There’s nothing more annoying than someone gasping when you mention that you haven’t seen a particular film, as if not watching is akin to committing murder. That said, there are certain films everyone should watch at least once. Not because life should be one long piece of homework, but because good films – as in, – have the power to crack the mind wide open, or change the way you think about the world, and isn’t that what all of this is about, really?
Obviously everyone has a different opinion on what these films should be (for some it’s , for others it’s ), so consider the below list a subjective take from British . With that in mind, here are just 20 of the films that everyone should watch at least once in their lifetime.
Paris is Burning (1990)
Let’s kick the list off with a canonical text; the Jane Livingstone documentary which took the underground drag ball culture of the late 1980s in New York City and thrust it into the light. There’s so much to love about Paris is Burning – its observational style, the charm and eloquence of its subjects, the colourful ballroom sequences and its deft exploration of class, racial inequality, gender and the devastation of the AIDS crisis. The film was not without controversy, but its influence – and the influence of ballroom culture more generally – stretches so far and wide, from the way we speak to the art we consume, that watching a document of the time and place from whence it came is fundamental.
It’s worth making your way through the David Lynch canon if you haven’t already, but if there’s one I always return to, it’s (and , too, but that involves spending a whole afternoon in a sort of semi-dissociative viewing state). With its weird and feverish vision of Los Angeles, mind-bendingly surrealist storyline and stand-out performances from Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, there’s something about which just lodges itself inside your brain and stays there. So often I come for the sapphic overtones of this film and leave with a profound sense of wonder.
In The Mood For Love (2000)
My favourite Wong Kar-wai movie will always be 1995’s , but if we’re talking about films everyone should watch at least once, which we are, then the people’s favourite, In The Mood For Love, is a no-brainer. Bathed in a sumptuously rich palette of red, pink and orange, with cheongsam dresses that deserve their own separate deep dive (lore has it that 46 dresses were made for Maggie Cheung’s Mrs Chan), the visual influence of this film cannot be understated. Following two neighbours who find solace in one another during the breakdown of their own respective relationships, there’s much brooding passion to be found in this film, too.
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004)
Everyone should watch at least once, yes, but I also think that the film should be watched multiple times at different life stages. Once as a devastated teenager, when you believe that main characters Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) should have ended up together. And then after your first big break-up in your 20s, when you relate to the concept of wanting to scrub someone from memory while also finding it impossible to let go. And then again, as a wizened 30-something, when you realise, with a jolt, that everything is transient yet meaningful, and that there is no love without pain, and that erasing something or someone from your mind means very little when each experience etches itself onto the body. Anyway, a masterpiece!
If you’re not familiar with the films of Satyajit Ray – the Bengali polymath who won an honorary Oscar in 1992 for his unparalleled body of work – there are a number of places where you could begin. (Days and Nights in the Forest) is a knock-out, is beautiful, the films hilarious, and the movies thrilling. But I’d advise that you start with his first and best: , which loosely translates to “Song of the Road”, and is the first entry in Ray’s revered trilogy.
It centres on a little boy, the titular Apu (Subir Banerjee), who is growing up in a village in the eastern corner of India in the early 20th century, the youngest in a family that is struggling to stay afloat. With an incredible poeticism in its storytelling, swooning black-and-white cinematography and a goosebump-inducing classical score from sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, it is simply one of the most extraordinary pieces of work ever committed to film – compassionate, humanist and life-affirming. Follow it up with , which tracks the same family as they move to a city, and then which chronicles Apu’s marriage and later life. –
A miniature masterpiece, Céline Sciamma’s magical realist fable had me in floods of tears for its entire, just-over-an-hour-long runtime when I first saw it. But please don’t let that put you off: this study of an eight-year-old girl (Joséphine Sanz), grappling with the recent loss of her grandmother, who finds solace in a new friend (Gabrielle Sanz), will also fill your heart up to full capacity. It’s a strange and mysterious fever dream of a film, which keeps you guessing and then wallops you emotionally, breaking open the complicated, sometimes unspoken love between mothers and daughters. A small miracle of a movie to treasure forever. –
Parker Posey’s Mary begins dressed exactly as she lives: extravagant and impulsive. Hers is a wardrobe of vintage mini-dresses, structured tailoring (that could work in an office if she wasn’t allergic to the nine to five), and gloriously impractical accessories: blue satin opera gloves, a rainbow Todd Oldham purse, bitchy sunglasses. I think often about her layered Comme des Garçons tees, and the cropped leopard coat paired with red hot pants and tights to pick up falafel. More than being one of the best ’90s fashion films ever, Mary’s style contours her character arc. As she swaps the club for the library and begins to cobble together a more put-together life, clothes sharpen, but without ever eroding her eccentricities. In an era where our aesthetics are enslaved to the algorithm, reflects personal style less as costume, and more a way of ever-fabulously figuring out who you are. –
Saying that everyone should watch at least once is a bit like saying pizza tastes good or that Harry Styles was blessed in the genes department. That said, much like and (consider them honorary mentions), I actually avoided this film for a long time for that very reason. But it’s true, Quentin Tarantino’s second film has it all: career-high performances from Uma Thurman, John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson, exceptional costuming (how many times a week do you think someone enters a hair salon and asks for a “Mia Wallace”?) and arguably one of the tightest scripts ever committed to the screen. completely changed the landscape of film and there’s still nothing quite like it.
Easily one of the best documentaries of all time, follows the everyday lives of an upper-class mother and daughter, both named Edie Beale, who are the aunt and first cousin of former US first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Once high-society women with a fortune, the two Edies have since become impoverished and reclusive, spending their days in increasing isolation and squalor inside their crumbling, raccoon-infested 14-bedroom mansion in East Hampton, New York. Notable for its hands-off, non-judgemental style, and for the sheer eccentricity of its two leading ladies, is one of those films you watch once and think about forever.
(1999)
I remember interviewing Air, the electronic duo behind ’ famous soundtrack, way back in 2015, and they told me that, while composing the music, they had been suffering from a terrible fever. “I honestly feel like the fever went into the music,” said Air’s Jean-Benoit Dunckel. “My body was all hot and everything was happening really fast.” It’s one of my favourite titbits about Sofia Coppola’s hazy, dreamlike cult classic – which follows the five Lisbon sisters in a sleepy suburb in Michigan as they each succumb to the miseries of girlhood – because I feel like it perfectly captures the mesmeric experience of watching it. With its recognisable visual language – all laced nightgowns, milky hair and flushed cheeks – there’s a reason it’s still so oft-referenced.
There’s a particular, hard-to-pin-down, bittersweet melancholy that can come from remembering your childhood – a world of juice boxes, sun lotion, endless summers, the pop music of the era – and the people around you, but through adult eyes. In her astonishing directorial debut, Charlotte Wells somehow manages to capture this exact feeling. Following 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) and her 30-year-old father Calum (Paul Mescal) on an all-inclusive holiday to Turkey in the ’90s, is a story of memory, love, depression and the specific ache in your heart when you finally see a parent as just someone who was trying to do their best.
Following the extraordinary life and career of Alexander McQueen, Ian Bonhôte’s 2018 film is one of those documentaries that everyone ought to watch once. It’s more than your average streamer fare with a bunch of semi-relevant talking heads, instead taking a deep dive into how this lad from east London became one of the century’s most legendary designers. With a focus on his boundary-breaking fashion shows – watching them back is enough to make you gasp – with all the pressures and expectations that bringing them together entailed, offers a fascinating insight into the mind of a true visionary.
and might be John Waters’s most accessible films, and his most underrated (as I like to remind people after exactly 2.5 cocktails), but if you’re going to watch just one then make it his 1974 classic Female Trouble. Here’s the logline, if you needed convincing: a spoiled schoolgirl, played by drag icon Divine, flees home after her parents refuse to buy her some cha-cha heels (entirely reasonable). She then gets pregnant after being picked up hitchhiking and becomes a fashion model for a pair of beauticians who like to photograph women committing crimes. is part of Waters’s “trash trilogy”, which also includes (1972) and (1977), so it’s worth watching all three.
Divine may be infamous for his on-screen antics, but Loewe is exploring another side of the iconic actor and drag queen.
If you ever needed proof that you could make a mini masterpiece on a micro-budget then look no further than Sean Baker’s 2015 film , which was primarily shot on an iPhone 5. Taking place over the space of a single day, follows transgender sex worker Sin-Dee Rella, who’s just finished a 28-day jail sentence, as she tries to track down her boyfriend and pimp, Chester, who she’s heard has been cheating on her. Not only is it a feat in filmmaking, but it’s a heady, engrossing watch in its own right – you know how some films make you feel like you’re right inside them? Follow up with Baker’s and the Oscar-winning , respectively.
Barry Jenkins’s – which won Best Picture at the Oscars in 2017, as well as Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Mahershala Ali’s performance, from eight (!) nominations in total – is one of those films that only comes around once every decade or so. Told across three chapters in the life of a gay Black man growing up in Miami – with the character played by three different actors at different stages of his life – is a quietly devastating yet gorgeous coming-of-age tale about queer love, masculinity and the ways in which the two intertwine.
I and over whether to include Larry Clark’s as I’m aware that this list is fairly ’90s and Noughties heavy, but I do think that this is a film that everyone should watch – if you can stomach it. Known for its bleak and unflinching vision of teendom – as well as introducing us to a 19-year-old Chloë Sevigny, who was the then-girlfriend of 19-year-old screenwriter Harmony Korine – is one of those films that would most certainly not have been made today, but wound up being utterly influential regardless. One writer, Ben Detrick, described it best as “Lord of the Flies with skateboards, nitrous oxide and hip-hop”.
A good film should make you feel something, and watching will make you feel, variously: amused, enraged, heartbroken, and just plain moved by the power of small, everyday acts of human kindness. Filmmaker Ken Loach won the Palme d’Or for his tale of a middle-aged widower who, following a near fatal heart attack, is declared too sick to work by his doctor, but learns he is not sick enough to qualify for benefits. Between Daniel – played beautifully by stand-up comic Dave Johns – and his attempts to navigate a bureaucratic quagmire that seems designed specifically to thwart a pre-internet generation; and Katie (Hayley Squires), the struggling single mum he befriends along the way, it offers a devastating picture of the cruelty of a broken system. –
(1980)
A blindingly obvious choice, yes, but nobody should exit this mortal coil without having watched . The Stanley Kubrick horror classic has it all: a career-best performance from both Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall (may she rest in peace), the sort of insane art deco interiors that’ll have you saying “this looks like !” every time you enter a specific type of hotel, lines that reverberate around your mind daily (“all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”) and visually stunning scenes created by practical effects at every step of the way. is cinema with a capital C.
Bong Joon Ho’s black comedy-drama thriller – which, among its many accolades, became the first non-English film to win Best Picture at the Oscars, as well as the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or – is a story of a poor, working-class family who infiltrate the life and home of a wealthy family by pretending to be employees who don’t know each other. Equal parts unsettling, hilarious and at times unpredictable, is a masterful satire on the class divide. It’s worth diving into the rest of Joon Ho’s oeuvre, too, specifically: Memories of Murder (2003), (2006) (2009).
It was a toss-up between this and Alfred Hitchcock’s but this timeless Grace Kelly and James Stewart link-up just about pipped it to the post (it’d take years to trawl through the entire works of Hitchcock, who made almost 70 films and TV shows, but there’s no harm in revisiting the classics). Shot almost entirely within one room, and largely from the perspective of outside a window, follows a New York photojournalist (played by Stewart) who’s stuck in his apartment recovering from an injury. He spends a great deal of time watching his neighbours until, one day, he becomes convinced he’s witnessed a murder. Eery, gripping and utterly thrilling, is a prime example of why Hitchcock was crowned the master of suspense.
