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Best Drug use Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of drug use cinema — measured across 950 indexed frames from 14 films, against a 404,689-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Drug use films over-index on child, skin and t-shirt — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    The Florida Project (2017)

    Sean BakerDP Alexis ZabéIMDb 7.6TMDB 7.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    Halley lives with her six year old daughter Moonee in a budget motel along one of the commercial strips catering to the Walt Disney World tourist clientele outside Orlando, Florida. Halley, who survives largely on welfare, has little respect for people, especially those who cross her, it an attitude that she has passed down to Moonee, who curses and gives the finger like her mother. Although the motel's policy is not to allow long term rentals, Bobby, the motel manager, has made arrangements for people like Halley to live there while not undermining the policy as he realizes that many such tenants have no place to go otherwise. Halley, Moonee and Moonee's friends, who live in the motel or others like it along the strip and who she often drags into her disruptive pranks, are often the bane of Bobby's existence, but while dealing with whatever problem arises, Bobby has a soft spot especially for the children and thus, by association, their parents, as he knows that Moonee and others like her are just children acting like a children under whatever guidance they have, Moonee who has less guidance than most. Although there are some lines which he will not tolerate to be crossed, Bobby lets most of the disruptive things that they do go, largely as long as it does not affect the bread and butter of the motel, namely the tourist trade. The summer in this collective is presented, when Moonee and her friends, such as Scooty, are out of school and are left largely to their own devices while self-absorbed Halley does whatever she wants, often just staying in the room watching TV. Halley is supposed to look after Scooty, the son of Halley's friend Ashley, they who live in the unit immediately underneath Halley and Moonee's, while Ashley is at work at a local diner. In turn, Ashley pilfers cooked meals from the diner to feed Halley, Moonee and Scooty. Over the course of the summer, Halley systematically begins to alienate one by one the people who are her unofficial support by responding with that disrespect to anything she feels is against her. As such, Halley begins to take more and more extreme measures to maintain the life she leads with Moonee.

  2. 2

    Beasts of No Nation (2015)

    Cary Joji FukunagaDP Cary Joji FukunagaIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    Follows the journey of a young boy, Agu, who is forced to join a group of soldiers in a fictional West African country. While Agu fears his commander and many of the men around him, his fledgling childhood has been brutally shattered by the war raging through his country, and he is at first torn between conflicting revulsion and fascination Depicts the mechanics of war and does not shy away from explicit, visceral detail, and paints a complex, difficult picture of Agu as a child soldier.

  3. 3

    Honey Boy (2019)

    Alma Har'elDP Natasha BraierIMDb 7.2TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    From a screenplay by Shia LaBeouf, based on his own experiences, award-winning filmmaker Alma Har'el brings to life a young actor's stormy childhood and early adult years as he struggles to reconcile with his father through cinema and dreams. Fictionalizing his childhood's ascent to stardom, and subsequent adult crash-landing into rehab and recovery, Har'el casts Noah Jupe and Lucas Hedges as Otis Lort, navigating different stages in a frenetic career. LaBeouf takes on the daring and therapeutic challenge of playing a version of his own father, an ex-rodeo clown and a felon. Artist and musician FKA Twigs makes her feature-film debut, playing neighbor and kindred spirit to the younger Otis in their garden-court motel home. Har'el's feature narrative debut is a one-of-a-kind collaboration between filmmaker and subject, exploring art as medicine and imagination as hope.

  4. 4

    Requiem For A Dream (2000)

    Darren AronofskyDP Matthew LibatiqueIMDb 8.3TMDB 8.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn) is a retired widow, living in a small apartment. She spends most of her time watching TV, especially a particular self-help show. She has delusions of rising above her current dull existence by being a guest on that show. Her son, Harry (Jared Leto) is a junkie but along with his friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) has visions of making it big by becoming a drug dealer. Harry's girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) could be fashion designer or artist but is swept along in Harry's drug-centric world. Meanwhile Sara has developed an addiction of her own. She desperately wants to lose weight and so goes on a crash course involving popping pills, pills which turn out to be very addictive and harmful to her mental state.

  5. 5

    Out of the Furnace (2013)

    Scott CooperDP Masanobu TakayanagiIMDb 6.7TMDB 6.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    Russell and his younger brother Rodney live in the economically depressed Rust Belt and have always dreamed of escaping and finding better lives. But when a cruel twist of fate lands Russell in prison, Rodney becomes involved with one of the most violent and ruthless crime rings in the Northeast - a mistake that will cost him everything. Once released, Russell must choose between his own freedom or risking it all to seek justice for his brother.

  6. 6

    Twelve Monkeys (1995)

    Terry GilliamDP Roger PrattIMDb 8.0TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    James Cole, a prisoner of the state in the year 2035, can earn parole if he agrees to travel back in time and thwart a devastating plague. The virus has wiped out most of the Earth's population and the remainder live underground because the air is poisonous. Returning to the year 1990, six years before the start of the plague, Cole is soon imprisoned in a psychiatric facility because his warnings sound like mad ravings. There he meets a scientist named Dr. Kathryn Railly and Jeffrey Goines, the mad son of an eminent virologist. Cole is returned by the authorities to the year 2035, and finally ends up at his intended destination in 1996. He kidnaps Dr. Railly in order to enlist her help in his quest. Cole discovers graffiti by an apparent animal rights group called the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, but as he delves into the mystery, he hears voices, loses his bearings, and doubts his own sanity. He must figure out if Goines, who seems to be a raving lunatic, holds the key to the puzzle.

  7. 7

    The Bad Batch (2016)

    Ana Lily AmirpourDP Lyle VincentIMDb 5.2TMDB 5.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    THE BAD BATCH follows Arlen (Waterhouse) after she's left in a Texas wasteland fenced off from civilization. While trying to navigate the unforgiving landscape, Arlen is captured by a savage band of cannibals led by the mysterious Miami Man (Momoa). With her life on the line, she makes her way to The Dream (Reeves). As she adjusts to life in 'the bad batch' Arlen discovers that being good or bad mostly depends on who's standing next to you.

  8. 8

    Altered States (1980)

    Ken RussellDP Jordan CronenwethIMDb 6.9TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →

    A research scientist explores the boundaries and frontiers of human consciousness. Using sensory deprivation and hallucinogenic mixtures from Native American shamans, he explores these altered states of cognizance and finds that memory, time, and reality itself are states of mind.

What drug use films are made of

How much more often each element appears in a drug use frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — child is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.

  • child2.2×
  • skin2.1×
  • t-shirt1.8×
  • boy1.8×
  • brick wall1.7×
  • grass1.5×

How drug use 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 drug use from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.

  • 25%widevs 20% baseline

What breaks the pattern

Babel (2006) 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 950 frames from 14 films carrying the drug use label, and compares each figure to the same measurement across the whole catalogue (404,689 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/drug-use

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These are real movie frames, shown at reduced resolution. All rights remain with their respective owners; they appear here for study, commentary and education under fair-use principles. How these are meant to be used