plays like a bittersweet comedy about the afterlife, but it hits like a thousand-pound dare.
    
    This wasn’t just about Daniel being judged in the afterlife. Defending Your Life explores the process of building one’s personal philosophy for living a fully realized life.
    
    You don’t wait around to feel brave or hope the things you want out of life to come your way. You act, or you miss your chance.
    
    And no one’s keeping score but you.

    ---

66. Victor/Victoria (1982)

    At first, many are understandably surprised why this hits so hard, especially if they aren’t a fan of musicals.
    
    But Edward's richly realized art-deco Paris, Andrews' velvety voice, and that bodyguard needledrop made us feel something we couldn’t quite put into words.
    
    Lesley Ann Warren still slays every time.
    
    This one’s for the misfits of any stripe.

    ---

67. Parasite (2019)

    We expected sharp class critique from Bong. We didn’t expect to find ourselves so artfully portrayed in both families at once.

    
    The same fears, same instincts — just different addresses, altitudes, and square footage.
    
    It wasn’t just rich vs. poor. It was the systems that keep us locked into our given roles, blind to each other’s lives, and to the quiet desperation of wanting to be seen.
    
    There’s a reason it became the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.
    
    Simply put: the most perfect film of the 2010s.

    ---

68. Dr. Strangelove (1964)

    You think it’s all satire until you realize the fate of the world hinges on a missed phone call and a d*ck joke.
    
    It’s the kind of laughter that gets stuck in your throat, because the absurdity isn’t funny when you realize that it’s real.
    
    Kubrick forces us to see how easily we can laugh at our catastrophic communal fate... until it’s too late to stop it.

    ---

69. 8 ½ (1963)

    At first, it all just seems like nonsense.
    
    Then we slowly realize that we’re watching ourselves: caught in the dance of denial.
    
    Performing, directing, narrating — doing everything but fully existing.
    
    Fellini asks us to see how easy it is to build a life without ever really living it.

    ---

70. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

    Personally, it was my first Hitchcock.
    
    I was the boy’s age, stuck inside during a hurricane, watching his parents scramble across countries to save him.
    
    I didn’t entirely understand what it meant to be protected until I saw them push past their perceived limits, doing whatever it took to get him back.
    
    Protection is about love overcoming vulnerability and taking you to places you never thought you’d go.

    ---

71. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

    Hope is key to human survival.
    
    King and Darabont made us realize that dignity isn’t a luxury — it’s what keeps you alive when everything else falls away.
    
    It’s how you actually manage to retain your humanity even when the walls start to close in.

    ---

72. Stand By Me (1986)

    Reiner’s film adaptation of King was never really about “the body,” per se.
    
    It was about that moment when you realize you’re growing up laughing alongside lifelong friends both onscreen and off.
    
    A film that magically makes us feel like we’ve aged and matured with its characters by the time the tears flow and credits roll.

    
    And the fact that it was later mirrored in real-life tragedy turns the picture all the more gut-wrenching.

    ---

73. The Lost Boys (1987)

    Kiefer in a platinum mullet. Billy Wirth in fangs.
    
    Sexuality and danger dance together in the pale moonlight and ask us to feel the draw of both.
    
    Easily Joel Schumacher’s most accomplished film, Lost Boys promised freedom to an entire generation — or at least a cooler leather jacket and a stuffed beaver shoved in the closet behind the poster of a half-naked Rob Lowe.

    ---

74. Le Grand Bleu / The Big Blue (1988)

    The beauty grasps us first. Then the longing follows.
    
    This was the film that seeded our wanderlust — before we even knew the word. Personally, it’s why I became a diver. It's certainly why I've traveled to over 80 countries over the years.
    
    Much like L’Avventura at the top of this list, Big Blue was a direct inspiration for Season 2 of The White Lotus — filmed at the exact same locations.
    
    Utterly fascinating origin story and journey into the canon. Coming your way soon on SINephile.
    
    Some part of me at times still wants to vanish into water that impossibly blue.

    ---

75. The Goonies (1985)

    Mikey never stopped believing. Many of us did.
    
    Watching it now feels like grief for the part of us that thought idealism could actually win.
    
    Especially knowing most grown-ups long since traded their childhood wonder for 24-hour news cycles, social media rage machines, and the bizarre comfort many find in staying collectively scared.
    
    But regardless of age, there's still a part of us that misses that belief — and maybe even a part that still wants to believe it can win.

    ---

The Glorious Contradictions

Highbrow meets lowbrow. Prestige Oscar bait crashes into pop trash.

These are the films that define what we ineffably love about cinema. They also mark why we started SINephile in the first place.

Because greatness in film isn’t just about taste. It’s about impact. The SINemeter speaks to that.

If even the most ardent of self-professed cinephiles can’t appreciate this last segment… well, you’re just missing out on so much joy.

And, before film became industry, isn’t that what it was all supposed to be about?

76. Showgirls (1995)

    The Queen of Camp.
    
    No film was mocked more savagely, or proved itself more worthy of redemption.

    An unholy fusion of All About Eve, Flashdance, and a crack’d coke mirror, Showgirls knows exactly what it’s doing — satirically torching the toxic confluence of misogyny and capitalism.
    
    It’s beautiful, hateful, operatic, trashy, cruel, stupid, smart.
    
    And the absurdity of that pool scene is one for the record books.

    ---

77. Fargo (1994)

    An uncomfortably polite descent into brutality.
    
    The Coens’ true-crime fable finds tragedy in small talk and comedy in corpses, spinning moral rot and Midwestern manners into something oddly touching.
    
    It's both the best and worst of America — with a wood chipper, a duck stamp, and Frances McDormand standing calmly between them.

    ---

78. Serial Mom (1994)

    Beneath the pastels and pearls lies pure, unadulterated rage.
    
    John Waters gives us “Stepford Wife-as-serial killer,” gleefully impaling the hypocrisy of ‘90s suburbia — and the bloodlust of those performatively pretending to be shocked.
    
    This is courtroom drama as tabloid slasher, and it’s not guilty of anything except being the most fun we’ve ever had watching someone murder a VHS unrewinder with a leg of lamb.

    ---

79. Tootsie (1982)

    A tonally pitch-perfect ‘80s comedy that only deepens with time.
    
    Yes, it’s about a man in drag learning empathy for the experience of being a woman.
    
    But it’s also about actors as parasites, power as seduction, and identity as performance.
    
    Somehow, amid all the trickery, it’s still genuinely romantic. Somehow, it still works.
    
    Oddly, alongside Jaws, Tootsie is one of only two post-Golden Age of Hollywood features that today’s titans of cinema most frequently acknowledge as profound historical influences on their work.

    ---

80. Diabolique (1955)

    French, foul, and fabulous.
    
    This is horror as elegance — shot like noir, paced like a heart attack.
    
    Before Hitchcock stole its thunder (and even its twist structure), Clouzot’s classic had already mastered the art of sick suspense: a cheating wife, an ice-cold mistress, and a body that refuses to stay dead.
    
    Dirty water never looked this batheable.

    ---

81. Ed Wood (1993)

    Tim Burton’s hands-down best film is ironically about someone who never made a good one.
    
    A deeply sincere love letter to delusion, resilience, and the handmade magic of B-movie dreams.
    
    It elevates the real-life, gender-non-conforming pulp director of infamous mid-century bombs into something close to a secular saint, without ever losing sight of the angora.
    
    It’s camp as reverence, and that’s a contradiction we’ll always believe in.

    ---

82. The Mother and the Whore (1973)

    Three hours of talk, chain-smoking, and emotional gridlock, all scored to the rhythm of post-’68 hangover.
    
    It shouldn’t work. It barely does. But it captures the ache of existential longing with a kind of accidental ferocity.
    
    Fascinating distribution history and ride into the canon, too.
    
    A film that flirts with nihilism, then dares to bare its bruised, bleeding heart before the credits roll.

    ---

83. The Thing (1982)

    No one trusted it in ’82. Critics pounced and audiences shrugged, resulting in box office disappointment.
    
    Too gross, too cynical, too cold.
    
    But Carpenter’s masterpiece has aged with perfection as one of the most frightening and enduring metaphors for paranoia, masculinity, and identity.
    
    It’s gore as philosophy. Suspicion as style.
    
    And still cooler than most “serious” horror films that tried way harder.
    
    The blood test scene still gets us Every. Single. Time.

    ---

84. The Great Dictator (1940)

    The fact that Chaplin pulled off a Hitler parody before the U.S. even entered the war is wild enough.
    
    But what makes it truly sing is the sincerity he gamely tucked inside the satire.
    
    The speech at the end has been imitated to death, and yet, when you watch it in context, it slaps.
    
    Idealism weaponized. A clown show with something real to say.
    
    And timelier than ever.

    ---

85. Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)

    As if Heathers went to the Mall of America, hitched a ride with Christopher Guest, and spent a week blackout drunk watching Dateline NBC.
    
    Upon release, it was cast aside as mean-spirited.
    
    Now it’s a bona fide cult classic satire, thankfully recognized by all but the most clueless as playfully designed to offend. And if it doesn’t, congrats, you’re part of the joke.
    
    Beauty pageants, exploding teenagers, and small-town desperation — all served up deadpan with Aqua Net and a side of lutefisk.

    ---

86. Beverly Hills Cop (1984)

    A fish-out-of-water action/comedy where the protagonist is smarter, funnier, and more morally grounded than anyone.
    
    Murphy’s Axel Foley is all instinct and improvisation, turning Detroit hustle into a Swiss Army knife of justice wrapped in synthesizer, swagger, and banana-in-the-tailpipe irreverence.
    
    The resulting combo in Martin Brest’s original was so magical, it makes the existence of the pathetic third installment all the more tragic.

    ---

87. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

    Saturday afternoon matinee thrills sculpted with Old Hollywood gravitas that’s simply no longer possible to achieve or even properly mimic anymore.
    
    It's cinematic theology in a leather jacket — sacred relics, fascist face-melting, and yet somehow still a first-date popcorn movie.

    
    Harrison Ford played so many iconic characters throughout his career, but to us, he’ll always just be Indy.

    ---

88. Die Hard (1988)

    The blue-collar action flick that rewrote how vulnerability plays on-screen.
    
    John McClane limps through glass, wisecracks through trauma, and makes masculinity more complicated and fun.
    
    It’s violence as therapy meets terrorism as marriage counseling.
    
    And Christmas Movie incarnate.

    ---

89. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

    A space opera with Shakespearean soul.
    
    This midlife crisis dressed in naval uniforms, literary quotations, and cold fusion has Kirk confronting mortality, mentorship, and regret, while the film boldly goes for gut-punches over phasers.
    
    Few genre films explore humanity this earnestly.

    ---

90. Jaws (1975)

    A trashy dimestore novel elevated with orchestral terror and Spielbergian awe.
    
    Yes, it's about a shark, but also about the cracks in every institution meant to protect us. Hammy in structure, poetry in rhythm.
    
    Spielberg has since rightfully lamented the ecological fallout of falsely demonizing a crucial link in our ecological chain, instilling largely irrational fear (5-6 deaths annually worldwide, folks) that’s since helped push many species of the fish, including great whites, toward the brink of extinction.
    
    But what he and composer John Williams accomplished here simply through a single sound cue and knowing when *not* to display the goods, showed near unparalleled inventive genius.

    ---

91. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

    A morality play dipped in Technicolor and LSD.
    
    Gene Wilder’s Wonka is equal parts dreamweaver and nihilist, rewarding goodness but punishing gluttony, pride, and TV addiction with a wink and a flute fetish.
    
    Childhood fantasy, yes, but with the logic of a parable and the pathos of a sick fever dream.
    
    Wilder was right to only agree to the role if he could rewrite his titular character’s on-screen entrance. Subtly brilliant.

    ---

92. The War of the Roses (1989)

    Marriage as mutually assured destruction.
    
    DeVito directs this operatic screwball farce like a Greek tragedy in a McMansion, as Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas weaponize domesticity.
    
    Love curdled into litigation, gourmet dinner parties into guerrilla warfare. No one wins, but it’s utterly delicious to watch them try.
    
    DeVito was always underappreciated for his directorial talent, but this is him at his best.

    ---

93. Ratatouille (2007)

    The rat cooks, but the real miracle is that the critic is moved.
    
    A Pixar fable about unlikely talent and the joy of making art in a world that prefers gatekeeping.
    
    Its most subversive act is arguing that even a bitter palate can be redeemed by something beautiful — even simple — done really well.
    
    Sort of like these Glorious Contradictions.

    ---

94. Aliens (1986)

    Yes, the sequel.
    
    What begins as survival horror becomes a meditation on maternal instinct and militarized panic.
    
    Ripley returns to LV-426 to fight, to rescue, to reclaim, and to protect.
    
    Ridley Scott’s OG expertly crafted the suspenseful setup. But Cameron creatively merged genres, adding firepower, velocity, and unprecedented brutality for mainstream cinema, while somehow never sacrificing heart.
    
    Beneath all the pulse rifles: a lullaby.

    ---

95. Near Dark (1987)

    The western and the vampire movie drive into each other at dawn.

    
    Kathyrn Bigelow’s dust-and-blood romance finds poetry in addiction, violence, and the alienation of being perceived as a societal outsider.
    
    It’s too tender to be a horror film, too brutal to be a love story, but that’s exactly the point.
    
    And who knew Adrian Pasdar would look that good as a blond?

    ---

96. Point Break (1991)

    Zen crime.
    
    The surfing-as-spirituality, bank-robbing-as-bromance we didn’t know we needed.
    
    Bigelow returns (she was on a roll…) with what should be pure testosterone into a tender, mythic pursuit between soulmates on opposite sides of a line neither believes in.

    ---

97. Boogie Nights (1997)

    The rise and crash of a found family in the disco-lit trenches of the ‘70s porn industry.
    
    Paul Thomas Anderson makes you laugh at their delusion and weep at their dignity, then empathetically offers them a second chance.
    
    Ebert once called Anderson’s suspense work on display in key sequences the best since Hitchcock — not hyperbole.
    
    It’s an elegy wrapped in a party, a cautionary tale pulsing with compassion.

    ---

98. Starship Troopers (1997)

    “Would you like to know more?”
    
    Alongside Network, earlier on this list, one of the most eerily prescient satires ever constructed, disguised as a propaganda film, wrapped inside a teen soap, packaged as sci-fi spectacle.
    
    Verhoeven weaponizes irony so thoroughly that an entire generation missed the joke — and in doing so, they proved the film’s point.

    ---

99. Young Frankenstein (1974)

    A perfect parody that gamely becomes the very thing it’s mocking.
    
    Mel Brooks brings reverence to ridicule, honoring the OG master James Whale’s legacy while making us giggle at flatulence and tap dancing.
    
    Somehow, it’s alive with pathos, romance, and the sheer joy of making movies.

    ---

100. Matinee (1993)

     A small film about absolutely everything: Cold War anxiety, sexual awakening, parental absence, and the way movies give us courage.
     
     Joe Dante’s ode to William Castle and teenage terror feels like the antidote to today’s warranted cynicism, one cardboard atomic ant at a time.
     
     A fitting bookend to this list, as a love letter to cinema itself.

     ---

That’s the show, my friend. 100 essentials.

A few masterpieces, a few underdogs, and plenty that don’t fit into neat categories.

Because neither do we.

If these films prove anything, it’s that greatness isn’t about consistency. It’s about conviction.

These are the ones that made us laugh, gasp, and hurt to become a part of who we are. And we hope they also cause you to feel, because that’s the power of cinema.

Thanks for staying for the whole retrospective, and make sure to share what else you think makes for essential viewing.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has been deemed the #1 film of all time — according to the world’s most renowned movie poll that ironically never actually asked that question… to anyone.

Understandably, almost everyone thinks it did.

Since 1952, and only once per decade thereafter, Sight & Sound — the magazine of the British Film Institute — has released its definitive canon: a survey-based, industry-led ranking of the 100 Greatest Films of All Time.

Roger Ebert called it “by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies — the only one most serious movie people take seriously.” He even credited its existence as a formative influence on his decision to become a film critic, and later built entire class curricula around its Top 10.

So when this decade’s results were announced, cinephiles and casual readers alike were left slack-jawed. A film most of the public had never even heard of — let alone seen — had taken the top spot, dethroning longtime champions like Citizen Kane and, most recently, Vertigo.

The new crown jewel? A 3.5-hour, nearly-silent study of a woman peeling potatoes in her kitchen.

But the outrage that ensued was misplaced. The problem wasn’t the film (which is indeed great). It was the framing. Few understood how the list was assembled — or what it even really measured.

Rather than offering an authoritative statement on what constitutes “great cinema,” the 2020s poll played more like a masterclass in how easily research design can collapse under its own good intentions to hilarious results. Dielman’s surprise ascent was just one symptom, among many, exposing a far deeper methodological disaster.

So here’s the thing: “The Greatest Film of All Time”?

Despite Sight & Sound claiming they have the answer, that’s not really what their poll says… at all.

Let me explain.

This Wasn’t a Conspiracy. It’s a Broken System.

I, too, have long championed the Sight & Sound list — ever since I was fresh out of college and working at The Criterion Collection.

Instead of relying on one editor’s whimsical opinion or even just anwers to a Buzzfeed quiz, it’s one of the only film rankings that even attempts to aggregate the insights of critics, historians, theorists and filmmakers across generations and points on the globe. I credit it with introducing me to many essential works I might've otherwise missed over the years.

So when I say that the 2022 poll was fundamentally flawed, I say it with reverence and measured affection. But also exasperation at the predictability of the ways in which increasingly bad survey design has corrupted it beyond recognition or resolve.

The problem isn’t at all specific to Jeanne Dielman. It’s the illusion that the poll is telling us what voters collectively believe is the best film of all time.

It doesn’t. It can’t. And it hasn’t been able to do so for awhile.

The survey methodology has been degrading for decades. And, in 2022, it finally fully collapsed.

How the Poll Actually Works

Everyone knows by now that polling isn’t an exact science, every method introduces some measure of unintended bias.

But the Sight & Sound poll is particularly jacked, and it became this way organically over time — not by purposeful design.

S&S asks participants to name their ten “greatest films of all time,” unranked.

That might sound trivial, but it means the poll operates on an “equal-weight, open ballot system.” Every film listed, among countless options available, scores a single point, regardless of whether it was a voter’s #1 or their #10.

That structure becomes precarious in a “repeated poll,” like this one. Voters the next time around don’t arrive blind; they enter with full knowledge of the last poll’s results and, in many cases, a quiet agenda to influence what comes next.

This immediately invites two problems:

1. Bandwagon effects, where prior winners stay winners simply because they’ve always been there.

2. Strategic voting, whereby participants game the system by boosting underrepresented choices — or promoting titles they think are ranked too low or might otherwise fall off.

So when the Sight & Sound editors take that unranked, strategicly assembled, raw ballot data of Top 10s and turn it into a stack-ranked Top 100 (or, god forbid, 250) list, the numbers aren’t telling you at all what they pretend to tell you.

That full list doesn’t resemble consensus anymore. At this point, it’s just elevated noise.

So how did a list meant to reflect global cinematic opinion become so easy to distort?

Let’s have some fun with the art of statistics and break down the flawed design choices — one rotten onion layer at a time.

Polling Bias Bingo Card

1. Network & Snowball Sampling

   

   Rather than using a randomized or broadly representative sample of film experts, Sight & Sound relies on an in-house editorial nomination process.
   
   This means new voters are invited by the same institution that shaped previous polls — projecting the biases of the curators forward.
   
   In fairness, S&S has always been transparent about this, and while it was once the most prominent critique of the poll during decades when the participant pool was far smaller, it's no longer anywhere near the most damaging.

   ---

2. Equal-Weight, Open Ballot Voting

   

   Since 1952, voters list ten unranked movies from all of film history.
   
   Each entry counts equally, regardless of whether it was a passionate #1 or near afterthought. A film appearing tenth on 100 ballots still beats one appearing first on 99.
   
   This system behaves an awful lot like Approval Voting — think Rotten Tomatoes — only with an open, infinite nomination pool. It flattens voter intent, favors consensus picks, and rewards strategy over informed opinion.

   ---

3. Repeated Survey Effects

   

   Every ten years, the same well-informed voter pool returns (each time, expanded) — armed with a full history of past results, including an extended, ordered list of the 150 runners-up who didn’t quite make the cut the last go-around.
   
   This turns the poll into an endless feedback loop.
   
   Voters know exactly what was snubbed and what’s hovering near the cutoff, nudging future ballots toward "fixing" those perceived oversights.
   
   The result is less discovery, more editorializing.

   ---

4. Limited Input, Unlimited Output

   

   Voters supply ten titles.

   
   S&S extrapolates a Top 100 — and even a Top 250.

   
   That’s a massive interpretive leap from such a small data sample.

   
   Voters with only 10 precious votes, aware of this disconnect, make tactical choices: omitting “safe” films from the prior list, boosting vulnerable ones or those they think should rise in rank.

   
   Multiply that behavior to absurd proportions, and the final list starts to look less like a democratic snapshot and more like a coordinated chess game flipped upside down in frustration.

   ---

5. Stack-Ranked Results

   

   The final product is a ranked list, even though voters can’t rank their choices.

   
   This presents the illusion of mathematical authority, yet it's all built on top of unranked, strategically-assembled ballots.

   
   This disconnect didn’t matter much when only a Top 10 was published for the first fifty years — not as statistically sound as collecting ranked lists from the start, but also not terrible.

   
   Once S&S began inflating the output to a Top 100 at the turn of the century, the underlying system couldn’t bear the weight of the ensuing effects and the whole thing eventually collapsed.

The Death Cyle of a Poll

The first two methodologies in the Bingo Card above introduced flaws inherent in the poll's design since its inception over 70 years ago, but at least those were manageable.

"Repeated Survey" obviously wasn't a vector until the second poll in 1962. But even by that early point the effects were made clear, with voters “correcting” the #1 from the first list, Bicycle Thieves, to the “safer,” Hollywood-centric consensus pick Citizen Kane.

The problems were far less apparent in the results until 2002, before which S&S only published the Top 10 Greatest Films of All Time. Everything changed that year when they decided to expand to a "Top 100" list — understandably, to break the catharsis of a largely static list with Citizen Kane cemented at the top for decades.

The critical mistake was that they kept the same survey design asking for unranked "Top 10" lists thereafter, at which point they shifted from simply equal-weight, open balloting to an extremely problematic hybrid with “Limited Voting.”

The breaking point came in 2002 with that change, but the effects on that decade’s list were still rather contained because voters were neither aware that a Top 100 was being compiled from their limited ballots of ten entries, nor had they seen the 90 runners’ up from any of the prior polls that didn’t make the cut.

Sight & Sound then fractured their methodology even further in 2012, when the "repeated survey" vector kicked back in, since voters had seen prior results for a complete Top 100 at that point, and would, for the first time, use their now-”Limited Voting” capacity of still compiling Top 10s to influence the broader list results to the extent they could via "strategic voting."

Sadly, they broke the poll yet again when they began releasing the 150 runners-up list beginning in 2012. The availability of this historical, behind-the-curtain info to voters in 2022 encouraged an unintentional pile-on effect whereby "strategic voting" targets specific entries to push them over the line and onto the Top 100.

With each breakage, compounded by evermore participants armed with only 10 votes, the methodology introduced an unmanageable amount of noise, and the results got more and more skewed and non-sensical.

In this now-grotesquely Frankesteined polling methodolgy, it’s illogical to assume people won't engage in strategic voting to stretch their influence. Regrettably, those who don't vote that way are penalized in this system because, while they may be more honest in their answers, if they choose films not already on the prior Top 250, they're throwing their vote away for the final list.

So, in design, the system rewards strategic voting, wildly skewing results, even worse in a repeated poll in which voters know the prior results. As of the 2020s, the rankings may have turned Looney Tunes. But, as of 2012, all bets were already off.

What you're left with is a canon built on distorted math and earnest intentions. It’s not that voters are wrong — it’s that the poll is. And the publication behind it is infering that it states something it’s simply not capable of determining.

Jeanne Dielman: Signal or Static?

Let me be clear: Jeanne Dielman is a spectacular film and much of the ire directed at it in the aftermath of the list drop was entirely misguided.

It’s daring, formally radical, and one of the most honest portrayals of identity and femininity ever captured on film. As a means to draw attention to a highly deserving picture that few non-cineastes had ever heard of, I somewhat cheer that far more people were sent scrambling to see it, echoing my thoughts on L’Avventura’s surprise debut at #2 on the Top 10 in 1962 (a story coming soon to SINephile).

However, it's so challenging in length and format that it borders on the cusp of experimental cinema. That doesn’t make it unworthy for inclusion, but it was instantly recognizable by almost everyone as an incredibly strange choice for the single Greatest Film of All Time — especially when so few who've seen it, loved it and perhaps even voted for it, would’ve claimed it as their own personal favorite film ever.

So, let's break it down by starting with what the poll DOES say about Jeanne Dielman:

1. More people believed that Jeanne Dielman belonged *somewhere* on the Top 100 than any other film.

2. Aware of the prior 2012 poll results, voters thought a female-helmed picture should be higher on the list than at #34.

That's it. Nothing relating to its exact rank.

You may think, "Well, why would I want to know THAT?"

To which my response would be, "Exactly. It's too high-level to be useful."

So how did it rise to the pole position? Because voters, perhaps unconsciously and certainly not in collusion, were trying to correct for past underrepresentation of female directors in the canon. And Jeanne Dielman became the inadvertant strategic beneficiary.

The film was on a lot of voters’ 10-lists not because they thought it was best film ever made, but simply because they wanted to see better billing for the previously highest-ranked woman-directed film on the list. Not complicated and certainly not conspiracy.

It wasn't an endorsement of supremacy. It was a collective signal: "A female auteur should be on my list." The completely illogical polling design then wildly distorted that signal and editors packaged it in a way that either indicates they don't understand how statistics works or they simply didn't care. My bet’s on the latter.

Strategic Voting and the Unintended Canon

Aside from Jeanne Dielman, let's look at some of the other reasonably derived but largely crazytown assumptions from the same poll and we see similar troublesome patterns emerge more broadly, all the result of lousy survey methodology.

1. POPULAR CLAIM:
   "Jordan Peele's fantastic 2017 film Get Out tied with five other films for last on the Top 100 in 2022. So, it's now considered better than Lawrence of Arabia, Raging Bull, Godfather Part II, Chinatown, Nashville, or The Seventh Seal, given that all of those films got cut.”
   
   REALITY:
   Wrong. The poll doesn’t say that at all.

   The departure of those films is the unintentional result of “strategic voting" by individuals with an extremely limited number of votes to:

   a) Protect films they feel strongly should stay
   b) Elevate films they think are deserving of being on the Top 100

   With each voter only able to pick their Top 10, Lawrence and company were the movies folks cut from their personal lists most frequently to make room for others. The poll can claim no intent on behalf of voters to remove any film from the Top 100 because no one could vote for a Top 100. In many cases, it's logical to believe that some people cut them simply because they assumed they were other voters’ mainstays and didn't need their vote to stay on the list.
   

2. POPULAR CLAIM:
   "It doesn't make any sense that Jeanne Dielman is #1, and Claire Denis' Beau Travail landed at #7 when so many of the other films in the Top 10 stayed in the same place unless there's some ‘woke mob’ conspiracy to insert them there."
   
   REALITY:
   Wrong. This accusation spread like wildfire on social media in the aftermath of the list’s release.

   Just as with films that got the boot, strategic voting in a repeated poll has another inherent flaw that results in specific entries remaining static, particularly at the top of a list.
   
   Due to the "bandwagon effect" mentioned earlier, many voters will look at the prior 2012 results and go:

   "Oh, yeah, Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, Vertigo, 2001, and Man with a Movie Camera should all definitely stay in the Top 10. So, I'll keep those on my list to stick with the majority opinion and use the other half of my ballot to indicate what I want to help get onto the Top 100."

   And that's exactly what we saw happen.
   
   Those five anchors in the Top 10 barely budged while pandemonium set in practically everywhere else. Similarly, we saw outsized jumps in ranking among films that nearly everyone predicted would see their standings rise, and the skewed severity of those increases is inherent in the flawed nature of the poll.
   
   For instance, let's again look at female filmmakers. Most were ready to admit it was somewhat embarrassing that the work of only two female directors was represented in the 2012 poll results. Voters were likely to aim for a correction here with their limited individual capacity to contribute.
   

   

   In addition to Dielman, Beau Travail & The Piano, I predicted online in the lead-up to the S&S poll update that Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 would rise from #202 to take a spot in the Top 100. I did *not* expect it to jump 188 spots to #14. Nor, I'm sure, did practically anyone who voted for it.
   
   This wild swing is another flaw introduced by the confluence of poor polling methodology.
   
   The Top 250 results from 2012 were widely available, and people were going to look for the female-directed features most likely to get elevated into the 100 from the runners-up list. That’s how I made my prediction and it wasn’t terribly prescient of me to do so.

   It's yet another example of the bandwagon effect and strategic voting emerging from a repeated poll, with the noise ampliifed by individual voters’ limited capacity of picking only ten films and cramming their few strategic (i.e. non-true-Top 10) votes into the back half of their ballots.
   
   And guess what? En masse, voters elevated every female-directed feature on the prior Top 250 in almost the exact same order they appeared on the 2012 list (with a few newcomers sprinkled in).

   2012:

   Dielman > Beau Travail > Meshes of the Afternoon > Cléo from 5 to 7 = Daisies = Wanda > The Piano
   
   2022:
   
   Dielman > Beau Travail > Cléo > Meshes > Daisies > Wanda > The Piano

   Meshes likely took the sole — slight — hit because it's a decidedly experimental, not narrative, short film.
   
   What's surprising about that result? Nothing.

   If you think it’s coincidence, given they’d doubled the size of the voter pool since the prior poll, you’re fooling yourself. Voters were attempting to correct for prior bias in a repeated poll. On an individual basis, I’d call that admirable. And the terrible survey methodology then skewed their intent into a result that no one intended.
   
   So it wasn’t some mass conspiracy. It was amplified noise erroneously packaged as intent.
   

   

   One film I'm particularly delighted to see benefit from a Sight & Sound reset, regardless of the reasons behind it, was Do the Right Thing.

   That film shamefully sat at #127 back in 2012, despite being one of the most transformative pictures of the last half century, well beyond its surface context of race relations in the U.S.

   I’d long proclaimed Do the Right Thing belonged in the Top 20 without thinking it had any chance of rising that high. Instead, it jumped 103 spots to land at #24, and polling flaws or not, I’m personally quite pleased with that result as not an overcorrection.
   

3. POPULAR CLAIM:
   "Sight & Sound has destroyed the list by inviting too many new voices who threw out a lot of unquestionable classics in favor of contemporary cinema."
   
   REALITY:
   I can't simply state, "Wrong." That's an entirely subjective viewpoint, but it lacks essential context.
   
   The shift isn't remotely surprising, nor is it all that unwarranted, and no one purposefully "threw out" anything. Nor were they really capable of doing so.

   I also predicted prior to the poll drop that we'd see some paring among the works of OG masters of cinema that were likely over-indexed if we wanted to have a list more representative of contemporary film.
   
   The order I called the likelihood of cuts was:

   Bergman > Bresson > Dreyer > Godard > Tarkovsky > Hitchcock

   And that was precisely the order of works cut, with the last three spared.
   
   I also wrote about the relative lack of representation for contemporary cinema (post-Golden Age of Hollywood or post-1970), risking the list's relevance to an increasingly apathetic public, the average age of whom saw very few films listed among the 100 Greatest (single digits) made in their lifetimes. So, everyone would be upset about something for this issue to get properly addressed.
   
   They needed to expand the voting pool to address it — which they did. Nowhere are the poll's inherent flaws more evident concerning modernization than David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. landing at #8. To be sure, the film was relatively high already, debuting at #28 in 2012.
   
   However, this is yet another "bandwagon effect" bias of a repeated poll in which many voters simply looked at the existing list, identified that it also needed to be more contemporary, picked the most recent film on the list, and strategically elevated it en masse to their own Top 10s.
   
   Just as with Dielman, the public cannot assume this to mean "voters think Mulholland Dr. is the 8th Greatest Film of All Time," even though the list implies this. Likewise, voters cherry-picked other films from 2012's Top 250 to elevate for modernity’s-sake, with Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro leap-frogging others into the Top 100, to represent modern animation.

4. POPULAR CLAIM:
   “Fine, make the Greatest Films of All Time list more contemporary, but why include X film from a few years ago just because it was popular and remains fresh in people's minds?"
   
   REALITY:
   As for more recent pictures from the 2010s, I've long maintained that I'm of mixed opinions... While S&S purposefully (and rightfully) leaves the term "greatest" to the subjectivity of those polled, voters have long been shy of over-indexing on recent films, primarily because they're following one of the few pieces of guidance set out for them in the poll criteria:

   “Films should be considered to stand the test of time.”

   They're trying to ensure voters process past “recency bias” and have the needed perspective that only time provides to evaluate an entry against the nearly endless canon of films over the past 130 years.
   
   For an even better illustration of why that's so important than I can muster, watch this marvelous clip in which director Nicolas Winding Refn interviews the late William Friedkin in 2015.

   When Refn unfacetiously claims that his own 2011 film Drive, made just four years prior, is every bit as good as Citizen Kane and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Friedkin laughs in his face. He also repeatedly asks the camera crew to fetch a medic to haul Refn away before proceeding to school him on the critical difference between confidence and arrogance, explaining that even he's uncomfortable comparing films he made 50 years ago (The Exorcist, French Connection, etc.) with the greats of classic cinema. It's genuinely cathartic to watch.
   
   But this is all human subjectivity, and it's understandable why some may lean into impaired judgment to promote films they genuinely love and believe will ultimately meet the criteria someday. S&S permits this by requiring that films have theatrical releases only before the current polling year to be eligible.
   
   Granted, four films on this list were released just a few years prior to the survey, so the votes for those movies ignored Sight & Sound's limited guidance because by definition, there simply hadn’t been "time" to evaluate their legitimacy as a timeless pillar of cinema.
   
   In my pre-poll prediction, I claimed that if any films from the most recent decade were worthy of inclusion, they were (in order):
   

   Parasite > Moonlight > Boyhood > Roma

   Parasite (#90) and Moonlight (#60) made the list (in reverse order), and I can't say I'm entirely unhappy about that if we view the poll results as a living document at least partly reflective of its time.

The debate should never have morphed into whether any of these films are worthy of inclusion — only about whether the methodology can support the conclusions being drawn.

So What Can the Poll Tell Us?

Despite all its failings, the BFI’s list is not entirely useless — only that its rankings are largely meaningless now. Here’s the high-level of what we can reasonably still extract:

1. Every film listed is broadly deemed of importance and worth seeing.
   There’s lasting curatorial value in determining what shows up frequently on ballots. Tastes may vary, but typically these films should be seen as essential viewing for admirers of the art form.
   

2. There is a visible corrective shift toward diversity across a multitude of spectrums.
   Compared to the 2012 list, clear trends emerge of the voting pool attempting to compensate for perceived bias in the prior results. A focus on elevating women's voices, those of other marginalized groups, as well as contemporary and 3rd world cinema was enough of a priority that voters used a portion of their limited ballots to help address it. En masse, this caused unintentional deletions and wildly skewed rankings away from being intent-driven.
   
   The fault of the poll, not the voters.

   Obsessing over exact positions in the S&S ranking is a mistake because the poll's design would need a massive overhaul to measure voter intent correctly and present itself as any sort of ranking with a straight face.
   
   So, if you want to blame something, blame the brokenness of the survey. The voters operated out of a sense of altruism.

   Remember, all art (including film) is a collective reflection of ourselves. When the work ceases to represent us in our entirety, the promise inherent in that art is undermined.
   

3. Some sacred cows are still sacred.
   Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, Vertigo, and 2001 barely moved. Which tells us that while voter behavior may shift, mainstays on the list (particularly post-2002) deserve even more attention than they typically receive.
   
   Many clearly remain top-of-mind with voters using one of their precious ten votes to safeguard as “true Top 10.” Terrible poll design bumped some films that got cut, so readers cannot assume the inverse is also true.
   

4. Strategic voting is real and it isn’t going anywhere.
   Unless the poll design changes, compounding this effect with each of the aforementioned methodology biases will only make the results increasingly less credible as indicative of voter intent over time.

How to Fix It (or at Least Make It Honest)

• Kill off Limited Voting.
  It doesn’t work in this context. If Sight & Sound intends to publish a Top 100, then collect Top 100 ballots — don’t infer one from a bunch of unranked Top 10 lists. Not with all the other polling design flaws already compounding the distortion. Even if you still plan to publish the 150 runners-up, extrapolating results out 2.5x from your data set is a whole lot better than 10x.

  I get it: after the expansion to 100 in 2002, limiting ballots to ten films was a way to reduce “response burden” and encourage participation. But Sight & Sound has since increased its voter pool elevenfold. They can afford some attrition from an otherwise hyper-engaged base.
  

• Transition to Ranked Ballots using weighted composite scoring.
  If they insist on keeping limited voting to individual Top 10s, don’t couple it with the poll’s original equal-weight, open ballot system.
  
  Ranked Ballots would have a slight dampening effect on strategic voting and better capture intent behind the ranking of films the higher they sit on the list. Correcting prior voter bias, like occurred broadly in 2022, would still be possible, just not to the wildly unintentional extent that we saw this last go-around.
  

• Cease publishing the 150 runners-up list.
  As interesting as the info may be, they should immediately stop revealing those films that didn’t quite make the cut (particularly harmful that’s it’s also ranked), which we've seen clearly injects massive bias into the poll results.
  
  Stop handing voters the cheat sheet.
  
  S&S is not going to solve the problems inherent with repeated polls because that's the very nature of this survey at its core. So, they have to compensate elsewhere and this coda is the biggest handicap.

• Randomize your data set.
  Broaden the voter base without depending on strictly in-house editorial nomination and stochastically include qualified participants in the final survey or select data from a randomized sample of the broader eligible base. Also, given the wider participant pool, proactively monitor and correct for non-response bias among legacy participants who may drop out after having seen the 2022 results.
  

Interestingly, Sight & Sound has since rearranged how it presents the results on its website.

Rather than listing the Top 100 led by a traditional #1 and separating out the 150 runners-up, the poll now defaults to a reverse-order countdown of all 250. It’s a quiet reflexive reframe that sort of adds insult to injury — like trying to “neutralize” the problem by burying it in a longer scroll. But the change speaks volumes.

In another likely response to criticism, the BFI also since published every individual voter ballot from the 2022 poll — something they hadn’t done with this level of specificity before. Whether intended as an act of transparency or deflection (perhaps, both), it shifts some of the focus away from the aggregated outcome and toward the fragmented voter intent behind it. The result is a fascinating data set… and an even messier canon.

Bonus takeaway: check out the Director’s Poll for comparison. It suffers many of the same structural defects, and several similar trends are visible, but the impact is far less chaotic. Why? The voter pool is smaller and more focused — about one-third the size of the main poll — and the responses read as more ideologically consistent and intent-driven as a result.

Final Reel

Let’s be honest: Jeanne Dielman going viral was probably the greatest thing to happen to Sight & Sound thus far this century. They got a visibility boost. They dominated the discourse for a few weeks. They made #FilmTwitter implode. In an attention economy, maybe that was the goal all along. Perhaps the noise really is the point now.

But if Sight & Sound wants to retain its relevance beyond the decade-to-decade media cycle, it needs to shore up the integrity of its process. I still decided to watch the 16 new films I hadn't yet seen from the 2022 list. Because flawed methodology aside, the recommendations are all still noteworthy.

But the rankings? They’re garbage. Not just for Dielman, but throughout most of the stack. They’re a reflection of a deeply flawed survey design and good intentions gone statistically sideways.

Again, don’t blame the voters. Blame the format.

And if Jeanne Dielman got you to peel back the layers (and maybe a few potatoes along the way), like it did for me, maybe it really is doing something truly great after all.

See you in 2032. Bring snacks.

🎧 [PLAYBACK: SOUND ON]

First, cue up Henry Mancini’s Oscar-winning score while you read.

🟢 For the full listen, open the score in Spotify and set the tone right.

The Musical For People Who Hate Musicals

I honestly can’t remember a time when I hadn’t seen Victor/Victoria.

Initially, I was probably eight, catching it on cable, and instantly became obsessed. It felt like being whisked away to a 1930s Parisian theme park, where Mary Poppins swapped her umbrella for a tux and a top hat and, frankly, looked all the hotter for it.

Did I grasp all the layers—the subversion, the gender play, half the jokes? Absolutely not. If I recall, I even had to look up the word “horny” afterward. But I was utterly transfixed anyway.

I’ve slotted this in the pole position on my list of “Musicals for People Who Hate Musicals,” precisely because it’s the archetype of an entry that even doesn’t ask you to like the genre.

No whimsical plot devices forcing characters to burst into song-and-dance while grocery shopping. No need to suspend disbelief. Everyone’s singing because they’re supposed to be singing—on stage, in clubs, rehearsing acts.

The songs are simply part of this Crazy World, not some fantastical break from it.

No False Fronts, All Fabulous

What really locked me in then—and still does—is how fully realized that world is.

Instead of shooting on location as originally planned, budget constraints (which he admittedly blew past) forced Edwards to recreate his entire period cityscape across 15 interconnected soundstages at Pinewood Studios.

Lucky for us, it freed him up to design a Paris that feels like a cabaret-infused fever dream: neon-lit boulevards, gleaming Art Deco bars, bustling brasseries, velvet-draped nightclubs.

Not a false front in sight—you could practically walk the whole set through its snowswept cobblestone streets. It’s the kind of place you want to crawl into and explore. Hell, I’ve been to the City of Lights plenty of times, yet I still want to book a weekend trip to Edwards’ version that I’m certain never really existed.

Gender Games & Genre Hacking

How do we land in this glittering magic box to begin with? Julie Andrews (The Sound of Music) plays Victoria Grant, a down-on-her-luck singer in Depression-era Paris, who, at the encouragement of her newfound gay friend Toddy (Robert Preston), decides to masquerade as a man impersonating a woman to land a gig.

Cue gender confusion, mistaken identities, and enough romantic chaos to power half a season of Schitt’s Creek.

And no, the illusion was never about perfect believability—it’s about the performance, the playfulness, the sheer joy of the con.

Edwards lifted the concept from the 1933 German comedy Viktor und Viktoria, but to be clear, this remake leaves the original in the dust.

What’s even more impressive is how Victor/Victoria takes 1930s attitudes toward sexuality, filters them through early-80s sensibilities, and still winds up about 15 years ahead of most of Hollywood’s curve on the subject. All the more remarkable considering this was the same year Arthur Hiller’s Making Love came out and effectively ended careers in a cloud of moral panic.

Edwards’ picture, by contrast, threaded the needle with audiences, walking away with statuettes and a permanent spot in cinema history.

But make no mistake—this is a comedy first and foremost, musical second.

The gags land even harder than the high notes, with Edwards’ sharp timing letting everything from slapstick hotel farces to sly double entendres hit so well that the AFI still lists Victor/Victoria on their 100 Funniest American Movies of All Time.

When the music does kick in, it’s woven seamlessly into the performances.

“Le Jazz Hot” and “The Shady Dame from Seville” might be all-time bangers, but they never interrupt the narrative—they’re part of the show within the show, just another extension of the film’s playful wit.

The Secret Sauce

Credit where it's due: Julie Andrews may deservedly command center stage, but it’s Preston and Warren who nearly walk off with the whole shebang.

Robert Preston (The Music Man, Semi-Tough) deliciously shreds his 70s tough guy image, leaning full force into playing a flamboyant lounge singer, dropping quips like he’s been waiting his entire life to deliver them—playfully bitchy and perfectly timed. If there’s a patron saint of scene-stealers, it’s him.

But it’s Lesley Ann Warren (Clue, Color of Night) who proves the film’s true secret sauce, nailing her ditzy moll character with surprising depth and charm. Her reaction to realizing that her macho gangster boyfriend, James Garner (The Great Escape, Maverick), was ogling a “female impersonator” throughout her debut performance is the stuff of legend.

The Academy wasn’t blind either—seven Oscar nods, including Andrews, Preston, and Warren, plus a win for Henry Mancini’s jazzy score. No wonder it holds up as the rare musical that can win over even the staunchest of genre skeptics—like me—because it’s not just a musical. It’s a perfect little world unto itself.

Eight-year-old me never stood a chance.

ENCORE APPLAUSE:

+ 3 points for Graham Stark as perhaps the most memorable waiter in cinema history. Tip fully earned, my friend!

+ 3 points for casting Blake Edwards’ uncredited son to check out his own stepmom, calling her “divine” while she’s rehearsing as “Victor”

+ 5 points for ex-NFLer Alex Karras (aka Webster’s dad) fully going there in 1982. Proving that the quiet ones often land the wildest punches.

+ 5 points for NYT film critic Vincent Canby noting, “the only depressing thing about it is the suspicion that Mr. Edwards is going to have a terrible time trying to top it.” Indeed, he never came close.

+ 10 points for Bob Preston going for broke with that final number in a single, uninterrupted take with Edwards capturing the real-time reaction of the audience

If you only ever see one musical… well, other than The Wizard of Oz (practically required viewing at birth), this is the one it should be.

A must-see film. Preferably with favored libation in hand, if so inclined.

📊 [PLAYBACK: PERFORMANCE]

Budget: $15M in 1982, or approximately $47M today
Domestic Box Office: $28.2M ($87M now)
*Adjusted as of 2025

Cinema DEFCON Threat Assessment:
201 Days — Theatrical-to-VHS Window

Verdict
Strutted to seven Oscar noms and one win. Re-released just eight months later, it doubled its production budget—but thanks to cost overruns and studio math, MGM still claimed $22M in unrecouped costs. Lavish, lauded, and legally tangled. More than six months to reach home video? Easy DEFCON 5.

🎬 [PLAYBACK: TRAILER]

The original theatrical trailer sells all the gleeful mayhem that Edwards was about to unleash upon unsuspecting early ‘80s audiences.