Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.
Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.
These shameless comedies don’t care if you’re offended — they only care about making you laugh.
A brutal but affectionate takedown of teen movies from Lucas to She’s All That to Fast Times at Ridgemont High to The Breakfast Club, Not Another Teen Movie is a blitzkrieg of offense filled with sex, bathroom jokes, insane violence and surprisingly acute social commentary.
Where else can you see Chris Evans misusing a banana, white kids who pretend to be Asian, and football players split in half?
Not Another Teen Movie could cut every offensive joke and still be very funny, but it gets extra points for the sheer audacity of keeping them in.
Marlon and Shawn Wayans play Black FBI agents who impersonate rich white socialites to infiltrate a pompous Hamptons social scene — and break up a conspiracy. Along the way they learn how white people act when they think no one of other races are around, but also start to see the world from a woman’s perspective.
If you’re not offended by something in White Chicks, you aren’t paying attention. The Wayans take down privileged white people, but also everyone else, and make points about our weird racial and sexual hangups along the way. White Chicks always keeps you guessing about how far it will go, and it goes pretty far.
June Cleaver speaking jive is deeply inappropriate — and one of the funniest things that has ever happened in a movie.
God bless Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker for coming up with the idea of Barbara Billingsley delivering the line, “Oh stewardess? I speak jive.” And also for the 7,000 other great jokes in Airplane, one of the all-time greatest comedies.
You can question its taste if you want to, but you’d be better off just going with the laughs. There are a lot of them.
It’s impossible to take any self-righteous actor seriously after watching this puppet-movie spy thriller that despises Kim Jong-Il, but hates Sean Penn even more.
Puppet love scenes, projectile vomiting that goes on much too long, unapologetic jingoism — Team America, from the creators of South Park, is a mockery of gung-ho nationalism, but also a compelling defense of American foreign policy at its best.
There’s also a fantastic metaphor involving three different body parts that we think about way more than we should.
Sacha Baron Cohen impersonates a sexist, anti-Semitic, generally clueless Kazakh journalist who makes Americans feel free to say things they wouldn’t ordinarily say. He’s gloriously ignorant, but his guilelessness brings out the worst in people who should know better. (And also, very occasionally, the best.)
Borat’s behavior is wildly offensive, but he’s so demented that you can’t help but feel sorry for him, and Baron Cohen and his team manage to strike a perfect mix of revulsion and vulnerability. What’s most impressive is how much of it Baron Cohen had to improvise on the fly, in tense and often dangerous positions.
The 2020 sequel, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, is also terrific.
With wall-to-wall gratuitous flesh and racial humor, The Kentucky Fried Movie is the modern-day definition of problematic, but it’s also a perfect time capsule of the freewheeling 1970s: It spots and skewers genres from kung-fu to Blaxploitation to women-in-prison movies in quick-hit, take-it-or-leave it sketches that are perfect sendups of a whole slew of grindhouse classics.
It’s also an important movie, believe it or not — it was the breakthrough for its director, John Landis, and for its writers, the comedic team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, who would soon go on to make Airplane.
Kentucky Fried Movie is one of those comedies that Gen X kids spoke of in whispers because so many of their parents banned them from seeing it. It has a well-earned reputation for what we used to call a dirty movie. It really is, in a way that still feels subversive, wrong, and thrilling.
Also Read: The 12 Best Movie Plot Twists, Ranked
Are you Black, white, Jewish, Christian, African, American, young or old?
There’s something to offend you in the cartoonish grotesquerie of Coming to America, in which Eddie Murphy plays people fitting into almost all of the demographics we just listed, mercilessly mocking them all.
Coming to America takes shots at royalty, the nouveau riche, and the scrappy underclass, but is most focused on gender dynamics. It’s such a sharp judge of human behavior that the only appropriate reaction is awe.
Monty Python takes on the ultimate sacred cow: the story of Jesus. It looks as magnificent as Hollywood’s biggest Biblical epics, which makes its takedown of pomposity all the more subversive and hysterical.
A great many great bits and routines darkly culminate in the deranged cheeriness of the final musical number, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
It’s all quite sacrilegious, and that’s the whole point.
Tropic Thunder always walks a thin line, but especially with Ben Stiller’s Simple Jack character and Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Kirk Lazarus, an Australian actor who really, really commits to playing a Black character.
The film mocks actors desperate for awards, and it’s uncomfortable — but also funny. Stiller has admirably stuck to his guns, standing by his movie.
“I make no apologies for Tropic Thunder,” Stiller tweeted last year when someone erroneously said he had apologized for the film. “Don’t know who told you that. It’s always been a controversial movie since when we opened. Proud of it and the work everyone did on it.”
“I was born a poor Black child,” Steve Martin’s Navin Johnson explains at the start of this absurdist masterpiece, and it all builds up into a righteous kung-fu takedown at his hideously tacky mansion that features maybe the only time in history it’s been totally OK for a white guy to scream the most offensive of all racial slurs.
No one else could have pulled of the balancing act except for Steve Martin, whose special purpose is to make us all laugh.
We won’t pretend to be objective here: This is maybe our favorite movie out of all comedies, ever.
South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut seeks out sympathy for the devil: We’re supposed to root for Satan himself as he tries to escape an abusive relationship with Saddam Hussein.
There’s also lots of violence against kids and flagrant anti-Canadian propaganda.
But of course, Canadians were too nice to get offended.
Blazing Saddles is filled with gags big and small, some of which will work for you and some of which won’t. It has quite a few race-based jokes, but the film is very much on the side of Sheriff Bart (Cleavon Little), a Black sheriff trying to bring progress to the Wild West.
The American Film Institute ranks Blazing Saddles as the sixth-funniest movie of all time, but director and co-writer Mel Brooks disagrees: “I love Some Like It Hot, but we have the funniest movie ever made,” Brooks told Vanity Fair in 2016, not caring if you’re offended.
The five films that landed ahead of Blazing Saddles on AFI’s list were, from first to fifth, Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, Dr. Strangelove, Annie Hall, and Duck Soup.
We’re happily including Bottoms for everyone who thinks today’s comedies are afraid to be funny. In fact, it’s on our spinoff list from this one — 15 Shameless New Comedies That Just Don’t Care If You’re Offended.
Bottoms is about “teen girls who start a fight club so they can try to impress and hook up with cheerleaders,” explains writer-director Emma Seligman. It breaks a lot of rules about what kind of violence it’s considered decent to present onscreen — the girls really do fight, and don’t always win — and resists recent play-it-safe rules that dictate that LGBTQ+ characters have to be saintly or victimized or both.
“I think every human deserves to see a relatable, complicated, nuanced version of themselves on screen. And I don’t think that I’ve seen it enough for me to feel recognized,” says Seligman.
You might also like this list of “Based on a True Story” Movies That Are Actually Pretty True or this list of 12 Rad ’80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.
Main image: The Kentucky Fried Movie.
Editor’s Note: Corrects main image.
Warner Bros. is going the creepy viral route to promote Weapons, the new child horror film from Barbarian writer-director Zack Cregger: A new two-hour, unlisted video features two hours of supposed surveillance video, mostly of children running through the night.
The innocuously jarring title is simply “2025_░_░_06:17AM.mov.”
It’s a wonderful bit of mystery, sure to raise interest in what’s already one of the most-anticipated horror films of the summer. The new poster for the film explains its concept: “Last night at 2:17 am, every child from Mrs. Gandy’s class woke up, got out of bed, went downstairs, opened the front door, walked into the dark… and never came back.”
That summary raises a lot of questions: Does every single kid in Mrs, Gandy’s house have at least a two-story house? But we guess the more important question, which we hope the film will answer, is where all those children went. Also: What or who are the weapons in Weapons?
Spend a while watching the Weapons video — sorry, we mean “2025_░_░_06:17AM.mov” — and you start to notice some extremely jarring things (or cool things, if you love horror.) Among them is the fact that one of the monitors we’re seeing appears to feature the reflected, emotionless face of a middle-aged man. Who is he? Why is he watching? What does he want?
Weapons stars Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, June Diane Raphael, Toby Huss, and Benedict Wong, among others. We don’t think any of them appear in “2025_░_░_06:17AM.mov,” but who knows? (The middle aged man just might be Huss.)
Also Read: The 11 Most Nightmare Inducing Horror Villains
Additional marketing materials for the film note that 17 children run away in all. And while the poster says it happens at 2:17 am — and time stamps on some of the assembled surveillance footage say 2:17 — the title of the video includes the time stamp 6:17 am. So maybe something is happening with the number 17?
We already love this movie.
The Weapons unlisted video continues a long run of cool viral Warner Bros. immersive marketing campaigns: 2008’s Christopher Nolan Batman film The Dark Knight, for example, fascinated fans with an interactive website, not clearly identified as promotional, to drop hints about Heath Ledger’s bold take on The Joker. Such campaigns have since become a frequent part of the rollout for hotly anticipated films.
Cregger’s Barbarian, released in 2022 by 20th Century Fox, benefitted from a similarly jolting campaign. A trailer for the film promoted it pleasantly as “Justin Long’s New Movie,” and featured Long’s character driving along Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible, as cheery music plays.
“From the Producers of the Lego Movie,” the trailer brightly misdirects, before adding more bona fides: “The studio that brought you Alvin and the Chipmunks.”
But around the one-minute mark, things take a dark turn. Long’s character realizes one of his Michigan properties has an unwanted visitor. There’s a thud. The cheery music drops out. And the trailer drops a hammer: “From the Producer of It.”
With Weapons, the scares are right up front: two hours of creepy images, accompanied by static-y, disorienting sound. What’s discombobulating this time is the medium: As with The Dark Knight campaign, we don’t even know what we’re seeing has anything to do with a movie. If you missed the name Warner Bros., you might think you were just seeing some very alarming footage, from Ring cameras, dash cams, and whatever else is surveilling the suburban streets.
Barbarian went on to be one of the most unexpected breakthroughs of 2022, earning more than $45 million against a low production budget of just $4.5 million. Hopes are even higher for Weapons.
Weapons arrives in theaters on August 8, from Warner Bros. Pictures.
Main image: Children running in the night in 2025_░_░_06:17AM.mov to promote Weapons. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.
Here are all 6 Joker actors ranked, from worst to best.
Also, we’re only counting film Jokers, and not animated ones.
Disagree? Great, that’s what the comments are for. Here we go.
The emperor has no clothes. We know: Joaquin Phoenix’s take on The Joker in Joker was a spectacular success, bringing in a billion dollars and winning Phoenix an Oscar for Best Actor.
Well, everyone was wrong. It was painful to watch Phoenix’s Joker ham it up through some nonsensical psychological condition cobbled together from superior movies like Taxi Driver and Fight Club.
Phoenix’s Joker was cool visually — his emaciated body was more resonant than any of his dialogue — but his knockoff Travis Bickle felt so disconnected from any real human being that he and his movie had no stakes. He was the last thing the Joker should be: boring.
What if The Joker were hot? That seems to be the odd approach to Jared Leto’s Joker of Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey, and Zack Snyder’s Justice League. He came off like one of those sexy influencers constantly insisting that they’re “deep” and “complex.” Not one for subtlety — he’s The Joker — he even had the word “Damaged” tattooed on his forehead.
This is a matter of personal taste, but we prefer the idea of The Joker as a miscreant who could never survive in polite society, no matter how hard he might try, who turns to The Joker persona out of desperation. Leto’s Joker could have just quit crime to go into modeling.
There were some cool things about Jared Leto’s Joker, for sure. He had the best clothes of any Joker, and we liked how he took fashion and tattoo inspiration from East L.A. gangsters. But maybe he should have just been a new character, not The Joker.
2022’s The Batman went in the opposite direction from Jared Leto’s sexy Joker, portraying The Joker as having some kind of complicated skin condition that looks like a cross between burns and syphilis, in addition to his demented grin.
We think Barry Keoghan is one of the best actors around, but we can’t abide by the decision to give him glorified cameo status as an fellow Arkham resident who cheerleads Paul Dano’s (terrific) Riddler. Keoghan gets more to do in a deleted scene that really should have been in the movie.
Many versions of The Joker seems to use a pretense of comedy to mask profound despair and depression, but Keoghan’s seems to be just depressed and low energy. He doesn’t have the undeniable presence of the best Jokers.
He’ll reportedly return in the next Batman film, and will hopefully have more to do.
It was great to see Jack Nicholson pop up at the Saturday Night Live 50th Anniversary show on Sunday, reminding everyone of what a cool screen presence he’s always had.
Speaking of cool: He seemed a little above Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman — he didn’t phone it in, exactly, but he also avoided exploring any real pain or messiness in his version of the Clown Prince of Crime. He just seemed like he was having fun.
One thing we especially like about Nicholson’s Joker is that unlike all the others, he really did have pale skin and green hair, a consequence of a long dip in a huge vat at Axis Chemicals. We weren’t as sold on his interest in art, which seemed like too many things, or the notion that he killed Bruce’s parents, which felt a little on the nose.
Some people would deduct points for Cesar Romero’s refusal to shave his mustache to play The Joker in the 1966 Batman film and the 1966-68 TV series. But we love it: It’s the most Joker thing he could possibly do. It’s a completely anarchic, middle-finger-to-the-world level of commitment — or refusal to commit — that is as Joker as you can get.
We also find Romero’s Joker effortlessly creepy in a way no other Joker is. He’s kind of suave and dashing, which makes him somehow even more grotesque. His voice, alternately sinewy and gravelly, is compelling. And his laugh is the best of any Joker’s. He also had the best hair, especially when it bounced as he shook with rage.
You got the sense that he thought his whole ensemble — the purple suit, the green hair — looked good. Rather than seeming ashamed of his appearance, he seemed vain, which gave him an unnerving element of narcissism. You can say his Joker was too broad, but come on: He’s a criminal who dresses like a clown to play to the cheap seats. He set the standard for all future Jokers.
Only one actor has gotten The Joker exactly right, honoring the comic-book legacy of The Joker while grounding him completely in reality. In Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger delivered a Gen X Joker, pragmatic and detached — so detached that he seems meta.
He refuses to disclose an origin story, instead offering several — one of many ways he maintains a jittery sense of perpetual menace. But the real pleasure of The Dark Knight is realizing that despite his disheveled appearance and chaotic appearance, the war-painted misanthrope is the most meticulous planner in Gotham, whether robbing a bank of staging a moral showdown between ferry passengers.
“His Joker was deeply, deeply warped and damaged, though you never find out exactly why, or what he’s really looking for,” Ledger’s Dark Knight co-star, Michael Caine, observes in his recent memoir. “Looking back, I think Heath’s excellence made all of us raise our game. The psychological battle between The Joker and Batman is completely riveting. Are they in any way the same? What nudges one man to do good, and the other to do evil? The Joker wants to torment Bruce by convincing him that they’re two of a kind.”
Ledger earned a posthumous Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the film. Sadly, he died before its release.
You might also like this list of all 7 Batman actors ranked worst to best.
Main image: Kim Basinger as Vicky Vale and Jack Nicholson as The Joker in Batman. Warner Bros.
These horror movie villains don’t pack much of a punch. Honestly, we’re surprised they can even hurt a fly, let alone people. Here are the 13 weakest, most pathetic horror movie villains we can think of. Spoilers follow.
In this 1997 straight-to-video slasher comedy, a serial killer on the way to his execution is exposed to chemicals that cause him to disintegrate and fuse with snow, turning him into a killer snowman.
Although Jack Frost commits very brutal killings — like shoving an axe down one guy’s throat — his looks make him one of the least scary villains ever. Basically, the only difference between him and the beloved children’s character Frosty the Snowman are his arched eyebrows made of sticks and the fact that he’s missing a top hat.
Plus, how easy would it be to kill Jack Frost? All you’d need is a hair dryer or something else hot to melt him away. He’s mostly able to pull off his crimes because he has the element of surprise, since people assume he’s a regular snowman and don’t suspect that he’ll kill them while their back is turned.
This 2010 horror movie was based on a story by M. Night Shyamalan. Directed by John Erick Dowdle, it revolves around everyone’s worst nightmare: getting stuck in an elevator. But it has a sickening twist — one of the elevator’s passengers is secretly the devil.
Spoiler alert! The devil turns out to be the one you’d least expected: an old lady played by Jenny O’Hara.
However, even though her voice gets super deep and demonic and her eyes turn black, there isn’t much really scary about her appearance. All of her heinous killings are done in the dark. And she’s ultimately foiled because her main target — the guy whose soul she wants to claim — confesses his sins, rendering her powerless. She vanishes, just like that.
It’s obvious to point out, but something else worth noting here is that it would be super easy to overtake this character, known only as Old Woman. Her only power is the element of surprise and the fact that she’s possessed by the devil himself. Otherwise, she’s pretty toothless, and she’s not very scary looking at all. This is not the type of devil that would give anyone nightmares, making her a rather pathetic horror movie villain.
While the idea of a children’s doll possessed by the soul of a serial killer is pretty unsettling, there’s an argument to be made that Chucky himself is not that scary. He’s arguably one of the more pathetic horror movie villains.
He’s just a doll. And honestly, in the decades since the original Child’s Play was released in 1988, horror movie dolls have gotten a lot scarier (just look at Annabelle from The Conjuring universe). The scariest thing about Chucky is his piercing blue eyes that are frozen in a permanent stare.
But although it takes multiple gun shots to finally take him down in the original film, it doesn’t seem that hard to subdue a little doll the size of a toddler. Just disarm him by taking his knife away and throw him in an incinerator or something. He doesn’t have any crazy abilities other than bleeding like a real human, which makes him relatively easy to kill.
In the grand scheme of horror villains, Chucky is pretty gentle.
Nevermind that you could knock them both over with a feather — Pearl and Howard are both more creepy than they are actually scary in X, the first installment in Ti West’s trilogy starring Mia Goth.
Sure, Pearl is deranged. She’s a vengeful old woman hell-bent on killing the porn actors who are renting out she and her husband Howard’s cabin. But she could easily be overpowered by anyone with an ounce of muscle. Same goes for Howard. He’s pretty much just Pearl’s minion anyway. Pearl obviously wears the pants in that relationship.
Although Pearl is pretty dastardly and we wouldn’t want to encounter her in a dimly lit barn, the odds are good that most people could take her in a fight.
They’re literally just rabbits. No special effects to be seen here — the terrifying creatures that taunt a small town and kill people are just actual bunny rabbits.
This film is infamous for its failure to make these little guys seem scary. To shoot scenes like the one pictured above, they just let some bunnies lose on a miniature set to make them look giant. But even with the perspective, it’s pretty obvious that they’re just regular bunnies.
For attack scenes, they had actors dress up in bunny costumes, which makes the whole thing even funnier. You can watch one bunny attack scene here — in the shots of the real bunnies, they’re actually really cute, even when their little bunny faces are smeared with blood.
This one requires little explanation as to why the GingerDead Man is a pretty pathetic horror movie villain. He’s just a cookie! He would literally crumble in a glass of milk.
Look at his face in the picture above. Sure, it’s a face only a mother could love. But is it particularly scary? Not really.
The weakness of this cookie villain is similar to the aforementioned Jack Frost above. It’s hard to believe why the protagonists of the film didn’t figure out a way to kill him faster. This particular cookie is, like Jack Frost, possessed by the spirit of a serial killer — but this time it’s because his ashes were mixed in with blood and cookie ingredients. A witch’s curse allows him to come back to life. But does he really have that much strength or power? We doubt it.
The scariest thing about him is that the serial killer who the cookie embodies is played by Gary Busey.
We won’t try to argue that the plot of this 2020 horror film is one of the most messed up and psychologically disturbing ones we’ve witnessed in a while. But we will argue that the main villain, an old woman named Karen (Barbra Kingsley), shouldn’t be so hard to conquer.
With the help of an old man named Eulis, Karen lures a young couple into her home through deception. From there, she tricks them into eating her food and later drugs them in various ways, including with gas masks. From there, she lobotomizes her victims and eats their flesh, cannibal style… yeah.
But Karen herself is arguably physically weak and could be overcome if everyone teamed up on her.
The problem is that Karen does her work while her victims are knocked out, which is ultimately how she overcomes otherwise healthy adversaries like the protagonists Sam and Rylie. But if they had taken her out when they had a chance, before she drugged them, they could have easily gotten away. Fun fact, this movie also features Lena Dunham!
In 2016’s The Boy, the villain is a porcelain doll named Brahms. His creepy parents are convinced that the doll is actually their late son. At first, he seems inanimate, but then it’s revealed that he’s actually alive, possessed by the spirit of their murderous little boy.
But honestly, Brahms isn’t that scary. He somehow has the ability to overpower a grown man, but then when he tries to overpower his nanny, Greta (Lauren Cohan), she uses his own trick against him — invoking the rules by which he lives.
So if Brahms can be subdued that easily, couldn’t Greta just smash him with a hammer or something? He’s just a little doll, much like Chucky. He doesn’t seem like he would realistically be that hard to kill.
In this hilariously bad movie, Troll 2, the villains are a pack of vegetarian goblins who turn people into vegetables so they can eat them.
That premise is already pretty goofy. Why not have the goblins be carnivores? That would be scarier. Nope — these goblins eat vegetables only, please. But instead of eating veggies and calling it a day, they decide to trick people into drinking a potion that dissolves them into vegetables.
Although they look pretty unsavory, their masks are so misshapen that they look like something you’d find for your hard in Spirit Halloween. They’re also tiny. And, again, they survive on vegetables. How hard could it be to kill them? Case in point (and spoiler ahead): simply eating a bologna sandwich renders a person’s body poisonous to the goblins. The fact that the goblins win out in the end is honestly so disappointing.
The clowns from this 1988 B-movie cult-classic are more funny looking than they are scary.
True, one punch from an extraterrestrial clown’s boxing glove can knock a man’s head clean off. But still, these strange little alien men look more like demented fun house animatronics than horror villains.
We must admire the artistry that went into the practical effects — the details of their lifelike, weird little clown faces are something to be admired. But these aren’t the kind of horror movie characters that inspire nightmares, unless you’re six years old. But to be fair, horror movie characters have gotten a LOT more sinister and disturbing since 1988, so maybe in their day, these clowns were a bit scarier in context.
Jennifer Aniston looks plenty scared in the 1993 horror film about an evil leprechaun who hunts down a family he believes has stolen his pot of gold. But in reality, this little Irish man has very few scares in him.
We’d argue that the titular leprechaun is actually a pretty pathetic horror movie villain. Again, we admire the artistry of the practical effects — it’s actually a real actor in this little leprechaun suit, played by Warwick Davis. But he doesn’t really send shivers down our spine. Also, his Irish accent is not very Irish sounding.
If you want a real scare, listen to some stories about the culturally-authentic supernatural folk of Ireland — the fairies. Leprechauns are mostly an American concept. In Ireland, the superstition around faeries, also called “the good people,” is no joke.
This 2011 horror film is based on Virginia’s urban legend of the Bunny Man — a man in a bunny suit who threatens people with an axe. In the movie, the Bunnyman in question wields a chainsaw instead.
But really, he’s just a guy in a bunny suit. And the suit itself isn’t scary at all. It’s just a regular bunny costume not unlike one you might find at the mall when little kids take pictures with the Easter bunny.
We’d actually argue that the bunny suit in Donnie Darko is much scarier in appearance. However, this Bunnyman eats people’s flesh after murdering and dismembering them, so that is pretty scary. He just doesn’t look like much.
In this 1993 horror movie, Macaulay Culkin plays a sort of real-life version of Brahms from The Boy. He’s a nasty little boy who likes to hurt people on purpose.
But he doesn’t have any supernatural abilities. He’s just a sociopathic, or perhaps psychopathic, little kid. He could easily be stopped if someone put him in a time-out — they just might have to keep an eye on him, because he’s really good at outsmarting adults who underestimate him.
Overall, he’s got to be one of the all-time least intimidating horror movie characters. He’s basically just a little guy who really needs therapy.
You might also like this list of 7 Horror Remakes No One Really Needed — which featured unexpected movie deaths galore — or this list of 12 TV Characters Who Deserved to Die.
Pretty Woman is among the many movies about the world’s oldest profession that make it seem kind of glamorous. These movies don’t.
The first film in Alan J. Pakula’s Paranoia Trilogy — which also includes The Parallex View and All the President’s Men — this dark thriller stars Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels, who believes she’s being stalked by a deadly john. She works with a detective played by Donald Sutherland who of course thinks he can save her, in every sense.
Fonda (above) won her first Best Actress Oscar for playing Daniels, a complex character who initially seems to enjoy her job — except for the part of being stalked, of course.
The first and only film with an X rating ever to win Best Picture, Midnight Cowboy tells the seedy story of Joe Buck, a Texas boy who moves to the big city and dresses up as a cowboy to sell his wares. He falls under the shaky wing of Rico “Ratso” Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman, who gets to deliver the often-imitated line “I’m walkin’ here!”
Directed by John Schlesinger and written by Waldo Salt, the film is notable for its empathetic portrayal — especially by 1960s standards — of low-level street hustlers, and its willingness to just spend time with its characters without judgement or false moralizing.
There’s a long story behind the film’s rating, which was later changed to an R.
At first, it seems like Mike Figgis’ drama is going to go along with the heart-of-gold trope as Elisabeth Shue’s Las Vegas sex worker, Sera (above), tries to save Hollywood washout Ben (Nicolas Cage) from his plan to drink himself to death. But then things get darker and darker, especially in a horrific scene in which Sera takes on multiple awful young clients.
Leaving Las Vegas is a sad, sad movie, but Shue imbues Sera with dignity and supreme likability throughout, even as her plans collapse — and she still holds onto her dreams.
Cage won a Best Actor Oscar, and Shue was nominated for Best Actress but lost to Susan Sarandon for her role in Dead Man Walking. Sarandon is great but Shue absolutely deserved to win for a harrowing, tough performance in one of the most bluntly sad movies about the oldest profession.
Charlize Theron played hard against type as she de-glammed for this searing, uncompromising Patty Jenkins film inspired by the story of real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos.
Suggesting that Wuornos first descended into murder out of desperation, mental illness and self-defense, Monster makes you kind of sympathize with a serial killer — until you definitely don’t. Wuornos’ claims of self defense soon turn into empty justifications.
Theron deservedly won a Best Actress Oscar for the role.
The young Jodie Foster is heartbreaking as a child so caught up in street life that she doesn’t comprehend how horribly she’s being exploited by the smooth-talking Sport (Harvey Keitel) in this masterful collaboration between director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader.
With Mean Streets, Taxi Driver is one of the best and most-imitated time capsules of 1970s New York City grime, and it’s a testament to the film’s narrative virtuosity that by the end we’re rooting hard for obvious psychopath Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) to do what needs to be done.
De Niro and Foster were both nominated for Oscars in this, one of the most enduring and harrowing movies about sex trafficking.
A highlight of 1990s indie filmmaking, this Gus Van Sant drama follows narcoleptic hustler Mike (River Phoenix in one of the best roles of his too-short life) in a journey from Portland to Idaho to Rome with fellow hustler Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves).
The film is a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, and Reeves believed in Van Sant’s script so much that he rode over 1,300 miles by motorcycle to convince Phoenix to make the movie with him. Its one of the most even-handed movies about sex work to focus on men.
If you want to convince people not to do heroin, show them Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s brilliant but painful adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel about people who turn to drugs to escape reality — and end up in a much worse place than they started.
Things turn out especially horribly for Marion Silver (Jennifer Connelly, above), whose despair culminates in a party scene you’ll wish you could forget.
This early mostly black-and-white masterpiece, directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller based on Miller’s graphic novels, does nothing to minimize the struggles of the hardworking women of Old Town.
But it also stresses that pretty much all of them — including the very blue-eyed Becky (Alexis Bledel, above) — can very much hold their own.
When one would-be john Jackie Boy (Benicio Del Toro) pulls a gun on Becky, she intones: “Oh sugar. You just gone and done the dumbest thing in your whole life.” Then her reinforcements arrive and things go very badly for Jackie Boy and his boys.
In 12 vignettes, Jean-Luc Godard directs his then-wife and muse Anna Karina in this tough drama about a struggling woman who works in a record shop, mourning her collapsing marriage and dreaming of stardom.
Instead, she descends into the world’s oldest profession, and things only get worse from there.
The film’s bittersweet title translates to “My Life to Live.”
Director and co-writer Sean Baker may be the greatest chronicler of modern-day hustlers, and Tangerine, shot on iPhones, is one of the best films of our relatively young century. It follows to transgender sex workers (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) who stage a donut-shop confrontation with a cheating boyfriend.
Comic, tragic, totally empathetic and gorgeous throughout — especially the drive-thru carwash scene — Tangerine is also, according to Rotten Tomatoes, it’s No. 4 on the list of the best Christmas movies ever made.
Sean Baker’s followup to Tangerine is another wild, brutally honest look at the life of a woman selling herself — one in perhaps even more desperate straits than the protagonists of Tangerine.
The film stars first-time actress Bria Vinaite as Halley, who works out of a cheap motel on the outskirts of Orlando’s magic kingdom as she tries to shield her daughter (Brooklyn Prince) from the hardship of her life and make their sad surroundings feel like the happiest place on earth.
Willem Dafoe (above, with Vinaite) earned an Oscar nomination for his role as motel manager Bobby, who doesn’t need money to have endless generosity. This is a real faith-in-humanity movie, even when things seem impossibly bleak.
Almsot every Sean Baker film is in some sense about the world’s oldest profession, including the next one on our list…
Baker’s 2024 story about a dancer and escort who finds herself in a relationship with a Russian oligarch’s son seems like a Pretty Woman fantasy — at first.
But then Ani, aka Anora, discovers some grim realities about her new beau’s life. The movie is somehow frank, suspenseful, very funny and deeply sad, all at once.
Anora cleaned up at the Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Director for Sean Baker, Best Actress for lead Mikey Madison, and more. It also won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
If you’ve never heard of this film, you’re not alone — but film cognoscenti who took part in last year’s prestigious Sight and Sound poll declared it the greatest film of all time. You can decide for yourself next time you have three hours and twenty-one minutes to spare, because that’s the runtime of this French film, made by Chantal Akerman when she was just 25, about a widowed single mother who supports her son by entertaining male clients in her humble apartment.
Whether its the best movie ever made is up for debate (among those who’ve actually seen it, at least) but it’s one of the most remarkable movies about the oldest profession in the way it presents it, nearly 50 years ago, as just another job.
You might also like this list of movies that do sugarcoat the world’s oldest profession.
Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.
Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.
