The 12 Most Mind-Blowing Movies We’ve Ever Seen

These mind-blowing movies might change the way you see reality. They might even make you question whether your reality is reality. Whoa.

If nothing else, they'll keep you entertained. Here's our list.

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Based on Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel, the film was co-written by Michael Wilson and Twilight Zone mastermind Rod Serling, who knew a thing or two about using the genre stories to smuggle in social commentary.

This is a mind-blowing movie just for the setup: Human astronauts crash-land on a planet ruled by intellectual apes who treat homo sapiens the way we treat animals.

But just as you're wrapping your head around the layers of metaphor about man's inhumanity to man, the film delivers what is, for our money, the all-time greatest twist ending.

The franchise introduced another mind-bending element with the second Apes sequel, 1971's Escape From the Planet of the Apes, in which the timeline of the films begins to fold in on itself. And the Apes franchise of course continues to this day.

Star Wars (1977)

There were lots of great sci-fi movies before Star Wars, but its greatest innovation was trying not to make everything look new, but to make things look old. It wasn't set in a utopian future, like Star Trek, but, famously, "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away."

So the good guys' ships were always shaking. The hyperdrives never worked. The robots were falling apart. The ragtag quality of the rebellion gave Star Wars a lived in, anti-pretentious quality that was very 1970s, and made us root instantly for the rebels from the very beginning.

By setting the bar low — these ships are supposed to look bad! — George Lucas made one of the most mind-blowing movies of all, immersing us completely in a galaxy in which we forgave any apparent flaws because we all knew, intimately, that our own lives are flawed, from that dent in the car we can't justify fixing to the old jacket we can't throw away.

Star Wars looked like us. Or at least, most of us. And the film reflected our resentment of an Empire that was shiny, efficient, and evil.

It was also a marvel of storytelling from the first shot of a big ship chasing a small ship. A two-year-old could tell the good guys from the bad guys, even without mom or dad reading them the cool yellow crawl.

Jurassic Park (1993)

Watching this Steven Spielberg film in a theater in 1993, the simplest explanation for the verisimilitude of the dinosaurs was simply this:

You had entered a time machine, designed to look like a movie theater, and now found yourself looking out a giant window at real dinosaurs, going about their lives in the Jurassic era of about 200 million years ago.

Until 1993, no other movie had come close to Jurassic Park, in terms of mixing practical and CGI. And many films released all these decades later still don't have its jaw-dropping illusion of realism.

The Usual Suspects (1996)

There are twist endings and then there are twist endings.

After establishing the mysterious Keyser Söze as one of the most ruthless villains in cinematic history, Christopher McQuarrie's script pulls one of the great cinematic rug pulls — one that makes you want to watch the whole movie again.

McQuarrie has taken his knack for well-crafted surprises to a slew of collaborations with Tom Cruise, who is mentioned elsewhere on this list. Their latest is Mission: Impossible — the Final Reckoning, which careens into theaters later this month.

This is also a film beautifully steeped in cinematic history, starting with the title, a nod to Casablanca.

Dark City (1998)

There were a lot of reality bending films in the late '90s, but Alex Proyas' Dark City got to its version of a dystopian world where things are not as they seem a year before The Matrix.

Set in a world that feels like a hyper-stylized 1940s noir film, Dark City follows a man named John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) who wakes up in a seedy motel room with a murdered woman. He comes to learn that he's married to a singer named Emma (Jennifer Connelly) who has recently cheated on him — and that he may or may not be a serial killer.

It's always night, and he's desperate to get to a place called Shell Beach — though no one can remember quite how to get there. And he's pursued by ghastly pale beings called the Strangers.

After a lot of behind-the-scenes back-and-forth, the filmmakers agreed to add an explanatory voiceover by Kiefer Sutherland's creepy character, Dr. Daniel P. Schreber. It makes a wonderfully mysterious film a little less mysterious, and perhaps not as good.

Dark City bombed, but is very much worth a watch for the cast, world-building, twists, and captivating atmosphere.

The Matrix (1999)

The gold standard of mind-blowing movies, The Matrix seized on a very '90s sense that, to quote Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus, "there's something wrong with the world."

The central idea of the film is that everything we see is an illusion to anesthetize us and keep us from rising up to fight back from the true horrors of our existence. "It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth," Morpheus explains. "You were born into a prison — for your mind."

What makes The Matrix so compelling, after more than 25 years, is that no one can prove the movie's central theory isn't true. It's an elegantly simple idea, and it feels more believable with every new A.I. innovation — and with every second we spend on our phones, in a kind of (anti-)social media prison.

The film has an Occam's-razor elegance, upon with the Wachowskis added layers of complexity in the sequels. (Maybe too many layers?) We think about The Matrix daily, and not just when someone makes a now-tiresome reference to being red-pilled.

Those of us who were born into an analog world can't help but feel like maybe one day — perhaps around 1999, when The Matrix came out? — we were thrown into a very strange new reality. The film captured the Zeitgeist of our new millennium like no other.

The Matrix is also, it's important to say, fun — especially when the film shifts into bullet- time action scenes, and offers its explanation of what deja vu is.

Fight Club (1999)

What was it about the '90s that produced so many mind-blowing movies? Perhaps the lack of online options allowed more times for our minds — and writers' minds — to wander. There was also a sense of fatalism in the air, and a sense that, to quote Morpheus again, "there's something wrong with the world."

David Fincher's Fight Club, based on the 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk, has the same general idea as The Matrix, one that Fiona Apple also nicely encompassed in a famous VMA acceptance speech: "This world is bulls---."

Fight Club was a nice takedown of 1980s yuppiedom, but is also contained one of the all-time great narrative bait-and-switches, something so simultaneously smart and dumb that Charlie Kaufman, who will be referenced again soon, made fun of it (and many other movies of this era) in his hilarious script for 2002's Adaptation.

Donnie Darko (2001)

A mind-blowing movie on its face and because of the timing of its release, Donnie Darko is about a young man whose mind has been blown apart by either mental illness or the ability to compact time and see horrific events before they happen.

It remains wide open to interpretation to this day, but however you understand Donnie Darko, writer-director Richard Kelly creates mesmerizing atmospherics and elicits all-around outstanding performances, especially by lead Jake Gyllenhaal and Patrick Swayze, who plays way against type as not-what-he-seems motivational speaker Jim Cunningham.

The air disaster that plays a major role in Donnie Darko made the film feel darkly prescient of the September 11, 2001 attacks — almost as if the movie itself shared Donnie's ability to foresee tragedy. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2001, before the attacks, and was released into theaters a month after they happened.

Nervousness about the 9/11 connection limited the film's advertising and doomed its box office chances. So Donnie Darko has to settle for being a cult hit, especially among brooding Millennials, and one of the most mind-blowing movies of all time.

Vanilla Sky (2001)

Cameron Crowe and Tom Cruise's follow up to their crowd-pleasing Jerry Maguire was a wild film that was too much for some audiences, but we're among its big admirers.

It's what Crowe called a cover version (not quite the same as a remake) of the excellent 1997 Spanish film Abre Los Ojos, directed by Alejandro Amenábar. Penelope Cruz, the star of that film, stars in Vanilla Sky as well.

The film follows handsome millionaire David (Tom Cruise) whose biggest problem seems to be a lover (Cameron Diaz) who gets too attached. But things go very awry when a horrible accident mangles his face.

Of course, that's just the beginning of a mind-bending, genre-switching journey that takes us into serious sci-fi territory, and finds time for grace notes like recreating The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album cover and a lovely meditation on your favorite Beatle.

As with Donnie Darko, there's another 9/11 connection. The film's shot of the World Trade Center — and the motif of Cruise's character, David, facing a crisis on the roof of a skyscraper — were especially haunting when the film was released just three months after the attacks.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Would you wipe an entire relationship from your mind just to escape the heartbreak when it ended?

That's the question at the heart of Michel Gondry's gorgeous, heartbreaking Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, written by Charlie Kaufman at a moment when his brilliantly experimental screenwriting was also accessible enough for multiplex audiences. (The idea for the film originated with talks between Gondry and his friend Pierre Busmuth. Gondry, Bismuth and Kaufman collaborated on the story.)

Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet have never been better than they are in this film, in part because Carrey plays a rare straight man role and lets Winslet be the wild one. Gondry took pains to make Carrey tone down his comic impulses, and that counterintuitive decision pays off beautifully: You feel Carrey's longing to break out.

For all its big questions about love and memory and how pain both breaks and shapes us, the film is grounded in a beautiful melancholy that will stay with you long after the plot points fade — like a relationship you've left that will never leave you.

Inception (2010)

Christopher Nolan has been devoted to mind-blowing movies from the start — he broke out with the backwards-told Memento in 2000 — but for our money he never did sci-fi mind-bending better than he did in the soulful, endlessly inventive Inception.

The idea of going into dreams, changing their architecture, and incepting new ideas was stunning enough. But then add the layered dreams within dreams, and corresponding set pieces, and you have one of the coolest and most fun films we've ever seen.

Not content with that, though, Nolan builds the film around a tragic love affair between Leonardo DiCaprio's Cobb and his deceased wife, Mal, played to aching perfection by Marion Cotillard.

And you can watch Inception a dozen times without reaching a conclusion about its devastating final shot.

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020)

The least-known film on this list, Junta Yamaguchi's 70-minute Japanese is a technical masterpiece that will leave your head spinning. It's the story of a cafe owner who discovers a TV that shows images from two minutes into the future.

If that somehow sounds simple enough, the film mounts an astonishing challenge for itself: The entire story takes place in one shot. Which means the film not only tells its story in real time, but incorporates in events from two minutes in the future — which of course becomes the past as the film unfurls.

Infinitely cool, infinitely charming, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is proof that you don't need a massive budget to make an unforgettable film.

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Main image: A promotional image of Carrie-Anne Moss in The Matrix. Warner Bros.

Editor's Note: Corrects main image.