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Curated category

Existentialist films

  • Blade RunnerBlade Runner arrived in theaters on the 25th of June, 1982, a date producer Alan Ladd Jr. chose deliberately because the 25th of the month had been his lucky…
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey2001: A Space Odyssey premiered on the 2nd of April 1968 at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., before an audience that included critics who were, in…
  • The Trial (1962 film)Orson Welles declared immediately after finishing the project that The Trial was the best film he had ever made. He began writing the screenplay in 1960 and…
  • Toy StoryToy Story arrived in theaters on the 22nd of November 1995, and nothing in cinema looked quite like it. For the first time, a feature film had been built…
  • A Clockwork Orange (film)A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 film that opens with a young man staring directly into the camera, a glass of milk-plus raised to his lips, and the audience…
  • Apocalypse NowApocalypse Now arrived in theaters on the 15th of August 1979, and it carried on its back over a million feet of film, a near-fatal heart attack, a typhoon…
  • Waking LifeWaking Life, Richard Linklater's 2001 animated film, opens with a boy floating upward from a driveway into the sky. It is the first signal that gravity here…
  • The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (film)In 1960, Isao Takahata prepared a potential adaptation of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter for Toei Animation. That project never came to fruition.
  • Taxi DriverTaxi Driver opens on a pair of eyes in a rearview mirror, catching the city through a fog of steam. The man behind those eyes is Travis Bickle, a Marine…
  • Synecdoche, New YorkCharlie Kaufman entered the director's chair in 2008 with a $20 million budget for his first feature film. Sony Pictures Classics had initially approached…
  • Ghost in the Shell (1995 film)Mamoru Oshii originally wanted to direct Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade after he finished Patlabor 2: The Movie in 1993. He proposed the project to Bandai Visual…
  • The Seventh SealA knight kneels on a grey rocky beach and looks up to find Death waiting for him. This is the opening of The Seventh Seal, a 1957 Swedish film written and…
  • Everything Everywhere All at OnceEvelyn Quan Wang stands in a laundromat in Simi Valley, California, staring at an IRS audit notice that threatens to destroy her family's life.
  • Pokémon: The First MoviePokémon: The First Movie opened on a Wednesday in November 1999, and so many children skipped school to see it that the day earned its own nickname: the…
  • Jacob's Ladder (1990 film)Bruce Joel Rubin woke from a dream in 1980 where he found himself trapped inside a New York City subway station. He wrote the script for Jacob's Ladder that…
  • Groundhog Day (film)Groundhog Day, the 1993 film directed by Harold Ramis, opens on a man who is wrong about the weather. Phil Connors, a Pittsburgh weatherman, confidently…
  • Barbie (film)The concept of a live-action Barbie film first emerged in the mid-1980s at Cannon Films, but nothing came to fruition. Renewed development began in September…
  • I Heart HuckabeesI Heart Huckabees arrived in cinemas on the 1st of October 2004, opening in limited release with just $292,177 at the box office and ranking 24th for the…
  • Mind Game (film)Mind Game arrived in Japanese cinemas in 2004 as the directorial debut of Masaaki Yuasa, a film that would go on to earn a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes…