At this point, 25 years after its release, there’s no reason to debate the quality of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. A catastrophe for boomers and Gen Xers forever entranced by the spell of the original trilogy; a defining tentpole moment for millennials who rode the high of the 1997 Special Edition rereleases only to hit the turbulence of George Lucas’ bubbly new vision; a bedrock of a new era of storytelling for Gen Zers who have more love in their hearts for The Clone Wars TV show than anything in live action — it’s a film that means something different to everyone and, almost objectively, an inflection point for blockbuster moviemaking. Or, to put it another way: The Phantom Menace is.
But The Phantom Menace trailer… a masterpiece. And Lucasfilm is rightfully treating 1998’s biggest two-minute hype video, a preview that helped the notorious bomb Meet Joe Black make what little money it made back in the day, as an equally important part of the Star Wars legacy: With the movie back in theaters for a 25th anniversary rerelease, the studio has remastered its original trailer, which was produced and released so early that it was simply called “Episode I” instead of The Phantom Menace. LeAndre Thomas, project manager for video & digital assets at Lucasfilm, said on X that he and his team rescanned an original 35mm print of the trailer in order to remaster it in 4K. The new version was posted to YouTube on Sunday night, and was immediately watched by people who enjoy a good nostalgia trip.
In honor of a pristine new version of the Phantom Menace trailer arriving online, here are the top five moments that still make me think, Hot damn, this movie is going to be absolutely sick, Star Wars is so back, baby, hell yeah!!!!, despite knowing that it is not exactly a perfect movie.
5. The 20th Century Fox logo
Image: 20th Century Studios
I will never age as long as the Phantom Menace trailer is watchable with the click of a button. When the 20th Century Fox logo pops up in silence at the beginning of the trailer, I am a child in a dark movie theater, barely breathing. That logo is Star Wars to my brain, with an additional hit of dopamine arriving when Lucasfilm’s logo sparkles onto the screen a second later. Ah, to be young and alive at a time when getting fired up over a corporate logo was not only acceptable, but welcome! I still hold a grudge against Disney for acquiring Fox and opening The Force Awakens with just the Lucasfilm logo — at the end of the day, I am now a grumbly adult.
4. Darth Maul firing up the dual lightsaber blades
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
Who is that guy????? Tell me everything about that guy. Everyone in the old movies had one lightsaber, but he has two. Holy hell. (Equally important to the Sith presence in this trailer: Mace Windu’s laser stare bringing balance to the badassery of the Force.)
3. The cockpit of the podrace
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
There’s no reason to debate the quality of The Phantom Menace, but… the podracing sequence is unimpeachable. The first taste we get of the No. 1 best action sequence in all of the Star Wars movies (fight me) is from Anakin’s POV — a complete adrenaline rush as John Williams’ theme kicks in. The other images race by like scenery witnessed out the side window. Truly, I had no memory of how many times we see Jar Jar doing Jar Jar shit in the trailer, because it’s cut like the podrace. Spectacular.
2. Padme standing in front of a window, fade to Darth Vader exhaling over ‘every saga has a beginning’
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
Chills. Finally, Darth Vader’s tragic story will be told.
1. Gungans emerge from the fog of Naboo’s swamps
Image: Lucasfilm Ltd.
The greatest opening shot in a movie trailer ever. Lucas doing Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood with a brand-new alien race. Star Wars is art now. Nothing could possibly go wrong with any of this.
With the recent international success of live-action adaptations of manga and anime like One Piece and Yu Yu Hakusho, Netflix finally seems to have made solid forward progress on a process that it has spent a few years on. Though some major franchises remain in development (no real news on that My Hero Academia movie yet aside from “production might have started”) the streaming service has amassed quite a list to run through if you’re interested.
Now, whether that interest is genuine or morbid is up to you. The live-action adaptations of anime and manga on Netflix were certainly not made equally. And while some creative choices make the series feel like fitting spiritual successors to the source material, others remain baffling or simply disappointing. Note that if an adaptation consists of more than one film, the sequels will be judged alongside the originals here.
13. Rurouni Kenshin, Rurouni Kenshin: The Final, Rurouni Kenshin: The Beginning
Image: Warner Bros. Japan
The three Rurouni Kenshin films available on Netflix are fine. Director Keishi Otomo does his best to bring the thrilling (and often surprisingly violent) battles to life, and the results are admirable when not chopped up in intense, jumpy editing. The character development, particularly of the lead character, can’t escape comparisons to the source material. In the manga series, protagonist Himura Kenshin is a vibrant man of contradictions, capable of both immense destruction and charming affability, and actor Takeru Satoh does his best with it (it’s clear that he put a lot of work into sword fight training). But it too often feels like an impression of a character rather than a fully realized one.
While this is a more positive take than some you’ll read ahead, it’s hard to recommend any aspect of the franchise thanks to the actions of author Nobuhiro Watsuki. Getting little more than a slap on the wrist for being discovered with an immense amount of child pornography, Watsuki’s legacy (and the series which he is known for) is stained, and as such, these three films are impossible to wholeheartedly endorse.
12. Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead
Photo: Masako Iwasaki/Netflix
The concept behind this manga series (what if the zombie apocalypse allowed you to quit your wage slave existence and live life the way you want?) is undeniably fun, but the Netflix series is never quite able to hone in on it. It doesn’t help that it debuted in the middle of the first season of the anime, a refreshing, colorful experience that, despite its various episode delays, took the energetic scope of the manga and ran with it. With two strong comparison pieces, the film becomes little more than a lighthearted exercise in Netflix covering its franchising bases. Watch this only if animation gives you hives or something.
11. Cowboy Bebop
Photo: Geoffrey Short/Netflix
Likely the most infamous series on this list is Cowboy Bebop, an adaptation of the most widely praised anime of all time. In retrospect, it seems ill conceived to have put so much pressure on it to tap into the inimitable cool of director Shinichiro Watanabe’s masterpiece. The anime’s combination of noir aesthetics, space opera grandness, moody character work, and all that jazz makes it unfair to compare it to, well, most other works of fiction. Adapting Cowboy Bebop into live action was a big swing from the top of a high mountain, and sadly, it was a miss.
If it succeeds in anything, it’s the dedication of its cast, particularly the lead, John Cho. Given the unenviable task of trying to replicate a character whose mix of mystery and relatability only really works in animation, Cho is as adequate as any live-action performance of Spike Spiegel could be. The same goes for Mustafa Shakir as Jet Black, and though her quips have been reduced to mocking memes, Daniella Pineda’s Faye Valentine can be really fun when divorced from its connection to the anime. The rest, however, is a mess that does little more than fumble through Watanabe’s work.
10. Death Note
Photo: James Dittiger/Netflix
Death Note is a weird case. On paper, it has elements that should work. The story is a thriller that seems easy to trim down into a shorter movie length. It’s not so fantastical as to leave one wondering, “Well, how are they gonna pull that off?” And it has Willem Dafoe voicing the death god Ryuk. Willem Dafoe! When assembled, though, none of it coalesces, and it falls apart instantly.
The decision to turn main character Light from the sociopathic deity wannabe of the manga into an angsty outsider meant that, in the mental duel between him and super detective L, there was really no one to root for. This decision takes the effortless drive of the manga and anime and renders it inert. Even when the titular murder journal falls into even more unscrupulous hands, the film is too dragged down to enter its “Oooh, maybe there will be a sequel…” resolution with any excitement. Better luck next time (probably).
9. Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: The Revenge of Scar, Fullmetal Alchemist: The Final Alchemy
Image: Netflix
There are a lot of great ways to enjoy Fullmetal Alchemist — its fantastic manga, its underrated 2003 anime, or its faithful anime reboot from 2009. The Netflix live-action trilogy doesn’t quite join that pedestal. It’s a fun time if you’ve read the manga previously, but there’s so much crammed in (particularly in the third film, where the glue and tape of editing the narrative down are most apparent) that it’s never clear why anything, outside of the two main brother characters, is important. It’s a trilogy of films, but it only manages to skim the surface of the series’ emotional depth and exquisite themes.
8. Kakegurui
Image: Netflix
Kakegurui doesn’t have to make any big special effects or labyrinthine plotline leaps to work as a TV series. Instead, it mostly sticks to the manga and the joy of the chemistry of the three leads: teenagers in a private academy where status is determined by gambling. It’s an easy watch, though Netflix has yet to add the live-action film where the actors reprise their roles.
7. Bleach
Image: Netflix
You can tell how old someone is by how they recommend Bleach. Older manga fans remember the dynamic, genre-bouncing early days, while those who came in later likely know it by how it fell into a swamp of storytelling tropes and incomprehensibility. Luckily, the live-action Bleach film harnesses a lot of the mythology when it was at its most potent before manga author Tite Kubo exhausted it. In fact, the film’s best quality is that it’s able to deftly build its world without feeling like it’s preparing the audience for a pop quiz after. Whereas a few of these adaptations, like the aforementioned Fullmetal Alchemist, approach the details of the manga in vague, bullet-point fashion, Bleach weaves them into its story, which uplifts a film that is otherwise middling in most respects.
6. The Ingenuity of the Househusband
Image: Netflix
Disclaimer: The Ingenuity of the Househusband is not a direct adaptation of the delightful manga series The Way of the Househusband. You’ll have to watch the lackluster anime series for that. Instead, it’s a collection of shorts that show the husband, a former yakuza boss, dealing with various domestic duties, like making coffee or fixing a screen door. It’s cute and certainly doesn’t aim for the heights of anything else on this list. But playing it safe is its most appealing quality, and it serves as a pleasant side gig for fans of the manga (which you should read.)
5. Kingdom
Image: Juhan Noh/Netflix
Kingdom, running at over two hours, is one of the most fun efforts of Shinsuke Sato (a director who, having helmed films like Gantz, I Am a Hero, and Bleach, is a go-to in the space). It’s also a noble attempt at tackling a manga/historical fiction series that, to date, runs 70 volumes. Very little of the emotional weight of the manga carries over, but Sato brings undeniable visual panache to the battle choreography and stunt work here. Kingdom is best when it’s pure spectacle, with sequences that even folks with no connection to the manga can enjoy. At one point, during a barrage of arrows, the camera lingers briefly on a man that dies from having been shot through the mouth by one. What’s not to like?
4. Alice in Borderland
Image: Netflix
Directed by Shinsuke Sato (jeez, that man is everywhere), Alice in Borderland is a series that thrives whenever you don’t have to think too much about the “who” of it all. Character development is slim — the actors are mostly around to look tense and nervous in a Battle Royale-esque survival situation where they have to win “games” to survive. Even if new viewers might compare it to Squid Game but without all that pesky social commentary, Sato is very good at building stakes and making you grip the sides of your chair as you wonder who is going to get gruesomely murdered next.
3. From Me to You
Image: Netflix
This live-action adaptation of a powerhouse shojo manga (Another “If you haven’t read it, go read it right now!” series) was never going to approach the charms of its source material. Karuho Shiina’s art, both quirky and engrossing as it expresses the blushing warmth of young love, would leave any live-action adaptation struggling to fit in. So From Me to You mostly works as a tribute to an irreplaceable series and, as such, does an exceptional job. It’s got cuteness to spare and the dedication of its lead performers carries it through any stumbles.
2. Yu Yu Hakusho
Image: Netflix
Yu Yu Hakusho’s main offense is that it’s just too short. At only five episodes (which cover over 100 chapters of manga), there’s simply no time to get through everything. As such, events that would otherwise be big emotional moments (especially in the latter half, which is full of them) get little more than a shrug. However, the first half of the series is rather marvelous. The fight choreography in the opening battles is top-notch, and the way we get to know each of the four main beloved boys is appropriately awesome. It also handles the tonal shifts of the story well, jumping from genre to genre (horror to fantasy to martial arts to comedy) adeptly. And just as in the Yu Yu Hakusho manga and anime, co-lead Kuwabara shines through with his trademark masculine insecurity and swaggering pathos.
1. One Piece
Image: Netflix
It’s weird to live in a world where we not only got a serviceable live-action One Piece adaptation, but one that’s good enough to adequately capture the spirit of the manga. Eiichiro Oda’s epic, 25-plus-year saga is such a testament to the power of manga art that trying to recreate it with flesh and blood, on first glance, looks like a dumbfounding proposition. But Netflix’s One Piece found a way.
This is mostly thanks to the enthusiasm of its cast, who are all able to capture the broad emotional swings of the characters without falling into parody, and what looks to be an every-penny-spent approach on set design. There are so many practical flourishes, from the exteriors of the ships and seaside towns to the interiors of locations like Kaya’s mansion and the Baratie floating restaurant, that it manages to feel less like an imitation of Oda’s world and more like its own entity. The commitment paid off: The astounding viewership of One Piece’s first season led Netflix to greenlight a season 2, one that, from the looks of things, will be a flagship (pun intended) addition to the service’s manga-to-live-action lineup.
It’s easy to think of Denzel Washington as the best actor of his generation, and in conversation with the greatest actors who have ever lived. He already has two Oscars, and has deserved many more. And with the recent release of The Equalizer 3 on Netflix, it’s the perfect time to look back on his body of work and legitimately pose the question: Is he also the greatest action star of his generation?
If Denzel is on screen in a movie made this century, he’s likely got at least one gun on him. Perhaps you’d conclude that, like Liam Neeson, that means Denzel has been on autopilot. But from the beginning, Denzel has had coinciding populist taste, multiplex butter-flavored syrup infused in his cinematic DNA. Amid historical biopics, Civil War epics, and Spike Lee’s formative romantic meditations, there have always been gleeful crowd-pleasers in Denzel’s body of work: noirs, heists, erotic thrillers, and serial killers.
You may ask, is The Manchurian Candidate really an action flick? And the answer is that once, yes it was. Not that long ago, movies could be more than one thing. A prestige drama could have a great tension-packed car chase. A vigilante movie could be about socialized medicine. A noir could also be a time-traveling sci-fi. By cataloging his hits over decades, through Denzel’s resume, we can chart a devolution in what kinds of genre/spectacle films are being made in Hollywood.
If this is the end of that kind of film, it is fitting to celebrate it by honoring Denzel’s great action flicks, and his best moments in them. He remains one of the best who ever did it. Let’s kick some ass.
Honorable mentions that aren’t quite action movies: American Gangster, Cry Freedom, The Tragedy of Macbeth
26. The Taking of Pelham 123
Image: Columbia Pictures/MGM
Director: Tony Scott Where to watch: Starz, AMC Plus, or for digital rental/purchase
Every one of these movies is a good idea on paper, but this is the most disappointing, because it had the potential to be really special. It’s Denzel and Tony Scott with James Gandolfini, and maybe the last good Tony Manero performance, taking on one of the greatest detail-rich, lived-in New York movies ever made. The original Pelham 123 is a film that really embodies that cliche about the city as a character, and it utilizes it like few movies ever had. It’s about a city of pressed-together schnooks that speak and think like neurotic piece-of-work Jews like me, arguing with each other through the duration of a crisis they all seem more annoyed by than concerned about. This film is entirely drained of that energy, focusing on Scott’s continuing experiments with digital photography instead of the liveliness of the city. Denzel gets to play hostage negotiator versus a scene-chewing John Travolta, and even though Travolta is supposed to be the dominant force in the conversation, Denzel bodies him in most of their exchanges by thinking through his lines.
Best Denzel moment: Confessing to Travolta that he took a bribe to save a hostage’s life, leading to a masterful controlled breakdown over the phone.
25. Safe House
Image: Universal Pictures
Director: Daniel Espinosa Where to watch: Netflix, or for digital rental/purchase
An actually admirable attempt that’s better than what you may remember, Safe House features an old-school Tom Clancy plot about a house cat itching for a taste of the field who finally gets his monkey-paw wish granted. Unfortunately, the movie has either no feel or no time for character development. It’s reaching for the intimate kinetic grit of Paul Greengrass’ Bourne movies via Sam Peckinpah, and of course it doesn’t get there, but I have to respect a movie that pays this much attention to its spycraft. The fun of the film is watching Denzel’s endlessly resourceful old agent think his way out of a series of seemingly impossible dead ends by leaning on his experience and reflexive improvisation. The Achilles heel is that we’re forced to care about a perfunctory Ryan Reynolds love story C-plot when what we want is more Reynolds and Denzel face-offs. For whatever you may feel about Ryan Reynolds’ “gifts,” this humorless film wastes them. Safe House is better than the next three films in many ways, but they have the courage to be weird and take some swings.
Best Denzel moment: The hint of a smile after Denzel comes up from a first session of being waterboarded.
24. The Bone Collector
Image: Universal/Everett Collection
Director: Phillip Noyce Where to watch: Digital rental/purchase
Solely based on the title and poster, this feels like it should’ve been Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman. But it’s Denzel and young Angelina Jolie, and it is so much worse and stranger than the Morgan/Judd movies. Denzel is quadriplegic and waiting for a seizure that will put him in a vegetative state, and he is desperate to be euthanized. Instead, he becomes the cuddly cop version of a bedridden Hannibal Lecter, with Jolie as his Clarice. The movie anticipates CSI, as the genius and his protege study the crime scenes left by the killer, who has a research-loving crime fiction writer’s interest in historical New York City trivia and lore and communicates directly with forensic investigators via obscure clues. It also presents an alternate universe where most of the NYPD seems to give a fuck about doing their jobs.
Best Denzel moment: When Denzel, who doesn’t have the ability to move his arms or legs, destroys a serial killer’s hand and rips off his ear using only his mouth.
23. Virtuosity
Image: Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection
Director: Brett Leonard Where to watch: Paramount Plus, free with a library card on Kanopy, free with ads on Pluto
A riff on Frankenstein and the Stallone/Snipes dystopian face-off classic Demolition Man, this is a pretty silly and absurd sci-fi trifle about society, technology, and humanity in the form of a goofball summer thriller. They used to make these inadvertently hilarious techno-thrillers in the ’90s both by and for people with no understanding of how computers work. Virtuosity wins the award for worst CGI on this list, and maybe ever in the history of film? Russell Crowe, as a VR serial killer composite, is made of some cybernetic material that manifests on screen as hair gel tendrils, so he can grow his finger back when it’s chopped off, bullet holes fill back in immediately, etc. You want to give them a pass for the technology not being quite there to execute the vision, but they’re attempting to rip off Terminator 2, a film that was released four years earlier. It’s a more interesting iteration of Denzel’s standard, upstanding, dour straight cop because his character is an ex-cop, ex-con with a dead family and an edge to him, released to track down and kill the film’s true saving grace: young Russell Crowe having more fun than anyone besides Denzel gets to have on this entire list. In fact, here’s a list within a list:
Best Denzel moment: I’d conservatively estimate Denzel shoots cybernetic serial killer composite Russell Crowe 300 times.
22. Ricochet
Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
Director: Russell Mulcahy Where to watch: Cinemax
You really have to see this movie to believe it, particularly if your only relationship to John Lithgow is 3rd Rock from the Sun or Love Is Strange. Ricochet is just a completely unhinged, borderline slapstick exploitation film. It’s Cape Fear on meth, and ironically came out the same year. Denzel matches Lithgow’s energy here. He begins the movie stripping to his drawers and shooting a hostage-holding Lithgow with a behind-the-back trick shot, then spends a portion of the movie on drugs ranting and raving in a pink robe. It’s wild shit, and wildly entertaining.
Best Denzel moment: Denzel, to his wife, after handing both of his daughters off to drug-dealing gangster Ice-T’s bodyguard for protection before going after Lithgow for the final showdown, and after his wife finds out he has tested positive for gonorrhea:
“Listen, you were right before. I should’ve trusted you with everything, but now you gotta trust me with everything too. Now, if you don’t love me, tell me right now, because I’m fighting for what used to be my life, and you are all of it. Are you with me?”
[Instant nod from his wife] “Yes.”
21. The Manchurian Candidate
Image: Paramount Pictures
Director: Jonathan Demme Where to watch: Max, or for digital rental/purchase
So you get Streep as Hillary Clinton and my guys Jeffrey Wright, Liev Schreiber, and Bruno Ganz, all directed by Jonathan Demme, in a political thriller about literally incestuous cronyism in party politics, phony patriotism, PTSD, the American war machine, the prison of ambition, and the nefarious influence of special interests on our representatives. Unfortunately, this Manchurian Candidate is unbearably goofy and nothing lands. No one is doing their best work, including Demme. And because it’s a Denzel film, which almost always have tidy resolutions, there isn’t even the conviction to go through with the standard cynical conspiracy thriller ending.
Manchurian provides an interesting opportunity to discuss Denzel and what makes him great. It’s not the worst movie on this list by far, but this is probably my least favorite performance of his, maybe ever. He’s playing this broken, paranoid guy, and it completely robs him of his warmth and charisma. I can’t even really think of another dramatic performance that does that. If you’re into over-the-top metaphors for late-’90s/early-aughts liberal politics, there’s another film down this list I greatly prefer.
Best Denzel moment: When Denzel takes his first shot at Liev, trying to convince him they’ve been compromised.
20. Deja Vu
Image: Touchstone Pictures
Director: Tony Scott Where to watch: Free with ads on Tubi, or for digital rental/purchase
Very silly shit. The film doesn’t always respect or really even seem to understand the rules of time augmentation it sets up for itself. It turns into a series of Choose Your Own Adventures where Denzel goes out into the field, then the team back in the lab debates what happened and why and the nature of fate and time. It’s a pretty dry and joyless Denzel performance in a pretty dry and joyless film. Tony Scott gets the game ball for elevating the material. If you want to see a much, much better version of this, I’d recommend the brilliant and heavily slept-on Source Code.
Best Denzel moment: Denzel, watching helplessly from the future, reacting to his partner getting killed because he inadvertently led him to his death by meddling with the past.
19. Fallen
Image: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
Director: Gregory Hoblit Where to watch: Digital rental/purchase
What is this movie? A detective stumbling upon, then attempting to fight, a demonic consciousness of an evil angel passed by physical touch? What is its objective? To destroy humanity at the rate of one detective in a cabin in the woods every few decades? This is a borderline horror flick, but we’ve decided to classify it as a supernatural thriller. Unlike some of the films above, it’s pretty good at staying faithful to its dumb conceit and sticking to the rules it establishes. I also believe it’s probably the only film on this list where Denzel actually loses. But it’s Denzel doing his version of a Philip Marlowe — up against an angel-demon, of course, but still a good time.
Best Denzel moment: When Denzel thinks he’s killed the demon and starts singing its own theme song back at it.
18. The Equalizer
Image: Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
Director: Antoine Fuqua Where to watch: Starz, or for digital rental/purchase
A fine action film, I guess. It’s Denzel’s bid for his own Mission: Impossible, another old piece of TV IP barely tethered to its superstar’s modern, globe-trotting franchise machine. You could also call it his John Wick, but unlike that film, it’s a movie that’s both too serious and not serious enough. Wick just had its best installment by far because it leaned into the over-the-top giddy spectacle of a phantasmagoric blood opera. The Equalizer is no fun. It also doesn’t have any real stakes. Denzel simply, methodically kills his way through an army of bland Russians with no tension, or any remote sense of danger or threat. Denzel is an inevitable guardian angel of death, with no flaws or weaknesses, so none of the kills mean that much to him, or to the film, or to us. The result is a competent slog, but as the rest of his body of work proves, we used to demand more from our “mindless” blood-soaked genre movies.
Best Denzel moment: Denzel gets one speech, at dinner with a Russian bad guy whose full-body tattoos make Master Gardener appear modest by comparison, and obviously nails it.
17. The Book of Eli
Image: Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection
Directors: Albert Hughes, Allen Hughes Where to watch: For digital rental/purchase
A pretty fascinating, high-concept misfire: a Kung Fu dystopian Western about Christianity. Denzel is the lonely wandering ronin who lives simply and humbly off the land after a human-made apocalypse. He adheres to his own code, navigating an American wasteland overrun by scavengers and cannibals. Denzel doesn’t make many films about his faith, but this one is clearly deeply felt by both the directors and their star. The only “disappointment” for me is Gary Oldman, who is fine, but casting him as your bad guy means you’re walking on sacred ground, and through no fault of his own we get maybe 60% of the way to a The Professional/True Romance/Fifth Element-level performance.
Best Denzel moment: When Denzel, gut-shot and dying, recites the entirety of the King James Bible by heart so it can be committed to page and reintroduced to society.
16. The Magnificent Seven
Image: Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection
Director: Antoine Fuqua Where to watch: Digital rental/purchase
Denzel on a horse! If Fallen is Denzel channeling Bogart, here he channels John Wayne, albeit in the classic Badass Black Cowboy’s mustache-and-mutton-chop pairing. He has a death wish, and he’s enjoying himself. Can’t understate how special it is seeing one of the greatest movie stars of this era imprinting on a nearly extinct form of American cinema, even if it’s not the great film the cast list and trailer promised. It gets maybe 70% of the way there. Needed some shock and awe, some Eli Wallach energy. Instead, it typifies this tier on the list of competent and unspectacular popcorn flicks.
Best Denzel moment: Denzel eats a heart.
15. The Equalizer 2
Image: Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection
Director: Antoine Fuqua Where to watch: Hulu, or for digital rental/purchase
Improved on the original because of a crucial plot point that actually lends the story purpose (killing Melissa Leo), but not by much. I don’t really have much else to say about it, so for fun:
Best Denzel moment: When Denzel demands, and gets, a five-star Uber rating from the women-abusing frat bros he beats the shit out of in their apartment.
14. The Little Things
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
Director: John Lee Hancock Where to watch: Max, or for digital rental/purchase
Notable because Denzel really leans into being paunchy and washed. We’re not quite hitting Roman J. Israel levels, but we’re not far off. The headline is a three-hander with Denzel and two weirdos with Oscars. But it’s Denzel’s dumber and less meticulous diet-Fincher. A film about obsession and the inability to live with life’s mysteries. The ball is fumbled in the red zone, and its resolution is problematic to say the least, but for much of its run time it’s atmospheric and well paced, and Denzel is unsurprisingly great as a detective battling madness and the mess he made of his life.
Best Denzel moment: Denzel has a heart-to-heart with the corpse of a murder victim that is legitimately some of his best work.
13. 2 Guns
Image: Universal/Everett Collection
Director:Baltasar Kormákur Where to watch: Free with ads on Tubi, or for digital rental/purchase
This one’s based on a series of graphic novels by Steven Grant, with a screenplay from Blake Masters, who has worked primarily as a network TV workhorse, and there’s the issue. It needed to be 20-30% funnier. You see from the beginning what they’re going for, two frenemies bickering over a diner breakfast order and how much to tip as they cooly set the building on fire and head to their muscle car without looking back just before it explodes. It’s Avary/Tarantino/McQuarrie-in-the-’90s quippy action comedy territory. There’s still fun to be had: a heist, a lot of Mark Wahlberg with his eyebrows raised, ending his sentences with upspeak. For the most part, Wahlberg gets to have the lion’s share of the fun, except…
Best Denzel moment: Denzel, whose characters have sex surprisingly rarely considering how much of a sex symbol he has been, has sex with Paula Patton!
12. The Siege
Image: 20th Century Fox
Director: Edward Zwick Where to watch: Starz, or for digital rental/purchase
A messy movie with fraught politics, but generally good ideas: The liberal resistance to the coming fascist post-9/11 Patriot Act world, but also one that is not above the fearmongering, stereotyping, and profiling that made it possible to exist in the first place. The Annette Bening character is probably the focus of an NYU poli sci class this semester. In a lot of ways this is a reprisal of Crimson Tide, with Denzel attempting to posit himself as the voice of liberal reason in the face of a black-and-white fascist.
Best Denzel moment: Denzel makes a stirring but hilariously quaint and naive argument against torture and why it will compromise the constitution and American way of life.
11. Unstoppable
Image: Twentieth Century Fox
Director: Tony Scott Where to watch: Digital rental/purchase
An admirable simplicity of purpose. This might be the only movie on this list with no gun and no bad guy. It’s a disaster movie, ThePerfect Storm for trains. Purely in terms of direction, it’s Tony Scott’s best work throughout the partnership. Working-class Denzel is the best. How many people in action movies have actual jobs anymore?
Best Denzel moment: I know it had to be a mix of stunt work and green screen, but it’s Denzel hopping from car to car on top of the train, setting the individual brakes, trying to slow it down.
10. The Mighty Quinn
Image: MGM Home Entertainment
Director: Carl Schenkel Where to watch: Prime Video, free with a library card on Hoopla, free with ads on Tubi and Pluto TV
By no means a perfect film, The Mighty Quinn is a product of the late ’80s and feels very much like one (complete with a harebrained, nonsensical resolution). Denzel and the great Robert Townsend are doing borderline parody accents. It’s obvious there was no budget or experience behind the camera to really know how to shoot action. From fistfights to car accidents, those moments are rife with bad transitions and continuity errors. But it’s a fun and original bizarre hybrid: a musical noir set in Jamaica about race, class, imperialism, and corruption. And Denzel is great! He’s a rebel, beset on all sides by superiors who want to sweep a mess under the rug, and he manages a blend of determined, defiant, charming, and dignified while telling his elders to go fuck themselves.
Best Denzel moment: Dezel sings the blues in a piano bar/shack.
9. Out of Time
Image: MGM/Everett Collection
Director: Carl Franklin Where to watch: Max, or for digital rental/purchase
A blend of Bad Lieutenant and Body Heat. Notable in Denzel’s oeuvre because Matt Lee Whitlock is arguably the biggest loser he’s ever played, a piece of shit constantly working off his back foot (perhaps aside from another cop, Alonzo Harris in Training Day). The film is essentially a series of unlikely narrow escapes a sweat-drenched Denzel has to pull off to fix an escalating pile of fuck-ups and loose ends. Everyone’s slimy and dumb and depraved — a perfect old-school erotic thriller.
Best Denzel moment: When the book is finally closed and we gather to tell the tales and sing the songs, the real Johnny Appleseed, Bunyan, John Henry shit will be the time Denzel literally cucked Superman.
8. The Equalizer 3
Photo: Stefano Montesi/Sony Pictures Entertainment
Director: Antoine Fuqua Where to watch: Netflix
I’m as shocked as you are, but the third installment of The Equalizer is not just the best of the series, it’s one of Denzel’s best action flicks. If I wasn’t afraid of recency bias, I might’ve ranked it higher. It starts with the fun grindhouse smut I requested in discussing the first installment of the franchise. It’s also much slower, a shockingly patient film that isn’t just about being washed, but actual mortality. It really leans into Denzel, who looks every day of his then 68 years, being old and frail. It’s at times moving, not just about protection or revenge, but rather about finding peace and preserving a way of life in a coastal Italian village.
But the true genius of the film is casting Denzel’s old co-star, Dakota Fanning, as his young protege, which essentially makes the film a Man on Fire sequel. It made me think about Ghost Protocol and Fast Five, two films that elevated their respective franchises by embracing all the old characters who had passed through and reveling in the lore. Why not turn The Equalizer into the Denzel extended universe? Obviously not the same characters across the non-canon films, but let’s bring them all back, Cheadle and Snipes and Owen and Wahlberg and Patton and Pine and Streep. I’ll watch 10 more of these.
Best Denzel moment: The reunion tea with Dakota Fanning.
7. Training Day
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
Director: Antoine Fuqua Where to watch: Free with ads on Tubi, or for digital rental/purchase
One of my hotter takes is I think the Oscar has unduly raised the appraisal of this pretty goofy film whose message has aged terribly. A great cartoon Denzel performance, full of his most memorable (and I think crucially, quotable) line readings, and cartoons are obviously a lot of fun, but it’s not close to his best, so I won’t belabor the point. All I will say is on this latest rewatch, the “Not All Cops” message embodied by Ethan Hawke’s Boy Scout dignity was particularly grating. Also, I will just never get over the leap off the roof onto the hood of Denzel’s car. Bird-brain shit.
Best Denzel moment: Denzel making Ethan Hawke get wet.
6. Man on Fire
Image: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Director: Tony Scott Where to watch: Max, or for digital rental/purchase
Obviously a great film, but Scott’s visual language hasn’t aged well. It’s treated and cut like a Nine Inch Nails video or a Fincher credit sequence. But aside from that, Scott is near his peak here. The camera rarely stops moving, even when it’s two people talking in a room, which adds to the film’s restless, manic energy of pissed-off pulp. Man on Fire is a quasi-religious text about a broken sinner killing his way to redemption. Denzel is that sinner, awash in layers of alcohol and nihilism, attempting to drown his regret. The chemistry with young Dakota Fanning jumps off the screen, and totally sells the extremes he goes to in order to bring her home.
Best Denzel moment: The film-long touching bond between an adorable little girl and her father figure.
5. Inside Man
Image: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment
Director: Spike Lee Where to watch: Starz, or for digital rental/purchase
At the outset of this list, I criticized Pelham for not honoring the Jewishness of its text. This film does that. It’s a multi-ethnic and bilingual melting pot of annoyed, annoying, combative, neurotic, and stubborn people getting on each other’s nerves in a high-stress and cramped environment. Or, they’re all “Jewish” New Yorkers. It’s the texture of New York that Pelham completely missed the boat on. Another in a rare sort of Denzel performance: Denzel the dumbass, always a step behind and a second late.
Best Denzel moment: It’s a cooperative with Spike Lee and his calling card, but the revved-up dolly shot might be Lee’s best. Denzel has just fallen for a gag execution, and his laser-focused anger in the shot is a microcosm of the film: He’s a marionette reacting to each step of Clive Owen’s meticulous plan.
4. The Pelican Brief
Image: Warner Bros/Everett Collection
Director: Alan J. Pakula Where to watch: For free with ads on Pluto TV, or for digital rental/purchase
A great, fascinating adaptation from the John Grisham era of ’90s Hollywood blockbusters, when a thought-provoking legal thriller could still be a blockbuster. Two Supreme Court justices are simultaneously assassinated, and a plucky law student (prime Julia Roberts) hacks the plot by studying case histories and following threads in a conspiracy that goes all the way to the Oval Office. Denzel is a determined, dickhead politico journalist who goes on the run with her (but infamously, in what is the film’s only glaring flaw, doesn’t have sex). It’s Pakula’s last great film, and the likes of Sam Shepard, John Lithgow, and Stanley Tucci show up to cook for perhaps three minutes each. It’s a pure piece of nostalgia for a better, lost age of movies.
Best Denzel moment: I’mcurrently working on a tough story with a lot of moving parts, and I greatly appreciate watching Denzel work a source.
3. Crimson Tide
Image: Buena Vista Pictures/Everett Collection
Director: Tony Scott Where to watch: For digital rental/purchase
A chamber drama conveyed through cheesy Dutch angles about fascism and Cold War-era nuclear paranoia, but really on a very short list of the greatest all-time “actors at the top of their games face off” films. Coming off Malcolm X, this movie signaled Denzel becoming the greatest actor in America. He’s riveting as a rebellious son who actually has the upper hand on his father figure and refuses to give an inch. It’s a deceptively simple film — as the two men trade mutinies for control of a nuke — that doesn’t need the scaffolding of a B-, C-, and D-plot. There’s no spouse at home for Denzel to sneak off and spend five minutes with here and there to distract from the basic core of the story. It knows exactly what it is and what it wants to do, and lets its incredible talent fill in the rest.
Best Denzel moment: The shouting match when Denzel backs down Hackman and takes control of the sub.
2. John Q.
Image: New Line Cinema/Courtesy Everett Collection
Director: Nick Cassavetes Where to watch: Starz, or for digital rental/purchase
Could hear arguments for this not being an action movie, but I won’t listen. It’sa good old-fashioned Chayefsky-esque message film as agitprop, taking down capitalism, told by a working-class schlub trying to get his son a heart transplant and socialize health care in one Chicago hospital by any means necessary. There is some sermonizing infotainment, but it’s a righteous cause and doesn’t bog down the film or break the tension. It’s moving and thought-provoking, heady stuff for a dumped-out February popcorn thriller, and quite possibly the most emotional Denzel performance on this list and beyond.
Best Denzel moment: Denzel pleading for James Woods to take his heart out of his chest and give it to his son so he can live, and then when he says goodbye to him before the surgery. There’s zero chance you won’t cry.
1. Devil in a Blue Dress
Image: Sony Pictures
Director: Carl Franklin Where to watch: For digital rental/purchase
In these films, it can be easy to lose sight of Denzel’s Blackness. Many of the roles on this list could’ve been played, by design, by any leading actor. Among many, many other elements in this incredible noir, what makes Devil in a Blue Dress special is that Liam Neeson couldn’t play Easy Rawlins. It’s Chinatown for race in America, a raw, sad, thrilling movie that showcases Denzel’s full complement of gifts and the very unique space he’s held in American cinema for 40 years. It’s channeling Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but also Nella Larsen. There are great performances all around, with an outrageous, all-cylinders Don Cheadle being fairly recognized and winning a SAG Best Supporting Actor Award that should’ve been attached to an Oscar. But Denzel is center frame in every shot, and it’s unlike any of his other detective films because when the movie starts, he’s not established, not even a detective. It’s an incredible origin story, as we watch Easy discover his gifts and his calling. If this isn’t his very best performance, it’s on his Mount Rushmore.
Best Denzel moment: When Denzel is so caught up having sex with his friend’s girl that he completely forgets about the information he’s ostensibly having the sex to obtain.
The year 2023 gave fans a standout year in sizzling romance. Baldur’s Gate 3allowed players to fall in love — and then make love — with its sexy and eclectic band of misfits. The Resident Evil 4 remake gave Leon Kennedy a head-to-toe makeover and turned him into a bona fide internet babygirl. Outside of games, longtime fan favorite Satoru Gojo made his long-awaited reappearance in the Jujutsu Kaisen anime.
I love it all, but sometimes the source material isn’t enough. It never hurts to add a bit of extra spice to the stories. We simply want characters to kiss each other! Sometimes… it’s just a little more fun to ship.
Whether it’s a steamy slow-burn fanfic or sharing perfectly edited clips of characters online, shipping characters helps build out our favorite worlds in exciting ways. Ships and all that romance provide the fuel to ignite the roaring engine of fandom. So with that, we’ve decided to round up our favorite ships and romantic pairings from 2023.
Shadowheart and Lae’zel from Baldur’s Gate 3
Image: Larian Studios via Polygon
If I had a nickel for every sprawling RPG with romanceable options that had a super-duper compelling sapphic enemies-to-lovers ship that was so good that I couldn’t find it in my heart to come in between the pairing with my player character, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird it happened twice.
Anyway, Shadowheart and Lae’zel from Baldur’s Gate 3 have earned a place in my shipper’s heart right next to Miranda Lawson and Jack from Mass Effect. They have such a delicious chemistry, the sort of antagonism that comes from actually being in super similar positions but refusing to acknowledge that, because that would mean acknowledging one’s own faults and shortcomings. Also, I love a spicy knife-to-the-throat scene!!!!!! —Petrana Radulovic
Zelda and Link from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon
Justice for Link and Prince Sidon shippers!!!!! Nintendo really did the Prince Sidon and Link romance dirty this year when it released Tears of the Kingdom. Apparently Sidon is not only straight, but engaged to some lady named Yona? Link didn’t even ride Sidon AT ALL. Boo! Regardless, I actually do love this game for the way it portrays such a beautiful and unending love between Link and Zelda. It was the first time that I felt like I truly understood Zelink shippers, and why I would now count myself among them. —Ana Diaz
Leon and Luis from Resident Evil 4
Image: Capcom via Polygon
Most people playing Resident Evil 4 — either the original 2005 game or the recent remake — ship its dreamboat protagonist Leon S. Kennedy with either the looks-barely-legal-but-she’s-20-something-actually Ashley Graham or the mysterious femme fatale Ada Wong. These two women conform to the typical Madonna/whore dichotomy, and what’s more boring than that? Furthermore, Leon always seems so awkward as a person that I always saw him as a semi-closeted queer guy who swipes through Grindr on the DL. (OK, back in 2005 it was Craigslist and not Grindr, but you’re following nonetheless.) For all those reasons, I see Leon’s true love in RE4 as Luis, the flamboyant Spanish babe who even gets a few more lines of dialogue in the remake. The only problem with their relationship becoming more serious (because I can only assume they’ve hooked up) is that they won’t have enough room for each of their respective hair products in any ordinary-sized bathroom. —Maddy Myers
Janine and Gregory from Abbott Elementary
Image: ABC
It’s no secret that Janine and Gregory are meant for each other in Abbott Elementary. Sure, this ship is predictable and maybe not that exciting! But also consider this: Both characters fucking rule.
They’ve long been my endgame, like so many other sitcom couples — the same way we all knew Nick and Jesse were fated in New Girl, and that Chidi and Eleanor would end up together in every life in The Good Place. Since those shows ended their runs, I’d waited for another slow-burn romance to come onto the scene. Abbott’s slow burn is refreshing because it doesn’t rely on pure hijinx or plot contrivances to keep its leads apart. Janine and Gregory are both full of heart, carrying around so much (matching) baggage, and trying their best to show up for their students every day. They’re just so profoundly awkward that they struggle to read each other’s signals, and yet they keep trying — because their relationship is built on a bedrock of friendship and trust.
This friendship also means they are excellent scene partners, whose conversations go from flirty banter to serious and consequential very fluidly. Gregory helps pull Janine back from her naive improvement projects, while she helps him gain confidence. I think often of the scene where Janine gently calls out Gregory’s office-supply store decorative classroom posters. Gregory then shares all of the drawings his students make of him; viewers realize he has no idea how beloved he is. Janine — who already knows this — helps him see it, and maybe he starts to believe it a little himself. —Nicole Clark
Literally all of the Owl House ships (Luz and Amity, Hunter and Willow, Eda and Raine)
Image: Disney
I simply cannot pick one! Am I in the mood for a rivals-to-friends-to-lovers where a mean girl goes from being rude to being in love with the plucky hero? Or for a prickly guy who’s secretly super soft and a soft girl who’s secretly a badass, who are both outcasts in their own way but find solace in one another? Or a decades-long friends-to-lovers-to-exes-to-estranged-acquaintances-to-reconciled-allies, all while mutually pining for one another after their relationship fell apart all those years ago? The Owl House kept us fed. —PR
Bronya and Seele from Honkai: Star Rail
Image: Hoyoverse via Polygon
I haven’t even played the other Honkai games, but apparently Seele and Bronya are lesbians in every universe. I literally adore these two. One is a tough punk leader of an underground grassroots organization that helps the poor, and the other is a world ruler who was originally raised to be ignorant of the cruelty of the state. It’s a match made in heaven! —AD
Haymitch Abernathy and Effie Trinket from The Hunger Games
Image: Lionsgate
After I saw The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, I went on a bit of a Hunger Games bender and reread the original trilogy. And let me tell you, reading these books as an adult makes you zero in on Haymitch as the hottest character. The movie trilogy had already seeded some Effie and Haymitch in my mind, but my reread made me want to write a fic from Haymitch and Effie’s point of view, where everything is mostly the same except they’ve been secretly hooking up the whole time. —PR
The player and Rusty from Armored Core 6
Image: FromSoftware/Bandai Namco
You simply gotta respect a ship for which almost every single piece of it is something that’s been invented wholesale by the fans. Rusty and the player character in Armored Core 6 have chemistry, don’t get me wrong — but you never even see this character’s face in the game! In the mercenary hellscape of AC6’s post-apocalyptic, corporate-controlled gig economy, though, any friendly voice in your ear is enough to make you fall in love. Every single piece of fan art I’ve seen of Rusty depicts him as gorgeous. But who cares about his literal physical form! No player actually needed that, turns out, in order to believe that Rusty believes in us. —MM
Geto and Gojo from Jujutsu Kaisen
Image: Mappa/Crunchyroll
Do you ever love your bro so much that you let it radicalize you into hating the entire human race? No? Well, this is kind-of sort-of not really what happens with SatoSugu, a popular pairing that matches the infamous Satoru Gojo with Suguru Geto in the anime and manga Jujutsu Kaisen. Their love story is one of a teenage bond gone wrong. I’m still sad they broke up, but hey, at least the Mappa is great at delivering us hot characters. —AD
Keefe and Kelvin from The Righteous Gemstones
Photo: Jake Giles Netter/HBO
The best ships sneak up on you, and none more so than Kelvin and Keefe on The Righteous Gemstones. Every character on this show is such a weirdo, not only because the Gemstone family is rich (yeah, rich people are weird, I said it), but because the family business is televangelism. Kelvin is one of the three adult siblings vying to inherit his family’s megachurch mantle, but he’s so far in the closet that he had my gaydar readings going haywire for the whole first season. Super-closeted Christian adults are like this in real life, and it’s not that funny, although The Righteous Gemstones manages to make it funny, and even heartwarming as Kelvin’s reliance on his ex-Satanist BFF Keefe grows stronger and stranger. Will God forgive them? According to me, an agnostic: Yes!! —MM
Kaveh and Alhaitham from Genshin Impact
Image: Hoyoverse via Polygon
Sometimes the best ship is one that feels the most real. This is why I love Alhaitham and Kaveh from Genshin Impact. Together, the two act like an old bickering couple. Kaveh will make snide remarks about the decor and Alhaitham will groan like an old bear. It’s not exactly steamy or hot, but it feels stupidly domestic and entirely possible. It’s basically canon, right? —AD
Throughout 2023, in honor of the magnificent Tears of the Kingdom, Polygon has been celebrating Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series. It’s been fascinating. Perhaps no other video game series is so rewarding to revisit, or presents such wildly different, refracted visions of its core idea — which nevertheless remains consistent throughout.
Created by the great Shigeru Miyamoto in the 1980s as an expression of his childhood love of exploring without a map, Zelda has always held a revered position in gaming culture, although it never quite enjoyed popular success to match — not, that is, until its unlikely rebirth in 2017, thanks to the runaway success of the Nintendo Switch and the revolutionary design of Breath of the Wild.
The series’ strong traditions are balanced by an ingrained habit of hitting the reset button. Across 16 mainline entries, only a small handful (Majora’s Mask, Phantom Hourglass, Tears of the Kingdom) are true sequels, and even these delight in reinvention. The Zelda timeline is more a tangle of rumor and myth than an established canon, and its lore is constantly rewritten.
Ranking these brilliant, shapeshifting games is, in some ways, an absurd task. They’re all great (well, perhaps all but one); the top seven or so are masterpieces that could be arranged in just about any order. But it’s an interesting exercise in exploring a series of games that exist in a unique, echoing conversation with each other. In putting this ranking together, we paid at least as much attention to how fun the games are to play now as to their historical import.
A few points of order: Though they’re technically part of the main Zelda canon, we have excluded the multiplayer games Four Swords, Four Swords Adventures, and Tri Force Heroes. They’re difficult to play as their makers intended now, and honestly feel more like spinoffs (though Four Swords Adventures, in particular, absolutely rules). Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, which were released as a pair, Pokémon-style, are counted as a single entry. And actual spinoffs like Link’s Crossbow Training or Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland are also excluded. The Zelda series is gloriously weird — but maybe not that weird.
16. Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link
Image: Nintendo
Original release: 1987, on NES Where to play now: Nintendo Switch Online
If the original The Legend of Zelda is the series at its most youthful, exuberant, and promising, Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link represents the games’ awkward teen years. Fittingly, the Link we play in Zelda 2 is 16 years old, fumbling his way through new gameplay territory, as Nintendo explores the lite role-playing mechanics from a side-scrolling perspective. Spread across overworld segments of dangerous exploration and equally harrowing side-scrolling dungeon crawling, Zelda 2 is a more challenging, more obtuse style of adventure.
Long considered the black sheep of the Legend of Zelda games, The Adventure of Link was a harder, clumsier experiment for Nintendo. It was envisioned as an action game infused with role-playing game stats, and the end result feels like Nintendo’s designers copying others’ work (e.g., Dragon Quest, Kung-Fu Master) instead of flexing the company’s trademark originality. Zelda 2 is not a failed experiment, however. Nintendo clearly learned the right lessons from it, as well as influencing other games, including Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest, Faxanadu, and Shovel Knight. Even the worst Zelda games have their importance. —Michael McWhertor
15. Phantom Hourglass
Image: Nintendo
Original release: 2007, on Nintendo DS Where to play now: Unavailable — track down a used copy
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass represents a somewhat awkward era of Zelda. As a direct sequel to The Wind Waker, it had big shoes to fill, and wore them a little clumsily. Phantom Hourglass was the first mainline Zelda game to be released on the Nintendo DS family of handhelds and the first Zelda game to take advantage of the console’s touch controls. Overall, the controls fit in nicely with the Zelda formula and allow players to scribble on dungeon maps and tap to fight. However, the game suffers from uneven pacing while traveling on your customizable steamboat ship, or revisiting the Temple of the Ocean King, a dungeon that requires you to come back to it multiple times. Still, I’ll remember it for its willingness to try new gameplay and test the Zelda waters. —Ana Diaz
14. Twilight Princess
Image: Nintendo
Original release: 2006, on GameCube and Wii Where to play now: Unavailable — track down a used copy of Twilight Princess HD for Wii U
Link spends a pretty big chunk of time in wolf form in Twilight Princess, which you’d think would be a selling point (because he looks so darn cute), but it’s actually pretty weird. After all, Link can’t do all of the best parts of being Link when he’s a wolf: throwing a boomerang, say, or twirling his sword around in a circle while shouting “Hiyah!” Twilight Princess also introduces Midna, a helper character in the vein of Navi, but a lot more condescending. I find Midna’s snarky comments to be deeply satisfying, and the conclusion of her arc at the game’s end feels more fulfilling than most of Princess Zelda’s arcs. The Legend of Zelda series does not always allow its female side characters to have much to do, but by the end of Twilight Princess, it’s actually more Midna’s story than anyone else’s. —Maddy Myers
13. Oracle of Ages / Oracle of Seasons
Image: Nintendo
Original release: 2001, on Game Boy Color Where to play now: Nintendo Switch Online
In 2001, Nintendo lent the proverbial Zelda keys to Capcom. As it turns out, Capcom didn’t need them: It kicked down the door to one of gaming’s most hallowed series and made itself right at home. Billed as a double feature focused on time- and season-based puzzles, respectively, Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons are tight and sophisticated enough to have emerged from the offices of Nintendo itself. (Series creator Shigeru Miyamoto had big-picture production input, to be fair.)
Ages’ time-traveling puzzles are among the finest in the 2D Zelda pantheon, and Seasons’ more action-oriented approach makes it a fresh entry in the otherwise “left-brained” franchise. Director Hidemaro Fujibayashi would go on to direct a handful of later Zelda games (The Minish Cap, Skyward Sword, and — checks notes — Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom among them), but as far as “classic” Zelda goes, few entries capture the series on a grand scale like Capcom’s dark horse two-parter. —Mike Mahardy
12. Spirit Tracks
Image: Nintendo
Original release: 2009, on Nintendo DS Where to play now: Unavailable — track down a used copy
As follow-ups in this endlessly changeable series go, Spirit Tracks has one of the most straightforward, cut-and-paste premises: it’s Phantom Hourglass but with a train instead of a boat. Like its immediate predecessor, it leans hard on stylus control, course-plotting map traversal, and a style of adventure that’s breezily approachable until it suddenly isn’t, in the grim, stealthy, piecemeal ascent of its central tower dungeon.
If Spirit Tracks ultimately surpasses Phantom Hourglass, it’s because of its sheer, ebullient charm. The appeal of its steam-train playset is irresistable, and this is also the only game in the series in which Link and Zelda — the latter admittedly in ghost form — get to hang out for the whole thing. Zelda even gets to be semi-playable, by possessing clanking suits of armor, while the pair have an adorable, innocent chemistry. Choo choo! —Oli Welsh
11. The Legend of Zelda
Image: Nintendo
Original release: 1986, on NES Where to play now: Nintendo Switch Online
It’s the rare game that impresses me more with each passing year. But as trends come and go, genres flourish and stagnate, and open worlds continue to distance themselves from their late-2010s growing pains, The Legend of Zelda continually grows in my estimation. It’s opaque by today’s standards, replete as it is with hidden doorways and labyrinthine shifts from one screen to another. And given the choice, it’s fairly far down the list of “fun” Zelda games. But it stands as a progenitor of most of today’s best games, open-world or otherwise, and it took Nintendo 31 years to circle back to its elegant conceit of a sprawling, mysterious world worth exploring in Breath of the Wild. —M. Mahardy
10. Skyward Sword
Image: Nintendo
Original release: 2011, on Nintendo Wii Where to play now: Skyward Sword HD on Nintendo Switch
It’s time to reclaim perhaps the most consistently underrated game in the Legend of Zelda series. There are reasons Skyward Sword’s reputation has suffered. First, its original motion controls, while well implemented, are just not how anyone wants to play an epic adventure like this. Second, it has a ridiculously overwrought climax worthy of a Hideo Kojima game. Third, it arrived at just the point when the Zelda games’ Ocarina of Time-inspired design was starting to show its age.
Skyward Sword ended up being a swan song for that era of Zelda — but what a swan song. It’s a dense and satisfying game, expertly designed, with intricate, cleverly conceived dungeons that rank alongside the very best in the series’ history. And it also has a soaring, romantic spirit. Skyward Sword is perhaps the purest expression of Zelda’s high-fantasy aesthetic — and the only time the series fully owned up to being a love story. —OW
9. A Link Between Worlds
Image: Nintendo
Original release: 2013, on Nintendo 3DS Where to play now: Boxed 3DS edition is still in print
I always found A Link Between Worlds to be a special game because of the way it iterates on the classic Zelda theme of traversing parallel worlds. Instead of using a mirror to flip between worlds, this game allows Link to transform into a 2D painting, in which form he can walk along walls and into the glittering crevices of Hyrule and its counterpart, Lorule.
For me, Lorule is one of the more interesting versions of Zelda’s classic Dark World. It isn’t just a barren wasteland filled with monsters; it’s also the home of kind and heroic people who want a better way of life. The game plays well, with perhaps the best-integrated touch controls in a Zelda game. On top of all that, it features an unconventional weapon rental system that allows you to explore wherever you want early on. The game’s title nods to the revered A Link to the Past,and it certainly doesn’t fail to live up to its namesake. —AD
8. The Minish Cap
Image: Nintendo
Original release: 2004, on Game Boy Advance Where to play now: Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack
The Minish Cap is a hidden gem of the Zelda series. Developed by Capcom, this Zelda game follows Link after he meets a talking hat named Ezlo that grants him the power to shrink to the size of a pea. Exploring as a tiny hero literally changes our perspective on Hyrule and allows the developers to conjure up a sensorial and vivid world where you’ll fight Vaati and dodge the deathly plop of raindrops.
Similarly to The Wind Waker, The Minish Cap leans into a cartoony charm; you’ll meet zany sword instructors and talk to cows chewing cud. This game also contains one of the Legend of Zelda’s goofiest items, a magical cane that turns objects upside down. Combine these charms with some great dungeon design, and you have the makings of a fantastic Zelda game. It might not usually be counted among the Zelda greats, but The Minish Cap finds its brilliance in the tiny details. —AD
7. Link’s Awakening
Image: Grezzo/Nintendo
Original release: 1993, on Game Boy Where to play now: Choose between its 1998 DX form for Game Boy Color on Nintendo Switch Online or the modernized 2019 Nintendo Switch remake
This was the first-ever Zelda game I played, so all of the references to other games flew over my head, as well as the very obvious signposting about how the story would end. I felt confused, as so many players do, about why the name “Zelda” was in the title (I did think maybe the owl was named Zelda). And yet — although I experienced the classic Zelda tropes and mechanics in the dreamlike setting of Koholint Island, rather than in the larger and more defined kingdom of Hyrule — their magic captivated me completely. Like many others on this list, Link’s Awakening is a weird Zelda game, and it’s proof that being weird and silly is just as much a part of the patchwork of “being a Zelda game” as environmental puzzles or a magic sword wielded by an eternally reincarnating hero. —M. Myers
6. The Wind Waker
Image: Nintendo
Original release: 2002, on GameCube Where to play now: Unavailable — track down a used copy of The Wind Waker HD for Wii U
The Wind Waker oozes a charm and sense of character that distinguishes it from other Zelda games and makes it a series great. It dared to take the Legend of Zelda in a bold new visual direction with its wonderfully expressive, cartoony graphics, and introduced one of my favorite Zelda casts. Tetra is an inspired take on the role of Zelda: an adventurous and capable pirate captain who helps Link along his journey. This Link, too, is one of my favorite Links, with his comic book expressions and bumbling antics.
The game moved me emotionally in ways that no other Zelda game has, and I still think about Link’s big send-off, as he waves his tiny arms goodbye to his granny. All this, and it’s thoroughly enjoyable to play. Flourishes like the adaptive soundtrack that plays stringed instruments as Link hits his enemies only add to its zippy combat. This game — from its snot-nosed kids to its timeless art style — is endlessly endearing. To me, its ingredients make for the perfect elixir of a Zelda game. —AD
5. Ocarina of Time
Image: Nintendo
Original release: 1998, on Nintendo 64 Where to play now: Choose between the original version on Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack, or the Ocarina of Time 3D remaster on 3DS (boxed edition still in print)
Just as Twilight Princess is secretly Midna’s game, Ocarina of Time is secretly Zelda’s game — or perhaps it belongs to Sheik. It may not be the best Zelda game by modern standards, but Ocarina of Time set a benchmark by which all subsequent entries have been measured, particularly when it comes to storytelling and world-building. It offers up the illusion of an open-world Hyrule, planting the seeds for a garden that would bloom in Breath of the Wild. And it’s the game with a time-travel story that splintered the entire series into disparate arcs — perhaps the most important linchpin in the greater Ganondorf saga. And it still holds up after all these years. Too bad its best version is relegated to the Nintendo 3DS — at least, for now. —M. Myers
4. Breath of the Wild
Image: Nintendo
Original release: 2017, on Nintendo Switch and Wii U Where to play now: Nintendo Switch
Breath of the Wildrepresents the most consequential overhaul the Zelda series has had since it moved into 3D with Ocarina of Time; in fact, it might be the most consequential ever, bravely scrapping most of the design hallmarks of a revered game series. Nintendo was seeking to modernize Zelda, but also to cut through 30 years of accumulated tradition, all the way back to the untamed adventure of the very first game.
It hardly needs to be said what a success it was: Breath of the Wild catapulted the Zelda series to a new level of popularity and challenged the assumptions of a lot of open-world and role-playing game design in a way that the rest of the industry is still digesting. It’s a dynamic, organic, thrillingly pure adventure, and the only reason it doesn’t top this list is because of what followed. —OW
3. A Link to the Past
Image: Nintendo
Original release: 1991, on SNES Where to play now: Nintendo Switch Online
Writing entries for this ranked list has me thinking about just what it is that makes a Zelda game great, and I think it’s the moment of realization. A Link to the Past serves up delicious moments of realization over and over and over again. You figure out that a cracked wall can be blown open to reveal a hidden passageway — oooh! You get a brand-new tool and you realize exactly how you need to use it — aha! You suddenly figure out the trick to a boss fight — take that! And then you realize that you have not even come close — not even close — to seeing all of the discoveries on offer here. A Link to the Past delivers on the pure dopamine rush of discovery, forcing a grin onto your face at every new revelation. It just feels good. —M. Myers
2. Majora’s Mask
Image: Nintendo via Polygon
Original release: 2000, on Nintendo 64 Where to play now: Choose between the original version on Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack, or the Majora’s Mask 3D remaster on 3DS (boxed edition still in print)
As we’re talking about a series so centered on music, allow me a metaphor: Whereas Ocarina of Time’s time travel was classical in its approach (elegant, balletic, and nimble), Majora’s Mask’s time loop was more reminiscent of jazz: fractured, messy, and challenging, but revelatory all the same. Arriving two decades before the time-loop craze comprising Outer Wilds, Deathloop, and 12 Minutes, Majora’s Mask puts Link in a three-day cycle that unwinds and respools in a strange dream world replete with characters contemplating the impending apocalypse. Compared to most games in the series, Majora largely revolves around side quests, which are largely predicated on the collection of masks. Said quests reset themselves every time Link travels back to the dawn of the first day, (hopefully) armed with the necessary knowledge to bolster his collection and save a life or two in the process.
Majora was the feverish answer to a confounding question: “How do we follow the resounding success of Ocarina of Time and also bridge the gap between the Nintendo 64 and the GameCube?” No one could have predicted the answer: a melancholy, tick-tock ballet of thwarted dreams and desperate lives in the face of the apocalypse, the most intimate and personal Zelda has ever been. It remains the strangest and darkest entry in the series, and I doubt we’ll ever see anything like it again. —M. Mahardy
1. Tears of the Kingdom
Image: Nintendo
Original release: 2023, on Nintendo Switch Where to play now: Nintendo Switch
Every Zelda game has built upon the foundations of the games before it, with even the characters in its world acknowledging the myths of yore. No one believes more in the concept of predicting the future based on the past than the developers of Zelda — as well as Princess Zelda herself, who opens Tears of the Kingdom by guiding Link through a series of historical underground murals.
And yet even Princess Zelda in her wisdom couldn’t possibly have predicted how incredible and miraculous her story would become. Tears of the Kingdom is a reflection of this continued promise: You may imagine you understand — based on the history of Zelda games — how ambitious and creative and world-warping a Zelda game could be. And yet that very world will still surprise you. Tears of the Kingdom still surprises me. It’s a gift that I can’t believe we all got.—M. Myers
2023 was a banner year for anime. From beloved continuing series like Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba and Jujutsu Kaisen to long-awaited passion projects like Pluto and Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, there was pretty much something for every type of anime fan. While we’ve already published our picks for the best anime of the year and where to watch them, we also wanted to highlight one of the important yet overlooked elements of any great anime: the opening title sequence.
Opening title sequences in anime have a lot of purposes, from crediting the staff of animators who pour their hearts and craft into creating an excellent production to foreshadowing significant moments in the series itself. Combined with a particularly memorable theme song, a well-done title sequence has the potential to create a lasting impression on audiences and fans, if not even possibly eclipsing the quality of the show itself.
With that in mind, we’ve pulled together a list of some of our favorite anime openings of the year to highlight the work of the animators who created them while sharing our favorite anime theme bops.
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off — “Bloom”
Director: Masamichi Ishiyama Music by: Necry Talkie
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was one of the year’s big surprises, despite being highly anticipated. The anime adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s action rom-com comic series turned the story of Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers’ whirlwind romance on its head, reinventing its world as a way of reintroducing characters that fans knew and loved.
Chief animation director and character designer Masamichi Ishiyama’s opening sequence was the perfect reintroduction of Scott to new and old fans of the series, taking the video game-inspired visuals of the comic and injecting them with vibrant anime flair. Aside from a very clever blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to the opening sequence of the 2004 anime Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad, what makes the opening sequence for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is for how much it doesn’t tease the big twist of the series. It’s just a brilliant distillation of what made Scott Pilgrim such a beloved hang-out in the first place, and that’s all that it really needs to be. Combine that with an awesome track “Bloom” courtesy of the Japanese pop rock band Necry Talkie, and you’ve got a certified banger.
Jujutsu Kaisen season 2 — “SPECIALZ”
Director: Yuki Kamiya Music by: King Gnu
This season of Jujutsu Kaisen took a significantly darker turn, and the series’ second opening title sequence encapsulates that. Just as Shōta Goshozono took on the role of directing the show’s second season from previous director Sung Hoo Park, so too did Yuki Kamiya inherit the role of crafting this season’s opening title sequences from Jujutsu Kaisen’s former animation director Shingo Yamashita.
Of the two sequences Kamiya directed for this season, it’s the second one, created for the “Shibuya Incident Arc,” that stands out as one of the year’s best. It’s dark, ominous, and foreboding; foreshadowing not only Yuji Itadori’s fraught battle against the cursed spirit Mahito and the increased prominence of the malicious jujutsu sorcerer Sukuna, but also the tragic passing of one of the series’ most beloved characters. It’s an apt opening for a bracing, violent, and heartbreaking season.
Heavenly Delusion — “Innocent Arrogance”
Director: Weilin Zhang Music by: BiSH
Heavenly Delusion was one of my favorite anime premieres of the year, so it’s little wonder the series’ opening title sequence would also win a place in my heart. Weilin Zhang absolutely nails it with this opening, translating the already excellent character designs by the artist known as Utsushita into scenes that feel as unruly and adventurous as the series’ protagonist.
One particular moment in the sequence that stands out to me is at the one-minute mark, when Kiruko is running against a pink and purple sunset sky, the outline of their body racing out of sync alongside them before eventually merging. It’s a memorable and impressive artistic decision that feels, in hindsight, like a symbolic metaphor for Kiruko’s struggles with body dysmorphia throughout the season. The gorgeous sequence is made even more impactful for how perfectly BiSH’s original theme song “Innocent Arrogance” complements it.
Spy x Family season 2 — “Ado Kura Kura”
Director: Masaaki Yuasa Music by: Ado
Who do you choose to direct the opening title sequence for the second season of Spy x Family, one of the best animated action comedies in recent memory, if you want it to be an absolute legendary effort? Why Masaaki Yuasa, former president of Science Saru, of course!
The opening sequence for Spy x Family feels like the anime equivalent of an Avengers-style team up, with Yuasa’s whimsical polka-dotted animation backed by a theme song performed by Ado (of One Piece Film: Red-fame) and composed by none other than Cowboy Bebop’s Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts. The result is a sequence that feels every bit as auspicious as the creative team behind it, a wild and rollicking adventure that finds everyone’s favorite family of undercover spy-assassins-psychics enjoying a good cup of tea in-between performing donuts in their car.
Trigun Stampede — “TOMBI”
Director: None listed Music by: Kvi Baba
Much has been said about Trigun Stampede, the latest 3D CG anime adaptation of Yasuhiro Nightow’s space western manga, and the differences between it and the beloved 1998 anime produced by Madhouse. One of the key points of contention that fans of the original anime have is the absence of any equivalent to the 1998 Trigun’s rock-’n’-roll-inspired score by Tsuneo Imahori, with Trigun Stampede composer Tatsuya Kato taking on a more electronic and orchestrally inspired approach for the new series.
As a fan of the 1998 anime, I totally get it. But I will happily go to bat for it, and I absolutely loved the western-inspired title theme song by Kvi Baba and its accompanying sequence. Without fail, every time I watched this sequence before a new episode of the series, I was locked in and ready to take in the latest chapter in Vash the Stampede’s mission to protect the people of the planet Gunsmoke from his murderous brother Knives. It sets the tone for the series perfectly, striking a balance between mournful, adventurous, and appropriately epic.
The Fire Hunter — “Usotsuki”
Director: Kenichi Kutsuna Music by: Leo Ieiri
The Fire Hunter flew under the radar of many anime viewers this year, despite the pedigree of talent attached to its production. Make time to watch it — Ranma 1⁄2 director Junji Nishimura reunites with Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) on an epic apocalyptic fantasy story and the opening title sequence for the series absolutely rocks.
Directed by Kenichi Kutsuna, who previously worked as a key animator on Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Dororo, the opening for The Fire Hunter is a beautiful and memorable sequence that expounds on Takuya Saitō’s delicately rendered character designs and pairs them with elegantly pictorial backgrounds. I mean, look at that shot at the 23-second mark with the shafts of light piercing through the thinly outlined mass of clouds! Art!
Vinland Saga season 2 — “River”
Director: Yūsuke Sunouchi Music by: Anonymouz
Like Jujutsu Kaisen season 2, the second season of the historical adventure epic Vinland Saga took a sharp tonal shift from the vibe of its first season. Far from a revenge story, this season’s focus was on Thorfinn’s search for a sense of meaning and a life separate from the vengeance that previously drove him.
Directed by Yūsuke Sunouchi, who previously worked as an episode director on the first season of Vinland Saga, the opening title sequence for Vinland Saga season 2 perfectly captures the feeling of someone emerging out of the darkness and grasping after a sense of renewed clarity and direction. It’s a sequence that drops you directly into Thorfinn’s mindset at the outset of the season and primes the audience for the next chapter of his story.
Whether 2023 is one of the best years for video games is up for debate. But it is certainly one of the best years for Christmas video games, thanks to a surprising number of festive, holiday-themed releases. That includes a video game sequel to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, starring Ebenezer Scrooge and made in the Metroidvania style.
While many live service games will drench themselves in Christmas and Hanukkah-themed cosmetics and map makeovers this month, not since Sega’s Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams… has there been such an eclectic mix of festive fare. Some are naughty, and some are nice. And at least one, a gory slasher that will appeal to fans of Rockstar Games’ murderous Manhunt, is definitely not for kids.
Here’s a look at 2023’s Christmas games.
Ebenezer and the Invisible World
Set after the events of Ebenezer Scrooge’s encounter with Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come, Ebenezer and the Invisible World sees the once-miserly grump setting off on a new adventure. Invigorated by Christmas cheer, Ebenezer is enlisted by another ghost to help alter the destiny of evil industrialist and population-principle-believer Caspar Malthus. Aiding Ebenezer in his mission are many more ghosts — which are basically summonable familiars and power-ups that are heavily inspired by Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. (Ebenezer even has Alucard’s back dash.)
Ebenezer and the Invisible World is an enjoyable action-adventure game with greater depth than you might think. The game’s hand-drawn graphics and wide array of characters and quests keep the whole thing moving along pleasantly; plus it’s just fun to see old Ebenezer wielding a giant ax or spinning a flaming spear. He’s very spry for his age!
Ebenezer and the Invisible World is available now on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Lake: Seasons Greetings
The video game Lake is a cozy, narrative adventure set in the sleepy village of Providence Oaks, Oregon. Set in the year 1986, players stepped into the shoes of Meredith Weiss, a metropolitan, career-driven woman who returns home to temporarily take over her father’s postal route. Lake: Season’s Greetings delivers similar smalltown vibes, but this time, players tour the town as Thomas Weiss, Meredith’s father, as Christmastime approaches.
Lake: Season’s Greetings is a prequel to the original Lake, available as DLC for that game. These cozy, wintry vibes are available on PS4, PS5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Christmas Massacre
Make it a silent night, make it a deadly night with the stealth-slasher Christmas Massacre, which made its debut on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 in November. (It’s been on PC since 2021.) Inspired by snuff game Manhunt, top-down shoot-’em-up Hotline Miami, and PlayStation 1-era aesthetics, Christmas Massacre lets you slay as Larry, a man who is clearly not well, because his Christmas tree is commanding him to kill.
Obviously, Christmas Massacre is probably not something you should play with the whole family, but if over-the-top violence and gore done super lo-fi is your thing, it’s a fun romp, as murder rampages go. You will be flamethrowing roomfuls of children and nuns, just as a heads up.
Christmas Massacre is available on PS4, PS5, and Windows PC via Steam.
The Grinch: Christmas Adventures
Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch stars in a 2D side-scrolling platform adventure game that may or may not be any good — I haven’t played it! But The Grinch: Christmas Adventures gives players control of The Grinch himself (and his dog Max, in two-player local co-op) on another Christmas-ruining mission. Like Ebenezer and the Invisible World, this is a one-year-later sequel to the original source material. And like The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Grinch’s Christmas Adventures promise to teach him a “valuable lesson about the true spirit of the holiday.” Hopefully he learns for good this time!!
The Grinch: Christmas Adventures is out now on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis: The Holy Flame’s Gift
Image: Square Enix
Square Enix’s mobile remake of the expanded Final Fantasy 7 franchise has a new holiday event, which isn’t a stand-alone game, but a new story that features two important elements.
One is a Christmasy new Tifa costume that is currently riling up Tifa fans worldwide. You can see that above.
The other is that the chief antagonist of Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis’ new holiday-themed story is a gingerbread Cactuar. Amazing!
Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis is currently available on Android and iOS devices, and is coming to PC via Steam on Dec. 7, Square Enix just announced. The game’s The Holy Flame’s Gift story is available now.
Whenever a new movie prequel is announced, even the core audience that loved the original work sometimes responds with a resounding ugh. Who can blame anyone for dismissing out of hand the marketing formulation that gave us 2007’s Hannibal Rising, 1979’s Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, or 2004’s Exorcist: The Beginning? Prequels tell stories where the end has been predetermined, often without beloved key actors, prompting unflattering comparisons to inimitable classics. (Like what happened with the Star Wars prequel movies.)
But once in a long while, prequels can also tell new stories that experiment with stylistic shifts and new characters. At their best, they can deepen an existing story, or offer additional dimension and insight into familiar characters. (Like what happened with… the Star Wars prequel movies.)
Prequels have become an overly familiar go-to move for anyone hoping to reverse-engineer a hit. But maybe the form has gotten a bad rap. A good prequel can be an escape hatch from dead-end sequels and tangled continuity. Sometimes they’re just baggage-shedding fun. With that in mind, let’s have a look at 10 prequel movies that actually are surprisingly worth your time.
A few ground rules: No Star Wars movies, because at this point, nearly half the Star Wars feature films in existence are prequels, and they’ve been discussed to death. Also out: alternate-timeline reboots (like the 2009 Star Trek), retellings with ambiguous relationships to previous films (like Rise of the Planet of the Apes or the 2006 James Bond movie Casino Royale), and movies set years before an iconic original film, but with no particular narrative or character connection to the earlier film (like the Predator prequel Prey). In other words, we’re keeping it challenging! You can sayWonder Woman is technically a prequel to Batman v. Supermanbecause it comes before it in the same continuity, but that isn’t really what Wonder Woman is doing on a narrative level. Here, on the other hand, are 10 pure prequel movies that prove jumping back in a story doesn’t have to be a doomed, last-ditch effort.
The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023)
Image: Lionsgate
Director: Francis Lawrence Where to watch: Currently in theatrical release
Has there been a 21st-century film series as successfully built around a single star as the Hunger Games movies are built around Jennifer Lawrence? The original Hunger Games movie quadrilogy features a stacked cast of Oscar nominees, but Lawrence’s steely resolve sells the humanity behind the world-building. So how the hell does a Hunger Games prequel manage without Katniss Everdeen?
Songbirds & Snakes makes the attempt by shifting character focus, turning the villain (President Snow, previously played by Donald Sutherland) into a good-looking, young pre-fascist, caught between a corrupt institution and more idealistic friends, and falling for an irresistibly feisty brunette. (Sound familiar? It’s the Attack of the Clones approach.) While Suzanne Collins’ books and Lawrence’s performance gave Katniss a directness and aversion to artifice that made her a compelling and unwilling Tribute, Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) and his Hunger Games mentee Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) have more complicated, less clear-eyed relationships with their respective worlds — and with each other. That adds an element of unpredictability to a story whose ultimate ending has already been dramatized.
Circling back to explain how certain aspects of series lore developed in-world can be a risky, hardcore-fans-only strategy, so it’s all the more impressive that The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is by turns brutal (for a PG-13 fantasy) and entertainingly daft. (At some points, it resembles a musical.) It’s also notable that the movie, perhaps owing to its literary source material, doesn’t tease a whole world of prequels, sequels, and spinoffs, even if some fans will hope for them anyway. The book and movie simply tell a compelling, sometimes haunting story that feels complete even in its ambiguities. In that way, it even outdoes its predecessors, none of which were expected to stand alone the same way.
Pearl (2022)
Photo: Christopher Moss/A24
Director: Ti West Where to watch: Showtime, Paramount Plus
Knowing the full backstory of Pearl, the elderly killer who picks off the cast and crew of a porn movie in Ti West’s superior slasher X, can diminish the way X evokes a lifetime of thwarted dreams. But at least West and his star Mia Goth came by Pearl’s story honestly: While quarantining prior to filming X in 2021, they wound up working out a character history and accompanying screenplay, shooting this companion prequel on the fly alongside the original film.
That explains why Pearl feels like a bit more of a low-key creative exercise compared to the fully developed X — but what an exercise! Pearl pulls from 1950s Technicolor melodramas, its Silent Era period setting, and its status as a contemporary pandemic production, all tied together with Goth’s fierce performance. It avoids killing X’s vibe because Pearl never feels especially opportunistic: It’s a prequel that stays true to its conception as an artistic experiment.
Orphan: First Kill (2022)
Photo: Steve Ackerman/Paramount Pictures
Director: William Brent Bell Where to watch: Prime Video, Paramount Plus
Orphan: First Kill is undoubtedly cheaper-looking than the slick 2009 original. It also has a counterintuitive reversal worthy of Benjamin Button: While the first movie has then-tween Isabelle Fuhrman playing a little girl who’s secretly a murderous grown woman with proportional dwarfism, the 2022 prequel uses camera tricks and good old-fashioned great acting to have now-adult Fuhrman play the same character when she’s supposed to look even younger.
Orphan: First Kill uses the audience’s presumed knowledge of the first movie’s wild twist as a distraction, unleashing a second, unrelated but brilliant twist upon a seemingly straightforward story that has Esther (Fuhrman) claiming to be the long-missing daughter of a well-to-do suburban couple. It’s a too-rare case of a horror prequel playing better — cleverer, weirder, more daring — for viewers who keep the original’s triumphs in mind.
300: Rise of an Empire (2014)
Image: Warner Bros/Everett Collection
Director: Noam Munro Where to watch: DirecTV; streaming rental
Following up Zack Snyder’s influential megahit 300 was always a fool’s errand, one especially unlikely to succeed without Snyder directing or Gerard Butler starring. (In retrospect, it seems amazing that this seven-years-later prequel made it past the $100 million mark at the box office essentially on branding alone.) That said, maybe fool’s errands would have a better reputation if more of them featured Eva Green.
In300: Rise of an Empire, Green plays Artemisia, naval officer and secret architect of an ongoing conflict between the Greeks and the Persians. For Green, that entails kissing a severed head on the lips, wearing a shiny dress while occupying a boat-throne, and having rough recruitment sex with the enemy. (She even gets a mini-prequel-within-the-prequel to explain her origin story.) Her movie-star energy may make the rest of the movie dim by comparison (the Snyder-knockoff battlescapes had greater exploitation-movie kick in the film’s 3-D theatrical release), but that makes sense — she dominates the original 300 in the same way.
Prometheus (2012)
Image: 20th Century Fox/Everett Collection
Director: Ridley Scott Where to watch: Streaming rental
George Lucas must have felt a lot less lonely in the decade following the end of his Star Wars prequel trilogy, as a host of directors beloved of surly Gen-X males, like Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings) and the Wachowskis (The Matrix), made their own ill-regarded prequels and sequels. In 2012, it was Ridley Scott’s turn to make an underappreciated prequel to his sci-fi classic Alien. Like another film on this list, Prometheus feels meaner than its predecessor. (Though Alien: Covenant, also good but less of a prequel, is even nastier).
That alone feels like a refreshing rejection of the fan service prequels often represent. The movie itself has a menacing, terrible grandeur, using xenomorph-related imagery and mythology to explore the idea of creations and creators pitted against each other in an impossible struggle.
X-Men: First Class (2011)
Photo: Murray Close/20th Century Fox
Director: Matthew Vaughn Where to watch: Starz
You know what’s worse than a prequel? A movie hastily reconfigured as a trilogy-capper, against all evidence to the contrary. The X-Men comics contain vast numbers of characters and stories for potential adaptation, yet for some reason, Fox hedged its bets with X-Men: The Last Stand, positioning it as an abbreviated grand finale that killed off major characters abruptly, treated famous storylines carelessly, then cravenly left a few doors ajar for the future sequels the studio seemed to be spurning.
So it was a blessed relief (and, at the time, surprise) that the mainline X-Men series went into prequel mode instead, with this stylish, zippy period story about how Professor X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) met as young men in the 1960s and formed an early iteration of the superhero team.
X-Men: First Class provided a badly needed reset for the franchise, not in terms of timeline (Days of Future Past attempted that a few years later), but in form, casting aside various Canadian locations in favor of a globetrotting James Bond-esque fantasy. It felt capricious to swerve the story into a prequel world, but the approach let the X-Men series open up a whole new avenue, resulting in one of the best superhero movies of the modern era.
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009)
Image: Screen Gems/Everett Collection
Director: Patrick Tatopoulos Where to watch: AMC Plus
On paper, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans represents everything wrong with prequels. It jettisons the charismatic star of the first two movies, Kate Beckinsale, to retell a story the earlier movies covered in mere minutes of exposition. In this case, it’s a historical rundown on the werewolf uprising that led to a generations-long conflict between werewolves and vampires.
Yet returning to the origin of the werewolf-vampire battles lends Rise of the Lycans a medieval-fantasy kick; it’s pulpier, lustier, and more all-around entertaining than any other Underworld entry, and one that best fulfills the lizard-brained promise of supernatural creatures in love and at war.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
Image: Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection
Director: Steven Spielberg Where to watch: Disney Plus, Paramount Plus
A lot of folks first heard the term “prequel” in connection with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, one of the highest-profile pure prequels that had yet been released in 1984. At first, it feels strange that Spielberg and Lucas bothered situating this movie before Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s not as if the first film had such a neatly resolved happy ending that it precluded further adventures, and Indiana Jones’ nature suggests his whole life is a series of adventures. The reason it makes sense for Temple of Doom to take place before Raiders turns out to be what put off some audiences. (Not exclusively; there’s also the racism.)
As it turns out, this is a meaner movie, with a more callous Dr. Jones pursuing “fortune and glory,” bickering with a lady, and repeatedly endangering his child sidekick. Anyone who felt they were acclimated to Indiana Jones’ rhythms might still be thrown off: Temple of Doom is grosser, more violent, and eclectic enough to accommodate a James Bond homage, a musical number, and a literal rollercoaster ride. Apart from its racial insensitivity (which will understandably not be easy for many viewers to hurdle), it’s still the most interesting and best-crafted of the four post-Raiders Indy movies.
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)
Image: 20th Century Fox/Everett Collection
Director: J. Lee Thompson Where to watch: Starz
The original Planet of the Apes series is so dependent on time-travel that you could claim it doesn’t contain any true prequels, just stories kicked into gear by a potential temporal paradox. That feels truer of Escape from the Planet of the Apes, though, than it does for Conquest, which dramatizes the story of ape oppression and uprising that eventually leads into the 1968 original.
Thefirst wave of Apes movies notoriously decreased in budget with each entry, but director J. Lee Thompson stretches his resources impressively far in this fourth installment, creating an evocative future city that gets absolutely and satisfyingly trashed by the apes resisting slavery to humanity. Sometimes actually witnessing the watershed event from a film series’ lore is as powerful and exciting as it’s supposed to be.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
Image: Everett Collection
Director: Sergio Leone Where to watch: Streaming rental
The surprising part about this one isn’t the quality — the third in Sergio Leone’s “Man with No Name” trilogy is an acknowledged classic. But how often is the third movie in a trilogy the best one, and how often is a third movie in a trilogy set entirely before its predecessors?
It seems unlikely that the intent was to add backstory to Clint Eastwood’s nameless character (here nicknamed “Blondie”), even if the movie does show him acquiring his iconic poncho. Leone probably just wanted to set his three-hour epic during the Civil War, allowing for more epic sweep than the comparably smaller post-war stories of A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. That decision gives The Good, the Bad and the Ugly some extra weight without sacrificing his stylizations.
If anything, those go even further than the film’s predecessors, with close-ups, exaggerated perspectives, and drawn-out confrontations galore. But having the film’s trio of gunslingers (Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef) repeatedly crossing through the ongoing wreckage of the Civil War on their competing quests for graveyard treasure gives the story a sense of real-life scale that also makes their violence seem small compared to the senseless slaughter around them.
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