There are a lot of reasons to go to the movies. We want to be entertained, amused, to laugh and cry. As Nicole Kidman says before seemingly every movie, we want to be “not just entertained, but somehow reborn together. Dazzling images on a huge silver screen. Sound that I can feel.” Sure…
But beyond the dazzling images and heartbreaks that somehow feel good, movies have a unique audiovisual language that allows them to engage us on more than one level. From blockbusters like The Matrix to cult classics like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and little seen gems like Delicatessen, a good number of films want to make their audience think. Below we’ve selected a few of the best, most thoughtful, interesting, and challenging films from around the world.
My Dinner with Andre
Probably one of the most famously “philosophical” movies ever made, My Dinner with Andre centers on a single long conversation between two thoughtful characters and touches on numerous philosophical ideas. Director Louis Malle essentially steps back and lets the performances from stage legends André Gregory and Wallace Shawn carry the film.
They accomplish this so well that the movie stayed in theaters for more than a year, with film critic Roger Ebert claiming that the film was the first that came to mind when he was asked to name one entirely devoid of clichés. A surprise hit that remains a cultural touchstone, My Dinner with Andre expertly demonstrates that a movie can be built around two people simply sitting around talking about big ideas.
Stalker
Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky might be the most philosophically-oriented filmmaker of all time, with movies like Solaris, Nostalgia, The Sacrifice, and The Mirror, among others, diving deep into the thorniest issues of existence. Stalker is the best of these, in part because it questions whole project of philosophy itself. It must have succeeded, because it’s listed as the greatest sci-fi film ever made according to Rotten Tomatoes.
The film’s titular “stalker” illegally guides people into a lush, forbidden zone where they will find a room that grants their heart’s truest desire. For almost everyone who accepts this offer, though, this truest desire is also something of a nightmare. The film is Tarkovsky’s argument that maybe we don’t actually know ourselves, or want to know ourselves, as much as we might claim.
Monty Python and the Meaning of Life
The Monty Python crew always had a bit of a philosophical bent, and when the troupe began making movies, this came to the for. Movies like The Life of Brian wrestle with weighty metaphysical questions with sparks of great insight coursing through the humor. As philosopher Alan Richardson has written: “the principal difference between, say, Terry Jones and Martin Heidegger, is that Jones is aware that he is a comedian.”
For Richardson, Monty Python carries on the tradition of analytical philosophy begun by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, but turning the world’s stubborn refusal to offer logical, meaningful answers into comedy rather than despair. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, though, may be their most explicitly philosophical, using absurdist humor to tackle very big ideas.
A Serious Man
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The Coen brothers consistently give voice to unexpected insights, and in A Serious Man, they take on the meaning of life. The movie’s protagonist, Larry Gopnik, played with hangdog existentialism by Michael Stuhlbarg, is presented with numerous common but unsettling misfortunes and goes in search of an explanation.
The movie delivers far more questions than answers, but like many of the films on this list, we get a number of possible approaches to understanding the mysteries of life before coming to the conclusion that it is, if nothing else, ridiculous. Larry wonders if he’s something of a Job figure, tormented by God or the universe, but his problems, divorce, unhappy children, stress at work, never quite rise to that level. Indeed, Larry’s suffering is eventually so common as to feel universal.
Rashomon
Akira Kurosawa’s classic film from 1950 still lends its name to ‘The Rashomon Effect,’ where two or more people will remember an event differently, and Kurosawa puts it to good use with a harrowing crime story. By the end of Rashomon, though, the truth is not so much unknowable as unfaceable.
The film’s characters, standing in for humanity in general, are revealed by the end to be actively hypocritical, often deceiving others but constantly deceiving themselves in order to obscure just how deeply selfish they truly are. This aspect of the film hasn’t made it down through posterity to the same extent, but it drenches the movie’s philosophy in more darkness than is usually noted.
Being There
Criterion
Hal Ashby was one of America’s most interesting directors throughout the 1970s, with movies like Shampoo and Coming Home tackling heady subjects with a lightness and strangeness that set him apart from the easy riders and raging bulls of the decade. In Being There, Ashby sets his sights on no less a figure than Martin Heidegger. The movie’s title refers to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, usually translated as “Being” or even, yes, “Being there,” which seeks to define the unique experience of being a human being in the world.
As Peter Sellers’ main character, Chance, is forced out into the world early in the movie, we see how he not only responds to the world around him, but also how the reactions of those around him reveal a tremendous amount about themselves. Sellers’ brilliant portrayal of a naive innocent encountering the world for the first time is one of the smartest, most subtle performances ever given, and the same could easily be said of the delightful, entrancing, and ultimately mysterious movie itself.
