Stop me if this sounds familiar. It’s Friday night and you’re keen to put on a flick. You start scrolling through movies, trying to figure out what you want to watch, when you suddenly realise a half hour has passed and you’re no closer to picking something to watch.
Star, the huge new Disney Plus expansion, saw over 600 films added to the already chockablock streaming platform. That’s a ridiculous amount of movies to sort through if you don’t know what to watch.
To help you out, we’ve done the heavy lifting for you. Here’s a list of 15 films that you need to watch for your next movie night.
28 Days Later
After waking up from a coma, Jim (Cillian Murphy) discovers he’s in a now abandoned hospital. Society has more or less collapsed due to a virus that causes people to turn into bloodthirsty psychopaths.
Jim saddles up with a few survivors and they attempt to trek across England to a supposed safe haven in Manchester, all while dodging hoards of ravenous infected.
28 Days Later is an incredibly bleak, but great horror movie. The opening sequence where Murphy wanders through a deserted London is still one of the eeriest moments in any movie.
Alien
Alien is an all-time classic sci-fi and horror film, it deserves to be rewatched regularly. It takes place in the distant future and starts with as spaceship crew responding to a distress signal on nearby planet.
One thing leads to another, and now there’s an alien on board that’s hunting down and killing everybody.
You’d assume that everyone has seen this movie, but I had a friend who somehow knew nothing about it. We watched it together and when that dining room scene happened, boy, did it go down a treat.
Con Air
In the words of Trisha Yearwood, “How do I live without you?” The “you” here is the 1997 action film Con Air.
Nicolas Cage plays Cameron Poe, an Army Ranger who has been imprisoned for accidentally killing a man, and has just been paroled after eight years in the slammer. With Poe’s release literally days away, he boards a plane designed for transporting prisoners, only for the other convicts to kill the guards and takeover Con Air.
Throw in a stacked cast that includes John Cusack, John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi and Dave Chappelle, and you’ve got one of the best blockbusters of the 1990s.
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
Dodgeball follows Peter LaFleur (Vince Vaughn), the owner of Average Joe’s Gymnasium, who is struggling to keep the lights on and not be bought out by the incredibly corporate Globo Gym.
In a last ditch effort, LaFleur puts together a rag tag team of weirdos to enter a major dodgeball competition where the grand prize will score them enough money to keep the gym open.
There was a hot minute in the mid-2000s where this movie was the funniest thing in the entire world, only for everyone to stop talking about it almost instantly. The good news is that it absolutely holds up.
Is this Ben Stiller‘s best role? You decide! (Answer: it is.)
Face/Off
In Face/Off, Castor Troy (Nic Cage) is a psychopathic international terrorist who’s face is swapped with Sean Archer’s (John Travolta), an FBI Special Agent. Archer’s plan is to go undercover as Troy to discover the location of bomb.
Things are going smoothly until Troy manages to escape and begins wrecking havok. So now Nic Cage is playing John Travolta who is pretending to be Nic Cage, and John Travolta is now playing Nic Cage who is pretending to be John Travolta.
Confused? Don’t be. Just sit back and embrace the over-the-top, action movie weirdness.
The Fly
In The Fly, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is a brilliant scientist who manages to invent teleportation. Needing to see whether or not it’s possible to transfer a human from pod to pod, Brundle uses himself as a test subject.
The experiment is a success, but Brundle’s DNA is accidentally crossed with a random fly’s that just happened to be in the pod at the time. Now Brundle is beginning to change, becoming something that’s not quite human.
What’s the opposite of a glow up, because that’s what this movie is for Goldblum.
Independence Day
There’s a scene in Independence Day where Will Smith opens up a flying saucer, punches out an alien, drops the amazing one-liner “Welcome to Earth!”, lights a cigar and then drops a second one-liner, “Now that’s what I call a close encounter.”
And if you don’t think that’s the coolest shit ever, I truly weep for you.
Jennifer’s Body
After disappearing one night after a seeing a rock show with her dweeby BFF Anita Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried), Jennifer (Megan Fox) returns to high school… different. Lesnicki notices something wrong with the popular cheerleader, especially when Jennifer starts killing and eating a bunch of her classmates.
When Jennifer’s Body first came out in 2009 it wasn’t very well received. It may have taken a decade, but Jennifer’s Body has finally gotten the praise it rightfully deserves as a feminist revenge flick and one of the most underrated horror movies of the last decade.
One Hour Photo
“Oh, cool, a new Robin Williams movie. I can’t wait to see what wacky hi-jinx he’ll get into while working in a photo stor-oh my God!”
– Me, aged 10, watching One Hour Photo for the first time.
If you only know Williams from his comedies, his role as a creepy photo technician who becomes obsessed with a specific family is a great example of how amazing he could be in serious movies.
Raising Arizona
A lot of people kind of treat Nic Cage’s acting as a joke. Which, look, that’s fair (see: Face/Off).
However, the man does some fantastic acting chops and can turn out a fantastic performance when the time calls for it. Case in point, the Coen Brothers‘ fantastic crime-comedy Raising Arizona.
Cage plays H.I., a somewhat goofy but charming, petty criminal who falls in love with police officer Edwina (Holly Hunter). The two eventually marry, but when they learn they can never have kids, they steal one of a famous quintuplet to raise as their own.
Things get even more complicated when H.I.’s old convenience store robbing buddies bust out of prison and show up on his doorstep.
Ready or Not
Ready or Not follows Grace (Samara Weaving), who is introduced to her husband’s insanely rich family on the night of their wedding. Things are going pretty well, up until the family unveil a long held tradition where a new family member need to compete in a random game before joining the family.
When Grace draws hide-and-seek, she’s given two choices: hide or die. If she manages to elude the family until morning, she gets to live. If she doesn’t, well…
Ready or Not is a fun horror movie, that manages to mix some surprisingly good gags in with the scares.
Romeo + Juliet
Question: Since this adaption of William’s Shakespeare‘s iconic play was directed by Baz Luhrmann, does that mean it’s technically the all-time best Australian film?
Even if you don’t give a damn about Shakespeare, this movie’s entire aesthetic is undefeatable. From the amazing costumes to the killer soundtrack, a single minute of this film has more concentrated cool than most people have in their entire lives.
The Royal Tenenbaums
How do you describe a movie like Wes Anderson‘s The Royal Tenebaums? An ironic comedy about a trio of gifted siblings grow up to be disillusioned adults that are all sad in different ways, who all return to their family home after years apart? And also Bill Murray is there too.
If you’ve already seen The Royal Tenebaums, it’s absolutely worth a revisit. If you’ve never dipped your toe in the quirky waters of Anderson’s films, this is the perfect place to start.
That Thing You Do!
That Thing You Do follows The Oneders, a pop band in the 1960s that make it big after one of their songs becomes a giant hit. From there, the movie tracks the band’s rise to pop stardom, along with all of the hurdles and challenges that come with it.
It’s the best Beatles movie that isn’t actually about the Beatles. Also? It was written and directed by everyone’s favourite movie dad, Tom Hanks.
The song itself, which is what the movie is named after, is so very, very good.
Underwater
The easy sell for Underwater is that its Alien but, uh, underwater.
It’s set in a research facility located at the very bottom of the Mariana Trench, which is currently digging into the earth’s crust. But when they dig a bit too deep in the wrong place, something horrible that is tearing the facility apart and hunting the remaining survivors.
If you absolutely hate tight spaces and aren’t a fan of open water, probably give this one a miss.
