Buddy FilmMidnight Cowboy (1969) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The only X-rated film ever to win Best Picture, and the X was self-inflicted by a nervous studio head who consulted a psychiatrist. Three million dollars, forty-five back,…
DramaHeaven's Gate (1980) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Cimino shot two hundred and twenty hours of film for forty-four million dollars, took three and a half million at the box office, and ended the era that…
DramaGone Girl (2014) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Gillian Flynn adapted her own novel and took a hammer to her own third act. Fincher shot it entirely in one small Missouri town for sixty-one million dollars,…
CrimeGodfather of Harlem (2019-2025) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A mafia series where you can state the protagonist's motivation in one sentence, which almost none of them manage. Bumpy Johnson wants his neighborhood back, and the…
DramaCarol (2015) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two women fall in love in 1952 and the film says almost none of it out loud. Todd Haynes shot it on Super 16 for under twelve million dollars…
CrimeCarlito's Way (1993) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. De Palma tells you Carlito dies in the first ninety seconds and then makes you hope for two and a half hours that he will not. Sean Penn…
ActionTombstone (1993) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The credited writer was fired a month into shooting, the credited director may not have directed it, and the result is the most quotable Western ever made. Val Kilmer…
ComedyThelma & Louise (1991) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Callie Khouri wrote it in six months as her first screenplay and took the Academy Award for it. Two women leave for a fishing weekend and never…
AdventureThe Time Machine (1960) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. George Pal made it for under a million dollars, won an Academy Award for a time-lapse effect built out of stop motion and melting wax, and kept…
Black ComedyParasite (2019) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A house built on a vertical axis, a family climbing it, and a genre change at the midpoint that almost no film survives. The first non-English winner of Best…
Cult ClassicA Clockwork Orange (1971) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Kubrick makes you enjoy a monster's company, then cures him, then asks whether the cure was worse. Withdrawn from Britain by its own director for nearly thirty…
DramaAtonement (2007) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A thirteen-year-old tells a lie and two lives end. The last ten minutes do not reveal a fact, they change what kind of object you have been watching.
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