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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 watched the rough cut of The Trial exactly once, in a darkened editing suite in Paris, and then declared it the best film he had ever made.
  • 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)The Tale of the Princess Kaguya arrived in Japanese cinemas on the 23rd of November 2013 as the most expensive Japanese film ever made, carrying a budget of…
  • 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)Ghost in the Shell, the 1995 Japanese animated film directed by Mamoru Oshii, opens not with an action sequence but with the slow assembly of a body.
  • 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 OnceEverything Everywhere All at Once was originally written for a man. The script's first version had a male lead, conceived specifically with Jackie Chan in…
  • 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)Jacob's Ladder is a 1990 psychological horror film starring Tim Robbins as Jacob Singer, an American infantryman whose experiences in Vietnam trigger bizarre…
  • 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…