5 Awesome Movie's
"For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake." - Alfred Hitchcock
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The Awesome Movie List
It’s 2012. I’m standing in a line that wraps around the side of a movie theater, the feeling around the crowd is electric. The guys I’m with, I wouldn’t call them my close friends, more like companions I go to school with, who occupy the same general orbit, fellow nerds. The line is long. We’ve been in it for a while. We’re going to see The Avengers.
This was before assigned seating. Before you could open an app three weeks in advance and reserve your exact spot, your preferred distance from the screen, your aisle preference, a buffer seat from strangers. Back then, when a movie was big enough, you showed up and you waited, and when those theater doors finally opened, something almost primal happened. People moved. Not violently, but with intention. There was a controlled urgency to it, a low-grade current running through a crowd of people who all wanted the same thing and had earned it through the ancient ritual of standing in a line.
I remember finding seats. I remember the theater filling up fast, the crowd settling into a collective exhale. I remember the lights going down.
And then for the next two-plus hours, I wasn’t in a movie theater in 2012. I was somewhere else entirely.
After that, I had my license. And for a few years, the Marvel films, the sequels everyone pretended to be too cool to care about while secretly caring deeply, were a part of my schedule. Opening night with my brother. Not every movie was great. Some of them were mediocre, some outright trash. But here’s what I’ve come to understand: a mediocre movie watched on opening night in a packed theater with your brother is not a mediocre experience. The movie is almost beside the point. Those nights were about something else. They were about being a teenager and having somewhere to be and someone to go with and a shared language of characters and storylines and post-credits scenes that meant something to both of you. Honestly the memories of talking about the bad movies are as good as reminiscing the good ones.
But here’s what I actually want to talk about.
The only experience better than watching a good movie in a packed, electric theater is watching a great movie in any setting at all. Great films do something that no other medium has fully cracked. They transport you. For two hours, sometimes more, your eyes and your brain enter into a kind of agreement with the screen, a willing surrender, and you go somewhere else. You are no longer where you were. The best ones leave a residue. You carry them out of the theater and they don’t fully leave you.
There are a lot of ways a film can be great. I don’t need to define that.
But there is a specific kind of greatness I want to make a case for today. A kind that doesn’t always get its proper intellectual due. And that is the great movie that is also, by any honest measure, awesome.
Let me be precise about what I mean.
Schindler’s List is one of the greatest films ever made. So is Rear Window, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Apartment, When Harry Met Sally. I have nothing bad to say about any of them. I’ve been moved by all of them in ways I could spend paragraphs explaining. But - and I mean this with complete sincerity, they are not awesome. They do not produce the specific sensation I am trying to describe. They don’t make you want to stand up from the couch.
I am twenty-nine years old. I say this not as a disclaimer but as relevant data. My calibration for awesome was formed by specific films at specific ages, sitting in specific seats, and refined over years of watching awesomeness.
Awesome is not spectacle for spectacle’s sake. Plenty of big movies are loud and expensive and completely inert. Awesome is something more specific. It’s a movie that builds. That earns its moments. That has set pieces so well constructed, so perfectly placed in the architecture of the story, that when they arrive, when the thing you’ve been waiting for finally happens, the hair on your arms stands up and you feel it somewhere behind your sternum.
Awesome is walking out of a theater unable to fully form sentences for thirty seconds.
Awesome is watching something alone at midnight and sitting up at the end and saying out loud, “Hell Yeah” to yourself.
Awesome is a feeling I genuinely believe is one of the best things this form of art can produce. And I don’t think we talk about it seriously enough.
Here are five movies that, in my estimation, belong to this category:
1. Heat (1995) — Michael Mann
There is a version of cool that exists in film that has never been fully replicated, only approached. Heat is the original. Michael Mann made a movie in 1995 that understood something about dudes, about crime, Los Angeles at night, the cost of the life you choose and then dressed all of that understanding into one of the most aesthetically immaculate packages cinema has ever produced. Characters who move through spaces like they’ve already accounted for every exit. And then there’s the coffee shop scene, Pacino and De Niro across a table from each other and it’s not loud, it just hums with the weight of two men who understand each other completely and are still going to try to destroy each other. Heat doesn’t chase cool. It simply is it. Every crime film made after 1995 is, to some degree, reaching for something Heat already had.
2. The Dark Knight (2008) — Christopher Nolan
The ending of The Dark Knight is one of the great closing sequences in modern cinema. Commissioner Gordon stands over his son and delivers the narration, “Because he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him. Because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector, a Dark Knight” and the camera finds Batman on the Batpod, accelerating into the dark, becoming something smaller and then gone. It’s a superhero movie explaining why its hero has to become a fugitive. Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker is its own separate conversation, an irreplaceable performance. Also, Nolan was heavily inspired by Heat, which is clear because it’s awesome.
3. Dune: Part Two (2024) — Denis Villeneuve
There is a moment in Dune: Part Two where Paul Atreides stops becoming and simply is. The speech. The stillness before it, the way the crowd gathers, the weight of everything the film has built pressing down on a single man in a single moment. Villeneuve spent an entire film, two films, really, earning that scene, and when it arrives it lands with the force of something mythological. Dune is a story about the seduction of power and the burden of destiny and the danger of believing your own legend, and somehow Villeneuve made all of that intellectually rigorous and viscerally, cool. The scale of this movie is almost incomprehensible. One of the best theater experiences of the past five years no doubt.
4. Avengers: Infinity War + Endgame (2018, 2019) — The Russo Brothers
These movies are not perfect. I want to say that clearly, because I think pretending otherwise would be dishonest, and also because it doesn’t matter. What these two films did, what they accomplished, is almost without precedent in the history of popular entertainment. I grew up watching every Marvel film. Every single one. Some of them were great, some were fine, some existed mostly as connective tissue. But I showed up for all of them, usually opening night, usually with my brother, and by the time Infinity War arrived, there was a decade of investment behind every character on that screen. When Thanos snaps his fingers and it actually happens, when they actually do it, I remember the silence in the theater. Not shock exactly. Something more like awe. And then Endgame, a year later, the culmination of twenty-two films, and the moment Captain America catches Thor’s hammer. The theater I was in didn’t just cheer. It erupted in a way I’ve only experienced a handful of times in my life, in a room full of strangers who had all been waiting for the same thing without knowing they were waiting for it. No film criticism can fully account for that. Some experiences belong to the theater, to the crowd, to a specific Thursday night with people you’ve never met and will never see again. Those two films gave me some of the best nights I’ve had at the movies. For that alone, they belong on this list.
5. John Wick (2014) — Chad Stahelski
Someone killed his dog. That’s the movie. That is the entire premise, delivered without irony or apology, and what Chad Stahelski understood is that simplicity at that level of commitment stops being simple and becomes something elegant. John Wick might be the most purely badass film ever made. It takes its own internal logic with complete sincerity, and that sincerity is what makes it work. The action choreography is clean, so precisely constructed, you’re watching a craftsman operate at the absolute ceiling of his craft. Keanu Reeves moves through those sequences like a man who has nothing left to lose and has therefore become something beyond. The whole mythology, the coins, the rules, the underworld operating in plain sight, is delivered with a straight face. Not one wasted scene. Not one unnecessary line. Someone killed his dog. The rest is consequence. Awesome.
Go to the movies. It’s awesome.
Seems like Dune 2 is also going to be ~awesome~