Collection
Honorable Mentions: Philosophy on Film
Overlooked and adjacent philosophical films worth a second look.
Every list makes cuts it later regrets, and this one is built from those regrets. These are the films that got a nod but not a number — the ones whose ideas were too large, too strange, or too well-worn to squeeze onto the main roster. A prisoner is offered his humanity back in exchange for his free will. Four witnesses to one death cannot agree on what happened, because none of them were ever describing the event so much as themselves. A man discovers his memories can be extracted like teeth, and elects to keep the aching ones anyway. Hope, it turns out, is not a plan but a discipline. Consider this the footnotes to the syllabus — no less essential for having been left off the main page.
Four people recount different versions of the story of a man's murder and the rape of his wife.
The defense and the prosecution have rested and the jury is filing into the jury room to decide if a young Spanish-American is guilty or innocent of murdering his father. What begins as an open and shut case soon becomes a mini-drama of each of the jurors' prejudices and preconceptions about the trial, the accused, and each other.
Meursault is a man who feels utterly isolated from everyone and everything around him. This alienation results in sudden, inexplicable bursts of violence, culminating in murder.
A psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet called Solaris to investigate the death of a doctor and the mental problems of cosmonauts on the station. He soon discovers that the water on the planet is a type of brain which brings out repressed memories and obsessions.
In a near-future Britain, young Alexander DeLarge and his pals get their kicks beating and raping anyone they please. When not destroying the lives of others, Alex swoons to the music of Beethoven. The state, eager to crack down on juvenile crime, gives an incarcerated Alex the option to undergo an invasive procedure that'll rob him of all personal agency. In a time when conscience is a commodity, can Alex change his tune?
Imprisoned in the 1940s for the double murder of his wife and her lover, upstanding banker Andy Dufresne begins a new life at the Shawshank prison, where he puts his accounting skills to work for an amoral warden. During his long stretch in prison, Dufresne comes to be admired by the other inmates -- including an older prisoner named Red -- for his integrity and unquenchable sense of hope.
An unflinching look at the how the battle over abortion rights has played out in the United States over the last 15 years.
Cobb, a skilled thief who commits corporate espionage by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets is offered a chance to regain his old life as payment for a task considered to be impossible: "inception", the implantation of another person's idea into a target's subconscious.
No films in this genre.