The 51 Most Controversial Movies Ever Made[html]
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Jonathan Majors made the Hollywood A-list on the back of lauded performances in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Da 5 Bloods, and The Harder They Fall, as well as a lead role in HBO's Lovecraft Country series. Starring turns in Creed III and as Marvel villain Kang the Conqueror established him as a power player just a few short years into his career.
Then came 2023, a series of abuse allegations, and eventual convictions for reckless assault in the 3rd degree and harassment. The news of the accusations broke a few months after Majors was lauded for his performance in Magazine Dreams, which has played to accolades at the Sundance Film Festival. In the wake of the scandal, Searchlight Pictures, which had acquired the film out of the festival, canceled plans for its release. But when there's money to be made, few films stay dead forever. This month, Magazine Dreams is finally slipping out into the wild—an event further complicated by the release of audio recordings in which Majors allegedly admits to an assault that he's previously denied.
Majors is undeniably a talent, but the allegations and his actions raise the age-old question: Does he deserve a comeback at all? The response to Magazine Dreams might offer a clue. And what of other movies that have struggled to escape controversy?
Hated, dogged, scandalous, sordid, nasty—the 50 following movies have been called all of those things, and much worse. Some have inspired death threats and physical attacks, while others have engendered heated wars of words that have endured decades. For some of these movies, the controversy has been helpful—hey say that any publicity is good publicity, after all. But that’s not always true. Sometimes canny filmmakers and distributors can turn scandal around, but an uproar is just as likely to bury a movie. That’s why while some of the most controversial movies ever are familiar now-classics, others might be new to you.
Cruising (1980)
Just a decade earlier, director William Friedkin had been responsible for a milestone in queer cinema with his adaptation of Matt Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band. Though its vision is of sometimes campy, often self-hating gay men, it’s loaded with empathy that mainstream American cinema had never previously shown for queer people. It was controversial among the usual suspects for depicting gay men at all, and drew some criticism for its stereotypes, but on the whole it pushed cinema forward. For a bit.
The Boys in the Band opened a door to the queer-adjacent classics of the 1970s (Dog Day Afternoon, Death in Venice, La Cage aux Folles, Pink Flamingoes, etc.), but hardly the floodgates. By 1980, a decade of boundary-pushing was due to give way to the Reagan era, and an undercover cop movie set against the world of New York’s gay S&M scene wound up feeling more exploitative than insightful (its use of the “queer serial killer” trope doesn’t help). It plays slightly better to modern eyes, if only because increased representation means that gay sex killers are more of a novelty now than in 1980; it also feels less like a screed than a misguided attempt by vanilla straight people to engage with something outside their experience. It also serves as a bit of a time capsule, though the veracity of its portrait of the 1980s NY S&M scene is dubious.. You can rent Cruising from Prime Video.
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
One of our ugliest and most spectacular cultural flashpoints came when one of our greatest and most beloved filmmakers, himself a devout Catholic, attempted a Biblical film in his own style. Based on the similarly controversial 1955 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, Scorsese’s film, in addition to coming into conflict with tenets of Catholic faith that are beyond my understanding, includes a sequence during which Jesus (Willem Dafoe) is tempted by Satan with the promise of a normal, human life including marriage and (gasp!) sex.
In America, nationwide protests saw several theaters refuse to screen the film, while the terrorist bombing of a French theater injured over a dozen people. The movie was banned in several countries (and remains verboten in the Philippines and Singapore). Sweet-looking EWTN founder Mother Angelica described the film as a “holocaust,” a particularly ugly bit of hyperbole at a time when Christian conservatives were literally setting buildings on fire. You can rent The Last Temptation of Christ from Prime Video.
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
For decades, Birth of a Nation was presented to film students as a mildly problematic classic, an unavoidable landmark in cinema history (which: perhaps) that singlehandedly invented the language of film—which is all wildly overstated. From roughly 1907 on, directors like Reginald Barker, Yevgenii Bauer, and Lois Weber were laying the groundwork for everything that D.W. Griffith accomplished in Birth of a Nation, and often using the new cinematic techniques with a fair bit more nuance. The movie was a hit, of course, the most successful film to its time, but that has as much to do with its reframing of the post-Reconstruction era as the triumph of perfidious, scheming northern whites who manage to trick the movie’s drunk, gullible, and relentlessly horny Black characters into thinking that slavery was a bad thing. It is rough.
But it’s also not a new controversy: time has actually dulled the (rather justifiable vitriol) directed at the film, which was widely protested before, during, and after its release; prominent civil rights leaders, social reformers, and religious groups denounced the film and riots greeted its release in major cities, while reviews were generally positive, but not nearly as rapturous as its modern reputation might lead you to believe. Such was the controversy that President Woodrow Wilson spoke out of both sides of his mouth when discussing the film, praising it in some circles and denouncing it in others. It’s revisionist history to suggest that the movie is only troubling to our modern eyes, when, if anything, we’ve cushioned it with a veneer of academic respectability. You can stream The Birth of a Nation on Kanopy and Hoopla.
Citizen Kane (1941)
Often ranked (arguably, but not unreasonably) as the greatest film ever made, Orson Welles’ debut is now an inescapable part of the American cinematic canon. There was a bit of controversy over RKO giving carte blanche to boy wonder Welles for his first picture, leading some in the press to root for his failure, but the real problems arose over the growing rumors that the film was based on the life of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Despite Welles’ and RKO’s half-assed denials, it’s clearly a take on Hearst, who deserved to be taken down a peg, and of actress Marion Davies, Heart’s longtime companion and mistress...who didn’t.
Before long, the entire Hearst media empire was gunning for Welles and for RKO more generally; the studio didn’t blink, but the lack of advertising in Hearst papers hurt, as did vague threats of lawsuits that discouraged local theater owners from running the film. Beyond that, the movie’s non-linear narrative and innovative style made it a hard sell to audiences outside of major cites; the movie still did decent business and got great reviews, but it’s hard to say what a controversy-free release might have looked like. The spectacle certainly dogged Welles for the rest of his career. You can rent Citizen Kane from Prime Video.
The Apprentice (2024)
Released just a month before the 2024 Presidential election, this indie biopic stars Sebastian Stan as a young-ish Donald Trump, engaging with professional fixer, blackmailer, and forger Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) just before the the latter was disbarred. The film depicts Trump's rise as a real estate developer in the 1980s, as well as his amphetamine use and his (alleged, I guess) rape of wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova), which she recounted during their divorce proceedings. That's likely the movie's most contentious bit. Though the divorce was granted on the grounds of "cruel and inhuman treatment,” Ivana later walked back her claims while under a gag order. Trump's lawyer defended him by saying, “you cannot rape your spouse.” (For her trouble, Ivana received a lovely burial near the tee-off spot for the first hole at Trump's primary golf course.)
President Trump, needless to say, was not impressed (though it's unclear if he ever saw the movie). On his Truth Social account, he described the film and its creators as fake, classless, cheap, and disgusting human scum, bemoaning that artists, "are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement." Trump and his team promised lawsuits on the premise that the release of the movie constituted election interference, but they seemed to lose interest given the muted (to say the least) reception at the box office. It was likely a victim of bad timing (the release already delayed by the search for a distributor). Trump voters weren't likely to sit through what the president had labeled a hit job, and those less enthusiastic about his second-term prospects had seen more than enough of the guy by late 2024. You can rent The Apprentice from Prime Video.
Un Chien Andalou (1929)
A rather shockingly modern collaboration between Spanish-Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, this 17-minute short strings together a series of dreamlike and sometimes shocking scenes and images, minus any obvious narrative framework. Ants crawl out of a severed hand; there’s a juxtaposition of a woman’s bare breasts and butt; a decaying donkey sits at a piano. Most memorable, and still stomach-churning, is the image of a living woman’s eye being sliced in half by a razor blade. The film was intended as a shot at the artsy French film scene, which, to Buñuel’s deep disappointment, embraced it instead, and made it a success.
For months, attempts were made to ban the film in France, the controversy never quite overcoming the film’s attraction as something new and unusual. There are stories of miscarriages at screenings, destroyed theaters, and papal bulls revolving around the film, though much of the discussion seems exaggerated, and it’s hard to know what’s true—sources can’t even agree on whether it was ever actually banned. You can stream Un Chien Andalou on Philo and
Though actor Dirk Bogarde never publicly came out during his lifetime (homosexual acts were a crime in Britain for much of his career, and he worked under morality clauses that would have meant instant termination), there’s not really much doubt these days that his 40-year relationship with Anthony Norwood wasn’t merely a roommate situation. Given that, director Basil Dearden’s Victim takes on an added poignance, with Dirk Bogarde’s closeted lawyer Melville Farr standing as mainstream cinema’s first major gay character, and an entirely sympathetic one, at that.
Until 1967, consensual homosexual acts were punishable with prison time—though sometimes hard to enforce, obscenity laws made people easy marks for blackmailers, as in the case for Victim’s successful lawyer. Though tame by modern standards (or even those of the time, really), the very mention of homosexuality lead the British Board of Film Censors to give the movie an X rating, which meant in Britain pretty much what it meant in the United States: a guarantee most cinemas wouldn’t show it. American censors refused to provide the film any classification, given that Hays Code restrictions explicitly banned mention of homosexuality. Distributors in both countries released it anyway with modest success; the movie was eventually seen as an influence on legal changes in the U.K. that came along five years later. You can stream Victim on Max and The Criterion Channel or rent it from
