Music, fashion, and filmmaking trends may evolve with time, but certain movies are so timelessly iconic that they never go out of style.

It’s one thing for a film to feature effortlessly cool characters that just ooze style and make you want to reach through the screen and raid their closets (frankly, the possibilities are endless: Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast At Tiffany’s”, Marcello Mastroianni in “8½”, Steve McQueen in “The Thomas Crown Affair”, Ron O’Neal in “Super Fly”, Pam Grier in “Foxy Brown”, Richard Gere in “American Gigolo”, Patricia Arquette in “True Romance”, Jude Law in “The Talented Mr. Ripley”, Brad Pitt in “Fight Club”, Gwyneth Paltrow in “The Royal Tenenbaums”, Alicia Silverstone in “Clueless”). But for a film to radiate style in every sense of the word is something else entirely.

For this list, we’re focusing on ten visually stunning movies with such a flawless color palette, costume design, framing, and blocking that every shot could easily be taken on its own and hung on a wall. After all, who said style can’t also be substance?

1. Breathless (1960)

Jean-Luc Godard argued that all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. The late French director certainly put his maxim to the test right out of the gate in his soaring debut. A freewheeling, noir-inspired meet-cute hybrid, “Breathless” ripped open film grammar, inspired an entire generation of filmmakers across the pond, and turned lead actors Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg into global icons of ‘60s French chic.

By and large one of the most influential movies of all time, this slice of self-reflexive pulp fiction finds Belmondo putting his scenery-chewing tendencies to perfect use as a sharp-tongued two-bit gangster trying to keep a low profile with his Yankee girlfriend (Seberg) after stealing a car and killing a cop. It’s a relatively straight narrative with a relaxed tempo that Godard uses as a baseline to experiment with handheld long takes, break the fourth wall with jarring jump cuts, and spend some time watching these on-the-lam lovers kick back, cuddle up together, and chat during their downtime.

Ain’t it funny how Quentin Tarantino wasn’t even born yet, and moviegoers were already being treated with a proudly irreverent hangout film peppered with free-form dialogue and meta pop-culture references alluding to other movies, books, and music that constantly reminded them they were, in fact, watching a film?

2. Tokyo Drifter (1966)

A pressure cooker of split loyalties, macho posturing, and melancholic yearning with such a radical pop-art aesthetic and deliriously over-the-top set design that it stretches the very fabric of genre cinema to its breaking point, Seijun Suzuki’s candy-colored bullet ballet is a feast for the eyes that stakes a legitimate claim to being the most stylish B-movie ever — Japanese or otherwise.

The devil is in the details when it comes to “Tokyo Drifter”, a hard-boiled crime saga with a secret weapon in Tetsuya Watari’s debonair lone wolf Phoenix Tetsu. A seasoned gun-for-hire that feels like Japan’s answer to James Bond with a dash of Spike Spiegel, this baby-blue-suited cock of the walk carries himself with unflappable swagger and even sings his own jazz theme song while mowing down Yakuza thugs. All is fine and dandy until suddenly Tetsuo gets a big target on his back after being caught between rival gangs.

Seijun Suzuki’s movies are the very definition of style over substance, and he’s known to throw logic and reason out of the door. And sure, the story here is overly convoluted and spread a little too thin, but this is the kind of movie where you could turn off the sound and let the visuals do all the talking.

3. Le Samourai (1967)

You need no further justification for including this cornerstone of the French New Wave on this list beyond these two words: Alain Delon. For the uninitiated, the late global screen icon is quite possibly the most photogenic man ever to be captured on celluloid. Like Sean Connery or Harrison Ford, men wanted to be him and women wanted to be with him.

Now, put Delon at the height of his powers in a trench coat and fedora as a brooding freelance killer, set him loose in 1960s Paris to steal cars, carry out hits in nightclubs, and outsmart cops, and there’s simply no universe in which the finished result isn’t impossibly cool and stylish. Come on now.

It also doesn’t hurt to have genre specialist Jean-Pierre Melville at the helm. Often hailed as the granddaddy of the modern crime caper, the French director made his name and reputation with chilly, introspective thrillers that put you in the shoes of highly competent, coolly detached criminals bound by rigid codes of honor and calculated routines. Here, he keeps the flash and dialogue to the bare minimum, knowing full well that his biggest asset is Delon’s magnetic on-screen presence, which commands your attention in virtually every scene he’s in despite having little to no lines of dialogue. And yet, he pulls off a real doozy of a chase sequence as we watch Jeff Costello ditch the cops by hopping onto different subway trains. Also of interest: “Purple Noon”, “La Piscine”.

4. Thief (1981)

Let’s face it: No one makes cooler movies than Michael Mann. A hyper-masculine filmmaker with an impeccable sense of style and knack for slick visuals, the undisputed king of gritty American actioners has linked up with some of Hollywood’s biggest divas including Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Russell Crowe in a glittering career than now spans over 45 years. And it’s easy to see why every brand-name A-list would leap at the chance to join his ranks — there’s something simply irresistible about watching hard-edged crime professionals, from robbers and hackers to ruthless gun-for-hires, carry out their jobs with clockwork precision and effortless style.

Long before Sonny Crockett made white linen suits trendy, and before Neil McCauley pulled off a $12 million bank heist in downtown L.A., there was James Caan’s unflappable master thief Frank — a safecracker-for-hire with nerves of steel and a fire $150 leather jacket determined to take on one last big score before hanging up the criminal life and going clean. A lot rides on the late Godfather alum to turn in a Hall of Fame-level performance (and boy does he deliver), but Mann doesn’t cut any corners and makes sure that every frame is dripping with flair and swagger. Throw in a climactic shootout for the ages and a banger electric score by Tangerine Dream, and you’ve got the paragon of ’80s cinematic cool.

5. Blade Runner (1982)

Hardly a controversial pick, Ridley Scott’s landmark Philip K. Dick adaptation — starring Harrison Ford as a bounty hunter pulled out of retirement to track down and wipe out a bunch of man-made skin-jobs known as replicants who’ve vanished off the grid — is overflowing with lofty philosophical ideas about mankind’s troubling dependence on technology and artificial intelligence. But if Roy Batty’s oft-quoted poetic monologue on the ephemeral nature of life grabs all the headlines and refuses to give up its cultural foothold, it’s Scott’s painstaking attention to detail and immersive production design that transformed this box office bomb into the single most influential sci-fi movie of the past 50 years.

2019 may already be in the rearview, but his dystopian vision of Los Angeles — a remarkably tactile, rain-soaked metropolis awash in neon lights, super-sized billboard ads, dense fog, and the perpetual hum of overcrowded night-markets — continues to wield an unparalleled influence on the aesthetic of cyberpunk sci-fi. And that’s without even mentioning Tangerine Dream’s propulsive synth score, Sean Young’s fur coat, and Deckard’s Bogart-inspired silk trench jacket. Say what you will about Ridley Scott’s storytelling, but the man has an eye for visuals.

There comes a point in every cinephile’s journey where a steady diet of mainstream blockbusters and broad crowd-pleasers won’t quite cut it anymore. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with rewatching “Terminator 2”, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, or any rock-solid cinematic comfort food you know backwards and forwards for the gazillionth time instead of finally diving into that obscure cult film you found browsing the Criterion Channel and your friend won’t stop raving about. However, if, deep down, you think you’re ready to take the plunge and expose yourself to alt-viewing options that defy explanation and will turn your brain into mush, we’ve got you covered.

From gruesome martial arts splatterfests that crank the action up to 11 and Warhol-inspired counterculture slashers to completely off-the-wall sci-fi extravaganzas, today we’re rounding up a collection of puzzling cinematic oddities — films that were too wacky and weird to be embraced by mainstream audiences, but that later amassed devoted cult followings and continue to inspire deep obsession today. Listed in chronological order, the following oddball gems might be outside the norm and not for everyone, but give them a fair shot and you won’t be disappointed.

1. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)

If you’re in the mood for a sumptuously shot, sexually charged gothic folk tale about a young innocent woman being viciously preyed upon by vampires in medieval Europe, you could watch last year’s “Nosferatu”, I guess. Or you could be cool and check out this adaptation of Vítezslav Nezval’s 1935 novel instead.

The loss of innocence and awkward sexual awakening of a thirteen-year-old girl (Jaroslava Schallerová) supplies the thematic bedrock of this landmark of the Czech New Wave directed by Jaromil Jireš, a defiantly anti-authoritarian film that offers less of a unified narrative than a string of dreamlike vignettes and striking imagery and that bleed into each other and furiously dig into your consciousness.

The movie’s underlying exploration of repressed desire, guilt, and domestic abuse through the distorted lens of a girl transitioning into womanhood in a religiously oppressive milieu is straightforward and relatively easy to grasp even if the most fantastical and metaphorical elements might throw you for a loop every now and then. Think “Alice in Wonderland” meets “Wizard of Oz”, only this time Alice/Dorothy is a horny teen and instead of talking cats, ruby slippers, and flying monkeys, she encounters magic earrings, parasitic grandmothers, and bloodsucking priests. Definitely not one for the kids.

2. Eraserhead (1977)

Complete with post-industrial urban hellscapes, screeching mutant babies, fizzling light bulbs, bleeding man-made chickens, and a deformed singing lady who lives in a radiator, David Lynch’s years-in-the-making debut came out of left field in 1977, wormed its way into our subconscious, and became an overnight sensation as the defining midnight movie staple of its era.

The main thing you need to know about “Eraserhead” is that Lynch conceived it back when he was a newly married man, expecting father, and up-and-coming film school grad living in Philadelphia. He took some odd jobs, secured funding from the American Film Institute, brought in a handful of his pals, and channeled his own fears and anxieties of unintended parenthood into Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), a meek print worker whose life is turned upside down after her one-time fling (Charlotte Stewart) gives birth to a hideously deformed creature.

What you’re left with is an odd film that is deeply unnerving and morbidly funny in nearly equal measure, and perhaps the first full-blown surreal movie to fully break into the American mainstream. Half a century later, “Eraserhead” remains a subject of fervid obsession, with many a dedicated movie buff still racking their brains to unravel its ambiguous mysteries — what’s the deal with the man pulling the levers, how does Henry end up taking his own life, and most importantly, how the heck did they manage to come up with such a convincingly hideous baby puppet on a $100,000 budget? Your guess is as good as mine.

3. House (1977)

Sure, many films by Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi dabble in the surreal, but how many feature floating heads, evil spirits, bleeding clocks, possessed watermelons, dancing skeletons, a demonic cat, and a carnivorous piano? After all, there’s a reason why this absolute bonkers, near-indescribable haunted house acid trip — about a teenage schoolgirl and six of her classmates heading to the country to visit her aunt’s secluded country farmhouse — is one of the most frequently named titles when you ask film buffs to suggest movies that will mess with your head.

An 88-minute-long full-on assault to the senses inspired by the childhood nightmares of Obayashi’s 10-year-old daughter, “House” is light on plot but so unabashedly silly over-the-top that you might find yourself unsure whether to laugh, scream, or cry in despair at every given turn. A good rule of thumb for the movies on this list is not to fret too much about plot details and simply enjoy the rollercoaster ride. If this one’s right up your alley and you’re not faint of heart, be sure to follow it up with Takashi Miike’s horror-tinged musical extravaganza “The Happiness of the Katakuris”.

4. Liquid Sky (1982)

“Strange Aliens having bizarre orgasms!” The film’s official tagline says it all, really, but frankly it doesn’t even begin to cover the reasons why this offbeat time capsule of early-1980s punk subculture by Soviet exile Slava Tsukerman continues to be a seminal rite of passage among diehard sci-fi aficionados and gets screened in New York revival houses every once in a while.

Shot with a shoestring $500,000 budget with a Soviet crew and a bunch of unknown actors, “Liquid Sky” plunges you right smack into the downtown New Wave scene and into the shoes of androgynous fashion model and heroine junkie Margaret (Anne Carlisle). It just so happens that an alien creature that feeds off a human endorphin produced during climax suddenly lands on her apartment roof, with Margaret striking a deal to lure unsuspecting partners to her apartment before it kills them off on the spot right as they’re about to reach orgasm. Sure, it may not be the ideal way to kick off a first date, but that wild plot description alone should at least make you think about tracking it down.

Come to watch a bunch of Manhattan oddballs being ruthlessly vaporized by invisible aliens Repo Man-style, stay for the neon-soaked visuals, eye-popping production design, and synthy ’80s score.

5. The Boxer’s Omen (1983)

Prolific Hong Kong studio Shaw Brothers churned out such an absurd number of martial arts movies in their heyday that you’d need a full year just to get through their 1980s catalog. Endless praise has been lumped upon the likes of “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin” and “The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter”, and rightly so — both hold a firm place in action cinema history as bona fide classics in their own right and are solid entry points for newcomers.

Though rarely mentioned in the same breath as these two, very few genre films in cinema history come close to the batshit energy and gross-out, visceral thrills of this lesser-known gem directed by Kuei Chih-Hung, about a Thai boxer avenging his crippled brother and breaking an ancient Buddhist curse that’s been tormenting his family.

Reincarnated monks regurgitating food, chopping limbs off, fighting demonic bats, flying heads, and using crocodile skeletons as vessels for supernatural mummies… Even if you’ve already skimmed the plot synopsis and think you have a sense of what to expect, rest assured, nothing can prepare you for the gloriously unhinged mayhem that is “The Boxer’s Omen”. Like a bizarre cross between “Rocky” and “Temple of Doom”, this Eighties cult item is so chaotic and demented that watching it feels like stumbling upon a cursed artifact from another dimension that somehow slithered into our own.

The chariot race in “Ben Hur”, the final graveyard showdown in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, the ‘I’m Spartacus’ scene in “Spartacus”, Steve McQueen keeping his foot on the gas during the motorcycle chase scene in “The Great Escape”, the bone-to-satellite transition in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, the Ride of the Valkyries in “Apocalypse Now”, the famed match cut in “Lawrence of Arabia” …. These are only a handful of iconic moments in cinema that immediately spring to mind when thinking of the term ‘epic’. No doubt, the minds of a younger generation will go to more recent fare like Ripley walking out in the cargo loader to fight the queen in “Aliens”, the lobby shootout in “The Matrix”, the opening beach sequence in “Saving Private Ryan”, the Rohirrim charge in “Return of the King”, or Russell Crowe revealing himself as Maximus in “Gladiator”.

But we can all pretty much agree that there’s a unique pleasure in winding down after a long week with a proper epic film that feels big in every sense of the word. You know the kind: For the most part, the titles listed down below are fairly long and extremely expensive, boast hundreds if not thousands of extras, monumental sets, and awesome battle scenes, and tell a sweeping story on the grandest canvas imaginable without worrying about such trivial things as running out of budget or screen time. From historical period dramas to fantasy novel adaptations, we’re plucking down a selection of titles that will get your adrenaline and leave you in awe, jaws dropped.

Listed in chronological order, here are the 10 most epic movies of all time.

1. Napoleon (1927)

Much ink has been spilled on Ridley Scott and the blatant historical inaccuracies of his recent “Napoleon” biopic. After it bombed at the box office and walked away empty-handed from the Oscars, there was talk about studio interference, a 4-hour director’s cut that ended up clocking in at a meager 3h20’, as well as an insider scoop making the rounds claiming that lead star Joaquin Phoenix threatened to abandon the project unless Paul Thomas Anderson came in to doctor the script at the eleventh hour. Overall, though, the hard truth remains: 2023s “Napoleon” is simply way more fun to read about than to actually watch.

Real ones know that every other movie centered on the famed French tyrant still plays second fiddle to Abel Gance’s near-centenarian silent opus — a groundbreaking technical achievement split in four acts that required three full-sized synchronized screens and featured a live score by 250+ musicians during its latest theatrical rollout in 2024. The film chronicles the Corsican’s meteoric rise through the ranks of the French military, from his pivotal role in the French Revolution all the way to his triumphant invasion of Italy in 1797.

A decades-in-the-making restoration that extended its already colossal runtime past the seven-hour mark and brings it as close as possible to its original form just recently became available, so there’s never been a better time to experience “Napoleon” in all its glory.

2. Gone with the Wind (1939)

Propelled by the irresistible all-star pairing of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable as the bratty daughter of a Georgia plantation owner and a cynical socialite who develop feelings for each other as the American Civil War rages on in the background, Victor Fleming’s monolith period drama has long been regarded as the epitome of old-fashioned Hollywood spectacle writ large.

Rose-tinted, uncritical view of the antebellum South notwithstanding, that lofty reputation feels thoroughly earned. When viewed through the lens of contemporary politics, you can make a strong case that time hasn’t been too kind to Hollywood’s longtime box-office champion. But in the wise words of Rhett Butler: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”. For what it’s worth, we’re talking about an 11-time Oscar winner that played in theaters for over a hundred consecutive weeks (!) and continues to be a permanent fixture on cable, warts and all. Just forget about its problematic politics, sit back, get comfortable, and let the majestic vistas and swooning romance sweep you away, as you surrender to the grandiosity of it all. Take our word for it: They don’t make ‘em like they used to.

3. The Human Condition (1959-1961)

This landmark in Japanese cinema concerning a young pacifist socialist named Kanji (Tatsuya Nakadai) who struggles to reconcile his rigid sense of morality with his duty as an Imperial soldier while supervising a forced labor camp in occupied Manchuria was initially split into three feature-length films totaling just over nine hours. But trailblazing director Masaki Kobayashi always envisioned his novel adaptation as one, overarching narrative about a man’s physical and spiritual journey through the soul-crushing meat grinder that was World War II.

We’re inclined to agree, of course, and taken as a unified whole, “The Human Condition” stands today not only as a staggering achievement but also the single most compelling rebuttal to François Truffaut’s hackneyed assertion that every anti-war movie inevitably ends up glorifying its subject. This is an unforgiving story that pulls no punches and seeps into your bones over the course of nearly ten grueling hours, in which we witness our naive protagonist endure unspeakable hardship — thrust into battle against his will, trapped behind enemy lines, and ultimately imprisoned in a Soviet POW camp. It’s a tough hang that makes “Schindler’s List” look like Disney World, so proceed at your own risk, but “The Human Condition” rewards the patient viewer.

4. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Hardly a controversial pick, this seven-time Oscar winner by David Lean (a certified master of grand-scale spectacle whose credentials include “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Doctor Zhivago”) based on the experiences of famed British officer T.E. Lawrence leading the Arabs against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War is a cinematic epic of near unprecedented scope and narrative ambition.

Running at over 228 minutes, this Peter O’Toole-led big-budget period epic represents the last hurrah of a long-dead genre that was on its last legs at the time and quickly flamed out the following year after Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s bloated “Cleopatra” went over-budget and borderline bankrupted Hollywood in 1963.

With jaw-droppingly beautiful landscape wide-shots by DOP Freddie Young, “Lawrence” has undeniably inspired the look and feel of countless subsequent Hollywood epics, and also beat Frank Herbert’s Dune novel saga to the punch when it comes to deconstructing the traditional hero’s journey through the lens of a charismatic white man-turned-manipulative Messiah who leads an indigenous desert tribe into revolt against a tyrannical colonial force (no 400-meter sandworms to be found here, though, sorry). 62 years on, “Lawrence of Arabia” is a sight to behold and a full-blown masterpiece that really oughta be seen on the big screen.

5. War and Peace (1967)

There are many fancy $2 words we could throw in to describe Sergei Bondarchuk’s Oscar-winning seven-hour adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1869 novel — sweeping, engrossing, awe-inspiring, gargantuan, you name it — but the word “epic” should suffice.

To fully grasp the extraordinary circumstances that brought about this once-in-a-lifetime, no-expense-spared behemoth of a film, it might help to know the basics and broad historical context behind it. To cut a long story short, Hollywood put together a glossy but tepid “War and Peace” adaptation — about the Napoleonic Wars driving a wedge between three lost souls in 19th-century Russia — in 1956. Fast forward to the height of the Cold War in the mid-‘60s, with the Soviet state eagerly throwing the kitchen sink and hiring 12,000 soldiers, 10,000 extras and handing out a $100 million check to complete their own adaptation, all in the name of sticking it to Uncle Sam.

To put it mildly, the big battle scenes in Bondarchuk’s movie makes its Audrey Hepburn-led American counterpart look like an amateur high-school production in comparison.

After a few untimely delays due to the Los Angeles wildfires, the nominations for the 97th Academy Awards were finally unveiled a few weeks ago on Jan. 23, with “Emilia Pérez” leading the pack with 13 nods overall including one for Best Motion Picture of the Year. Just so you know where things stand, this year’s field is rounded out by “Anora”, “The Brutalist”, “A Complete Unknown”, “Conclave”, “Dune: Part Two”, “I’m Still Here”, “Nickel Boys”, “The Substance”, and “Wicked”.

Even with the recent expansion from five to 10 slots, not a year goes by that the nominations manage to please everyone. As usual, there’s been much online quibbling over the conspicuous absence of a fair number of Oscar hopefuls that were once considered sure bets to make the cut. For better or worse, we fully expect this season’s wildly unpredictable race to continue to be a topic of discussion heading into the March 2 awards ceremony, with Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner grabbing the pole position and pulling away as the presumed frontrunner after a strong showing at the PGA awards.

In the meantime, however, we thought it’d be a fun exercise to round up a list of 2024 movies, from splashy festival standouts to underseen gems, that fell down the pecking order and couldn’t hold on to their spots as hoped. Some of this year’s most glaring omissions spent the entire campaign trail on the fringes of the Best Picture race, whereas others listed down below never had the commercial appeal and marketing push required to make a serious bid for Oscar contention in the first place. They may have ended up on the outside looking in, but in our hearts, they’re all winners.

1. Challengers

Italian-born provocateur Luca Guadagnino entered the home stretch of the awards season with a one-two punch of buzzy rabble-rousers in “Challengers” and “Queer” that instantly became lightning rods of contention and once seemed on the precipice of nominations. Sadly, the former’s early-spring release window meant it never stood a chance of staying fresh in the voters’ minds when the time came to hand the nominations out, while the best actor field was simply too crowded to make room for Daniel Craig’s career-best work as literary author William S. Burroughs stand-in in the latter.

A Best Picture nod wasn’t exactly a given, but the fact that “Challengers” somehow went unrecognized in all departments despite a strong showing at the Globes (including a much-deserved win for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ original score) had many of us scratching our heads. Zendaya is technically still in the mix in this year’s Best Picture race thanks to “Dune: Part Two”, but there’s no better showcase for the perennial A-lister’ onscreen charisma than this steamy ménage à trois, which finds her character — a former tennis prodigy turned pro trainer — struggling to choose between the two US Open contenders vying for her attention (Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist).

The days of yore when grown-up, racy erotic thrillers like “Fatal Attraction” muscled their way into the Best Picture race may be long gone, but “Challengers” near $100 million box office haul suggests moviegoers are still champing at the bit to get back to theaters to indulge in their most basic instincts.

2. A Real Pain

For months, most prognosticators have pegged Kieran Culkin as the presumed frontrunner in the best supporting actor category for his scenery-chewing turn as Benji Kaplan, a sharp-tongued Jewish-American man who flies across the pond with his estranged cousin to visit Poland and explore their Jewish heritage in honor of their late grandmother.

Sure, pundits have feuded over whether Culkin should have campaigned in the supporting slate to begin with, considering he’s unquestionably every bit a lead as Jesse Eisenberg. Be that as it may, barring a late surge by Edward Norton (“A Complete Unknown”) and his former Succession co-star Jeremy Strong (“The Apprentice”), the category feels now like an open and shut case after he cleaned up at the Globes.

However, the industry’s overwhelming enthusiasm for Culkin’s performance didn’t carry over to the Oscars’ Best Picture race, with this buzzy Sundance road-trip movie ending up on the outside looking in after being on the bubble all throughout the awards circuit. Eisenberg himself couldn’t break through the clutter in a historically competitive directing lineup, though at least he didn’t get shut out of the Best Original Screenplay race. The movie surely deserved better, if only for having the decency to wrap up in a brisk 89 minutes — mind you, that’s more than two full hours shorter than “The Brutalist”.

3. Hard Truths

All due respect to Demi Moore, Mikey Madison, and Fernanda Torres, but if there’s an actress who deserved to get her flowers for single-handedly carrying a film on her shoulders this year, that’s Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

Despite being showered in praise at TIFF for her emotionally raw, gutting turn in “Hard Truths”, the veteran actress and frequent Mike Leigh collaborator’s name was nevertheless conspicuously absent from the Oscar acting slate. However, the enduring power of her fearless, wounded, and singular performance as Pansy — an embittered British Jamaican housewife and self-loathing human dynamo who channels her chronic depression into violent outbursts of angst — won’t be fading anytime soon. In typical Leigh fashion, “Hard Truths” is an unassuming, slice-of-life movie that is less concerned with providing clear-cut resolutions and ham-fisted platitudes than finding genuine empathy and compassion in its dysfunctional yet relatable working-class characters.

You can see why the Academy would overlook an unglamorous, dialogue-heavy drama with no bankable movie stars. But was it too much to ask for it to edge out “Emilia Pérez”?

4. All We Imagine as Light

Widely considered to be one of the toasts of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it rightfully received the coveted Grand Prix, Payal Kapadia’s bittersweet sophomore feature seemed too good to pass up as India’s official Oscar submission for Best International Feature Film. In a surprising turn, that honor instead went to Kiran Rao’s “Laapataa Ladies”, leaving one of last year’s best-reviewed critical darlings completely iced out of a race it arguably deserves to win outright.

A big push was made for “All We Imagine as Light”, a tender, melancholy, and carefully observed character study that splits its focus on two nurses (Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha) living in Mumbai, to follow in Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” footsteps and break into the Best Picture and directing shortlists despite being snubbed by its own national selection committee. But after being on the bubble heading into the January 23 announcements, the film faced an uphill battle and couldn’t translate its stellar critical reception and positive word of mouth into a serious bid for Oscar contention.

Its exclusion feels like a slap in the face, but as lesser movies that did manage to squeak by in the Best Picture category inevitably start to fade over time, there’s little doubt in our minds that this understated gem will age like fine wine and only grow in stature for years to come.

5. Hundreds of Beavers

I could give you hundreds of reasons (pun intended) why Mike Cheslik’s microbudget cult sensation is every bit as awards-worthy as your average costume drama or prestige biopic. Had this actually made it onto the Best Picture lineup, it’d have been the funniest movie to do so since 1987s “Moonstruck” and a rare moment of redemption for an Academy that bafflingly ignored the likes of “Some Like It Hot”, “Raising Arizona”, and “Being John Malkovich”.

But let’s be real — expecting the Academy membership to even entertain the idea of throwing its weight behind a $150,000 silent slapstick comedy about a 19th-century applejack maker (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) battling actors in bargain-bin beaver costumes was always something of a pipe dream.

It may not be anyone’s idea of high art and hardly award-season catnip, but if reviving a long-extinct subgenre like the silent slapstick comedy in the year of our lord 2025 isn’t enough to sway voters, I don’t know what is. Gun to my head, it’d struggle to name a movie release in recent memory that delivered as much unadulterated joy and full-on belly-laugh moments as this nostalgic call back to classic Buster Keaton and Looney Tunes hijinks — a madcap rollercoaster ride shot over four years in Wisconsin that fully commits to its ridiculous premise and has more fresh ideas than this year’s crop of nominees put together. If the world was just, it’d swooped in for a shocking but very welcome upset.

It’s that time of the year again. The nominations for the 97th Academy Awards were announced on January 23, with “Emilia Perez” leading the pack with 13 nominations overall. “Wicked” and “The Brutalist” followed closely with ten nods apiece, with this year’s Best Picture lineup boasting a healthy mix of populist box office champs (“Dune: Part Two”), buzzy festival standouts (“Anora”), meaty actors’ showcases (“The Substance”), sturdy musical biopics (“A Complete Unknown), critic-proof indie darlings (“Nickel Boys”), and sentimental favorites (“I’m Still There”).

Barring one particularly grating choice, it’s hard to find much fault with this year’s slate of contenders. However, for those who still regard the U.S.-centric Oscars as the ultimate arbiter of artistic greatness, it is disappointing that even with the expansion from five to 10 Best Picture slots, some of last year’s finest films — from “Challengers” and “The Beast”, to “A Real Pain” — fell down the pecking order and were left out of the running entirely. Ditto Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Denzel Washington, Daniel Craig, and Nicole Kidman all getting the shaft in the acting categories.

As we approach the film industry’s annual awards pageant on March 2, what once looked like a wide-open year with no clear front-runner is slowly shaping out to be a three-horse race between “Anora”, “Emilia Pérez”, and “The Brutalist”, with the latter emerging as a strong contender and set to sweep a bunch of major categories including Best Director and Best Actor. It’s hard to imagine Oscar voters passing up the opportunity to give Brady Corbet’s portentous post-war drama their biggest stamp of approval and pat themselves on the back for acknowledging a ‘serious movie’ tackling ‘serious issues’, but “Anora” gained some late momentum after taking home the top prize at the DGA Awards. It’s a game of inches, really, but we’re going to give it an honest shot anyway with this comprehensive ranking, from worst to best, of all ten of the nominees for Best Motion Picture of the Year. Don’t forget to tune in on Sunday, March 2 to find out who comes out on top.

10. Emilia Pérez

You know the awards season has truly kicked into high gear when a divisive rabble-rouser that made headlines for all the wrong reasons and kept failing forward at every major industry precursor including the Globes ends up shoehorning its way into the forefront of the Best Picture race (while becoming the de-facto villain of this year’s campaign trail).

Taking up the mantle from “Crash”, “Green Book”, “Don’t Look Up” and “Maestro”, that dubious honor now belongs to Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language musical about a drug kingpin (Karla Sofía Gascón) trying to dupe the Mexican cartel with the help of an ace city lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) by faking his own death, undergoing gender-affirming surgery, and turning a new leaf as a woman. Unsurprisingly, there’s been much online quibbling over the fact that a film that ostensibly celebrates Mexican culture was shot in France with zero Mexican-born actors by a French director, who back in January issued a public apology after facing immediate blowback for his tone-deaf handling of trans issues and depiction of Mexico.

Yet here we are. Despite the abysmal word of mouth, migraine-inducing songs, and Karla Sofía Gascón’s self-imploding campaign, Netflix’ buzzy contender has managed to hang around in the best picture conversation all year long. And judging by its whopping 13-Oscar nomination haul (more than double that of “Parasite”!), it still has a legitimate shot of going all the way. Gascón surely blew her chances to come out on top in a stacked lead actress line-up after a bunch of her old racist tweets resurfaced online, but bet on Saldaña to pick up the slack and prevail in the supporting slate after committing category fraud.

9. A Complete Unknown

Never underestimate the Academy’s natural tendency to acknowledge well-made yet surface-level biopics that fade from memory pretty much as soon as you’re done watching them. Dressing up and lip-syncing as a true-life pop icon is always a reliable shortcut to an Oscar nomination (just ask Rami Malek or Austin Butler). Due credit to Timothée Chalamet for putting in extra shifts during a blitzkrieg Oscar campaign that’s seen him perform Dylan songs on SNL, pop up on multiple famous podcasts, and even roll up to the red carpet of the film’s London premiere on a public e-bike.

Though more of a mumbling impersonation than a bona fide dramatic performance, Chalamet was pegged early on as an Oscar hopeful and was always poised to eke out a nod for plunging himself into the role of one of the most singular, influential, and enigmatic American artists of the 20th century. Less expected is the presence of two of his co-stars (Edward Norton and Monica Barbaro) in the acting line-ups, while James Mangold notching a best directing honor at the expense of Denis Villeneuve and Edward Berger had many of us scratching our heads.

Not that anybody should question the “Walk the Line” director’s credentials as a dependable old warhorse with a clean-cut style, but his creative decision to follow the prestige-biopic playbook to a tee without adding anything new to the table — c’mon, we all knew it was going to end with Dylan going electric at the ’65 Newport Folk Festival — maybe wasn’t the right call when reckoning with the legacy of a complicated genius who defied imitation and always marched to the beat of his own drum. I guess it looks and feels like Oscar material (derogatory), but “A Complete Unknown” doesn’t stack up against Todd Haynes’ treatment (“I’m Not There”) and lacks the narrative and staying power to go all the way.

8. Wicked

Just like clockwork, whenever awards season rolls around, countless thinkpieces sound off the alarm to remind us of the obvious: Oscar viewership is down. Shocking, right? Sure, you could chalk it up to the overall decline of live TV across the board, but the harsh truth is this: your average Joe will only tune in to the broadcast if their favorite movies — that is, big, popular moneymakers they’ve actually seen or at least heard of — head into the ceremony with a real shot at snatching up the big awards.

Bearing this crucial context in mind, what better way for the Academy to attract a large audience and boost ratings this year than to tap into the massive Gen Z fan base of “Wicked” by making room for John M. Chu’s hit musical adaptation in their ballots? Just to give you an idea of their dedication: Leading up to the nominations announcement, a legion of hardcore devotees were already sharpening their pitchforks and bracing for outrage over a potential Cynthia Erivo snub in the best actress race — especially after she walked away empty-handed from the Globes. Luckily for them (and the rest of us), their fears were put to rest as the titular witch of the west claimed her spot among the five finalists, pushing the film’s total nomination haul into double digits.

The first half of this two-part theater adaptation may feel like 14 hours long, but we’re glad Ariana Grande’s comedic chops didn’t go unnoticed (not that one of the biggest pop idols in the world needs the clout or anything). Still, this is the kind of lowbrow fare that’s happy just to be nominated and only has a fighting chance in below-the-line categories.

7. The Brutalist

If the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes taught us anything, it’s that there’s no excuse for replacing actual human artists with generative AI. But to steal others’ work to create architectural images and building designs for a movie about the plight of an impoverished Hungarian Jewish architect sticking to his vision while struggling to make ends meet under capitalism? Now that’s just lame.

After patting himself on the back for not selling out to corporate Hollywood while being showered in accolades and unanimously hyped up as the new poster boy for capital-C Cinema, Oscar-nominated director Brady Corbet owes all an apology after mailing it in by resorting to the plagiarism machine model known as Midjourney to avoid paying visual artists for their work. And while deserving of praise for embodying the tortured soul of the film as László Tóth, Adrien Brody is poised to set an alarming precedent when he inevitably walks off with a statue for a performance that, sadly, was revealed to be enhanced and modulated using AI tools in post-production to correct his lacking Hungarian accent.

All that aside, there’s a lot to appreciate about this bloated yet undeniably ambitious 215-minute awards magnet. Even if the story ends on a whimper, this is a well-acted, technically competent film with heady ideas about the immigrant experience and the folly of the American Dream. It’s also refreshing to come across a cocksure young talent eager to prove his worth and ready to take big swings (whether he has the screenwriting chops to back up his oversized ambition is another matter entirely). That every pull quote hails “The Brutalist” as the ‘next great American epic’ with every pundit name-dropping the likes of “There Will Be Blood” and “The Godfather: Part II” in their reviews frankly set expectations a bit too high for this one (shooting on 35mm VistaVision can only get you so far).

Corbet is no Paul Thomas Anderson, mind you, but his drama Globes winner has been utterly immune to controversies and hasn’t stopped racking up trophies from critics’ groups leading up to the Oscar ceremony, so there’s little reason to doubt it’ll replicate the success and clean up shop here as well.

6. I’m Still Here

There was no suspense over whether Fernanda Torres would scoop up a much-deserved actress nod after winning a Golden Globe in an unusually competitive field, but if any awards prognosticator tries to convince you they had this Brazilian sleeper hit in their best picture ballots going into January 23, they’re probably lying through their teeth.

Our heart belongs to “All We Imagine as Light” (Payal Kapadia, your moment will come), but all’s right with the world when the Academy didn’t pass up the opportunity to celebrate international cinema for the fourth year running — a welcomed trend that proves that diversifying the Academy membership was a much-needed move to improve its notorious poor track record with foreign-language movies that require voters to, as Bong Joon-ho might put it, overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles.

Walter Salles’ gut-punching dramatization of the search for a 1970s Brazilian engineer who vanished without a trace during the country’s military has an ace in the hole in Torres’ tour-de-force performance as a resilient woman hellbent on uncovering the truth behind his husband’s fate. But “I’m Still Here” was still generally thought a long shot for the Best Picture shortlist right until it blew every forecast out of the water to become the first-ever Brazilian production to break into the top category.  It won’t happen unless the heavyweight contenders cancel each other out by splitting the vote, but this scrappy underdog could become the new CODA and pull in ahead in the home stretch.

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, today we’re counting down the very best romantic movies — from beloved meet-cutes that feel as cozy as being wrapped up in a warm blanket to old-fashioned tearjerkers that will shatter your heart into a million pieces.

From the first awkward stirrings of attraction and the giddy thrills of a fleeting encounter to the crushing lows of a missed connection, the following list represents just the tip of the iceberg in more than a century’s worth of swoon-worthy love stories that have charmed audiences and made us sob uncontrollably. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find room for time-honored classics like “The Clock”, “The Apartment”, “Moonstruck”, “The Lady Eve”, “City Lights”, “An Affair to Remember”, “It Happened One Night”, or “Comrades: Almost a Love Story”, while many other tales of forbidden romance (“In the Mood for Love”, “The Age of Innocence”, “Brokeback Mountain”, “All That Heaven Allows”, and “Pride & Prejudice”) could just as easily have found their way on here and obviously deserve your attention as well.

Our lineup below, listed in chronological order, offers a collection of movies that will tug at your heartstrings and are well worth revisiting time and time again.

1. History is Made at Night (1937)

Forget Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in “Titanic” — If you’re looking for the ultimate Hollywood romantic melodrama set against the backdrop of a tragic maritime disaster involving an iceberg, do yourself a favor and add this unsung masterpiece by Frank Borzage to your streaming queue.

In this buried treasure from Hollywood’s golden age ripe for reappraisal and newly restored by Criterion, the always-reliable Jean Arthur is an understated powerhouse as a wealthy American socialite caught in a tangled web of misunderstandings and messy divorce battles and torn between her possessive ex-husband and a sophisticated Parisian head waiter (Charles Boyer).

Sure, “History is Made at Night” may be syrupy enough to give viewers a sugar rush on their first go-round. But dig a little deeper and you’ll see there’s also a bit of something for everyone to enjoy: heartfelt performances, razor-sharp dialogue, Sirkian melodrama, pointed social commentary, screwball hijinks, grand setpieces, and a showstopping finale that puts James Cameron’s $2 billion tentpole to shame. Just make sure to have a box of tissues nearby.

2. Casablanca (1942)

You likely don’t need a reminder that “Casablanca” is a pretty fantastic romantic film. However, after being chewed up incessantly, buried under critical acclaim, and spoofed across all media for 83 years now, it’s easy to forget that during production, nobody involved including director Michael Curtiz realized they were making one of the best tearjerkers of Hollywood’s golden age as well as one of the most enduring Best Picture winners of all time.

We all love to quote lines of the dialogue by heart — “Here’s looking at you, kid”, “We’ll always have Paris,” and “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” have all entered the cultural lexicon at this point. And while its underlying theme of personal sacrifice for the greater good in the face of unfathomable evil obviously continues to strike a chord, what truly keeps us coming back is the irresistible megawatt star pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman as Rick and Ilsa — a pair of doomed old flames helplessly swept aside by the tides of history who reconnect behind enemy lines in North Africa during WWII. Fellas, they don’t make ’em like they used to.

3. Brief Encounter (1945)

Swooning romantic yearning builds to a fever pitch in this gorgeously-shot, post-war tale of mismatched lovers concerning two ordinary people — a married doctor (Trevor Howard) and a suburban housewife (Celia Johnson) — who earnestly fall head over heels for one-another after meeting at a railway station.

When one thinks of the great David Lean, grand, sweeping period epics with thousands of extras, colossal budgets, and an even bigger runtime instinctively spring to mind — not so much a hushed, 86-minute weepie. But despite scaling things down and working on a considerably smaller canvas than usual, the “Lawrence of Arabia” British director is just as effective and stirs up an ocean of emotions by making every little line of dialogue, gesture, and subtle glance count — though it is the things that are ultimately left unsaid that haunt the viewer the most.

An octogenarian black-and-white stage adaptation that consists almost entirely of quiet, intimate conversations between two grown adults can be a hard sell to watch for Valentine’s Day. But if you’re looking for a title that will tug at your heartstrings and leave you and your special someone in a puddle of tears, “Brief Encounter” is just the ticket.

4. Roman Holiday (1953)

Even by standard rom-com standards, the palpable chemistry between Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck here is as good as it gets and virtually impossible to resist. The A-list Hollywood coupling crack and sizzle together and set the screen aflame in this breezy fairy tale directed by William Wyler about a runaway European princess, Ann, who escapes from her dreary royal duties during a diplomatic visit to Rome only to run into a streetwise American reporter, Joe Bradley.

Part Cinderella story, part Italian travelogue, you simply couldn’t ask for a finer tonic for the soul to whisk you away, lift your spirits, and put you in a good mood when you’re feeling down than watching these two mismatched love birds gleefully riding around on a Vespa scooter through the streets of the Eternal City, doing some sightseeing, touring the Colosseum, and even attending a dance on a boat. The outcome is never truly in question — early on, it’s clear Joe is too smitten with Ann to betray her trust for the sake of getting the big scoop — but the bittersweet ending hits you like a ton of bricks nonetheless.

5. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

At a critical juncture in time when the big-budget musicals Hollywood’s studio system was dishing out grew increasingly bloated and stale, all it took was the most hopelessly romantic director in all of France trying to get his honest-to-goodness homage to old MGM musicals off the ground to jolt new life into the genre and steer it back on course.

“My Fair Lady” may have taken home the Oscar, but of all 1964 musicals, time has been most kind to this one by Jacques Demy, a candy-colored and immaculately staged emotional rollercoaster that recounts the on-again, off-again relationship between bright-eyed teen shopgirl Geneviève (a radiant Catherine Deneuve in a star-making turn) and a local garage mechanic called Guy (Nino Castelnuovo).

The sparks fly but, alas, fate had other plans. Before long, Guy is unexpectedly called up for military service in the Algerian War, leaving the newly pregnant Geneviève in complete disarray. With no other choice, she gives in to his mother’s demands and ends up settling for a Parisian upper-class suitor instead. The musical numbers and dazzling choreography will take your breath away, and if watching these star-crossed lovers reunite years later at a desolate gas station doesn’t make you well up inside, you must have a heart of steel.

Even if the internet will try to convince you otherwise, cinema isn’t going anywhere. In fact, plenty of great movies are still being made today on a regular basis. That almost every top-grossing movie in 2024 happened to be based on an existing IP and catered to the lowest common denominator might lead one to believe that last year was a dud, or that Hollywood has (finally) run out of fresh ideas. And sure, there’s even some truth to the notion that general moviegoers seek nothing more than to slip back into old comforts.

But as is always the case, no matter how many disposable sequels, spin-offs, and reboots big studios pump out and force down our throats, there will always be a wealth of smaller gems that blow every forecast out of the water and nudge their way in the broader pop-cultural conversation.

Last year, out-of-nowhere newcomers that will be making even bigger noise in years to come (Coralie Fargeat, Aaron Schimberg, RaMell Ross, and Payal Kapadia) went toe to toe and shared the spotlight with elder statesmen with nothing left to prove (Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Mike Leigh, and Ridley Scott). It was an exceptional year for horror (“Longlegs”, “Trap”, “The First Omen”), everyone from Bob Dylan and Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump got the biopic treatment, while Brady Corbet took a swing at making the next great American epic — with the help of AI, that is. Of course, we couldn’t squeeze in every title worthy of your attention, but our roundup of 2024 movies should have something for everyone.

20. Evil Does Not Exist

After breaking into the mainstream and nabbing a best directing nom at the 2022 Oscars, “Drive My Car” director Ryusuke Hamaguchi kept the ball rolling and set the Biennale ablaze with this modest but conceptually bold cautionary tale about corporate greed and the disruptive effects of rural development.

The stakes are plain: The residents of a small, peaceful village in the outskirts of Tokyo including a widowed father (Hitoshi Omika) gather in a town hall meeting to mull over the pros and cons of accepting a lucrative offer by some big-shot developers to build a large glamping site nearby.

In the hands of a less thoughtful filmmaker, this could’ve easily turned out to be a one-note, paint-by-numbers eco-parable about upstanding, nature-loving townspeople holding their ground and scaring off a bunch of greedy corporate shills. But if you’ve seen Hamaguchi’s previous work, you know better than to expect conventional heroes and villains. Instead, the director paints a rather nuanced portrait of average people with different shades of grey trying to keep afloat with the cards they’ve been dealt.

19. Wicked

Trust me, at this point I’ve scanned through every valid point of criticism of Jon M. Chau’s $150 million Broadway play adaptation. It’s overlong. It’s so poorly lit it looks like a sitcom. It’s barely half a movie at best — or, at worst, a cynical, 160-minute commercial for the next installment. And let’s not even get started on the overeager built-in fan base whipping out their phones and taking pictures of the screen at public screenings as if they were at an Ariana Grande concert.

I get it. But the fact of the matter is that you don’t need to be a theater kid, know your Wizard of Oz lore back to front, or even like musicals at all to understand why “Wicked” — a prequel-slash-villain origin story starring Cynthia Erivo as the titular witch of the west — became a massive cultural juggernaut long before it stormed into theaters and rampaged through the box office with a $700 million global haul to show for it.

Sure, it’s an acquired taste and certainly not above criticism, but instead of harping on the flat visuals and getting unnecessarily worked up over fan antics, why not appreciate the dazzling choreography, catchy songs, and inspired use of practical sets instead? Why not give Ariana Grande her flowers for a change? Believe it or not, it would be a minor travesty if she doesn’t wind up getting her dues this awards season.

18. Drive-Away Dolls

Though we still hold out hope that the Coen brothers can patch things up and work side-by-side sooner rather than later, having both estranged siblings pumping out solo projects simultaneously is a pretty sweet consolation prize all things considered.

While Joel played it too straight for our taste with his sturdy, black-and-white Macbeth rendition, Ethan seems right at home working on a lighter register and trying to replicate the directing duo’s trademark slapstick humor and wry misdirection (“Raising Arizona” and “Burn After Reading” spring to mind) in his own solo venture. Geraldine Viswanathan and Margaret Qualley (thrice represented in the present list) crack and sizzle together as two lesbian twentysomethings who tear across the country in a rental car and inadvertently become embroiled in a shady political cover-up scheme involving a Florida senator and a misplaced briefcase.

Critics bashed it, audiences ignore it, and, frankly, not every gag lands. But as long as you take it for what it is — a knowingly trashy, honest-to-goodness B-movie romp that barely stretches past the 80-minute mark — there’s a little something for every kind of viewer to enjoy here.

17. Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

If like us, you’re a person of simple pleasures who gets a real kick out of watching dudes clashing fists, throwing punches, and beating each other to a pulp while doing crazy backflips or jumping off rooftops, do yourself a favor and keep this martial arts extravaganza on your radar.

Set in the 1980s and self-consciously styled after the classic actioners of yore where Jackie Chan, Biu Yen, and Sammo Hung learned their trade and helped turn Hong Kong cinema into a global powerhouse, Soi Cheang’s “Walled In” is like a turbo-charged rollercoaster ride that just keeps on going until your stomach jumps out of your throat.

The plot itself — a mainland immigrant gets sucked into the shadowy Hong Kong underworld and caught in the crosshairs of a brutal feud between rival triad bosses — is serviceable but nothing you haven’t seen a million times before. What makes this movie sing is its uniquely fascinating setting: Kowloon Walled City — a densely-populated, self-regulating no man’s-land of makeshift buildings and narrow alleyways infamous for its black-market trade and rampant gang violence that was torn down in 1993.

16. Look Back

Animation fans were eating good in 2024: This was the year of “The Wild Robot”, “Flow”, “The War of the Rohirrim”, “Inside Out 2”, and another Wallace & Gromit feature, among many other standouts. But by far the one that tugged at our heartstrings and made us bawl our eyes out the most was Kiyotaka Oshiyama’s 58-minute weeper, a fantastic little gem about two middle-school budding manga artists developing a close friendship and successful creative partnership.

The next time some meathead tells you that feeding a bunch of prompts into a generative AI tool entitles one to call themselves an artist, point them to this film so they can grasp the amount of effort, dedication, sleepless hours, sweat, and tears behind authentic creative work. Practically anyone who’s ever picked up a pencil, brush, instrument, or simply pursued their passion in any form to create meaningful art that’ll resonate with others will find “Look Back” deeply relatable. Be warned — this film will also shatter your heart into a million pieces and destroy you into a sobbing mess.

15. Kinds of Kindness

Though considerably more out-there than your average Oscar bait, all the hoopla and pearl-clutching about the spicy sex scenes in “Poor Things” doesn’t alter the fact that it was the most accessible and commercial Yorgos Lanthimos movie to date by a country mile. Especially given the Greek director’s newfound status as a perennial Oscar contender and festival circuit mainstay, you couldn’t really blame unsuspecting audiences for gleefully flocking to theaters to watch his latest on day one expecting to be greeted with yet another cult classic in the making. Well, so much for that.

This three-legged, New Orleans-set anthology piece starring Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley was written off by pundits, barely made a blip at the box office, and, in all likelihood, won’t be cleaning up shop and taking home a pile of awards come March. But if nothing else, watching a critical darling fresh off a 4-Oscar campaign roll the dice and go for broke to get a passion project as uncompromisingly weird as this out in the open is cause for celebration. It almost makes one believe we might even be on the cusp of a new ‘auteur era’ after all (Sweet Dreams, indeed…) That is to say, bring on “Bugonia”!

14. A Different Man

In 2024, audiences were treated with not one but two darkly comic cautionary tales about the perils of the pursuit of beauty. Much like Demi Moore’s character in “The Substance” (more on that title later), Sebastian Stan’s Edward is a failing actor who tries to get his professional career back on track by undergoing an experimental medical procedure that drastically transforms his appearance.

Edward’s desire to reinvent himself as a conventionally handsome guy seems validated at first, as he quickly lands on his feet as a real estate agent, secures a role in an off-Broadway play based on his own life, and begins dating the cute girl-next-door (Renate Reinsve). But writer-director Aaron Schimberg pulls a great bait and switch by introducing Adam Pearson’s Oswald — a man who also happens to be born with disfiguring neurofibromatosis, but who lives life to the fullest, refuses to let his condition define his sense of self-worth, and ultimately replaces Edward in the play. The implication is clear: Edward’s deep-rooted insecurity and need for external validation not only brings him greater misery but also cost him the role he was, in essence, born to play.

13. I Saw the TV Glow

Back in January, sophomore writer-director Jane Schoenbrun kicked things off in striking fashion and earned glowing praise at Sundance with this ’90s time capsule, an unsettling and deeply personal coming-of-age tale tracing the on-and-off relationship between two lonely misfits called Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) who bond over their shared obsession about late-night TV show called The Pink Opaque.

A dreamy, spellbinding cross between Twin Peaks, “Videodrome” and “Donnie Darko” updated for millennials, “I Saw the TV Glow” is very much a thinly-veiled allegory of body dysphoria, and the existential dread and creeping anxiety of being uncomfortable in your own skin.

But Schoenbrun also stirs up deeper truths by examining the way both queer and non-queer people collectively seek refuge in pop cultural artifacts; how fandoms can become so intertwined with our personalities that they define us; and how the content and fictional stories we consume can often feel more real and cuttingly truthful than the outside world.

12. Juror #2

In what shaped out to be one of the most unlikely underdog stories of last fall, this old-fashioned courtroom drama directed by Clint Eastwood, now 94, proved doubters wrong (including Warner Bros.’ infamous CEO and certified scumbag David Zaslav) when it became an improbable word-of-mouth hit on streaming after being unceremoniously pulled from theaters merely a week after its rollout.

Even if the studio made it near impossible to watch at the multiplex, anyone bemoaning the recent demise of adult-oriented, mid-budget popcorn entertainment owe it to themselves to check this slippery morality play starring Nicholas Hault as a small-town average Joe selected for jury duty who suddenly realizes he might be involved with the ongoing murder trial in more ways than one.

The kind of straightforward, meats-and-potatoes legal thriller that’s all but disappeared from Hollywood’s ecosystem as of late, “Juror #2” is destined to become essential cable-viewing fodder specifically made for your dad to watch and fall asleep to in a recliner on a Saturday afternoon.

11. La Chimera

He got the cover of Variety magazine, became a fashion icon after absolutely rocking those plaid tennis shorts in “Challengers”, and landed prominent roles in the upcoming Knives Out instalment and the next sci-fi blockbuster by Steven Spielberg. Now he’s tipped to be playing James Bond.

It’s still not too late to hop on the Josh O’Connor hype train, but if you’re still unsure what all the fuss is about, catch him at his most rugged best in Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s breakout hit to understand why Hollywood can’t get enough of this man. The former “The Crown” alumnus is an understated powerhouse as a crestfallen English archeologist reeling from a tough breakup and a brief prison stint. In order to turn a quick profit, he roams through 1980s Italy sniffing out and plundering ancient relics with his ragtag team of tomb raiders before selling the loot on the side.

“La Chimera” was a major left-field discovery and one of the buzziest premieres at the 2023 Cannes festival, but the film somehow didn’t head stateside until last spring, so technically speaking, we’re not breaking any rules here by including it in our ballots.

Ten years ago, Robert Eggers established himself as a master craftsman after hitting the ground running with his breakthrough feature debut, the seventeenth-century folktale starring Anya Taylor-Joy, “The Witch”. A proven hand at well-researched, immersive horror movies steeped in mythology and folklore that send chills down your spine, the American genre specialist returned to the scene last December to put a fresh spin on the bloodcurdling, centuries-old vampire tale of Nosferatu.

Based on the 1922 German Expressionist silent film by F.M. Murnau, Eggers’ long-gestating dream project stars Nicholas Hault, Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, and Bill Skarsgård and introduces the menacing Romanian Count Orlok to contemporary audiences. The film has earned solid reviews and has already raked up $138 million at the global box office.

A medieval epic (“The Knight”), an untitled western, and a Rasputin miniseries are all in the pipeline for Eggers. But in the meantime, to celebrate the return to theaters of a director who’s rapidly become his own brand name especially among Criterion collectors and A24-crazed cinephiles, we have rounded up every film, both feature and short length, directed by Robert Eggers to date, to see how “Nosferatu” stacks up against the rest.

7. Hansel and Gretel (2007)

In a conversation with The Guardian in 2022, Eggers minced no words while reflecting on this 27-minute short, based on the famous 1812 fairy tale by the brothers Grimm of the same name, describing it as “absolutely terrible”. He not only lamented the fact that it’s out in the world but explained how, on his way home from a screening in the Boston Underground Film Festival, he realized he had to do something better if he wanted to make it big in showbiz. Granted, the director certainly had a long way to go before coming into his own behind the camera, but to his credit, there’s a lot to be appreciated in his spin on “Hansel & Gretel”, as long as you take it for what it is: an experimental film shot on a shoestring budget by a then-unproven, twenty-something former stage director and production designer.

Shot in black-and-white in anachronistic silent form with intertitles, the 2007 adaptation provides a tissue sample of Eggers’ pet interests, sharp attention to detail and uncanny ability to get under the viewer’s skin. For the most part, it sticks to the well-trodden source material — putting us in the shoes of the titular siblings (Luke Allison and Isabella Pease) as they venture into the forest and fall in the hands of a sinister witch who plots to fatten them before gobbling them up.

You can sense that the young director wasn’t entirely confident yet, but if nothing else, his debut proved he wasn’t afraid of swinging for the fences and has always marched to the beat of his own drum.

6. Brothers (2013)

Originally intended as a proof of concept to be shown to studio producers Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen in hopes of securing funding and getting his feature-length debut (The Witch) greenlit, this 11-minute short film finds Eggers drawing from the deep well of religion and mythology once again to retell the biblical tale of Cain and Abel as we watch two siblings called Tom and Jake spending some time out in the woods of rural New Hampshire before things take a dark, unexpected turn.

Despite its limited runtime and barebones production value, “Brothers” marked a stride forward in Eggers’ craft that effectively showcases the director’s knack for foreboding mood, and ability to instill the viewer with a creeping sense of dread and sustained paranoia. Eggers worked closely with frequent collaborators DP Jarin Blaschke and editor Louise Ford to get the short off the ground, and credits the production as a formative experience that ultimately helped him proved to himself that he could indeed pull off “The Witch” shortly after (a film which features a similar aspect ratio, scary woods, starred children, and had naturalistic performances). You can check it out online at Vimeo.

5. The Tell-Tale Heart (2008)

If you’re intrigued and want to dip your toes into Eggers’ early-career work but can’t be bothered to track down and take the plunge on all three of his obscure shorts, we suggest you stick to this 2008 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short novel of the same name, about a young servant (Carrington Vilmont) murdering his bedridden elder employer in cold blood after becoming increasingly fed up with his monotonous job.

Clocking in at twenty-odd minutes and shot in an abandoned 19th-century New Hampshire manor throughout eight months of production, “The Tell-Tale Heart” marked the first collaboration between Eggers and DP Jarin Blaschke (who’d go on to shoot all four of his feature-length films from “The Witch” to “Nosferatu”). By all accounts, it stands as the first true sign that suggested they were on the path to become one of Hollywood’s most formidable creative duos.

Until recently, your only hope to see the whole thing for yourself was to lay hands on one of its extremely-rare DVD copies floating around on eBay, as it remained completely unavailable online until finally resurfacing in 2022 on the heels of “The Northman” theatrical release. Eggers’ sure-handed direction, unsettling use of puppetry and keen eye for period detail keeps you engaged from start to finish and easily outbalances the occasional dull stretches of the story.

When a billion-dollar blockbuster franchise is ten movies in (and counting), having some ups and downs is pretty much unavoidable. And movies set within J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth are no exception: First there were a number of divisive but oddly fascinating animated adaptations in the late-’70s and early ’80s. Then came Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings live-action movies, which we can all pretty much agree is the one trilogy to rule them all, the high-point for the franchise so far, and a huge financial gamble that paid off and changed big-budget filmmaking in ways we’re still dealing with 20 years later.

Sadly, Hollywood seemed to have learned all the wrong lessons from its unprecedented success, and the last of the goodwill the franchise might have enjoyed from its movie fanbase had been entirely burned up by the time the bloated Hobbit series fizzled out in 2014. Last year we had “The War of the Rohirrim”, an animated standalone movie set 183 years before Frodo Baggins came upon the One Ring.

To celebrate the return of the Middle-Earth on the big screen, we’re offering a comprehensive ranking, from worst to best, for every Tolkien big-screen adaptation to date (you can probably guess which film will end at the bottom of the barrel).

10. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

With a bit of distance now, it’s hard to revisit the Hobbit trilogy without wondering what exactly went wrong, and what might have been. Blame it on Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, and Fran Walsh, or the studio execs at Warner Bros. for milking the IP for every cent it’s worth, but the decision to split a relatively short children’s book into a trio of nine-figure-budgeted movies with a combined runtime of eight hours feels in retrospect like artistic malpractice.

Not only the nadir of Jackson’s superfluous trilogy but far and away the low point of Middle-Earth big screen adaptations, “The Battle of the Five Armies” indulges in all the wrong ways, needlessly stretching out its eponymous big action set piece (which originally occupies about three pages in Tolkien’s novel) for what feels like an eternity as we watch Bilbo Baggins, mad prince Thorin Oakenshield, and the rest of the dwarven gang make an heroic final stand at the gates of Erebor.

No amount of key-jangling fan service (hey look, remember how cool and awesome Legolas and Galadriel are?) and weightless computer-generated mayhem can capture even a fraction of the sense of epic scale and white-knuckle thrills of Helm’s Deep or Pelennor Fields (Dáin Ironfoot looks about as believable today than, say, Jar Jar Binks in “The Phantom Menace”), while the less that’s said about the shoe-horned Tauriel-Kili courtship, the better. In a different timeline though, who knows, we may be lining up to revisit Guillermo del Toro’s version along with the mainline trilogy in our annual marathon binge.

9. The Lord of the Rings (1978)

This is where it all began. A case could be made that this late-1970s cult item deserves to be slotted a couple spots higher strictly based on the fact that it was regarded as the definitive Lord of the Rings screen adaptation for well over 20 years until Peter Jackson came along. And one does feel tempted to cut visionary animator Ralph Bakshi some slack for taking the huge undertaking of translating Tolkien’s universe from page to screen with little blueprint to go on, limited resources, a tight schedule, and a notoriously troubled production saddled with untimely setbacks. But here’s the cold truth: The film is simply not that good.

An early pioneer in rotoscoping animation style, the 1978s “The Lord of the Rings” saw Bakshi push boundaries and experiment by fusing conventional hand-drawn backgrounds and characters with extended sequences of animation cels traced over live-action footage. The result of this costly and laborious process is unfortunately very wonky, unintentionally funny, and considerably less coherent than any of his future endeavors (“Fire and Ice”, “American Pop”). The film covers the first two thirds of the story and culminates in the siege of Helm’s Deep, setting up a sequel that was ultimately ditched by the studio (Led Zeppelin was originally tapped to compose the music and Mick Jagger asked to voice Frodo).

Forty-odd years later, Bakshi’s “Lord of the Rings” is a mixed bag overall, only partially redeemed by a uniquely-retro, uncanny visual style that is totally its own. If you’re a diehard completionist, it might be worth tracking down.

8. The Return of the King (1980)

Can we all just agree that the “Where There’s a Whip, There’s a Way” song slaps and move on? Full disclosure: This is probably the hardest call in our Tolkien movie ranking so far. All things considered, this is probably the least essential adaptation of the lot — a film that we cannot bring ourselves to hate, but one that frankly doesn’t really stand on its own.

Weirdly, this 1980 film by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin serves as an unofficial sequel to their earlier animated adaptation of “The Hobbit” (why they decided to skip straight to Return of the King without so much as a nod to Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 “Lord of the Rings” is anyone’s guess). This leaves the viewer pretty much to their own devices to fill in the gaps and keep up with the story as we watch Frodo and Sam recount their perilous journey to Mount Doom to Bilbo at Rivendell, while Gandalf fends off Sauron’s forces at Minas Tirith.

Not everything sticks together, and you have to take it for what it is — a 77-minute TV movie pretty much made for kids that condenses the saga’s grand finale while wasting a large chunk of its runtime on Sam’s rescue of Frodo at the Pass of Cirith Ungol (also, Legolas and Gimli are omitted entirely). Hot take: The visually striking animation style, quirky character designs, and gorgeous hand-drawn backgrounds have aged much better than Bakshi’s noble but failed rotoscoping experiment, the voice-acting cast is stacked (John Huston gives Ian McKellen a run for his money as Gandalf), and the story effectively captures the dark, brooding atmosphere of Tolkien’s text.

7. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

Let’s start off with the positives, shall we? A lot was riding on the much-awaited introduction of the fearsome titular dragon (last seen hoarding dwarven treasure inside the Lonely Mountain) for the middle installment in Jackson’s three-parter to succeed, and despite everything else, Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug more than lived up to expectations.

Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice acting is spot on and manages to sell what is, hands down, the most memorable scene in the entire Hobbit series. And as usual, Martin Freeman puts in a great shift as Bilbo, who continues to prove his worth to Thorin and company through the Mirkwood Forest, the elven halls of Thranduil, and the human town of Lake-wood while the heist crew inch closer to their destination — the abandoned dwarven stronghold of Elebor.

Still, you can pinpoint to this bloated, 161-minute middle chapter as the moment where the wheels really started to come off. Standalone scenes that were barely even mentioned in the novel such as Gandalf’s detective side quest at Dol Guldur — while awesome in a vacuum — end up breaking the narrative flow and ultimately make the whole thing a bit of a chore to get through. Oh, and the fact that “The Desolation of Smaug” ends on a massive cliffhanger just before Smaug actually desolates is certainly… a choice (I know, I know, the title technically refers to the Lonely Mountain, whatever, my point still stands).

6. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

Peter Jackson’s much-anticipated return to Middle-earth didn’t exactly turn out to be the cinematic slam-dunk that most fans had envisioned. Nevertheless, after an unbearable wait of almost 10 years since “Return of the King” graced theaters, most of us were glad to just go along for the ride if only to spend a little more time back in the Shire catching up with our dear old buddies Bilbo and Gandalf.

Expecting the same consistent level of visual and storytelling brilliance as the Rings trilogy certainly set fans up for disappointment. Sure enough, “An Unexpected Journey” felt like a massive letdown at the time and doesn’t hold a candle to any of its predecessors. But we’ll personally die on the hill that says there’s a solid fantasy adventure epic buried here somewhere.

On the credit side of the ledger, Martin Freeman isn’t half-bad in the lead role as Bilbo, an ordinary little Hobbit suddenly thrust into extraordinary circumstances after signing up for a treasure hunt alongside a bunch of gold-hungry dwarves. Throw in Sir Ian McKellen and Andy Serkis reprising their roles as Gandalf and Gollum, as well as the same composer-DOP combo behind LOTR (Howard Shore and Andrew Lesnie), and moviegoers had every reason to believe they were in for another masterpiece. So much for that.

There’s fun to have in the margins (the Riddles in the Dark scene and Gandalf’s speech in Rivendell are obvious standouts), but this may be the single most disappointing Tolkien adaptation so far given what came before and the sheer talent attached. Somehow, it all went downhill from here.

The problem with film critics constantly pushing towards canonization is that, regardless of which criteria one ends up using, any definitive list that tries to consolidate the “Greatest Movies of All Time’ represents only the tip of the iceberg in more than a century’s worth of deserving titles. So we’ll be the first to admit that the following collection of movies should be taken as being no more or less objective as, say, the latest Sight and Sound critics’ poll topped by Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”.

Of course, we’re ready to go to the mattresses for any of the titles listed in chronological order down below, but to shake things up a little, we decided to limit ourselves to just one film per director and actively try to honor as many genres, eras, and filmmaking styles as possible. Plenty of other five-star masterpieces we can’t find a single flaw with have been left off, but to make up for it we’ve included an extensive list of honorable mentions that could just as easily have found their way on here. Read on and let us know what we’ve missed in the comments.

1. 12 Angry Men (1957)

By far one of the most assured directing debuts and beloved courtroom dramas ever as well as a timeless case study in blocking and clockwork plotting, “12 Angry Men” is a stone-cold masterpiece that hasn’t aged one bit in the past sixty-odd years. The film barely stretches past the 90-minute mark, but then-first-time director Sidney Lumet still managed to lift the mask on the entire American justice system and expose bone-deep prejudices without an ounce of narrative fat.

As far as premises go, few are as straightforward and pared-back as this: The life of an 18-year-old Puerto Rican boy accused of stabbing his father lies in the balance as a dozen white male jurors gather inside a claustrophobic jury room at a New York courthouse on the hottest day of the year to talk things over and reach a verdict. As simmering tensions rise to a boil, Henry Fonda’s calm voice of reason challenges preconceived notions and implores his fellow jurors to reconsider their biases and thoroughly examine the facts before rushing into any conclusions.

Every performance hits its mark and every little scene and character interaction serves a thematic purpose and moves the plot and momentum forward (something that, unfortunately, can’t be said for its bloated 1997 remake). If you’re looking to introduce your partner or friend to classic Hollywood cinema, this is as good a starting point as any.

2. Harakiri (1962)

When it comes to Japanese samurai flicks, Akira Kurosawa is naturally the first name that springs to mind. And though you wouldn’t be wrong to point out that his influence undeniably looms over the entire subgenre, today we’re casting a wider net to make a bid for Masaki Kobayashi’s subversive and confrontational Edo-era period piece. Like the yang to Seven Samurai’s yin, where Kurosawa’s touchstone masterpiece glorified the moral codes of honor and heroic values in feudal Japan, “Harakiri” peels off the layers and debunks them with equal conviction and gusto.

There’s far more than meets the eye in this slippery cautionary tale about a penniless, masterless samurai (the legendary Tatsuya Nakadai) ruthlessly abandoned and left out to dry by his previous employer, who waltzes through his former lord’s castle unannounced with the intention to commit ritual suicide in the courtyard in front of all his loyal retainers. New information comes to light as the film bounces through time through flashbacks to reveal the full scope of the tragic downfall of an honest man chewed up, spit out, and ultimately betrayed by a corrupting system that thrives on betrayal and perpetuates injustice. So much for the venerable bushido code.

3. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

The enduring appeal of the science fiction genre is evident: At its best, these films thrill and inspire us and captivate our imagination with evocative visions of the distant future that reflect on modern-day issues and ask deep questions about the human condition.

Where are we headed? What is humanity’s place in the cosmos? More than a half a century after Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” came along and changed cinema forever, we’re still wrestling with these eternal questions. No disrespect to “Star Wars”, “Blade Runner”, or “Alien”, but we’ll go with Kubrick’s monolithic opus — which not only spans millennia but, against all odds, maps a coherent path through human evolution — as the measuring stick to which all subsequent space movies should be judged.

From the Dawn of Man and spaceship-docking scenes to the Star Gate sequence, despite huge advancements in CGI, it’s safe to say that no modern sci-fi offering has come even remotely close to replicating its sense of wonder or epic scale.

4. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Few film genres, if any, are as deeply rooted in American history, iconography, and filmmaking as the Western. Yet, it wasn’t until two Italian guys joined forces and spiced things up during the mid-1960s, that the genre soared to heights of visual and storytelling brilliance that have rarely been matched before or since.

From the Dollars trilogy to “Once Upon a Time in America”, every collaboration between Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone resulted in nothing less than a flat-out masterpiece. But for us, the pinnacle and central reference point for their creative marriage has to be this 1968 spaghetti western — a flawless, towering achievement that simply couldn’t exist without either one of them.

Few moments in cinema history can hold a candle to that unforgettable, stirring opening showdown at a deserted train station. It’s a self-contained directing masterclass in itself that hooks you up from the start and tells you all you need to know about the key players, including Charles Bronson’s enigmatic gunslinger Harmonica, with little to no dialogue lines. You’d think that the rest of the film couldn’t possibly live up to that 13-minute sustained adrenaline rush, and yet Leone keeps you locked in over the next two hours and change without hitting a single dull note. If movies ever get any better than this, please let us know.

5. Apocalypse Now (1979)

Francis Ford Coppola never turned in a movie that he could resist tinkering with down the road. Sure, it’s easy to understand the impulse to try to salvage flawed but interesting misfires like, say, “The Godfather: Part III” or “One from the Heart”. But it’s both funny and mildly infuriating to watch a revered titan of modern American cinema endlessly tampering with his closest brush with perfection, when there’s a solid argument to be made that the director hit the bullseye right out of the gate.

In all likelihood, we’ll never settle on a definitive go-to version of “Apocalypse Now”, Coppola’s surreal descent into the horrors of the Vietnam War starring Martin Sheen as a U.S. Army Captain journeying into the heart of the Cambodian jungle on the hunt for the rogue and megalomaniac Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). That said, the 1979 Palme d’Or-winning film is virtually flawless in any of its alternative iterations floating around out there (We’re partial to the theatrical cut, though the jury is still out on the French plantation segment which, at least in this writer’s opinion, does bring things to a halt rather abruptly).