Critic Craig Mathieson has combed the Stan archives to deliver the mother of all guides to great movies available on the platform. In this list you will find modern masterpieces, 20th century classics, arthouse sensations, essential world cinema, and more.
See also
* All new movies & series on Stan
* All new streaming movies & series
* The 50 best movies on Netflix Australia
The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn (2011)
Watch on StanSteven Spielberg mixes voice work, motion-capture footage and digital effects to create this rip-roaring adaptation of the much-loved Hergé comic character. There are action sequences here the equal of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Jamie Bell’s boy reporter and Andy Serkis’ salty sea captain taking on Daniel Craig’s globe-trotting villain. Great, great fun.
American Gigolo (1980)
Watch on StanIn this gilded, prescient thriller—complete with a Robert Bresson homage—from Paul Schrader that foresaw the decade to come, Richard Gere plays a Los Angeles escort whose sense of physical and emotional control is tested after he’s drawn into a criminal conspiracy.
American Hustle (2013)
Watch on StanRecreating an FBI investigation from the 1970s with a cast that includes Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and a never-better Christian Bale, David O. Russell’s love of antagonistic energy and abrasive personalities finds a melancholic heart amidst the self-destructive cons of this brittle drama with a heartbreaking sting.
Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
WATCH ON STANAnchored by a full-bodied performance from Sandra Huller that delivers extraordinary but deeply authentic shards of emotion, Justine Triet’s legal procedural resides inside the expansive trial of a successful writer (Huller), whose husband has fallen to his death from the attic of their home. There are revelations and twists, but the film is unnervingly about the malleability of the truth and those who profess to share it.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Watch on StanThe Vietnam War was but a few years past when Francis Ford Coppola—who nearly died making it—unleashed this mesmerising study of personal and national collapse. Martin Sheen is the Green Beret sent beyond any boundaries, including reality, to assassinate Marlon Brando’s rogue American general, leading to vast set-pieces and dreamy invocations that bind the story together.
Arrival (2016)
Watch on StanDirected with menacing wonder by Denis Villeneuve, this is compelling and original hard science fiction, with Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner as two experts trying to communicate with obliquely intentioned aliens landed on an increasingly panicky planet. The story folds in on itself, so that triumph is tragedy and vice-versa in an elegiac requiem.
Birdman (2014)
Watch on StanAlejandro G. Inarritu’s dexterous and dazzling comic drama about the untold performances that comprise a life finds Michael Keaton’s fading Hollywood star on Broadway with Emma Stone, Edward Norton, and Naomi Watts offering complications and support. Come for the gorgeously fluid long takes, stay for the flights of celestial hope.
Bound (1996)
Watch on StanAn audition piece to prove that they could direct their screenplays and work with actors, this queer neo-noir thriller from Lana and Lilly Wachowski has grown richer with age. Jennifer Tilly is the gangster’s moll who falls in love with Gina Gershon’s ex-con, leading them to rip off mob money, resulting in a menacing, desire-laced drama about the ways people prove who they truly are.
Bridesmaids (2011)
Watch on StanRaunchy without being provocative, but never afraid to examine the dynamics between female friends, Paul Feig’s breakout hit turned the cast into comic movie stars: co-writer Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, and Rose Byrne all shone in a movie where the preparations for a wedding collapse from one mishap to the next.
Bronson (2009)
WATCH ON STANIn Nicolas Winding Refn’s English language debut, Tom Hardy repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to address the camera as Michael Peterson, a prisoner so violent the British jail system didn’t know how to contain him. This is biopic as a droll, even theatrical assemblage that leans into violent strangeness to create a barbed commentary and a benchmark for Hardy’s future work.
The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
Watch on StanSimultaneously a celebration and deconstruction of horror’s mainstream principles, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s dark comedy turns a group of college students’ trip to an isolated cabin into a ritual slaughter mundanely managed by a pair of white-collar company men (Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins). The genre’s lust for blood is cruelly satisfied.
Chinatown (1974)
Watch on StanA defining vision of Los Angeles, written by a native (Robert Towne) and directed by an outsider (Roman Polanski), this neo-noir mystery stars Jack Nicholson as a private eye caught up with Faye Dunaway’s widow. The wielding of power—over people and property—is dissected with sun-drenched menace. As a feared patriarch, John Huston gives one of the greatest supporting turns in Hollywood history.
Clueless (1995)
Watch on StanWhile the best lines from Amy Heckerling’s knowingly sweet teen comedy live on as memes, the film itself remains a perfectly calculated pleasure with Alicia Silverstone as the teenage sophisticate who sails through her privileged L.A. high school life while the ageless Paul Rudd waits in the wings.
Destroyer (2018)
Watch on StanUsing Point Blank and To Live and Die in L.A. as a nihilistic Californian lineage, director Karyn Kusama creates images that render female endurance both iconic and terrifying in a noir thriller where Nicole Kidman’s rogue police detective tries to protect her wayward child even as her own guilt consumes her.
Donnie Brasco (1997)
Where to watchDeath of a Salesman for Mafia foot soldiers, this real-life story recounts the friendship between minor mobster “Lefty” Ruggiero (Al Pacino) and young thief Donnie Brasco (Johnny Depp), who is in fact undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone. Mike Newell’s crucially detailed film reveals their mercantile struggle, while documenting how Joseph slowly disappears into his role.
Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
Watch on StanAn emblematic breakthrough for Gus Van Sant—with never better performances by Matt Dillon and Kelly Lynch—this vividly observed depiction of the early 1970s drug milieu and addiction’s grasp helped redefine arthouse cinema towards the American experience. Van Sant’s eye for the human failings of his characters and the memoir-like detail combine in tremendous ways.
The Dry (2021)
Watch on StanAn outback noir thriller about culpability and regret, Robert Connolly’s box-office hit stars Eric Bana as a financial crimes police officer who returns to the hometown he fled as a teenager to investigate a horrific crime attributed to his best friend. Less interested in plot twists than allowing the drought-stricken landscape and its frayed inhabitants to take hold, it’s a masterful Australian genre piece.
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
WATCH ON STANA Gilliam-esque visit to the tax office, inter-generational immigrant trauma, hot dog hands, inter-dimensional warfare… It’s easy to say that the latest absurdist comedy from directing duo The Daniels is a lot, but everything in this madcap story has purpose and pathos and it’s delivered with a magisterial lead performance by Michelle Yeoh.
Fight Club (1999)
Watch on StanDavid Fincher skewered the cul-de-sac hopes of Generation X, and presented himself as the successor to Stanley Kubrick in terms of coolly executed intellectual outrage with this bleak, blithe comedy about a corporate bureaucrat (Edward Norton) who, with a charismatic nihilist (Brad Pitt), starts a combat-as-bonding ritual movement. The film is serious when the topic is ludicrous and seditious when the going gets philosophical.
Game Night (2018)
WATCH ON STANSalted with 1990s movie nods, this entertaining Hollywood studio comedy neatly plays to Generation X, a couple’s weekly games night for friends getting entangled with a criminal conspiracy. There’s quick-witted dialogue, an evolving plot and comic equality between the leads: both Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams take turns flipping out or delivering burns.
Ghost in the Shell (1995)
Watch on StanStill the most influential anime ever produced—The Matrix doesn’t exist without it—Mamoru Oshii’s neo-noir animation is set in a cyberpunk Japan of 2029, where a police cyborg, Motoko Kusunagi, is pursuing a hacker who targets human brains online. The feature is wildly atmospheric, and existentially tormented: both the body and mind are symbols of resistance and yet vulnerable to the whims of others.
The Godfather (1972)
Watch on StanStrip away the long-celebrated gangster film tropes and Francis Ford Coppola’s breakthrough is a study of family and country, specifically Italian immigrants and America, that reveals how each shapes the other. It’s both immense and woundingly intimate, with scenes that redefined the crime epic.
Goodfellas (1990)
Watch on StanWith cocaine pans and Keith Richards riffs, this organised crime epic from Martin Scorsese was based on the (low) life and (bad) times of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), a wiseguy from his youth sequestered with the calculating Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and the violent Tommy De Vito (Joe Pesci). Magisterial filmmaking, damning anthropology.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022)
Watch on StanA sparse, compelling thriller for the age of climate crises, Daniel Goldhaber’s follow-up to Cam unfolds in the west Texan backblocks, where a disparate group of young activists execute a plan to sabotage oil company infrastructure. Suffused with existential urgency and nail-biting tension, the film conveys both the defiant mindset of its characters and the risks they face.
In Bruges (2008)
WATCH ON STANThe feature debut of Irish playwright Martin McDonagh was a pithy and blackly comic crime drama about two hitmen – a simpatico Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell – hiding out in Belgium after a job goes wrong. It’s a post-Tarantino crime flick, but McDonagh’s writing allows for mordant humour, ludicrously logical conversations, and a kind of spiritual transference, before Ralph Fiennes arrives as the duo’s terrifying boss.
Kill List (2011)
Watch on StanBen Wheatley’s low-budget second feature remains his best work, matching occult machinations to domestic undercurrents in the story of a troubled British soldier turned hitman (Neil Maskell) who accepts a contract for three killings only to find himself immersed in a conspiracy focused on his involvement. Workplace banter and gruesome executions combine to make an eerie summoning.
Lady Macbeth (2017)
Watch on StanFlorence Pugh delivered her breakthrough performance in William Oldroyd’s chilling 19th century noir, which reinvents the period drama with violent excess and psychological duress. Pugh invokes the darkest desire for freedom as a young bride on an English country estate who refuses to stay under the control of her husband and his family.
La La Land (2016)
Watch on StanBoth incandescent and heartbreaking, Damien Chazelle’s update of the classic Hollywood musical is dazzling but never oppressive—the everyday tips over into the extraordinary as Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling’s Los Angeles hopefuls perform with heart but never mere technical mastery. It’s a film about creative endurance and personal sacrifice that’s both thrilling and painful.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Watch on StanThe best action film of this century, or simply of all time? Either way, George Miller rebooted his post-apocalyptic franchise with Tom Hardy as the taciturn anti-hero and Charlize Theron as a feminist rebel for the ages to create a magisterial automotive experience.
Moonlight (2016)
Watch on StanBarry Jenkins’ Academy Award winner for Best Picture is a work of lyrical, incisive filmmaking, seemingly wrenched from three ages—an uncertain boy, a vulnerable teenager, and a hardened young man—in a single Black life. Flourishes of high art and tender realism refute clichés, as does the healing required to vanquish deeply felt trauma.
Mulholland Dr. (2001)
Watch on StanOne of the best—and most deeply inexplicable and hauntingly resonant—movies of this century, David Lynch’s film noir journey is a mystery about identity that resides in the subconscious of the filmmaker and his characters, especially Naomi Watts’ new-to-Los Angeles ingénue.
Mystery Road (2013)
Watch on StanIvan Sen’s modern outback western has a classic screen inquisitor—Aaron Pedersen’s Indigenous police detective Jay Swan—who ventures into the unknown against his better judgment. Divided from his community and his colleagues, Jay’s murder investigation involves an elite supporting cast, including Jack Thompson, Jack Charles, and Hugo Weaving, before culminating in a finale rife with exquisite tension.
Nightcrawler (2014)
Watch on StanDan Gilroy’s debut feature captures the eerie nocturnal ecosystem of Los Angeles, where a freelancer cameraman capturing bloodshed (Jake Gyllenhaal) reveals himself as a sociopath obsessed with self-advancement. Beautifully shot, acridly funny, and totally unnerving.
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Watch on StanSituated both on the U.S.-Mexican border in 1980 and in a realm of eternal, otherworldly violence, Cormac McCarthy’s novel became a terrifyingly taut neo-western pursuit as a Vietnam War veteran (Josh Brolin) attempts to hold onto drug cartel cash he has found even while a nightmarish assassin (Javier Bardem) pursues him. Tommy Lee Jones’ closing monologue is the definitive scene in his entire career.
Of An Age (2022)
WATCH ON STANAustralian filmmaker Goran Stolevski announced himself with the one-two punch of the gripping folk-horror film You Won’t Be Alone and this intimate queer romantic drama. Set in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, it tracks the bond discovered between Nikola (Elias Anton) and Adam (Thom Green), which unfolds with the thrill of discovery and the risk of loss.
Orlando (1992)
Watch on StanSally Potter’s Virginia Woolf adaptation doesn’t so much compress time and bend gender as treat both sets of parameters as starting points from which to examine worlds both real and fictional, exulting in the cinema’s ability to make images as a way of breaking down and retelling a story. Tilda Swinton is exceptional as an Elizabethan noble whose journey through love and time redefines the historical epic with a bold structure and barbed humour.
Perfect Days (2023)
WATCH ON STANWim Wenders hits a late career peak with this sublime character study, shot in just 17 days and soaked in the emotional restraint of classic Japanese cinema. Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) is a solitary Tokyo sanitation worker, cleaning public bathrooms and viewing his life with graceful acceptance. With sublime needle drops as punctuation, the film inhabits his soulful restraint.
Personal Shopper (2016)
Watch on StanA psychological horror for the 21 st century, Olivier Assayas’ compelling film positions Kristen Stewart’s American in Paris as a tremulous link between different worlds, whether serving as a conduit between fashion houses and her movie star employer, or a medium contacted by the dead. The ghostly texting scene on the train to London is one for the ages.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Watch on Stan“Do all lovers feel they’re inventing something?” A romance for the ages, Celina Sciamma’s French period drama is an invocation of love, the study and capture of image, and the deep reserves of the female gaze. A 19th century portrait painter (Noemie Merlant) is drawn to her wary subject (Adele Haenel) and the result is a wrenching union filled with anguish and pleasure.
Promising Young Woman (2020)
Watch on StanWriter/director Emerald Fennell’s debut feature has an exacting command of tone: as a black comedy that serves as a cultural inquisition, its romantic tropes have nightmarish outcomes. Unfolded through trauma’s hold, it follows Carey Mulligan’s Cassandra, who presents herself to men as a vulnerable victim and then takes command. Retribution and reconciliation have no chance to coexist here.
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Watch on StanA before and after line for American filmmaking. Over a quarter century old, Quentin Tarantino’s joyous dive into the mores of L.A. crime, narrative illusion, and actual conversations between men and women still crackles with delectable energy. An ensemble cast that includes John Travolta, Samuel L Jackson, Uma Thurman, and Bruce Willis enjoy the juiciest of parts.
Results (2015)
Watch on StanNo-one expected an offbeat independent romantic comedy from American mumblecore maven Andrew Bujalski. But he delivered one with this Austin gym ensemble that boasts a remarkable performance from Cobie Smulders—opposite Guy Pearce—as a personal trainer with a furious certainty about what she doesn’t want in life.
Romper Stomper (1992)
Watch on StanA Nazi skinhead gang in a Melbourne squat—memorably commanded by a young Russell Crowe—self-destructs amidst violence and unspoken desire. The best B-movie ever made in Australia.
Sicario (2015)
Watch on StanA Denis Villeneuve horror film about a woman—Emily Blunt’s door-kicking FBI agent—trying to survive in a male world, lodged inside a drug war thriller featuring Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro. It is set on the merciless border between America, Mexico, and obliteration.
Step Brothers (2008)
Watch on StanWill Ferrell and John C. Reilly play entitled 11-year-olds in adult bodies in Adam McKay’s finely revved comedy about two cosseted grown men forced to share a room by their parents’ relationship. The stars make the concept ludicrously believable, and the irrepressible escalation turns their idiocy into one lunatic man-child moment after another.
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Watch on StanPaul Thomas Anderson captures America’s transformation from frontier into industrial powerhouse with the tale of an obsessive oilman (Daniel Day-Lewis). Frame after frame evokes a furious wonder that can’t be stilled by success, family, or victory.
The Usual Suspects (1995)
Watch on StanGabriel Byrne, Benicio Del Toro (wonderfully indecipherable), Kevin Spacey and Stephen Baldwin are members of a criminal crew thrown together by official vindictiveness who decide to strike back…only to find themselves in so deep that there are boats full of bodies and a witness who makes Hungarian sound like the most fearful of languages. It’s an updated noir thriller—where hopes of survival flicker and fade.
True Grit (2010)
WATCH ON STANJoel and Ethan Coen played a straight bat with this western, sticking close to Charles Portis’ 1968 novel rather than the 1969 John Wayne film. It works a treat, thanks to an ornery performance from Jeff Bridges and a mix of dry humour and bloody adventure. “Why did they hang him so high?” Hailee Steinfeld’s Mattie asks Bridges’ “Rooster” Cogburn as they gaze upon gallows. “Possibly in the belief that it would make him more dead,” he replies.
Widows (2018)
WATCH ON STANFeminism is a life-or-death fight against powerlessness and inequality in Steve McQueen’s modern-day successor to 12 Years a Slave. In this Chicago rewiring of the heist drama, Viola Davis headlines an impressive cast that runs deep—Elizabeth Debicki, Brian Tyree Henry, Colin Farrell—as the beleaguered partner of an armed robber killed on the job who recruits the wives of his slain colleagues to pull off a lucrative job.
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
Watch on StanWarfare in the information age comes into brutal focus in Kathryn Bigelow’s magisterial action-thriller, where a Pakistan-based CIA analyst (Jessica Chastain) accepts torture and drone strikes in her obsessive post-9/11 hunt for Osama Bin-Laden. Revenge is consumptive, and history exists in the torrid, unfiltered moment.
This guide is regularly updated to reflect changes in Stan‘s catalogue. For a list of capsule reviews that have been removed from this page because they are no longer available on the platform, visit here.
