Every ‘American’ movie, ranked

Happy Fourth of July, Yanks

Commiserations to American Animals, American Gigolo and The American, none of which I could watch in time. You are all sorely missed. But as for the others? This is the definitive ranking. Don’t even think about arguing with it.

13. American Pastoral (2016)

I feel like this film came and went in 2016. It’s based on the Philip Roth book of the same name, and was Ewan McGregor’s directorial debut (he also stars). American Pastoral follows a man in the late 1960s named Seymour “Swede” Levov – named so because he’s tall, blond and blue-eyed, raising immediate questions about why the dark Scot McGregor cast himself… – whose life falls apart after his beloved, idealistic daughter Merry is radicalised as a teenager and commits an act of domestic terror, blowing up a local petrol station in protest against the Vietnam War. Merry goes on the run, essentially part of the Weather Underground; Swede and his beauty-queen wife Dawn spend years trying to find her, wrestling in the meantime with their mistakes as parents. They had everything, they did everything right – they were the postwar American dream incarnate. So why did Merry turn out the way she did?¹

McGregor overplays his cultural references to make sure we understand that it’s a time of rapid societal change: this is a film about Nam that uses Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” in the soundtrack, a mortal sin of cliché. A pastoral is a symbolic fable, a narrative format, one which is meant to show us something – presumably in this case about countercultural America in the 1960s. We know from the narrative framing at the beginning of this film that Swede Levov dies a broken man, and that Merry commits murder, so American Pastoral is less a whodunit than a whydunit.

And yet McGregor never gives us an answer. The film simply takes it for granted that discontent was the norm for the time, and that bombing houses was just what people did, up there with taking acid or wearing tie-dye. Merry is angry, and has a fractious relationship with her mother, but many thousands of teenagers were angry in the 1960s, and most teenagers are today. But they don’t commit acts of terrorism. The whole film ends up a mess. Too much, too soon for McGregor-as-director, in my opinion.

12. American Made (2017)

Ever wanted to see Tom Cruise ride a child’s bike with a face absolutely caked in cocaine, but not keen to join Scientology for the privilege?² Watch American Made instead. An underrated Cruise vehicle overshadowed by Edge of Tomorrow, the superior movie he made three years earlier with director Doug Liman, American Made was nonetheless one of those decent successes which dropped as the third act of Cruise’s career got underway in earnest. (Incidentally, we are still in this act now – his “just throw me the hell out of planes” era, which comes after his early, charismatic era (Risky Business through to Collateral) and his much shorter lost-in-the-woods flop era (MI:III through to Oblivion)).

American Made was a lot of campy fun, Cruise playing smug, double-dealing real-life pilot Barry Seal, who flew coke in for the cartels in the 1980s before informing on them. This is the sort of snappy thing you can imagine a lot of unimaginative couples watching after work on Netflix; but there’s a quickfire ease to the film, and you can tell that Cruise and Liman are a good match. Last I checked, they’re working together again on a supernatural film called Deeper. I’ll go see it.

11. American Hustle (2013)

American Hustle is relegated to lower mid-table because, if I am honest, I can’t really remember anything about this. Christian Bale is fat and bald? Amy Adams wears something very low-cut? Anyway – Wikipedia reminds me that it was nominated for ten (!) Academy Awards, and won zero. That’s exactly the same record as Gangs of New York, except David O. Russell is no Marty. He’s made some fucking stinkers (I’m mainly looking at Three Kings, and the truly atrocious I Heart Huckabees). Russell is one of those mid and forgettable directors, and by all accounts a pretty awful man to work with. So – next!

10. American Sniper (2014)

The problem with American Sniper was that nobody could tell the extent to which Clint Eastwood really thought Chris Kyle was a hero, or even whether that really mattered. Kyle shot 250-plus people during the war in Iraq, per his own numbers; some critics said the film was a devastating critique of the conflict, while others thought it lionised Kyle the way Eastwood’s Sully and Invictus did Chesley Sullenberger and Francois Pienaar. Something to ponder, I guess, as you watch Bradley Cooper’s Kyle squeeze the trigger sadly as he drops yet another Iraqi child given an RKG-3 by his mum and told to run as fast as he can at the infidels’ Abrams tank.

There’s definitely something to be said here about Truffaut’s whole bit about whether or not a film can ever be anti-war (and happily, Sophie of That Final Scene published something great about it yesterday – go read it!). Even though Eastwood paints the Iraq War as spiritually destructive and mentally painful for the American servicemen who went through it, the war itself is still somehow implied to have been necessary, which it extremely was not (not for anything except George Bush’s political career and Dick Cheney’s bank balance, that is). This is sort of typical of his career – for every speech delivered at the RNC Eastwood has also given us a Letters from Iwo Jima or a Gran Torino; for every American hero he’s played or written, he’s offered a more nuanced, if not critical, look at the States and its demons.

So here, too, I think that Clint did a decent job of capturing Kyle, the man, with all his foibles and braggadocio and obsessive self-mythologising around all the death he introduced to the world. I mean, for a guy to come home from war to Sienna Miller, and still experience depression and PTSD? Iraq must have truly fucked him up.

9. American Pie (1999)

American Pie, my sweet love. Aged 13, I thought this was the most transgressive work of art on God’s green earth; now, it seems almost quaint, with its (highly criminal) dial-up webcam sex scene and its pastry-based deviance. With its slightly offensive Czech exchange student and its hair-gelled high school students so utterly free of the curse of self-awareness. With Jason Biggs’ big(g) dumb face looming naively and desperately over every poor girl in the film, and Seann William Scott’s vulpine pervert Stifler stalking around fingering a lax stick.

There’s something funny about American Pie coming out in 1999, at the acme of American imperial confidence.³ It’s the mall punk’s comedy film, an establishment-approved, AOL-era, Kevin Smith-inspired joint with literal cameos by Blink-182 and John Cho playing a character simply billed as “MILF guy”. In that context, the film is an historical artefact, the last and greatest of the great teen sex comedies of the era (ironically, given there were about 900 much worse sequels in the franchise). You didn’t have to worry about being offensive back then; you didn’t have to worry about people thinking you were ignorant or crass. Because you were American.

It deserves its place in the pantheon, then, flanked by Harold and Kumar and Euro Trip and The Girl Next Door. And it gave us Jennifer Coolidge, too; without Stifler’s Mom, there’s arguably no Tanya McQuoid. That, in itself, is something to be grateful for.

8. American Beauty (1999)

The obvious attack line to deploy against American Beauty is to focus on the Kevin Spacey of it all, or on the fact it hinges entirely on a middle-aged guy who decides to blow his life up because he wants to fuck a 16-year-old. Spacey aside⁴, I actually think Lester Burnham’s sexual obsession with his daughter’s best friend is a great and compelling subject for a film – it’s a smart vehicle for the vapidity of the time, that existentialism that as far as I can tell came with living in all-too-prosperous 1999 (see the entry for American Pie, above). Said obsession also stops you from fully cheering him on as he extorts cash from his crocodilian boss, takes up lifting weights and smoking weed, and tells his harridan wife to fuck off – assuming you’re a person who thinks it’s wrong for a man of 40 to sleep with a teenager.

Though actually, it’s that last point, about the harridan wife, Annette Bening’s estate agent Carolyn, that feels dated and slightly objectionable. Why is it so bad that Carolyn wants to make money and sell real estate? That she likes living in a big suburban house with a green lawn and a picket fence? What’s more American than that? Watching her work her way through an open house, scrubbing the sideboards of the kitchen, rinsing the French doors and dusting the ceiling fans all while chanting, “I will sell this house today!”, I think that Sam Mendes wanted us to see her as ridiculous. But as I get older, I find Carolyn a lot more sympathetic, even relatable in her aspirational neurosis. Much of this is down to Bening’s excellent tragicomic performance. While we all know what happened with Spacey, she remains a true queen, and this is one of her best.

7. American Psycho (2000)

Lower than it could have been because they should have included the rat scene from the book.

6. American History X (1998)

Someone told me the other day that this was their friend’s favourite film of all time. Red flag? You tell me. A film which begins with Edward Norton’s white nationalist curb-stomping a wounded Crip’s skull into oblivion – I will never, ever forget the china-clink sound the guy’s teeth make as Norton places his mouth on the concrete before the stomp – and ends with (spoilers) his little brother blown away at school by a black kid with a handgun… I dunno. It’s certainly a heavy one to put on your Hinge.

But it is good! A little 90s in its messaging about how we would all just get along if we did laundry together, and perhaps a little melodramatic at times, but ultimately the sort of film which stays with you if you see it around the right age (17 or 18?). Larry Clark was apparently approached to direct at one point during production. Imagine that. Terrifying prospect.

5. American Fiction (2023)

Watching the trailer for American Fiction still makes me laugh:

“Yo Sharonda – girl, you be pregnant agin??”

“If I is, Ray-Ray is gonna be a real father this time around.”

Is there a sense of recently bias about the film being this high up? I don’t think so. I loved Jeffrey Wright’s academically angry performance in this as much as I liked its timeliness when I saw it the Christmas before last. I remember going into it worried it would be predictable, and realising within the first five minutes I wasn’t going to be disappointed. A less caustic and more realistic Sorry to Bother You, with fewer horse cocks. A very smart film, without being wanky.

Incidentally, I think this film is very American, too. Yes, that’s partly given its preoccupation with racial politics and representation, but it’s also down to the way that authorial identity in American publishing is given such massive valence. I genuinely don’t get the impression that that’s the case here in Britain, or at least that it’s much less prevalent in the discourse.

4. American Graffiti (1973)

Is there a world where this film was worse, and as a result we didn’t have to read thinkpieces every other week about what Andor means in an age of American fascism? Or else one in which George Lucas was so acclaimed for it that he stuck to making nostalgic comedy-dramas set in the San Fernando Valley of 1962, and thus nobody in 2025 gave a shit about things like “the Holdo Manoeuver” or whether “Han shot first”? Because American Graffiti, Lucas’s second, breakout film, is so, so much better than Star Wars. It has so much more meaning and heart. Which of course is saying very little.

There’s not loads of plot in American Graffiti, other than some typical coming-of-age beats: friends preparing to head off to college in the east, try-hard guys angling to lose their virginities on the back seats of cars, kids scheming to buy booze. A bit like Dazed and Confused, American Graffiti is a hangout film; also like Dazed and Confused, it’s a disorienting but fun experience to watch an older film nostalgic for a time long past even by the time it first came out. Your other obvious comparisons might be Freaks and Geeks or Grease or Almost Famous; it also has shades of a less cynical Sixteen Candles. A 1960s Superbad.

Wolfman Jack and surf rock dominate the radio, and everyone just kinda drives around on a Friday night and chats each other up at the junctions before the lights change. I loved the storyline with the unfortunate local badboy Milner, in particular – that bit when he walks through the scrapyard with Carol, the younger girl he’s been tricked into looking after all night, pointing out all the wrecked Corvettes and explaining which used to be whose before their owners all died young in car crashes. Ron Howard plays a very convincing arsehole, too, and treats his lovely girlfriend terribly – and utterly believably. Candy Clark has, as the kids like to say, mad rizz.

Incidentally, the highest the American teen pregnancy rate has ever been was in 1959, three years before when this film is set. It was an astonishing 96.3 per 1,000⁵ compared to 17.4 in 2018. I’m not surprised, really. What else were they going to do?

3. American Movie (1999)

I watched American Movie last year. It was easily the best documentary to cross my screen, funny and charming and mean and raucous all at once. It charts Mark Borchardt, a mulleted, rural Wisconsin-based filmmaker who has enlisted his stoner friends to help him make Coven, a low-budget short horror film which he hopes will act as a springboard for him to fund Northwestern, a different film which he regards as his magnum opus.

Really, though, it’s about two things. The first is the indie scene of the 1990s, and the way people were just going out and buying cameras and working nights in video shops to pay for their homemade films; think Kevin Smith making Clerks on a handful of maxed-out credit cards. Borchardt is no Smith, no Tarantino nor Roger Avary, but that doesn’t knock his belief in his project(s) for a moment.

The second, then, is the power of the amateur with unshakeable dedication to his or her project. Borchardt just ploughs on and on irrepressibly with Coven and Northwestern, over years, plugging away and shooting a scene or two at a time. There were and are still thousands, tens of thousands of people like him across the USA, trying to make it happen (though you do have to wonder what the internet might have meant for Northwestern). Allow me to say as an outsider that it’s one of the very coolest things about the States. Long may it continue.

2. American Honey (2016)

Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank was named at number 91 on the New York Times’ list of the greatest films of the 21^st century last month. Lena Dunham voted for it, apparently. I’m obviously delighted Arnold made the list, but I’d swap Fish Tank out for American Honey, personally.

A film largely peopled by non-actors who Arnold cast off the cuff, and who were only given the script a day in advance so as not to prepare to extensively, American Honey is a ragamuffin movie. We follow Sasha Lane’s Star, a twentysomething woman in Oklahoma who abandons her two children and her abusive partner to go on the road with a motley gang of door-to-door salespeople – homeless children and teens, essentially – who flog magazine subscriptions throughout the affluent burbs of the Midwest. The would-be Fagin of said gang is the fearsome Krystal, played by the whitest, trashiest incarnation of Riley Keough you’ve ever seen⁶, but it’s Shia LaBoeuf’s Jake – the rat-tailed, charismatic top salesman in the group, who may or may not be romantically involved with Krystal – who really pulls Star into his orbit.

Keough, Lane and LaBoeuf are all really, really good in this, as are the kids in the minibus – essentially mini-carnies each with a love of ebonics and – say it like a hick – “making moneyyyyyy y’alllll!!!” The British Arnold, an outsider, still captures the precarity of Breadline USA without ever being sentimental about it. The kids are sad and lost, but they have fun; the film is therefore sad but fun at the same time. Quotes in the trailer call it “optimistic”; I’m not sure about that, but it’s certainly not pessimistic, either. Rather, it’s young and wild and free and dangerous, like a Ryan McGinley photo stretched into a 163-minute tone poem.

1. American Gangster (2007)

Ridley Scott’s American Gangster wins points for featuring a 2007 who’s-who of black actors: Denzel, of course, but also Idris and Cuba and Chiwetel. Chuck Josh Brolin into the mix, and Common, RZA, John Hawkes and Norman Reedus and you’ve got a recipe for high-2000s magic, before Scott decided to make films at twice the rate and of half the quality. I’ll even make allowances for RZA’s Wu-Tang tattoo, which is proudly on display in every scene he’s in despite American Gangster ostensibly being a film set in, er, 1968.

It might sound silly, but until I watched it, I always thought Spike Lee directed this film. It’s stylistically very similar to Malcolm X; it’s shot as naturalistically and has a runtime of more than two hours. It’s dark, and cynical. Vietnam looms in the background. Ostensibly the true-life story of Frank Lucas, the Harlem-based black drug importer who supplied the Mafia with heroin smuggled into the States on returning US troop planes, American Gangster is in some ways a film by numbers. There’s the journey up (Fun! Everyone buys their mama a mansion!), and the journey down (Bad! Everyone is paranoid and on drugs!). Literally halfway through the film there’s a scene of extreme public violence – a beating at a party involving the heavy lid of a grand piano – which is sparked by overindulgent use of cocaine. Hubris has crept in, as it always does. It’s Goodfellas, Wolf, all the other crime classics writ large.

But American Gangster hits these beats so well that you forgive it. It has its own themes, too, many of which seem to parallel the talking points of the 1990s and early 2000s: Frank outsourcing his drugs to the Far East, undercutting local suppliers and upsetting the market. Gangsters discussing the importance of law and order, even within the underworld. Corrupt cops: quis custodiet ipsos custodies, and so on.

This, of course, is where Russell Crowe comes in, cast against type as an honest if dirtbag cop, and thriving for it. He’s taking night classes for his law degree even as he sleeps with the attorney representing him in family court against his estranged wife. “Oh Ritchie, fuck me like a cop, not a lawyer!” she shouts (the attorney, not the wife). He finds a million dollars in brown paper bags, and turns it in to the authorities rather than skimming it, knowing it will make him a pariah among his fellow cops. A shabby man, but honourable.

Crowe is masterfully counterbalanced by Denzel. I mentioned Goodfellas above, but this film could never be Goodfellas, not really, because Denzel as Frank is such a lone wolf. There are no other fellas. Frank sits somewhere between Malcolm X and Training Day’s Alonzo Harris, and of course he’s looking amazing the whole time. He’s well-spoken and observant, an utter hypocrite who speaks about honesty and family as he pumps junk into the projects he claims to love. His violence is controlled, until it isn’t. He grimaces when forced to be in the public eye, knowing that like cockroaches, the kingpins who survive are the ones who instinctively flee from the light. At the same time, he’s ambitious and proud of his work. Like American Gangster itself, Frank Lucas takes pleasure in being the best in class.

1. The answer, though McGregor never seems to reach it, is of course that it’s because they are the postwar American dream incarnate that Merry decides to blow up, literally and figuratively.

2. I assume that’s what they spend all their time doing in those compounds.

3. And is that not just the most “Substack” sentence you’ve ever read?

4. Big aside, I know!

5. Bear in mind a lot of those 18- and 19-year-olds will have been married, at least.

6. In a post-Zola world, that’s saying something.