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Best Twins Movies

Ranked by how strongly each film carries the visual signature of twins cinema — measured across 1,402 indexed frames from 22 films, against a 408,752-frame catalogue baseline. Not by box office, and not by vote.

Twins films over-index on tank top, sofa and cigarette — the objects that make the genre recognisable before a line is spoken.

  1. 1

    Goodnight Mommy (2022)

    Matt SobelDP Alexander DynanIMDb 5.7TMDB 6.3See in full on FrameThrower →

    When twin brothers arrive home to find their mother’s demeanor altered and face covered in surgical bandages, they begin to suspect the woman beneath the gauze might not be their mother.

  2. 2

    Dead Ringers (1988)

    David CronenbergDP Peter SuschitzkyIMDb 7.2TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    The Mantle brothers are both doctors - both gynecologists - and identical twins. Mentally however, one of them is more confident than the other, and always manages to seduce the women he meets. When he's tired of his current partner, she is passed on to the other brother - without her knowing. Everything runs smoothly, until an actress visits their clinic, and the shy brother is the first to fall in love. Will they be able to 'share' her ?

  3. 3

    Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014)

    Robert Rodriguez, Frank MillerDP Robert RodriguezIMDb 6.5TMDB 6.4See in full on FrameThrower →

    Marv is unconscious on a highway surrounded by corpses. When he awakes, he has amnesia and tries to recall his last steps from the Kadie's saloon on the Saturday night. He recalls that he found four playboys burning a homeless man alive and defended the poor man. Marv hunts them down and kills the group. The cocky gambler Johnny hits jackpot in slot machines in the Kadie's saloon and invites the waitress Marcie to go with him to play poker game against the powerful Senator Roark. He wins the game and suffers the consequence of his arrogance. The private detective Dwight McCarthy is contacted by his former lover Ava Lord that asks to meet him at the Kadie's saloon. Ava asks him for forgiveness for leaving him to marry the wealthy Damian Lord. However her strong chauffeur Manute takes her home. Dwight snoops around Ava's house but is found and beaten by Manute and the bodyguards. When he returns home, Ava is waiting for him naked in the bed and seduces him again. Then she tells that Damian and Manute torture her and soon she will be killed. Once again Manute takes Ava with him and hits Dwight that invites Marv to help him to rescue Ava. Damian denies the accusation but Dwight beats him to death while Marv tear Manute's eye out. But soon Dwight finds that he was lured by Ava that shoots him. Marv rescues Dwight and takes him to the Old Town where Dwight finds his former lover Gail that helps him to recover while Dwight plots revenge against Ava.

  4. 4

    The Dreamers (2003)

    Bernardo BertolucciDP Fabio CianchettiIMDb 7.1TMDB 7.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    Paris, spring 1968. While most students take the lead in the May 'revolution', a French poet's twin son Theo and daughter Isabelle enjoy the good life in his grand Paris home. As film buffs they meet and 'adopt' modest, conservatively educated Californian student Matthew. With their parents away for a month, they drag him into an orgy of indulgence of all senses, losing all of his and the last of their innocence. A sexual threesome shakes their rapport, yet only the outside reality will break it up.

  5. 5

    Personal Shopper (2016)

    Olivier AssayasDP Yorick Le SauxIMDb 6.1TMDB 5.9See in full on FrameThrower →

    It's already been three months since the sudden death of her 27-year-old twin brother Lewis from a congenital malformation of the heart, and Maureen, a young fashionista, assistant to a celebrity woman and a capable medium, still hasn't made any contact with him. Spending her time between high profile fashion establishments and the abandoned Lewis' house in Paris, Maureen is silently battling with the gut-wrenching grief and sorrow, while at the same time, looking for a sign from her deceased brother after an oath taken between the twins. Aloof, disoriented and still mourning, wraithlike Maureen attuned to the ethereal realm, is inevitably caught between this world and the spiritual, always looking for portals and a sign that would prove her brother right, however, in vain. Unexpectedly, as the days pass by swiftly and the random apparitions become more frequent, Maureen will start to receive strange text messages from an unknown sender who seems to know a lot about her, but in the end, if there is still no sign of the beloved Lewis, is there any point in waiting?

  6. 6

    The Shining (1980)

    Stanley KubrickDP John AlcottIMDb 8.4TMDB 8.2See in full on FrameThrower →

    Haunted by a persistent writer's block, the aspiring author and recovering alcoholic, Jack Torrance, drags his wife, Wendy, and his gifted son, Danny, up snow-capped Colorado's secluded Overlook Hotel after taking up a job as an off-season caretaker. As the cavernous hotel shuts down for the season, the manager gives Jack a grand tour, and the facility's chef, the ageing Mr Hallorann, has a fascinating chat with Danny about a rare psychic gift called "The Shining", making sure to warn him about the hotel's abandoned rooms, and, in particular, the off-limits Room 237. However, instead of overcoming the dismal creative rut, little by little, Jack starts losing his mind, trapped in an unforgiving environment of seemingly endless snowstorms, and a gargantuan silent prison riddled with strange occurrences and eerie visions. Now, the incessant voices inside Jack's head demand sacrifice. Is Jack capable of murder?

  7. 7

    House of Wax (2005)

    Jaume Collet-SerraDP Stephen F. WindonIMDb 5.5TMDB 6.0See in full on FrameThrower →

    Six friends are on their way to a football game. They decide to camp out for the night and continue driving the next day. The next day the friends find that they're having car troubles, so two of the friends accept a stranger's ride into a small town named Ambrose. The main attraction in Ambrose is the House of Wax. Except something is not right in this town, the wax figures are so realistic and the whole town is deserted - except for two murderous twin brothers. The six friends must fight to survive and escape from being the next exhibits in the House of Wax.

  8. 8

    Paterson (2016)

    Jim JarmuschDP Frederick ElmesIMDb 7.3TMDB 7.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    Exactly one week in the life of a young man named Paterson of Paterson, New Jersey is presented. He lives an extremely regimented and routinized life, that routine perhaps most vividly displayed by the fact that he is able to wake up at exactly the same time every day without an alarm. That life includes eating Cheerios for breakfast, walking to work carrying his brown bag lunch packed in his lunch pail by his wife Laura, having a casual chat with his colleague Donny before he begins his shift driving the #23 Paterson bus for the local public transit company, walking home where he straightens out the exterior mailbox which somehow during the day gets knocked crooked, eating dinner with Laura and listening to her goings-on of the day, taking Laura's English bulldog Marvin - who he would admit to himself he doesn't much like - out for a walk to his neighborhood bar where he has one and only one beer before walking home with Marvin. There are day to day variations which are often the result of how certain other routines associated to him manifest themselves, such as what drama will occur in the relationship of Marie and Everett who are always at the bar together despite her always saying that they are no longer together, or in what form Laura's unique and distinctive design sense will affect Paterson's life directly or indirectly. Paterson's keen observances of what happens around him are largely the bases for the poems he writes, he constantly thinking of these and writing them in his secret notebook whenever he has a spare moment during his day. He is influenced by among others Paterson natives such as William Carlos Williams and his epic poem "Paterson". Paterson's writing are largely for himself, although Laura would like him to share more with her and the rest of the world. Something that happens to Paterson this week has the potential to knock his routinized world into a tailspin.

  9. 9

    Before Midnight (2013)

    Richard LinklaterDP Christos VoudourisIMDb 7.9TMDB 7.5See in full on FrameThrower →

    It has been nine years since we last met Jesse and Celine, the French-American couple who once met on a train in Vienna. They now live in Paris with twin daughters, but have spent a summer in Greece on the invitation of an author colleague of Jesse's. When the vacation is over and Jesse must send his teenage son off to the States, he begins to question his life decisions, and his relationship with Celine is at risk.

  10. 10

    Incendies

    Denis VilleneuveDP André TurpinIMDb 8.3TMDB 8.1See in full on FrameThrower →

    A mother's last wishes send twins Jeanne and Simon on a journey to the Middle East in search of their tangled roots. Adapted from Wajdi Mouawad's acclaimed play, Incendies tells the powerful and moving tale of two young adults' voyage to the core of deep-rooted hatred, never-ending wars and enduring love.

What twins films are made of

How much more often each element appears in a twins 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×
  • sofa2.1×
  • cigarette2.0×
  • boy1.9×
  • lamp1.9×
  • mirror1.8×
  • stone wall1.7×
  • bed1.7×

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

  • 85%eye levelvs 69% baseline

What breaks the pattern

Okja (2017) 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 1,402 frames from 22 films carrying the twins 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/twins

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