Best Cat Movies
Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of cat cinema — measured across 1,558 indexed frames from 21 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.
Cat films over-index on cat, fur and dog — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.
- 1
The Garfield Movie (2024)
Mark DindalIMDb 5.7TMDB 7.0See in full on FrameThrower →
Garfield, the world-famous, Monday-hating, lasagna-loving indoor cat, is about to have a wild outdoor adventure! After an unexpected reunion with his long-lost father – scruffy street cat Vic – Garfield and his canine friend Odie are forced from their perfectly pampered life into joining Vic in a hilarious, high-stakes heist.
- 2
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Ethan Coen, Joel CoenDP Bruno DelbonnelIMDb 7.4TMDB 7.2See in full on FrameThrower →
Follow a week in the life of a young folk singer as he navigates the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961. Guitar in tow, huddled against the unforgiving New York winter, he is struggling to make it as a musician against seemingly insurmountable obstacles -- some of them of his own making.
- 3
Pet Sematary (2019)
Dennis Widmyer, Kevin KölschDP Laurie RoseIMDb 5.7TMDB 5.7See in full on FrameThrower →
Louis Creed, his wife Rachel, and their two children, Gage and Ellie, move to a rural home where they are welcomed and enlightened about the eerie 'Pet Sematary' located nearby. After the tragedy of their cat being killed by a truck, Louis resorts to burying it in the mysterious pet cemetery, which is definitely not as it seems, as it proves to the Creeds that sometimes, dead is better.
- 4
Soul (2020)
Pete DocterDP Matt AspburyIMDb 8.0TMDB 8.1See in full on FrameThrower →
Joe Gardner is a middle school teacher with a love for jazz music. After a successful audition at the Half Note Club, he suddenly gets into an accident that separates his soul from his body and is transported to the You Seminar, a center in which souls develop and gain passions before being transported to a newborn child. Joe must enlist help from the other souls-in-training, like 22, a soul who has spent eons in the You Seminar, in order to get back to Earth.
- 5
The Cat In The Hat (2003)
Bo WelchDP Emmanuel LubezkiIMDb 4.1TMDB 5.3See in full on FrameThrower →
Conrad and Sally Walden (Spencer Breslin and Dakota Fanning) are home alone with their pet fish. It is raining outside, and there is nothing to do. Until The Cat in the Hat ('Mike Myers') walks in the front door. He introduces them to their imagination, and at first it's all fun and games, until things get out of hand, and The Cat must go, go, go, before their mother gets back, but their pompous neighbor has bigger plans for them.
- 6
Carles TorrensDP Elías M. FélixIMDb 6.1TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →
When a kind of rabies that transforms people into aggressive creatures spreads across the planet, Manel isolates himself at home with his cat, relying on his wits to survive; but soon they must go out in search of food, by land and by sea, dodging many dangers.
- 7
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)
Marielle HellerDP Brandon TrostIMDb 7.1TMDB 6.8See in full on FrameThrower →
In the early 1990s, Lee Israel, a biographer with a modicum of writing success, has fallen on hard times largely of her own doing. Her choice of subjects is in general not of interest to today's book buying public, and she, in her only true friends being her aged cat Jersey and a scotch and soda in not really liking people and people in turn not really liking her, has burned bridges with everyone her agent Marjorie has built for her. She will have to start from the ground up again if she wants a writing career, as, hiding behind her subjects, the book buying public will not buy a "Lee Israel" on the strength of her name in not knowing who she is as a writer or person. This situation has led to her being months behind in rent as she spends whatever little money she has on alcohol and Jersey's medical needs. In doing research for her latest book on Fanny Brice - with no advance from Marjorie - and selling a cherished personal memento of a handwritten letter from Katharine Hepburn in needing the money, Lee discovers there is a market for such celebrity memorabilia, and in the process decides, with her writing talent, to go into the fraudulent business of creating and selling fake personal documents purportedly by dead celebrities, especially of writers with strong public personas, such as Dorothy Parker and Noël Coward. She ends up befriending a gay past acquaintance from her literary circles, Jack Hock, also having fallen on hard times, Jack, not only becoming her drinking buddy, but her partner in crime. As they are able to get out of their financial holes in this business, Lee may begin to have second thoughts in also befriending Anna, one of the rare bookstore owners who likes Lee for Lee, an unusual position for her. But as the fraud looks like it may catch up specifically to Lee, she, feeling like these fakes are at least stretching her writing muscles, only becomes more resolute in at least the creative pursuit of what she's doing.
- 8
House (Hausu) (1977)
Nobuhiko ObayashiDP Yoshitaka SakamotoIMDb 7.2TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →
Oshare (Gorgeous) is excited about spending summer vacation with her father, until she finds out that his beautiful, freakishly serene girlfriend Ryouko would be going as well. Oshare decides she will be going to her aunt's house in the country instead. She brings with her her friends from school - Fanta (who likes to take pictures, and daydreams a lot), KunFuu (who has very good reflexes), Gari/Prof (who is a major nerd), Sweet (who likes to clean), Mac (who eats a lot), and Melody (a musician). However, the girls are unaware that the house is actually haunted. When they arrive at the house, crazy events take place and the girls disappear one by one while slowly discovering the secret behind all the madness.
- 9
Hail, Caesar! (2016)
Joel Coen, Ethan CoenDP Roger DeakinsIMDb 6.3TMDB 5.9See in full on FrameThrower →
This movie follows a day in the life of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a Hollywood fixer for Capitol Pictures in the 1950s, who cleans up and solves problems for big names and stars in the industry. But when studio star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) disappears, Mannix has to deal with more than just the fix.
- 10
Cat People (1982)
Paul SchraderDP John BaileyIMDb 6.2TMDB 6.0See in full on FrameThrower →
The Cat People originated way back in time, when humans sacrificed their women to leopards, who mated with them. Cat People look similar to humans, but must mate with other Cat People before they transform into panthers. Irene Gallier was raised by adoptive parents and meets her older brother Paul for the first time since childhood. We follow brother and sister - who seem to be the only ones of their kind left.
What cat films are made of
How much more often each element appears in a cat frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — cat is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.
- cat49.2×
- fur7.4×
- dog4.3×
- fedora2.4×
- beard1.9×
- doorway1.8×
- glass1.7×
- tree1.6×
How cat films are shot
Weaker signals than the objects above, and worth saying so: most dramatic genres skew dark and night-heavy, so these numbers separate cat from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.
- 85%eye levelvs 69% baseline
What breaks the pattern
The Long Goodbye (1973) is the least typical film here — it carries the least of what the rest of this list is made of. Which is either a failure of the genre label, or the most interesting film on the page.
Method
Every frame in the FrameThrower catalogue is tagged for shot size, lighting, time of day, camera angle, colour and the objects visible in it. This page aggregates those tags across 1,558 frames from 21 films carrying the cat label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (408,752 frames). Films are ranked by how closely they match the theme’s over-indexed elements, weighted by how distinctive each element is; one film per series. Only films with at least 20 indexed frames and 500 TMDB votes are listed.
Machine-readable: /api/list/cat
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