Epix, the MGM-owned premium channel that also offers its service through digital platforms and the standalone Epix Now, has been rebranded as MGM+ to better reflect its corporate owner’s library of films. While its original offerings are squarely set in the TV realm (though MGM+ also has its fair share of exclusive stand-up specials), the best movies on MGM+ are worth digging into if you find yourself having access—either through the $5.99/month app or as a more traditional cable add-on.
The amount of films are more analogous to Starz or Showtime than a massive streamer like Netflix or even the similarly studio-owned Paramount+. At my last count, MGM+ has a nice round 250 films available and of those films, most are of a higher quality than the high percentage of filler that you’d find on a gigantic streaming service. It has a robust selection of horror, action, and drama—not to mention a slew of Westerns and the Star Trek films. We’ve curated a list of the best of the best, updated every month.
Here are the 20 best movies on MGM+ right now:
1. Nickel Boys
Year: 2024
Director: RaMell Ross
Stars: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, Jimmie Fails, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor
Rating: R
The experimental style of Nickel Boys recalls the more adventurous side of NYFF, where international directors will often bring formally rigorous, ambitious, or challenging films to an appreciative audience: For the most part, director and cowriter RaMell Ross constructs his film version of Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed novel entirely in point-of-view shots.
First, we’re only privy to the first-person experiences of Elwood (Ethan Cole Sharp, then Ethan Herisse), a Black high school student in the Jim Crow-era Florida of the early ’60s. We see what Elwood sees, which means not much of his actual face or body, catching a glimpse of him as a faded image in a store window, where he gazes at a row of television sets – or, in one beautiful shot, his reflection in the metallic trim of an iron held by his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). Early in the film, Elwood, a strong student who qualifies to take classes at a local college, is wrongly accused of helping to steal a car. (He’s only just accepted a ride from a stranger.) The police send him to Nickel Academy, a reform school that Whitehead based on a real institution, trafficking in segregation and cruelty. Once there, Elwood, who earnestly believes he can work his way out of the system, befriends the more cynical Turner (Brandon Wilson), opening up a second avenue for POV shots. From there, the movie alternates between the two of them. Though they grow close, the two boys rarely get to share the frame – which makes one wonderful overhead-mirror shot, reproduced on the film’s poster, even more memorable.
Shot after shot, in fact, sticks in the mind; even when the movie technically breaks from the point-of-view approach, the effect still lingers. The occasional archival footage, by its nature and through the movie’s context, starts to feel like a POV shot, as if we’re sitting alongside whoever is watching or reading the material in question. Another seeming departure, where a fixed point of view continually shows an adult version of one character from just behind him, affixed to his body but outside of it, distinguishes those flash-forward scenes. Later, it’s revealed to make even more thematic sense than it originally seems. This might all sound very technical, and to some extent it is. But the discipline with which Ross adheres to his own rules belies what an intuitive, unrestrictive film he’s able to craft within and because of those constrictions. —Jesse Hassenger
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2. Fargo
Year: 1996
Director: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
Stars: Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi
Rating: R
In exploring the unsavory implications of “Minnesota nice,” the Coen Brothers created one of the most beloved, acclaimed and quotable films of all time. Fargo explores the tension that accompanies polite social norms and the quiet desperations they often mask, setting up one scene after another so awkward it’ll make your skin crawl. The emotional restraint displayed by such characters as Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) and Mike Yanagita (Steve Park) is a thin and disingenuous veil over yearnings for money or companionship, while their foil, obviously, is Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), who really is that nice and hardworking and downright normal. The Coens strike a careful balance between gentleness and a stark gruesomeness underneath a typical all-American veneer, making you appreciate the art behind postage stamps as deeply as they make you cringe at the sound of a wood chipper. —Allie Conti
3. Full Metal Jacket
Year: 1987
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Stars: Matthew Modine, Lee Ermey, Vincent D’Onofrio, Adam Baldwin
Rating: R
It’s a non-controversial opinion that Full Metal Jacket’s worth extends as far as its first half and declines from there as the film nosedives into conventionality. But the second chapter of Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam horror story is responsible for creating the conventions by which we’re able to judge the picture in retrospect, and even conventional material as delivered by an artist like Kubrick is worth watching: Full Metal Jacket’s back half is, all told, pleasingly gripping and dark, a naked portrait of how war changes people in contrast to how the military culture depicted in the front half changes people. Being subject to debasement on a routine basis will break a person’s mind in twain. Being forced to kill another human will collapse their soul. Really, there’s nothing about Full Metal Jacket that doesn’t work or get Kubrick’s point across, but there’s also no denying just how indelible its pre-war sequence is, in particular due to R. Lee Ermey’s immortal performance as the world’s most terrifying Gunnery Sergeant. —Andy Crump
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4. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Year: 1966
Director: Sergio Leone
Stars: Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Aldo Giuffrè, Antonio Casas, Rada Rassimov, Aldo Sambrell, Enzo Petito
Rating: R
Arguably the greatest of the Italian Westerns, but also one of the finest Westerns ever made. Leone’s penchant for turning the genre’s sacred themes and obsessions inside out goes full tilt here. Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef are back for this third Dollars movie, but the addition of Eli Wallach adds a significant amount of caustic humor and even more cynicism to the mix. Set during the Civil War, though in a dry, barren landscape resembling the surreal panels of a Krazy Kat cartoon more than historical reality, Leone’s epic is the sublime, gloriously cinematic creation that he was always gunning for. Composer Ennio Morricone’s score ties it all together, particularly in the orgasmic “Ecstasy of Gold” finale. The director may have gone even more baroque with his subsequent Once Upon a Time in the West, but this is still his greatest achievement. Pop culture and the genre were never the same. —D.H.
5. RoboCop
Year: 1987
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Stars: Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox
Rating: R
Throughout the late-1970s and indulgent ’80s, “industry” went pejorative and Corporate America bleached white all but the most functional of blue collars. Broadly speaking, of course: Manufacturing was booming, but the homegrown “Big Three” automobile companies in Detroit—facing astronomical gas prices via the growth of OPEC, as well as increasing foreign competition and the decentralization of their labor force—resorted to drastic cost-cutting measures, investing in automation (which of course put thousands of people out of work, closing a number of plants) and moving facilities to “low-wage” countries (further decimating all hope for a secure assembly line job in the area). The impact of such a massive tectonic shift in the very foundation of the auto industry pushed aftershocks felt, of course, throughout the Rust Belt and the Midwest—but for Detroit, whose essence seemed composed almost wholly of exhaust fumes, the change left the city in an ever-present state of decay. And so, though it was filmed in Pittsburgh and around Texas, Detroit is the only logical city for a Robocop to inhabit. A practically peerless, putrid, brash concoction of social consciousness, ultra-violence and existential curiosity, Paul Verhoeven’s first Hollywood feature made its tenor clear: A new industrial revolution must take place not within the ranks of the unions or inside board rooms, but within the self. By 1987, much of the city was already in complete disarray, the closing of Michigan Central Station—and the admission that Detroit was no longer a vital hub of commerce—barely a year away, but its role as poster child for the Downfall of Western Civilization had yet to gain any real traction. Verhoeven screamed this notion alive. He made Detroit’s decay tactile, visceral and immeasurably loud, limning it in ideas about the limits of human identity and the hilarity of consumer culture. As Verhoeven passed a Christ-like cyborg—a true melding of man and savior—through the crumbling post-apocalyptic fringes of a part of the world that once held so much prosperity and hope, he wasn’t pointing to the hellscape of future Detroit as the battlefield over which the working class will fight against the greedy 1%, but instead to the robot cop, to Murphy (Peter Weller), as the battlefield unto himself. How can any of us save a place like Detroit? In Robocop, it’s a deeply personal matter. —Dom Sinacola
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6. Challengers
Year: 2024
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Stars: Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist
Rating: R
There’s no need to know, or even enjoy, anything about the sport of tennis to find enjoyment in director Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. Still, tennis is inextricably knotted to its sensuous love triangle, which evolves over the course of 13 tumultuous years, climaxing with a match between two estranged players whose love story eclipses the more overt romance between the pair and Zendaya’s tennis prodigy, Tashi Duncan. But it is a story of desire, love, power and co-dependency between three gifted young athletes who all hold that nagging fear, even in their early 30s, that their best years are behind them. The only thing that can reinvigorate their lost sparks is base, animalistic competition, like that which fueled their chaotic threesome over a decade prior to the lowly Fire Town challenger tournament in New Rochelle, New York. We first meet Tashi and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), married and with a mostly neglected young daughter, after Tashi’s best tennis-playing days are behind her (due to a consequential leg injury) and Art is all but bereft of his mojo. In an effort to get his head back in the game and out of early retirement, Tashi enrolls him in a challenger: A small, U.S. Open qualifier that should be beneath an athlete whose face adorns ads the size of building facades. The goal is to have Art compete against players who are obviously below him in order to loosen him up and regain his confidence. The only problem is, it’s the same kind of minor sporting event that attracts a hard-up guy like Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). Thirteen years earlier, Patrick and Art were both just two young tennis studs who once jerked off together (what guys can’t say the same?), in love with the same beautiful woman. Thirteen years later, one of them got the girl, the other is cosplaying as poor, and the former two haven’t spoken to the latter in years. The film is just as dynamic as its stars. Rapid cuts give the film a cohesive, kinetic rhythm that keeps the story in a near-constant state of momentum, and none of the frames the camera cuts to are superfluous compositions. This is matched by the occasionally dizzying camerawork from Gudagnino’s Suspiria cinematographer (also Apichatpong Weerasethkul’s on Memoria) Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Challengers surprised me. It’s a grandiose, propulsive, erotic follow-up to the dull, Tumblr-core emo of Bones and All, and I found myself enthralled by Guadagnino’s latest, in which three of our hottest young actors convincingly, tantalizingly explore alternating dynamics of power and sexuality. Challengers isn’t really a film for tennis fans—it’s a film for fans of guys being a little gay for each other, and also fans of the kind of explosive yearning that’s even hotter than the sex scenes we all like to complain don’t exist anymore.–Brianna Zigler
7. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
Year: 1987
Director: John Hughes
Stars: Steve Martin, John Candy, William Windom, Michael McKean, Edie McLurg
Rating: R
Anyone who’s ever endured holiday traffic on their way home for Thanksgiving can relate to this John Hughes tale—although hopefully you’ve never had to endure the sheer number of transportation mishaps (not to mention some accidental spooning) Neal Page and Del Griffith go through. Planes, Trains and Automobiles pits a petulant Steve Martin (Neal) against the usually mirthful John Candy (Del) as they travel home for the holidays. Weather and time are stacked up against them, so they end up traveling together with some disastrous results. Of course, nothing goes according to plan as Thanksgiving gets closer and closer. —Bonnie Stiernberg and Pete Mercer
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8. 10 Cloverfield Lane
Year: 2016
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Stars: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman, John Gallagher Jr.
Rating: PG-13
At its core, 10 Cloverfield Lane effectively works as an extended, modern-day riff on a Twilight Zone episode, a program producer J.J. Abrams holds near and dear to his heart. That’s not to say the resulting film feels like a lo-fi TV installment inorganically pumped up for the big screen. Quite the contrary, despite its enclosed setting and limited speaking parts, the film is very much a cinematic experience, with director Dan Trachtenberg (in his feature film debut) milking each interaction and set piece for maximum impact. What’s more, the script—the screenwriting debut from Josh Campbell and Matthew Stuecken alongside Whiplash writer-director Damien Chazelle—understands that sometimes the best way to raise tension is to allow it be deflated by humor (several tense sequences end with a chuckle rather than a gasp) before ramping it back up again. This well-calculated back-and-forth makes the film consistently nail-biting, yet never in a way that feels repetitive. By the time the film reaches its dramatic final stretch, the narrative has successfully escalated to a point wherein the crazier elements fit right in with the more grounded ones. —Mark Rozeman
9. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Year: 2007
Director: Andrew Dominik
Stars: Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Shepard
Rating: R
Is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford an ode to the first of its two title subjects, or a dirge about the second? Is it a loyal and authentic screenshot of history, or a folk-style retelling of historical events? Maybe it’s all of these. It’s certainly more than the sum total of the answers to the questions it poses, but above all else it’s a movie that attained near-instantaneous iconic status on its release. The film’s great achievement is its ease. You get the sense that Andrew Dominik didn’t make this movie as much as it simply flowed out of him, an anecdotal recount of a legend brought to his end by the toxic punch of hero worship and betrayal. The Assassination of Jesse James affixes intimate narrative to wide scope, as befits the commodious quality of the Western genre, and sets about getting to the promise of its name in as leisurely a fashion as possible. We know what’s coming, but the film is in no hurry to get there, and when the trigger is pulled minutes before the credits roll, the shot rings all the louder for it. —Andy Crump
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10. Election
Year: 1999
Director: Alexander Payne
Stars: Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon, Chris Klein
Rating: R
Tom Perrotta writes novels that strip the veneer from polite and “civilized” mid-American suburban life to expose it as the Starbucks-ian jungle that it is: The most reptilian impulses of human nature can strike at any time to dismantle the weak ones in the pack, or to at least flirt with pure narcissistic and hedonistic behavior. In fact, two great films based on his work outline this thematic connection—in Todd Field’s Little Children, the sexual indiscretions of small town characters are narrated like an old school National Geographic documentary, and in Alexander Payne’s Election, the soundtrack blares with a screeching, angry tribal chant whenever a character feels slighted, preparing for an attack to socially destroy an enemy. Perrotta and Payne’s narrative covers a rift between a high school teacher, Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), who isn’t self-aware enough to realize how much of a selfish prick he really is, and a student, Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), the embodiment of blind and ruthless ambition, during the election to appoint the new student body president. Underneath this simple story rides a precise and nimble exploration about the lengths anyone might go to on the road to success to protect their fragile ego while stabbing many backs. Witherspoon’s now-iconic take on Tracy Flick is the embodiment of that person we’ve all encountered who will do and say literally anything to get ahead in life. However, Broderick’s seemingly caring and guiding teacher also succumbs to his own basest desires. Which one perishes, and which one comes out on top depends not on any preconceived cosmic hierarchy of good morals (or ethics—what’s the difference?), but on who can be the shrewdest and cleverest animal in the pack. —Oktay Ege Kozak
11. The Wolf of Wall Street
Year: 2013
Director: Martin Scorsese
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jon Favreau, Jean Dujardin, Jon Bernthal
Rating: R
The decade’s been both kind and not so kind to good ol’ Marty, ten years of bad takes questioning his credentials for directing Silence, for denying Marvel movies the honorific of “cinema,” for forcing audiences to showers en masse following screenings of The Wolf of Wall Street. And yet it’s impossible to keep him down; he’s immune to controversy and he thrives on lively debate, which is why, at 70 years old, his chronicle of the life, times and crimes of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio)—a stock broker and inveterate fraudster who bilked over 1,000 schlemiels, suckers and saps out of billions (and got off easy)—feels like something an artist half his age directed. The Wolf of Wall Street is a pissed off film. It’s also a horny, pervy, brutal, an impeccably made and fundamentally hideous film. At every passing image, Scorsese’s white-hot rage burns around the edges of the frame. The director has his own beefs and conflicts with his Christian faith, but here his presence is felt as a furious deity sitting in judgment on the fun Belfort has screwing over his clients, two-timing his first wife, jerking around his second wife and doing more blow in three hours than Scorsese himself did in the 1970s and ’80s. The easy knock to make against this movie is that it endorses the finance bro culture it navigates over the course of its running time, because at no point does Scorsese impose manufactured morality on what happens in front of us; instead he plays the hits as Belfort wrote them, showing the audience exactly what Belfort did while running his company, Stratton Oakmont, and while running around on his spouses. That the film ultimately ends with Belfort out on the prowl again is the ultimate indictment: Being rich allowed this man to get away with financial murder, because being rich, in the end, makes everything better. “Being rich makes everything better,” for some, is the movie’s embraced philosophy, but The Wolf of Wall Street doesn’t appreciate displays of wealth unhinged. It reviles them. Scorsese puts energy into the film, a spring in its every greedy step; one could call such debauchery without consequences a “good time.” But The Wolf of Wall Street doesn’t care about that kind of time as much as it cares about hanging Belfort out to dry. —Andy Crump
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12. Clue
Year: 1985
Director: Jonathan Lynn
Stars: Eileen Brennan, Martin Mull, Lesley Ann Warren, Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Colleen Camp, Lee Ving, Bill Henderson, Howard Hesseman, Jane Wiedlin
Rating: PG
Clue is the definition of a cult classic: critics dismissed it, it stiffed at the box office, and during its brief stay in the theater it was known more for its multiple endings gimmick than its stellar cast or clever script. (Yep, those three endings you grew up watching on DVD and streaming were all released independently in theaters; the town I grew up in had exactly three first run theaters, and each one showed a different version of Clue at the exact same time.) It quickly grew a devoted fanbase once it hit VHS and cable TV, though, and not just because you could actually see every ending in a single sitting and not have to buy three movie tickets. Clue has one of the greatest casts ever assembled for a comedy, with each member pulling their own weight and then some. The chops of absolute pros like Brennan, Mull, McKean, and the rest more than compensate for what is actually a fairly thin script, with Kahn’s much-memed “flames” line reading still standing as one of the funniest scenes in movie history. Even though it wasn’t a hit, it remains a beloved classic comedy, and was a direct influence on Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies. —Garrett Martin
13. Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One
Year: 2023
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Stars: Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Hayley Atwell, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Cary Elwes
Rating: PG-13
A scene in Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One defines all Tom Cruise is and will ever be, arguably charting—in the language of death-defying action and in the voice of Hollywood A-lister beatitudes—the whole arc of contemporary blockbuster franchise filmmaking. Recovering with his team of Impossible Mission Force (IMF) agents following one of the worst catastrophes they’ve yet faced, Ethan Hunt (Cruise, asexual and totemic) admits to a new team member that, while he can’t guarantee he will keep them safe, he can guarantee that he’ll care more about their lives than his own. Not expecting such unmitigated humanity in the midst of such potential worldwide cataclysm, the new agent stares through welling tears. “But you don’t know me,” they say. “Does it matter?” Tom Cruise and Ethan Hunt both respond. Whether Cruise is capable of making a film that doesn’t reckon with his legacy? That’s not this one’s job. Helmed by director Christopher McQuarrie on his third go at M:I, Dead Reckoning Part One reaches back 28 years to the first film, not only bringing back Kittridge (Henry Czerny) as the head of the IMF, appointed apparently after Director Hunley’s (Alec Baldwin, ejected from the franchise with impeccable timing) murder in Fallout, but culling reverently from De Palma’s penchant for paranoid close-ups and canted angles, for long-held shots obsessed with the creased faces of defiantly sweaty men, studying their buttery eyes for omens. Dead Reckoning Part One’s plot, as convoluted as the best in the franchise, comes together stupendously. Every facet, from sound and set design to Cruise’s sheer athleticism to how McQuarrie knows exactly where to place the camera to embrace that athleticism, coalesces into a very real, often breathtaking sense of peril that’s mostly absent from every other IP that’s lasted this long. Cruise is showing us what kind of death it takes to achieve the immortality cinema promises.—Dom Sinacola
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14. The Abyss
Year: 1989
Director: James Cameron
Stars: Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Michael Biehn
Rating: PG-13
Waaaayyyy back in 1989, before disappearing beneath the waves with Titanic and Ghosts of the Abyss, James Cameron was torturing his cast and crew with the infamously punishing shoot of this nail-biter sci-fi thriller involving the deep sea exploration of an unidentified sub. Though generally remembered as “lesser Cameron,”—mainly due to a deus ex machina ending—The Abyss nevertheless rivets viewers with genuine tension throughout. (Claustrophobics, in particular, might want to give this one a wide berth.) Ed Harris is phenomenal as the foreman of a deep sea drilling rig in way over his head (sorry), and Cameron regular Michael Biehn gets to play the heavy this time. Of course, this being a Cameron project, the SFX were well ahead of its time, and still impress to this day. —Scott Wold
15. The Naked Gun
Year: 2025
Director: Akiva Schaffer
Stars: Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser, Kevin Durand, Danny Huston
Rating: PG-13
The Naked Gun, a sequel/remake/revival of the film series, returns to the basics of the series. Liam Neeson, taking the role of Frank Drebin Jr., may mug ever so lightly in the film’s more outlandish situations, and you can catch him turning to the camera once, maybe twice. But while delivering some of the silliest jokes possible, he maintains what Nielsen had in Airplane! and Police Squad! and in the best moments of the Naked Gun movies: a stone face of absolute seriousness. He’s earned it, throughout his storied career of commanding dramatic performances, commanding supporting performances as the hero’s mentor, and pulp thrillers where he literally commands people to return his daughter or wife or what-have-you, or else. —Jesse Hassenger
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16. The Birdcage
Year: 1996
Director: Mike Nichols
Stars: Robin Williams, Gene Hackman, Nathan Lane
Rating: R
You know what’s awkward? When you’re a middle-aged gay Jewish South Beach drag club owner (Armand, played by Robin Williams) and your straight son shows up and asks for your blessing to marry his girlfriend who is the daughter of a Neocon senator (Gene Hackman) who heads something called “The Coalition for Moral Order.” You want to support your kid, but you don’t love being closeted by him, and the dinner meet-up ends up meaning you and your partner, Albert (Nathan Lane), are forced into a whole new level of drag in which you are straight, a cultural attaché to Greece, and married to the one-night stand straight-sexperiment (Katherine, played by Christine Baranski) that led to the conception of your son. Your partner’s offended, the Senator’s being investigated by the tabloids, tensions are running high and your houseboy Agador (Hank Azaria) has agreed to transform into a Greek butler named “Spartacus,” but let’s face it, tensions are running high on all sides-and that’s before your baby-mama gets caught in traffic and Albert sees the opportunity for the drag role of a lifetime. Fully Shakespearean hijinks ensue. The 1996 Mike Nichols remake of Edouard Molinaro’s La Cage Aux Folles was not really blistering social commentary, but beneath its glib feel-good star-vehicle exterior there are some depths you could easily miss while you’re distracted by the batshit-crazy and heavily sequined antics of Williams and Lane. It’s actually not only rambunctious and witty but, as with many of Robin Williams’ film roles, The Birdcage has a serious streak where a genuine investigation of personal identity is underway, and hypocrisy, acceptance, snobbery, and most of all, everyone’s individual style of “drag” (and hey, we all have one, even if we don’t always express it by putting on fake lashes and singing Sondheim) gets taken out for a much-needed exam. —Amy Glynn
17. Event Horizon
Year: 1997
Director: Paul W. S. Anderson
Stars: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson
Rating: R
It’s weird to think that Paul W.S. Anderson, the auteur of shitty, big-budget videogame adaptations (not to mention 2011’s The Three Musketeers) was also the director of one of the more imaginative sci-fi horror films of the ’90s, but it’s true. Event Horizon follows a rescue crew boarding a derelict experimental ship that they learn has traveled between dimensions–and suffice to say, it hasn’t been to friendly places. The evil presence on the ship then tests all the crew members with disturbing visions of the beyond, succeeding in possessing the ship’s designer, played by Sam Neill. This gives you the best, craziest aspect of the film; a Sam Neill villain who has gouged his own eyes out, melodramatically lecturing members of the crew about how he’s going to take them all back to the hell dimension straight out of H.P. Lovecraft’s darkest nightmares. Neill is seriously way over-the-top in this one, and it’s simultaneously funny and scary and gross as hell, while seemingly being a clear inspiration on future videogame franchises such as Dead Space. —Jim Vorel
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18. Night of the Living Dead
Year: 1968
Director: George A. Romero
Stars: Judith O’Dea, Duane Jones, Marilyn Eastman, Karl Hardman, Judith Ridley, Keith Wayne
Rating: NR
What more can be said of Night of the Living Dead? It’s pretty obviously the most important zombie film ever made, and hugely influential as an independent film as well. George Romero’s cheap but momentous movie was a quantum leap forward in what the word “zombie” meant in pop culture, despite the fact that the word “zombie” is never actually uttered in it. More importantly, it established all of the genre rules: Zombies are reanimated corpses. Zombies are compelled to eat the flesh of the living. Zombies are unthinking, tireless and impervious to injury. The only way to kill a zombie is to destroy the brain. Those rules essentially categorize every single zombie movie from here on out—either the film features “Romero-style zombies,” or it tweaks with the formula and is ultimately noted for how it differs from the Romero standard. It’s essentially the horror equivalent of what Tolkien did for the idea of high fantasy “races.” After The Lord of the Rings, it became nearly impossible to write contrarian concepts of what elves, dwarves or orcs might be like. Romero’s impact on zombies is of that exact same caliber. There hasn’t been a zombie movie made in the last 50-plus years that hasn’t been influenced by it in some way, and you can barely hold a conversation on anything zombie-related if you haven’t seen it—so go out and watch it, if you haven’t. The film still holds up well, especially in its moody cinematography and stark, black-and-white images of zombie arms reaching through the windows of a rural farmhouse. Oh, and by the way—NOTLD is public domain, so don’t get tricked into buying it on a shoddy DVD. —Jim Vorel
19. Everybody Wants Some
Year: 2016
Director: Richard Linklater
Stars: Will Brittain, Zoey Deutch, Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin, Blake Jenner, J. Quinton Johnson, Glen Powell, Wyatt Russell
Rating: R
Everybody Wants Some!! is intended to play like a spiritual companion piece to Linklater’s ’70s-era Dazed and Confused, with the writer/director reveling in his turn-of-the-decade’s style and swagger. Big lapels, bigger hair, even bigger facial hair and outright enormous egos are the norm throughout this nostalgic saga. Boasting little in the way of plot, Linklater’s film is content to sidle up alongside Jake and his new friends to see where their appetites, whims and libidos will lead. And its laid-back vibe pays dividends as it progresses, given that one-note characters who initially appeared to be smug louts, hyper-gonzo wild cards, dim-bulb doofuses or inane hillbillies slowly develop semi-distinct personalities of their own. Their days devoted to slacking off, their nights spent trimming mustaches and dousing themselves in cologne before hitting the town in search of the next woman to bed, Linklater’s play-hard-and-party-harder characters are the embodiment of cocksure macho vitality, all of them rightly convinced that, at least for the moment, they have the world by the balls. But there’s also some requisite baseball team-based hazing thrown in for good measure, which feels like an authentic representation of what dudes like this would be up to—and, consequently, serves as a buzzkill reminder of their fundamentally dude-bro nature. —Nick Schager
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20. Novocaine
Year: 2025
Directors: Dan Berk, Robert Olsen
Stars: Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, Ray Nicholson, Betty Gabriel, Matt Walsh, Jacob Batalon
Rating: R
Novocaine starts with a premise that is Crank-like in its absurdity, deepens it with feeling, and then rams full speed ahead through a litany of stupidities. A common message-board-level complaint about a movie is that it “doesn’t know what it wants to be.” Here’s a helpful correction: Most movies, even bad ones, know. What Novocaine seems less sure of is why it wants to be. To sell a high-concept screenplay, probably. You can see why someone would buy it. Nathan Cain (Jack Quaid) has a rare genetic condition that doesn’t allow his body to feel any pain, nor sensations of heat, nor cold. This leaves him both resilient and fragile. A fist, knife, or bullet might not faze him, but could still kill him; our bodies have pain receptors for a reason, and Nathan’s body is incapable of receiving crucial warning signs. Once given an approximate life expectancy of 25, he has surpassed it through learned vigilance: He only consumes drinkable foods, because he has been warned that he could accidentally bite off his own tongue, and he must set a three-hour timer reminding him to use the bathroom, lest he strain his bladder without realizing it. —Jesse Hassenger
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