Best Punk rock Movies
Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of punk rock cinema — measured across 1,369 indexed frames from 23 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.
Punk rock films over-index on amplifier, electric guitar and drum kit — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.
- 1
Anton CorbijnDP Martin RuheIMDb 7.6TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →
Ian Curtis is a quiet and rather sad lad who works for an employment agency and sings in a band called Warsaw. He meets a girl named Debbie whom he promptly marries and his band, of which the name in the meantime has been changed to Joy Division, gets more and more successful. Even though Debbie and he become parents, their relationship is going downhill rapidly and Ian starts an affair with Belgium Annik whom he met after one of the gigs and he's almost never at home. Ian also suffers from epilepsy and has no-good medication for it. He doesn't know how to handle the feelings he has for Debbie and Annik and the pressure the popularity of Joy Division and the energy performing costs him.
- 2
Sid and Nancy (1986)
Alex CoxDP Roger DeakinsIMDb 7.0TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →
January 1978. After their success in England, the punk rock band Sex Pistols venture out on their tour of the southern United States. Temperamental bassist Sid Vicious is forced by his band mates to travel without his troubled girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, who will meet him in New York. When the band breaks up and Sid begins his solo career in a hostile city, the turbulent couple definitely falls into the depths of drug addiction.
- 3
Green Room (2015)
Jeremy SaulnierDP Sean PorterIMDb 7.0TMDB 6.7See in full on FrameThrower →
A band straying into a secluded part of the Pacific Northwest stumbles onto a horrific act of violence. Because they are the only witnesses, they become the targets of a terrifying gang of skinheads who want to make sure all the evidence is eliminated.
- 4
Summer of Sam (1999)
Spike LeeDP Ellen KurasIMDb 6.7TMDB 6.5See in full on FrameThrower →
Spike Lee's take on the "Son of Sam" murders in New York City during the summer of 1977 centering on the residents of an Italian-American Northeast Bronx neighborhood who live in fear and distrust of one another.
- 5
Persepolis (2007)
Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane SatrapiIMDb 8.0TMDB 7.9See in full on FrameThrower →
Chiara Mastroiannias Marjane (voice)
Danielle Darrieuxas Marjane's Grandmother (voice)
Catherine Deneuveas Marjane's Mother (voice)
In 1970s Iran, Marjane 'Marji' Satrapi watches events through her young eyes and her idealistic family of a long dream being fulfilled of the hated Shah's defeat in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. However as Marji grows up, she witnesses first hand how the new Iran, now ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, has become a repressive tyranny on its own. With Marji dangerously refusing to remain silent at this injustice, her parents send her abroad to Vienna to study for a better life. However, this change proves an equally difficult trial with the young woman finding herself in a different culture loaded with abrasive characters and profound disappointments that deeply trouble her. Even when she returns home, Marji finds that both she and homeland have changed too much and the young woman and her loving family must decide where she truly belongs.
- 6
Do The Right Thing (1989)
Spike LeeDP Ernest R. DickersonIMDb 7.9TMDB 7.8See in full on FrameThrower →
This film looks at life in the Bedford-Stuyvesant district of Brooklyn on a hot summer Sunday. As he does everyday, Sal Fragione opens the pizza parlor he's owned for 25 years. The neighborhood has changed considerably in the time he's been there and is now composed primarily of African-Americans and Hispanics. His son Pino hates it there and would like nothing better than to relocate the eatery to their own neighborhood. For Sal however, the restaurant represents something that is part of his life and sees it as a part of the community. What begins as a simple complaint by one of his customers, Buggin Out - who wonders why he has only pictures of famous Italian-Americans on the wall when most of his customers are black - eventually disintegrates into violence as frustration seemingly brings out the worst in everyone.
- 7
20th Century Women (2016)
Mike MillsDP Sean PorterIMDb 7.3TMDB 7.3See in full on FrameThrower →
Love, life, and the struggles of a mother bringing up a son in the late 70's. The ignorance of a free spirit against the needs of a young man trying to find his true character and beliefs. Living in a bohemian household shared with three like minded spirited people to help pay the rent, his mother tries to establish bonds that he cannot deal with. She cannot deal with his inability to talk, and enlists the help of other females in his life to share the burden of his upbringing. Slowly life unravels for them all without understanding how. In spite of their perceived struggles, they all go on to live defined lives without any serious consequences.
- 8
After Hours (1985)
Martin ScorseseDP Michael BallhausIMDb 7.6TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →
A meek word processor in New York impulsively travels downtown to Soho for date with an attractive, but apparently disturbed young woman, and finds himself trapped in a nightmarishly surreal vortex of improbable coincidences and farcical circumstances.
What punk rock films are made of
How much more often each element appears in a punk rock frame than in an average frame from the catalogue. A ratio, not a share — amplifier is not in most frames, it is simply far more common here than anywhere else.
- amplifier37.3×
- electric guitar27.2×
- drum kit24.3×
- microphone stand14.7×
- graffiti8.3×
- microphone5.7×
- poster4.5×
- denim jacket4.1×
How punk rock 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 punk rock from the catalogue far more than they separate it from its neighbours.
- 29%dayvs 42% baseline
- 56%nightvs 43% baseline
- 34%naturalvs 43% baseline
- 86%eye levelvs 69% baseline
- 49%low keyvs 40% baseline
What breaks the pattern
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011) 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 1,369 frames from 23 films carrying the punk rock 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/punk-rock
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