You can go to the movies for a lot of different reasons. We want to be amused, have fun, laugh, and cry. Nicole Kidman says this before what seems like every movie she’s in: “We don’t just want to be entertained. Images that sparkled on a big silver screen. I can feel the sound.” Sure…
But movies are more than just pretty pictures and sad stories that make us feel good. They also have their own audiovisual language that makes them interesting on more than one level. Many movies, from big hits like “The Matrix” to “cult classics” like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” to “hidden gems” like “Delicatessen,” try to make people think. Here are some of the best, most thought-provoking, interesting, and difficult movies from all over the world.
A Serious Man
The Coen brothers always find surprising things to say, and in A Serious Man, they talk about what life is all about. The main character of the movie, Larry Gopnik, is played by Michael Stuhlbarg with a hangdog existentialist attitude. He has a lot of common but unsettling bad luck and tries to figure out why.
The movie raises a lot more questions than it answers, but like many of the other movies on this list, it gives us a few different ways to look at life’s mysteries before we decide that, if nothing else, it’s silly. Larry sometimes wonders if he’s like Job and is being tormented by God or the universe, but his problems, like getting divorced, having unhappy kids, and being stressed at work, never reach that level. In fact, Larry’s pain becomes so common that it starts to feel universal.
Being There
During the 1970s, Hal Ashby was one of America’s most interesting directors. His films Shampoo and Coming Home dealt with serious issues in a light and strange way that set him apart from the decade’s easy riders and raging bulls. Ashby’s book Being There is about a person named Martin Heidegger. The name of the movie comes from Heidegger’s idea of “Dasein,” which is usually translated as “Being” or even “Being there.” This idea tries to explain what it is like to be a human in the world.
Chance, played by Peter Sellers, is forced out into the world early on in the movie. We see how he reacts to the world around him, but we also learn a lot about the people around him from how they react to him. Sellers’s brilliant portrayal of a naive child discovering the world for the first time is one of the smartest and most subtle performances ever, and the same could be said of the movie itself, which is charming, fascinating, and ultimately mysterious.
Monty Python and the Meaning of Life
The Monty Python crew has always been a little bit philosophical, and this came out when they started making movies. Movies like “The Life of Brian” deal with deep philosophical questions in a way that is both funny and full of great insights. Alan Richardson, a philosopher, has said, “The main difference between, say, Martin Heidegger and Terry Jones is that Jones knows he is a comedian.”
For Richardson, Monty Python continues the tradition of analytical philosophy started by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. However, instead of despair, Monty Python makes fun of the world’s stubborn refusal to give logical, meaningful answers. The Meaning of Life by Monty Python, on the other hand, may be their most overtly philosophical work. It uses absurdist humour to talk about very big ideas.
My Dinner with Andre
My Dinner with Andre is probably one of the most famous “philosophical” movies ever made. It’s about a long conversation between two thoughtful characters that touches on many philosophical ideas. Director Louis Malle stays mostly out of the way and lets stage legends André Gregory and Wallace Shawn do their thing.
They do this so well that the movie stayed in theatres for more than a year, and Roger Ebert, a film critic, said that it was the first movie that came to mind when he was asked to name one without any clichés. My Dinner with Andre, which was a surprise hit and remains a cultural touchstone, shows how two people just sitting around and talking about big ideas can make a great movie.
Rashomon
The classic film by Akira Kurosawa from 1950 is still known as “The Rashomon Effect.” This is when two or more people remember the same event in different ways, and Kurosawa uses it to tell a scary crime story. But by the end of Rashomon, the truth isn’t so much hard to find out as it is hard to face.
At the end of the movie, the characters, who represent people in general, are shown to be actively hypocritical. They often lie to other people, but they also lie to themselves all the time to hide how selfish they really are. This part of the movie hasn’t been remembered as much as other parts, but it gives the movie’s message a darker tone than is usually said.
Stalker
Andrei Tarkovsky, a Soviet director, might be the most philosophically focused director of all time. His films, such as Solaris, Nostalgia, The Sacrifice, and The Mirror, go deep into some of life’s most difficult questions. The best of these is Stalker, in part because it calls into question the whole project of philosophy. Rotten Tomatoes says that it is the best science fiction movie ever made, so it must have worked.
The movie’s “stalker” leads people into a forbidden, lush area where they can find a room that gives them their deepest wish. Most people who take this offer, though, find that their deepest desire is also a nightmare. Tarkovsky’s point in the movie is that we might not know ourselves or want to know ourselves as much as we say we do.
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