A running list of films worth your time.
1977
Sorcerer (1977) is William Friedkin's hidden gem. While it's a remake of The Wages of Fear, that label doesn't do it justice. Four men from different backgrounds end up in a decaying South American oil town: a getaway driver, a French banker, a Palestinian militant, and a hitman. They all hide from pasts that catch up with them. When a well catches fire in the jungle, one man must drive two hundred miles of treacherous mountain roads with a truckload of unstable dynamite. The pay offers a way out, but most won't make it. Friedkin uses the first act to show how each man earned his spot in hell. By the time the trucks roll, you realize the drive isn't just about money. It's about men trying to escape fate in vehicles that could kill them at any moment. The film's climax features two forty-ton trucks crossing a rope bridge in a raging storm. They creep across a crumbling span over a boiling river, creating one of the most terrifying scenes ever filmed. There are no CGI tricks, only months of hardship that almost derailed the production. Tangerine Dream's electronic score transforms the jungle into something eerie and cosmic. The title reflects this; it's painted on a truck, but Friedkin uses it to symbolize fate itself, an evil sorcerer nobody can escape. The film is bleak and deliberate, pushing boundaries and ending with a cruel twist. Audiences in 1977 wanted Star Wars but got a grim existential tale instead. It flopped and marked the end of Friedkin's golden era. Time has proven them wrong.
2009
Enter the Void (2009) is Gaspar Noé's challenge to look away. The film's nerve lies in its camera work. We don't just watch Oscar, a young dealer in neon Tokyo. We see through his eyes, blinks and all. Then, twenty minutes in, he's shot dead. The film pulls its best trick: the camera keeps moving. It lifts off his corpse and turns into a spirit, floating over the city. It phases through walls and revisits his memories like a ghost that can't let go. This impossible motion is key. Drawing from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Noé shows a dead man's perspective. It follows one stubborn consciousness circling its wreckage: the grief, the drugs, and the sister he can't leave behind. This journey drifts toward something like rebirth. You don't follow a story; you experience a mind dissolving. Noé ensures you feel death from the inside, not just as a spectator.
2000
Sexy Beast might be the most beautiful film ever made about a man who just wants to be left alone. Every frame looks incredible. The baking Spanish sun, the impossibly blue pool, a boulder rolling down the hill in the first five minutes like a bad omen with a great cinematographer. Gal Dove did the impossible. He got out. Did his time, made his money, retired to a villa with the woman he loves and a tan he earned. He finished on top, which almost nobody in his trade ever does. Then Don Logan shows up. Ben Kingsley plays him as pure menace in a golf shirt, a psychopath who takes the word "no" as a personal insult, and one of the great screen villains because he never needs a weapon when he can just wear you down instead. That's the whole film. One man's small perfect paradise against a force of nature that wants him back in the muck. Gorgeous, tense, remarkable.
2007
George Clooney plays a law firm's janitor, the guy who mops up messes for men richer than he will ever be. It's a legal thriller, technically, but really it's about being middle-aged in corporate America and realizing you took your one shot and missed. The question the movie asks is what's left of a man after that, and the answer, delivered in a silent cab ride over the closing credits, is: maybe just enough.
1999
Ewan McGregor plays Nick Leeson, the trader who vaporized Barings Bank, a 233-year-old institution, from a desk in Singapore. The plot is simple: get cocky, dig a hole, lie about the hole, dig faster. Not a masterpiece, but a perfect little fable about the secret account where we all stash our losses, and what happens when the bill finally clears.
2008
I'm not going to tell you what happens. Kurt Kuenne set out to make a scrapbook film about his murdered best friend, Andrew Bagby, for the son Andrew never got to meet. Usually in these stories the man is the monster. Not this time. Andrew was, by every account, one of the good ones, and what happened to his family is the hardest thing a documentary has ever asked me to sit through. It will make you cry. Watch it anyway.
2000
Michael Douglas as a pot-smoking novelist seven years and two thousand pages into a book that refuses to end. The most honest movie about creative work I know, because it admits that most of the artistic life isn't inspiration, it's driving around Pittsburgh with a dead dog in your trunk while your editor asks how it's coming. Warm, shaggy, and criminally underseen.
2007
Jeff Nichols' first film, and within five minutes you know you're watching an auteur. Michael Shannon and his brothers (Son, Boy, and Kid, which is what their father bothered to name them) go to war with the second family their dad raised after he sobered up and became somebody else's good father. It's a movie about dads, mostly the craters they leave. Quiet, Southern, and it goes off exactly like its title.
2003
A documentary about Troy Duffy, the Boston bartender Harvey Weinstein handed a movie deal, a record deal, and half a bar, and who torched every bit of it through sheer ego. A man given too much who appreciated none of it. It plays like a Greek tragedy, not to sound like a hack, except the gods are Miramax and the fatal flaw is being insufferable. Beautiful, in its awful way.
