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Best Euphoric Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of euphoric cinema — measured across 1,299 indexed frames from 18 films, against a 404,689-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Euphoric films over-index on boy, neon sign and clouds — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    Speed Racer (2008)

    Lana Wachowski, Lilly WachowskiDP David TattersallIMDb 6.1TMDB 6.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    Speed Racer is a young man with natural racing instincts whose goal is to win The Crucible, a cross-country car-racing rally that claimed the life of his older brother, Rex Racer. Speed is loyal to the family business, run by his parents Pops and Mom. Pops designed Speed's car, the Mach 5. The owner of Royalton Industries makes Speed a lucrative offer; Speed rejects it, angering the owner. Speed also uncovers a secret that top corporate interests, including Royalton, are fixing races and cheating to gain profit. With the offer to Speed denied, Royalton wants to ensure that Speed will not win races. Speed finds support from his parents and his girlfriend Trixie and enters The Crucible in a partnership with his one-time rival, Racer X, seeking to rescue his family's business and the racing sport itself.

  2. 2

    The Iron Giant (1999)

    Brad BirdDP Steven WilzbachIMDb 8.1TMDB 8.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    This is the story of a nine-year-old boy named Hogarth Hughes who makes friends with an innocent alien giant robot that came from outer space. Meanwhile, a paranoid U.S. Government agent named Kent Mansley arrives in town, determined to destroy the giant at all costs. It's up to Hogarth to protect him by keeping him at Dean McCoppin's place in the junkyard.

  3. 3

    True Romance (1993)

    Tony ScottDP Jeffrey L. KimballIMDb 7.9TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    In Detroit, Clarence Worley goes to the movie theater alone on the day of his birthday to watch some movies. The gorgeous Alabama Whitman accidentally drops her popcorn on Clarence and they watch the movie together. Later they go to a diner for pie, and end up having a one night stand. In the morning, Alabama confesses that she is a call-girl hired to spend the night with him, but she has fallen in love with him. In the morning they get married and Clarence goes to the club where she worked to bring her some clothes. However, her pimp Drexl Spivey and his partner beat up Clarence and he reacts by killing them both. Clarence asks for Alabama's suitcase with her clothes and the other girls mistakenly give another one with cocaine. When Clarence discovers the mistake, he decides to travel with Alabama to the house of his friend, the aspiring actor Dick Ritchie, to sell the drug and travel to Mexico. He visits his father Clifford Worley and gives his address to him. But the Sicilian Mafia is the owner of the drug and a group of killers are sent to hunt down Clarnece and Alabama.

  4. 4

    Boogie Nights

    Paul Thomas AndersonDP Robert ElswitIMDb 7.9TMDB 7.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    Set in 1977, back when sex was safe, pleasure was a business and business was booming, idealistic porn producer Jack Horner aspires to elevate his craft to an art form. Horner discovers Eddie Adams, a hot young talent working as a busboy in a nightclub, and welcomes him into the extended family of movie-makers, misfits and hangers-on that are always around. Adams' rise from nobody to a celebrity adult entertainer is meteoric, and soon the whole world seems to know his porn alter ego, "Dirk Diggler". Now, when disco and drugs are in vogue, fashion is in flux and the party never seems to stop, Adams' dreams of turning sex into stardom are about to collide with cold, hard reality.

  5. 5

    Strange Days (1995)

    Kathryn BigelowDP Matthew F. LeonettiIMDb 7.2TMDB 7.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    In 1999, Los Angeles is racial war zone with the army and LSPD and SWAT officers fighting Afro-American people. The former cop Lenny Nero is a dealer of illegal recording in CDs that gives the memories and sensations of the recorder to the user. He buys the recordings from the supplier Tick; he misses his former mistress Faith, who was a hooker and now is a singer; his best friend is the private eye Max Peltier and the limousine driver Lornette 'Mace' Mason, who has unrequited love for him. Two days before the turn of the century, the black rapper Jeriko One is murdered. The hooker Iris seeks Lenny out but there is an incident and they do not talk to each other. However she drops a recording into Lenny's car while he unsuccessfully tries to meet Faith at a night-club. However her boyfriend Philo Gant does not let them talk. When Lenny learns that Iris was sadistically raped and killed, he gets involved in a sick scheme and discovers dirty hidden secrets.

  6. 6

    Enter The Void (2009)

    Gaspar NoéDP Benoît DebieIMDb 7.2TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    Tokyo's nasty underside, seen primarily through the eyes of Oscar, a heavy drug user, whose sister Linda is a stripper. Oscar also has flashbacks to his childhood when trauma upends the siblings. Oscar's drug-fed hallucinations alter Tokyo's already-disconcerting nights, and after the police shoot him, he can float above and look down: on his sister's sorrow, on the rooms of a love hotel, and on life at even a molecular level. The spectrum's colors can be beautiful; it's people's colorless lives that can be ugly. And what of afterlife, is there more than a void?

  7. 7

    Hard Boiled (1992)

    John WooDP Horace Wong Wing-HangIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    Mobsters are smuggling guns into Hong Kong. The police orchestrate a raid at a teahouse where an ace detective loses his partner. Meanwhile, the two main gun smugglers are having a war over territory, and a young new gun is enlisted to wipe out informants and overcome barriers to growth. The detective, acting from inside sources, gets closer to the ring leaders and eventually must work with the inside man directly.

  8. 8

    Dellamorte Dellamore (1994)

    Michele SoaviDP Mauro MarchettiIMDb 7.0TMDB 6.9See in full on FrameThrower →

    This movie is based on a novel of Tiziano Sclavi, and it always reflects the "sclavian philosophy" diffused by the most succesful comics in Italy: Dylan Dog, the detective of the nightmare. There is the duality between love and dead (in Italian "dellamore" means "of love" and "dellamorte" means "of death"), a duality that Dellamorte feels in a really hard way. He is the guardian of the cemetery of Buffalora, a little town in the north of Italy, in which, we don't know why, corpses rise from tombs and Dellamorte has to destroy them. Dellamorte seems not to ask to himself why this happen, he shoots and loves. But at the end he wants to leave Buffalora...

  9. 9

    Invasion (2020)

    Fyodor BondarchukDP Vladislav OpelyantsIMDb 5.6TMDB 6.9See in full on FrameThrower →

    Two years after the fall of the alien ship, the life of a young woman from Moscow has been changed forever. Her growing powers are now at the focus of both human and celestial investigation: an alien force takes an interest in her, and will stop short of nothing, including an invasion. Can love and compassion save humanity, when faced with a much greater and more demanding test this time?

  10. 10

    Alice in Wonderland (2010)

    Tim BurtonDP Dariusz WolskiIMDb 6.4TMDB 6.6See in full on FrameThrower →

    Alice, an unpretentious and individual 19-year-old, is betrothed to a dunce of an English nobleman. At her engagement party, she escapes the crowd to consider whether to go through with the marriage and falls down a hole in the garden after spotting an unusual rabbit. Arriving in a strange and surreal place called "Underland," she finds herself in a world that resembles the nightmares she had as a child, filled with talking animals, villainous queens and knights, and frumious bandersnatches. Alice realizes that she is there for a reason--to conquer the horrific Jabberwocky and restore the rightful queen to her throne.

What euphoric films are made of

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

  • boy3.7×
  • neon sign2.1×
  • clouds2.1×
  • mirror1.7×
  • blazer1.7×

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

  • 16%high keyvs 12% baseline

What breaks the pattern

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) 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 1,299 frames from 18 films carrying the euphoric 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/euphoric

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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