- Ben Hur (1959)
A marble-plated revenge epic with the best chariot race ever shot. When the script didn’t manage to justify the lengths to which a man could go to to exact revenge on an old friend, Gore Vidal was quietly brought in to fix the story’s emotional dead zone, and he did it the only way that made sense: he told actor Stephen Boyd and director Wyler to play Messala’s hatred as the fury of a scorned lover. Charlton Heston stayed blissfully unaware, but Boyd commits so hard you can practically chart the emotional timeline. The reunion, the bitterness, the fixation. Suddenly every glare, every handshake, every betrayal lands with twice the heat. It’s camp, it’s colossal, and it’s somehow better when you know the secret.
- Accattone (1961)
You want to watch a Pasolini film but prefer the violence to be conceptual, born from forms of social organization and systems of thought. You’re the type of person to talk to strangers at the bar, but eventually regret it when the night turns too crummy. You enjoy films that lull you with a relatively flat aesthetic and seemingly floundering pacing, until the grime comes off the screen and you’re hooked. Accattone is for you.
- Office Space (1999)
A guy hates his job, gets hypnotized, the hypnotist dies mid-session, and suddenly he’s free from caring about anything. The movie works because it’s honest; everyone’s dreaming of just…stopping. It’s the rare comedy that understands your soul is allergic to corporate life. If you know Melville’s Bartleby this might feel like a lose adaptation, except in that it treats indifference as a lifestyle upgrade instead of a tragedy.
- Under the Silver Lake (2018)
One of the most slept-on movies of the 21st century, full stop. It’s a sun-bleached, noir treasure hunt that bounces from one bizarre L.A. nook to the next. Comics, cults, conspiracies, dog killers and more. It’s basically David Lynch but it doesn’t make you wanna kill yourself. It’s an experience that doesn’t punish you for liking movies; it just drags you down the rabbit hole. Something fun for the more dazed and apathetic.
- Something Wild (1986)
Jonathan Demme makes a rom-com, a road movie, and a thriller all at once. A much funner 500 Days of Summer made before everyone started dressing like they live inside an iPod commercial. It does the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl thing before it was even a thing and mocks it decades earlier. Somewhere between 500 days of Summer and Scott Pilgrim you got this subtle masterpiece with that dude from Dumb and Dumber.
Bonus: The Substance (2024)
A vicious, glossy blast of body horror pulling straight from Cronenberg’s playbook, a little Lynch and Carpenter for style and a few more that have been endlessly pointed out . It leans so hard on its lineage you start to wonder whether the genre is cursed with the same fate as the endlessly easter-eggy, self-referencial Superhero circle-jerk.
Bonus Bonus: Jodorowski’s Dune documentary
A documentary that doubles as a crash course in how cinema dreams get made and get blown up. It’s so wildly ambitious, so deliriously fun, and so influential in everything from Star Wars to Alien to half of modern sci-fi, that the movie feels less like a “what if” and more like a missing holy text. Smoke something and take a trip with a minor divinity.
