The 50 best movies on Stan
Critic Craig Mathieson has combed the Stan archives to deliver the mother of all guides to great movies available on the platform. In this list you will find modern masterpieces, 20th century classics, arthouse sensations, essential world cinema, and more.
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Steven Spielberg mixes voice work, motion-capture footage and digital effects to create this rip-roaring adaptation of the much-loved Hergé comic character. There are action sequences here the equal of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Jamie Bell’s boy reporter and Andy Serkis’ salty sea captain taking on Daniel Craig’s globe-trotting villain. Great, great f
In this gilded, prescient thriller—complete with a Robert Bresson homage—from Paul Schrader that foresaw the decade to come, Richard Gere plays a Los Angeles escort whose sense of physical and emotional control is tested after he’s drawn into a criminal conspiracy.
Recreating an FBI investigation from the 1970s with a cast that includes Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and a never-better Christian Bale, David O. Russell’s love of antagonistic energy and abrasive personalities finds a melancholic heart amidst the self-destructive cons of this brittle drama with a heartbreaking sting.
Anchored by a full-bodied performance from Sandra Huller that delivers extraordinary but deeply authentic shards of emotion, Justine Triet’s legal procedural resides inside the expansive trial of a successful writer (Huller), whose husband has fallen to his death from the attic of their home. There are revelations and twists, but the film is unnervingly about the malleability of the truth and those who profess to share it.
The Vietnam War was but a few years past when Francis Ford Coppola—who nearly died making it—unleashed this mesmerising study of personal and national collapse. Martin Sheen is the Green Beret sent beyond any boundaries, including reality, to assassinate Marlon Brando’s rogue American general, leading to vast set-pieces and dreamy invocations that bind the story together.
Directed with menacing wonder by Denis Villeneuve, this is compelling and original hard science fiction, with Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner as two experts trying to communicate with obliquely intentioned aliens landed on an increasingly panicky planet. The story folds in on itself, so that triumph is tragedy and vice-versa in an elegiac requiem.
Alejandro G. Inarritu’s dexterous and dazzling comic drama about the untold performances that comprise a life finds Michael Keaton’s fading Hollywood star on Broadway with Emma Stone, Edward Norton, and Naomi Watts offering complications and support. Come for the gorgeously fluid long takes, stay for the flights of celestial hope.
An audition piece to prove that they could direct their screenplays and work with actors, this queer neo-noir thriller from Lana and Lilly Wachowski has grown richer with age. Jennifer Tilly is the gangster’s moll who falls in love with Gina Gershon’s ex-con, leading them to rip off mob money, resulting in a menacing, desire-laced drama about the ways people prove who they truly are.
One of the truly great films in Terry Gilliam’s chaotic career, this distinctly British—despite the presence of Robert De Niro as a renegade heating engineer—dystopian satire is 1984 by way of Kafka. Jonathan Pryce is a daydreaming bureaucrat who goes through a looking glass of faulty mechanics, mind-bending rules, and grotesque elites in pursuit of hope, only to lodge himself in ever worsening circumstances.
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.
While the best lines from Amy Heckerling’s knowingly sweet teen comedy live on as memes, the film itself remains a perfectly calculated pleasure with Alicia Silverstone as the teenage sophisticate who sails through her privileged L.A. high school life while the ageless Paul Rudd waits in the wings.
Capturing the ecstatic highs and unbearable lows of unswerving love, Pawel Pawlikowski’s drama plots the intertwined desire and thwarted devotion of a singer (Joanna Kulig) and musician (Tomasz Kot). They meet in post-WWII Poland and ricochet through European history, as physical and emotional borders divide them. Shot in black and white and gorgeously composed, the film maintains an unbreakable hold.
Using Point Blank and To Live and Die in L.A. as a nihilistic Californian lineage, director Karyn Kusama creates images that render female endurance both iconic and terrifying in a noir thriller where Nicole Kidman’s rogue police detective tries to protect her wayward child even as her own guilt consumes her.
A study of xenophobia that mixes together The Office, Alien Nation, and even a little Kafka. Neil Blomkamp’s bracing debut has digital effects so complete and accomplished that they enhanced—instead of overwhelming—the story of a South African bureaucrat (Sharlto Copley) working an alien ghetto in Johannesburg, who’s exposed to an unknown substance and begins to transform. Heavy weapons and black humour proliferate.
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 is 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.
An outback noir thriller about culpability and regret, Robert Connolly’s box-office hit stars Eric Bana as a financial crimes police officer who returns to the hometown he fled as a teenager to investigate a horrific crime attributed to his best friend. Less interested in plot twists than allowing the drought-stricken landscape and its frayed inhabitants to take hold, it’s a masterful Australian genre piece.
In Malgoska Szumowska’s Paris-set feature, Anne (Juliette Binoche) is a journalist writing a story on female university students who support themselves by working as escorts. The more Anne learns, the more she begins to question her supposedly acceptable life with her husband (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) and their two sons. In a film of explicit elements, nothing exceeds the uneasy candour of Binoche’s performance.
A Gilliam-esque visit to the tax office, inter-generational immigrant trauma, hot dog hands, inter-dimensional warfare… It’s easy to say that the latest absurdist comedy from directing duo The Daniels is a lot, but everything in this madcap story has purpose and pathos and it’s delivered with a magisterial lead performance by Michelle Yeoh.
David Fincher skewered the cul-de-sac hopes of Generation X, and presented himself as the successor to Stanley Kubrick in terms of coolly executed intellectual outrage with this bleak, blithe comedy about a corporate bureaucrat (Edward Norton) who, with a charismatic nihilist (Brad Pitt), starts a combat-as-bonding ritual movement. The film is serious when the topic is ludicrous and seditious when the going gets philosophical.
John Cleese wrote and starred in this marvellous London heist comedy, in which stolen gems take a back seat to the cultural gap between Brits and Americans and the farcical mistakes of an inadvertent pet assassin. Bodies and attitudes collide, with Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Palin and a deliriously gung-ho Kevin Kline in perpetual play.
Salted with 1990s movie nods, this entertaining Hollywood studio comedy neatly plays to Generation X, a couple’s weekly games night for friends getting entangled with a criminal conspiracy. There’s quick-witted dialogue, an evolving plot and comic equality between the leads: both Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams take turns flipping out or delivering burns.
Still the most influential anime ever produced—The Matrix doesn’t exist without it—Mamoru Oshii’s neo-noir animation is set in a cyberpunk Japan of 2029, where a police cyborg, Motoko Kusunagi, is pursuing a hacker who targets human brains online. The feature is wildly atmospheric, and existentially tormented: both the body and mind are symbols of resistance and yet vulnerable to the whims of others.
Strip away the long-celebrated gangster film tropes and Francis Ford Coppola’s breakthrough is a study of family and country, specifically Italian immigrants and America, that reveals how each shapes the other. It’s both immense and woundingly intimate, with scenes that redefined the crime epic.
Sergio Leone’s classic spaghetti western—with Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach as the respective titular gunslingers chasing a buried treasure—is the epitome of grisly frontier elegance. The final instalment of the Italian filmmaker’s Dollars trilogy is a study in widescreen panoramas and sweat-strewn close-ups. It’s a masterclass in direction.
Adapted from Cressida Cowell’s excellent series of children’s novels, this witty, heartfelt animated adventure follows a Viking child (Jay Baruchel) doubting his warrior father (Gerard Butler), even as their village faces dragon attack. Buoyed by an immersive visual aesthetic, it shows how intelligence and acceptance can win out over xenophobia and brutishness.
The feature debut of Irish playwright Martin McDonagh was a pithy and blackly comic crime drama about two hitmen – a simpatico Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell – hiding out in Belgium after a job goes wrong. It’s a post-Tarantino crime flick, but McDonagh’s writing allows for mordant humour, ludicrously logical conversations, and a kind of spiritual transference, before Ralph Fiennes arrives as the duo’s terrifying boss.
Ben Wheatley’s low-budget second feature remains his best work, matching occult machinations to domestic undercurrents in the story of a troubled British soldier turned hitman (Neil Maskell) who accepts a contract for three killings only to find himself immersed in a conspiracy focused on his involvement. Workplace banter and gruesome executions combine to make an eerie summoning.
Florence Pugh delivered her breakthrough performance in William Oldroyd’s chilling 19th century noir, which reinvents the period drama with violent excess and psychological duress. Pugh invokes the darkest desire for freedom as a young bride on an English country estate who refuses to stay under the control of her husband and his family.
Both incandescent and heartbreaking, Damien Chazelle’s update of the classic Hollywood musical is dazzling but never oppressive—the everyday tips over into the extraordinary as Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling’s Los Angeles hopefuls perform with heart but never mere technical mastery. It’s a film about creative endurance and personal sacrifice that’s both thrilling and painful.
The best action film of this century, or simply of all time? Either way, George Miller rebooted his post-apocalyptic franchise with Tom Hardy as the taciturn anti-hero and Charlize Theron as a feminist rebel for the ages to create a magisterial automotive experience.
Come for the abs, stay for the social commentary. Like all Steven Soderbergh films, Magic Mike is purposeful and technically ingenious, telling the story of the
male stripper (Channing Tatum) trying to exit the troupe of the charmingly manipulative Dallas (Matthew McConaughey). It’s a simultaneous celebration and critique of what happens when you make dispensing pleasure your business.
Barry Jenkins’ Academy Award winner for Best Picture is a work of lyrical, incisive filmmaking, seemingly wrenched from three ages—an uncertain boy, a vulnerable teenager, and a hardened young man—in a single Black life. Flourishes of high art and tender realism refute clichés, as does the healing required to vanquish deeply felt trauma.
One of the best—and most deeply inexplicable and hauntingly resonant—movies of this century, David Lynch’s film noir journey is a mystery about identity that resides in the subconscious of the filmmaker and his characters, especially Naomi Watts’ new-to-Los Angeles ingénue.
Dan Gilroy’s debut feature captures the eerie nocturnal ecosystem of Los Angeles, where a freelancer cameraman capturing bloodshed (Jake Gyllenhaal) reveals himself as a sociopath obsessed with self-advancement. Beautifully shot, acridly funny, and totally unnerving.
Situated both on the U.S.-Mexican border in 1980 and in a realm of eternal, otherworldly violence, Cormac McCarthy’s novel became a terrifyingly taut neo-western pursuit as a Vietnam War veteran (Josh Brolin) attempts to hold onto drug cartel cash he has found even while a nightmarish assassin (Javier Bardem) pursues him. Tommy Lee Jones’ closing monologue is the definitive scene in his entire career.
Australian filmmaker Goran Stolevski announced himself with the one-two punch of the gripping folk-horror film You Won’t Be Alone and this intimate queer romantic drama. Set in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, it tracks the bond discovered between Nikola (Elias Anton) and Adam (Thom Green), which unfolds with the thrill of discovery and the risk of loss.
Wim Wenders hits a late career peak with this sublime character study, shot in just 17 days and soaked in the emotional restraint of classic Japanese cinema. Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) is a solitary Tokyo sanitation worker, cleaning public bathrooms and viewing his life with graceful acceptance. With sublime needle drops as punctuation, the film inhabits his soulful restraint.
A before and after line for American filmmaking. Over a quarter century old, 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. An ensemble cast that includes John Travolta, Samuel L Jackson, Uma Thurman, and Bruce Willis enjoy the juiciest of parts.
In one of Martin Scorsese’s greatest and most uncompromising movies, champion American boxer Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro) destroys himself in a succession of shuddering scenes that compress his world into the ring, a bedroom, and finally a prison cell. Joe Pesci, as his brother Joey, is the definitive foil.
A Nazi skinhead gang in a Melbourne squat—memorably commanded by a young Russell Crowe—self-destructs amidst violence and unspoken desire. The best B-movie ever made in Australia.
A Denis Villeneuve horror film about a woman—Emily Blunt’s door-kicking FBI agent—trying to survive in a male world, lodged inside a drug war thriller featuring Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro. It is set on the merciless border between America, Mexico, and obliteration.
“Nobody’s perfect!” Billy Wilder kept his cynicism at bay for this endlessly amusing comedy about a pair of Depression-era Chicago musicians (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) who flee gangsters by posing as women in an all-female band (fronted by Marilyn Monroe). The outrageous plot and gags work to top one another, making for delightful one-upmanship.
Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play entitled 11-year-olds in adult bodies in Adam McKay’s finely revved comedy about two cosseted grown men forced to share a room by their parents’ relationship. The stars make the concept ludicrously believable, and the irrepressible escalation turns their idiocy into one lunatic man-child moment after another.
The body horror canon crashes head-on into the Hollywood nightmare in French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s corrupted fairytale. Demi Moore, hitting harsh depths, plays a veteran Hollywood star who resorts to a black market drug that creates the version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley) she yearns for. All gore, no subtlety.
Paul Thomas Anderson captures America’s transformation from frontier into industrial powerhouse with the tale of an obsessive oilman (Daniel Day-Lewis). Frame after frame evokes a furious wonder that can’t be stilled by success, family, or victory.
Gabriel Byrne, Benicio Del Toro (wonderfully indecipherable), Kevin Spacey and Stephen Baldwin are members of a criminal crew thrown together by official vindictiveness who decide to strike back…only to find themselves in so deep that there are boats full of bodies and a witness who makes Hungarian sound like the most fearful of languages. It’s an updated noir thriller—where hopes of survival flicker and fade.
Joel and Ethan Coen played a straight bat with this western, sticking close to Charles Portis’ 1968 novel rather than the 1969 John Wayne film. It works a treat, thanks to an ornery performance from Jeff Bridges and a mix of dry humour and bloody adventure. “Why did they hang him so high?” Hailee Steinfeld’s Mattie asks Bridges’ “Rooster” Cogburn as they gaze upon gallows. “Possibly in the belief that it would make him more dead,” he replies.
Written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner, this is the foundation stone that rightfully underpins the modern romantic comedy. Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal play the title roles, sharing a ride from Chicago to New York and starting a conversation about whether men and women can truly be friends. “I’ll have what she’s having” is the movie’s signature line, but the dialogue is incisive and droll throughout.
Feminism is a life-or-death fight against powerlessness and inequality in Steve McQueen’s modern-day successor to 12 Years a Slave. In this Chicago rewiring of the heist drama, Viola Davis headlines an impressive cast that runs deep—Elizabeth Debicki, Brian Tyree Henry, Colin Farrell—as the beleaguered partner of an armed robber killed on the job who recruits the wives of his slain colleagues to pull off a lucrative job.
Warfare in the information age comes into brutal focus in Kathryn Bigelow’s magisterial action-thriller, where a Pakistan-based CIA analyst (Jessica Chastain) accepts torture and drone strikes in her obsessive post-9/11 hunt for Osama Bin-Laden. Revenge is consumptive, and history exists in the torrid, unfiltered moment.
This guide is regularly updated to reflect changes in Stan‘s catalogue. For a list of capsule reviews that have been removed from this page because they are no longer available on the platform, visit here.
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