The Best Films about Films

A snippet from in Many Corners Issue 3: Film. Get your copy or sign up for a subscription.

Hollywood loves one thing above all else: itself. Writers and directors have tried many, many times to capture the feeling of making a movie. In chronological order, these are our favorite movies about movies. 

Sunset Boulevard (1950): A faded silent film star waits for her close-up inside a career that ended twenty years ago. 

Singin' in the Rain (1952): This musical is set during Hollywood's panicked switch from silent films to sound, when careers ended overnight and nobody knew what they were doing. 

The Bad and the Beautiful (1952): Kirk Douglas plays a producer who is so good at his job that everyone he destroys still adores him. 

8½ (1963): A director with no idea what to make his next film and finds himself surrounded by everyone waiting for him to figure it out.

Day for Night (1973): Truffaut plays a director who tries to hold a production together while his cast falls apart around him. 

Burden of Dreams (1982): This documentary follows Werner Herzog while he films Fitzcarraldo in the Amazon jungle in a chaotic shoot where workers haul a steamship over a hill as everything falls apart, yet Herzog keeps going anyway.

The Player (1992): A Hollywood executive kills a screenwriter and the industry barely notices. This one is very funny until it suddenly isn't.

Ed Wood (1994): About a director played by Johnny Depp whose films were objectively terrible and who never stopped making them.

One Cut of the Dead (2017): Starts as a zombie film made in one take, then reveals itself to be something much stranger about the lengths people go to to finish a movie. 

See the rest of the list in the zine!