Best Melancholy Movies
Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of melancholy cinema — measured across 2,697 indexed frames from 43 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.
Melancholy films over-index on tank top, cigarette and fedora — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.
- 1
Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
Gus Van SantDP Robert D. YeomanIMDb 7.2TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →
Portland, Oregon, 1971. Bob Hughes is the charismatic leader of a peculiar quartet, formed by his wife, Dianne, and another couple, Rick and Nadine, who skillfully steal from drugstores and hospital medicine cabinets in order to appease their insatiable need for drugs. But neither fun nor luck last forever.
- 2
Beach Rats (2017)
Eliza HittmanDP Hélène LouvartIMDb 6.4TMDB 6.0See in full on FrameThrower →
An aimless teenager on the outer edges of Brooklyn struggles to escape his bleak home life and navigate questions of self-identity, as he balances his time between his delinquent friends, a potential new girlfriend, and older men he meets online.
- 3
Lost In Translation (2003)
Sofia CoppolaDP Lance AcordIMDb 7.7TMDB 7.4See in full on FrameThrower →
Middle-aged American movie star Bob Harris is in Tokyo to film a personal endorsement Suntory whiskey ad solely for the Japanese market. He is past his movie star prime, but his name and image still have enough cachet for him to have gotten this lucrative $2 million job. He has an unsatisfying home life where his wife Lydia follows him wherever he goes - in the form of messages and faxes - for him to deal with the minutiae of their everyday lives, while she stays at home to look after their kids. Staying at the same upscale hotel is fellow American, twenty-something recent Yale Philosophy graduate Charlotte, her husband John, an entertainment still photographer, who is on assignment in Japan. As such, she is largely left to her own devices in the city, especially when his job takes him out of Tokyo. Both Bob and Charlotte are feeling lost by their current situations, which are not helped by the cultural barriers they feel in Tokyo, those cultural barriers extending far beyond just not knowing the language. After a few chance encounters in the hotel, they end up spending much of their time hanging out together, each helping the other deal with their feelings of loss in their current lives. The friendship that develops between the two, which is not always a bumpy-free one, may be just for this specific place and time, but it may also have long lasting implications.
- 4
Loving Vincent (2017)
Hugh Welchman, DK WelchmanDP Tristan OliverIMDb 7.8TMDB 8.0See in full on FrameThrower →
A year after the death of artist Vincent van Gogh (Robert Gulaczyk), Postman Joseph Roulin Chris O'Dowd) gets his slacker son, Armand (Douglas Booth), to hand deliver the artist's final letter written to his now late brother, Theo (Cezary Lukaszewicz), to some worthy recipient after multiple failed postal delivery attempts. Although disdainful of this seemingly pointless chore, Armand travels to Auvers-sur-Oise where a purported close companion to Vincent, Dr. Gachet (Jerome Flynn), lives. Having to wait until the doctor returns from business, Armand meets many of the people of that village who not only knew Vincent, but were apparently also models and inspirations for his art. In doing so, Armand becomes increasingly fascinated in the psyche and fate of van Gogh as numerous suspicious details fail to add up. However, as Armand digs further, he comes to realize that Vincent's troubled life is as much a matter of interpretation as his paintings, and there are no easy answers for a man whose work and tragedy would only be truly appreciated in the future.
- 5
Tangerine (2015)
Sean BakerDP Sean BakerIMDb 7.1TMDB 6.9See in full on FrameThrower →
After twenty-eight long days of absence, Sin-Dee is back on the block. It's Christmastime, and everyone wants to get into the festive spirit; however, Sin-Dee is in for a shock when she accidentally discovers that Chester, the love of her life, has been cheating on her. And to think that poor Sin-Dee has been making plans for the future. To save what's left of her dignity, heartbroken Sin-Dee embarks on a desperate mission to locate two-timing Chester, and no one can stop her--not even her best friend Alexandra, who vainly tries to be the voice of reason. Now, nothing can stand in the way of justice. After all, who wants to live a lie?
- 6
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.
- 7
La Dolce Vita (1960)
Federico FelliniDP Otello MartelliIMDb 8.0TMDB 8.0See in full on FrameThrower →
In 1959/1960 Rome, Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) is a writer and journalist, the worst kind of journalist--a tabloid journalist. His job is to try to catch celebrities in compromising or embarrassing situations. He tends to get quite close to his subjects--especially when they're beautiful women. Two such subjects are local heiress Maddalena (Anouk Aimee), and Swedish superstar-actress Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), with both of whom he has affairs despite being engaged to Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), a clingy, insecure, nagging, melodramatic woman. Despite his extravagant, pleasure-filled lifestyle, he is wondering if maybe a simpler life wouldn't be better.
- 8
Moonlight (2016)
Barry JenkinsDP James LaxtonIMDb 7.4TMDB 7.4See in full on FrameThrower →
Three time periods - young adolescence, mid-teen and young adult - in the life of black-American Chiron is presented. When a child, Chiron lives with his single, crack addict mother Paula in a crime ridden neighborhood in Miami. Chiron is a shy, withdrawn child largely due to his small size and being neglected by his mother, who is more concerned about getting her fixes and satisfying her carnal needs than taking care of him. Because of these issues, Chiron is bullied, the slurs hurled at him which he doesn't understand beyond knowing that they are meant to be hurtful. Besides his same aged Cuban-American friend Kevin, Chiron is given what little guidance he has in life from a neighborhood drug dealer named Juan, who can see that he is neglected, and Juan's caring girlfriend Teresa, whose home acts as a sanctuary away from the bullies and away from Paula's abuse. With this childhood as a foundation, Chiron may have a predetermined path in life, one that will only be magnified in terms of its problems when he reaches his difficult teen years when peer pressure affects what he and many of his peers do, unless he follows Juan's advice of truly making his own decisions for himself.
- 9
Anomalisa (2015)
Duke Johnson, Charlie KaufmanDP Joe PassarelliIMDb 7.2TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →
David Thewlisas Michael Stone (voice)
Jennifer Jason Leighas Lisa Hesselman (voice)
Tom Noonanas Everyone Else (voice)
Michael Stone, an author that specializes in customer service, is a man who is unable to interact deeply with other people. His low sensitivity to excitement, and his lack of interest made him a man with a repetitive life on his own perspective. But, when he went on a business trip, he met a stranger - an extraordinary stranger, which slowly became a cure for his negative view on life that possibly will change his mundane life.
- 10
Wild At Heart (1990)
David LynchDP Frederick ElmesIMDb 7.2TMDB 7.0See in full on FrameThrower →
Lula's psychopathic mother goes crazy at the thought of Lula being with Sailor, who just got free from jail. Ignoring Sailor's probation, they set out for California. However their mother hires a killer to hunt down Sailor. Unaware of this, the two enjoy their journey and themselves being together... until they witness a young woman dying after a car accident - a bad omen.
What melancholy films are made of
How much more often each element appears in a melancholy frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — tank top is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.
- tank top2.5×
- cigarette2.1×
- fedora1.7×
- chair1.6×
- glass1.6×
- bed1.5×
- table1.5×
How melancholy 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 melancholy from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.
- 24%widevs 20% baseline
What breaks the pattern
How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) 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 2,697 frames from 43 films carrying the melancholy 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/melancholy
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