The 50 best movies on Binge
From the latest blockbusters to vintage Hollywood classics, there’s a vast array of movies to be found on BINGE. Craig Mathieson has picked the finest.
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Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay reached the peak of their American idiot phase with this truly inspired and deeply loopy comedy about a 1970s newsreader whose self-assurance and magnificent hair are shaken by the arrival of a female co-anchor (a note-perfect Christina Applegate). Truly sublime stupidity.
If you’ve got a souped-up DeLorean that can travel through time the you’ve got a science-fiction film, but Robert Zemeckis gives you so much more in the one of the finest enduring examples of Hollywood filmmaking where a young man (Michael J. Fox) finds himself back in the 1950s and infringing on his parents’ tentative connection. It remains an inventive delight.
Tim Burton’s macabre sensibility met the classic Hollywood screwball comedy in this madcap comedy about a ghostly young couple (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) who invite the titular ghoul (Michael Keaton) into their home to teach them how to scare off the dreadful new owners. The result is fierce, funny, and fearlessly exact.
A Canadian rise and fall corporate tale told with punky directness, clash of culture humour, and, finally, bittersweet understanding, Matt Johnson’s exhumation of the titular mobile phone—a sensation in the late 1990s, forgotten now—draws career best performances from Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton respectively as the gifted engineer and brutal CEO who seize the moment but can’t comprehend when it’s gone.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Gothic masterpiece gives romantic obsession, loving cinematic invention (some of the techniques used are from the dawn of the medium) and full, ripe performances (excluding a miscast Keanu Reeves) to the 19 th century tale of Gary Oldman’s undead Transylvanian Count, who pursues Winona Ryder’s Nina Harker while being hunted by Anthony Hopkins’ Professor Van Helsing.
Raunchy without being provocative, but never afraid to examine the dynamics between female friends, Paul Feig’s breakout hit turned the cast into comic movie stars: co-writer Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, and Rose Byrne all shone in a movie where the preparations for a wedding collapse from one mishap to the next.
Following two Mafia associates—Robert De Niro’s shrewd numbers cruncher and Joe Pesci’s brutal gangster—given the run of Las Vegas in the 1970s, Martin Scorsese’s organised crime epic reveals the yin and yang of his masculine longing. There are numerous sequences that pulse with the purest of filmmaking pleasure, but the transformative note is played by Sharon Stone as Vegas insider.
A defining vision of Los Angeles, written by a native (Robert Towne) and directed by an outsider (Roman Polanski), this neo-noir mystery stars Jack Nicholson as a private eye caught up with Faye Dunaway’s widow as the wielding of power—over people and property—is dissected with sun-drenched menace. As a feared patriarch, John Huston gives one of the greatest supporting turns in Hollywood history.
With Heath Ledger’s Joker—a jittery, nihilistic force who feels like a city’s dread come to life—as the antagonist, Christopher Nolan took the Batman franchise to a new level, grounding the superhero epic in the streets and giving a muscular authenticity to the deeds of Christian Bale’s masked vigilante.
There’s already been a Bruce Willis remake of this assassin thriller, and a series with Eddie Redmayne is on the way. But it’s Fred Zinnemann’s original adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s best-seller about a mysterious operative hired to kill the President of France that still sets the standard. It’s economical in style, visually informative, and quietly gripping as the net closes on Edward Fox’s ruthlessly precise protagonist.
Death of a Salesman for Mafia foot soldiers, this real-life story recounts the friendship between minor mobster “Lefty” Ruggiero (Al Pacino) and young thief Donnie Brasco (Johnny Depp), who’s in fact undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone. Mike Newell’s crucially detailed film reveals their mercantile struggle, while documenting how Joseph slowly disappears into his role.
Will Ferrell uses naivety and enthusiasm as his comedic weapons in this fairytale farce about a human baby raised by Santa’s elves—Ferrell’s Buddy—who’s sent to New York at Christmas to meet his real father (a curmudgeonly James Caan). Jon Favreau crafts a funny, fantastical comedy that engages both children and adults.
Steven Spielberg’s paean to the loneliness of childhood begins with a spindly creature from another planet being left behind in the Californian hills, but he soon joins the children who shelter him—yes, that’s Drew Barrymore—in eating candy, watching TV, and sneaking out for Halloween. It’s science-fiction as heartfelt childhood fantasy, directed with wonderment by Spielberg and still deeply compelling.
Legal thrillers were a Hollywood staple in the 1990s, and none are better than Tom Cruise plotting to save himself by selling out the respectable but corrupt legal
practice that had hired him in Sydney Pollack’s exemplary drama. The creeping sense of discovery is terrific, with a strong counterpoint of Jeanne Tripplehorn as a wife betrayed on multiple fronts.
Almost certainly the only film selected for preservation by the Library of Congress that features a line like “I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley,” this madcap parody of 1970s aviation disaster films is a cavalcade of absurd jokes. Plus sight gags, loopy sketches, and ludicrous asides—the nuttiness is non-stop.
What starts as a Star Trek satire, with estranged actors from a sci-fi series taken into outer space by aliens who think the show is real, becomes both a terrific comedy and a genuine adventure. Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver star, but the film belongs to Alan Rickman as a Shakespearean actor who despises his catchphrase.
Ridley Scott’s revival of the swords-and-sandals genre remains a canny blockbuster, focusing on noble Roman general Maximus (Russell Crowe), who’s supreme in battle but betrayed by politics. Cast into slavery by a jealous new emperor (Joaquin Phoenix), he uses success as a gladiator to steer him toward revenge and a satisfactory death.
A comedy so perfectly crafted that it appeals after countless viewings, Harold Ramis’ classic stars Bill Murray as an abrasive weatherman whose outside broadcast traps him in a day that he lives in on endless repeat. The existential conundrum is both hilarious and telling, complete with Andie MacDowell as the perfect foil.
How could it have taken almost two decades for director Alexander Payne and leading man Paul Giamatti to reunite? The Sideways duo are simpatico collaborators, and make the most of this bittersweet period drama about realisations shared by a curmudgeonly teacher (Giamatti), rebellious student (Dominic Sessa), and grieving cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) who are marooned at a shuttered private school.
Scared it would bomb, the studio put Steve Spielberg’s shark thriller into every cinema it could and went big on television marketing. It was a huge hit and the modern blockbuster was born. Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw play the trio who eventually confront the menacing great white, but the true star is John Williams’ score. Every motif has become part of cultural history.
What if I told you the first counterculture war movie was made in 1970, and stars Clint Eastwood? Set during the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France in WWII, this blood-strewn farce follows an American unit that goes rogue in pursuit of a stolen gold stash behind enemy lines. Eastwood leads the way, with Donald Sutherland as a beatnik tank commander. Often flippant, always anti-authority.
Horror auteur Osgood Perkins hit the mainstream with this extremely creepy film about an FBI agent (Maika Monroe) whose intuitive skills get her assigned to a case involving a string of murder-suicides. Longlegs feels perched on the edge of an otherworldly abyss, the hammer falling when a perfectly deployed Nicolas Cage appears.
Appearances can be deceiving: Todd Haynes turns this drama about an actress (Natalie Portman) embedding herself in the family of the woman she’ll be playing in a biopic (Julianne Moore) – who was jailed for having sex with a boy and subsequently married him when grown up (Charles Melton) – into a terrifying black comedy about control, role-playing, and the past’s imprecise but cruel grip.
A near miracle of restraint, Celine Song’s debut feature turns timeless romantic queries—“who am I meant to be with?”—into allusive, deeply felt existential moments as childhood friends from South Korea meet again in New York after decades apart. Greta Lee, as the now married host, gives a remarkable performance that balances memory, culture, and physical sensation in the moment.
A before and after line for American filmmaking. Almost 30 years on, Quentin Tarantino’s joyous dive into the mores of L.A. crime, narrative illusion, and actual conversations between men and women still crackles with delectable energy as an ensemble cast that includes John Travolta, Samuel L Jackson, Uma Thurman, and Bruce Willis enjoy the juiciest of parts.
Written by Oliver Stone and directed with bloody relish by Brian De Palma, this updating of the immigrant criminal’s rise and fall makes great use of Miami and the cocaine trade in the early 1980s. The film finds every garish angle in the bloody rise of Al Pacino’s Tony Montana, suggesting violence is the obvious outcome of unfettered capitalism.
The best film to date of Steven Spielberg’s already extensive career, adapted from a novel by Australian author Thomas Kenneally, Schindler’s List was a compelling depiction of the Holocaust, told through the eyes of an unscrupulous businessman (Liam Neeson) whose exposure to both the historic crimes against humanity and his threatened Jewish employees turns him into an unlikely saviour.
Writer Kevin Williamson took the teenage VHS cassette horror experience back into the multiplex with this self-referential horror reboot, expertly crafted by veteran director Wes Craven. A slasher film that explicitly acknowledges the genre with a new masked murderer in Ghostface, it put Neve Campbell at the centre of a high school killing spree that begins with Drew Barrymore’s now iconic cameo.
Equally committed to pub culture and the movies of George A. Romero, Edgar Wright’s very British and very amusing zombie apocalypse comedy finds Simon Pegg and Nick Frost negotiating the shuffling return of the undead with droll technique and genre-defying bursts of comic mayhem.
Perhaps the best—and certainly the truest—comic-book adaptation, this animated addition to the world of the New York web-slinger captured both the emotional spirit of the Spider-man franchise and the wondrous visual possibilities. It is bright, exhilarating and alive to teenage hopes and fears. Plus Spider-Ham!
Before Ocean’s Eleven there was this Depression-era conman thriller, which cleaned up at both the box-office and the Academy Awards, and cemented the legendary screen partnership of Paul Newman and Robert Redford. The duo play grifters out to swindle a violent crime boss (a memorable Robert Shaw), with an intricate scam orchestrated with elan by director George Roy Hill.
Posthumously narrated by the dead screenwriter memorably featured in the opening scene, Billy Wilder’s acidic love letter to Hollywood is more scathing than any movie the movie industry has made about itself in the many decades since. William Holden plays the struggling hack, who finds refuge with a reclusive silent movie star, Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond. Self-loathing, delusion, and cruel truths fight it out.
Everything that Clint Eastwood has learnt about the western, including the comfort it takes in its many myths, was brought to bear in this elegiac end of the trail tale. The director stars as an ageing gunslinger who embraces his past sins when he takes up a contract for murder in a town run by Gene Hackman’s uncompromising sheriff. Gnarled, brutal and haunting.
The beloved Aardman Animation shorts about doughty inventor Wallace and his clever canine minder Gromit segued perfectly into this delightful stop-motion feature. Couched in English pluck, vintage horror films, and with a carrot-munching nod to Fight Club, the duo have to save their hometown of Tottington (and its Giant Vegetable Competition) when science runs amok.
An immaculately recreated period piece about the killer who terrorised San Francisco in the early 1970s and wrote to the public, this masterful David Fincher movie is a procedural where the trail of the killer goes cold, but those who’ve gazed on the crime scenes and read the letters keep going. Characters Robert Downey Jr, Mark Ruffalo, and Jake Gyllenhaal are each gripped by the case. As obsessives, they’re all Zodiac victims.
