One of the greatest and most unique filmmakers currently living is Canada’s proud son, David Cronenberg, who is no doubt most known today because of the species of killer creature he inspired in the Adult Swim cartoon Rick & Morty. There’s more to Cronie than just gross-out monsters though, he’s one of the most cerebral artists in the business who, over the last 48 years, has made 20 feature length films, all varying in genre and technique.

Over the past couple months I watched for the first time or revisited all 20 of these movies. Here’s my ranking.

20. Fast Company (1979)

Cronenberg‘s worst film is not only tedious and unmemorable, its also his least Cronenbergian effort. 1979’s Fast Company was a director-for-hire gig that I believe he took because of his deep fascination with automobiles (more on that with Crash), and also because he needed the money. The movie is about a “really cool” drag racer (William Smith) who always gets the chicks naked and wins the races, but must battle an international oil company representative (John Saxon – yay!) over idealogical differences or money or something. Who cares? Look, while Cronenberg and my dad are deeply fascinated with cars, I flat out don’t like them. Every time I turn around there’s some bullshit thing wrong with my car, so I take it to my mechanic and they’re like “You gotta take it to the dealership.” and then the dealership is like “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with it but we still have to charge you $200 for wasting our time.” I spent like $2000 this year on my useless fucking KIA, so I’ll be goddamned if I spend another sentence talking about this stupid ass movie. _{Streaming on Kanopy.}

19. Cosmopolis (2012)

Even though we spend every minute of the film’s runtime with our protagonist, Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a 28-year-old billionaire financial speculator, we aren’t any closer to knowing him when the credits start to roll. Generally Cronenberg has a knack for somewhat disguising his themes in his narratives, but Cosmopolis is a film where every character is merely a mouth piece, discussing their view of what modern day capitalism looks like and the ramifications it will have on the future. I found it to be completely without subtlety and humor, quickly devolving into a grating exercise in avant-garde bullshit. Is Don DeLillo just a pseudonym for four insufferable grad students locked in a basement with a typewriter? He wrote the novel, Cosmopolis. Since most of the movie takes place in Eric’s slow moving limousine (NYC traffic + POTUS visit + Recent Terrorism Act), there’s a handful of 5-minute appearances by famous actors playing different people in Eric’s life who talk to him about money. The structure of the movie is 5-minute cameo appearance by Jay Baruchel or Samantha Mathis where they talk about money, and then the limo stops so Eric can ejaculate into a female character. Slow driving, money conversations, ejaculation – should be way more entertaining than it is. By the time Paul Giamatti shows up as a towel shrouded assassin, I was so over this movie I was laying upside down on my couch. This is ranked slightly higher than Fast Company because at least in its unrelenting cynicism it feels more like a Cronenberg picture.  _{Streaming on Tubi and Amazon Prime.}

18. A Dangerous Method (2011)

What a let down. A movie about Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud psychologically squaring off played by two of the best actors of their generation (Michael Fassbender and Cronenberg muse, Viggo Mortensen) and it’s pinch-your-arm-so-you-won’t-fall-asleep boring?! It’s almost shocking that a Cronenberg movie be this rigid and polite, even though we get flashes of these dirty shrink perverts talking about what sick motherfuckers they were. And spanking Keira Knightley‘s ass raw, while she screams and loves it and eventually becomes Jung’s partner in business as well as in ejaculation. Fassbender and especially Mortensen are excellent in their roles, making smart, subtle choices throughout, but their dialogue is so dry it becomes impossible to invest in the world the movie creates. Keira Knightley is confoundingly bad as a CRAAAAAZZZZZZY WOMAN who the two greatest minds in the world (at least according to them) must cure with their dicks. I think A Dangerous Method would be far more successful as a satirical comedy that mocks Jung and Freud. There are glimpses of that in here. Cronenberg doesn’t completely deitize these dudes, but more often than not this seems to take itself way too seriously, thus becoming one of the director’s least interesting and Cronenbergian outputs. _{Streaming on Mubi.}

17. M. Butterfly (1993)

Poorly received upon its initial release in 1993, this post-Crying-Game problematic 90s gay romance is based on real life history. SPOILERS: A super uptight French diplomat who sleeps in pajamas (Jeremy Irons), is seduced by a Chinese woman (John Lone) who is actually a Chinese spy in serious drag. Without ever having sex with her, cause he loves her for her mind and personality, he divulges a bunch of secrets to her from the French government. This eventually leads to the U.S. losing Vietnam. Both Irons and Lone give really solid performances and share a scene together towards the end that is expertly written and played. However, the film’s examination on gender and queerness seem very outdated and the film’s lethargic pace doesn’t make up for it. Especially when it ends with Jeremy Irons in prison, all geisha-faced up and crying as if finding out you’re maybe gay is the absolute worst thing that could ever happen to you. _{Available for rental and purchase on VOD.}

16. Crimes of the Future (2022)

When it comes to ideas, Crimes of the Future certainly isn’t lacking. It imagines a world where human beings are rapidly evolving into synthetic beings that survive by eating plastic, thus producing an off-white colored stomach acid to assist in breaking down food. In this world, the bad boy provocateurs are performance artists (Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux), making history by being the first movie where performance artists are portrayed as cool. They do live surgeries on themselves to roaring crowds since most possess the ability to feel no pain and grow additional organs. There’s also a child murder subplot and lots of full frontal nudity. While this may sound like a slam dunk for the director, unfortunately none of these ideas come together in a cohesive or satisfying way. None of the characters are particularly well developed and besides the mind-blowing aesthetics there isn’t much to latch onto. Kristen Stewart and Scott “Underworld Werewolf” Speedman co-star. _{Streaming on Hulu and Kanopy.}

15. Scanners (1981)

A lesser version of Brian DePalma‘s The Fury, and even that film is far from perfect, Scanners remains the single most overrated film in Cronenberg‘s oeuvre. There’s really only two exceptional things about this movie – Michael Ironside‘s performance and the exploding head, which is for the record, the second best exploding person scene I’ve ever seen. The first is when half a dozen escorts explode all over a motel room in Frank Henenlotter‘s Frankenhooker. For the most part its dueling psychics plot comes off as a pretty conventional X-Men movie but with less interesting characters and much more blood. _{Streaming on Max.}

14. Spider (2002)

Very well made drama/psychological thriller about a schizophrenic man (Ralph Fiennes) who is released from a mental institution and transitioning at a halfway house. However, he’s also trying to remember the death of his mother (Miranda Richardson) at the hands of his father (Gabriel Byrne). Or maybe it never happened at all. This is a deeply uncomfortable movie, completely by design, that is honest but frequently disengaging because it simply becomes too bleak to invest in. If there was just a tiny shred of hope in this protagonist it would have made a world of difference, but as it stands you’re left with a fantastic Ralph Fiennes performance in service of basically nothing. Not uncommon for post 90s Cronenberg outputs, it’s difficult to understand what he’s trying to do here. _{Available for rental and purchase on VOD.}

13. Rabid (1977)

Rabid, Cronenberg‘s second feature length film, is nearly identical to his debut, Shivers, only it’s slightly not as interesting. Adult film actress Marilyn Chambers plays a woman who, after suffering life-threatening injuries from a motorcycle accident, becomes a horny zombie when a dumb doctor tries an experimental procedure on her in an attempt to save. her life. Now, Ms. Chambers must survive on human blood and also some human horniness, and thus begins mutilating and transforming people into horny zombies. Armpit vagina monster is all I’ll say. There’s some well executed gross out scenes in this but while the effects and especially the acting are a step up from his previous movie, Shivers, it’s ultimately less streamlined. _{Streaming on Amazon Prime, Tubi, and Kanopy.}

12. Shivers (1975)

Cronenberg‘s debut feature has a very interesting premise for a zombie movie – a pedophile doctor thinks humans are getting too smart to live with dignity so he creates a parasite mixed with a venereal disease to make them dumber. Ultimately, the dumb perv M.D. ends up creating the rapepocalypse – a bunch of rabid zombies who can’t wait to fuck your brains out before they eat you. What truly gives this the edge over Cronenberg‘s second film, Rabid, is that it’s all limited to being set in a single apartment complex, isolated from the mainland? I don’t know, I’m not an expert in Canada’s geography and I don’t think it’s worth learning to do a write-up on this schlock. The acting is atrocious across the boards in this, somehow worse than most pornos I’ve seen, but in a way, that ultimately adds to the campiness and bizarre charm of Shivers. There’s a pool orgy scene that seems particularly inspired, but ultimately I’d only recommend this to firm Cronenberg fans and 70s Grindhouse nuts. I had a decent time but I’m also a sick bastard. _{Streaming on Tubi and Mubi.}

11. Maps to the Stars (2014)

After making two of the worst films of his career (A Dangerous Method, Cosmopolis), Cronenberg finally removed the arthouse stick from his behind and gave us something as funny as it was resonant, a wild but not that far fetched ‘fuck you’ letter to Hollywood. If you thought Robert Altman‘s The Player hated the industry, check out Maps to the Stars – an ensemble driven mosaic of the city’s most disgusting archetypes doing awful things and most notably, getting away with it. Julianne Moore gives one of her best performances ever as an aging C-list actress trying to land a role in a high profile remake that her mother, who died tragically young, originally played. John Cusack plays a sleazy self-help guru/scam artist with a wife (Olivia Williams) who is biologically his sister, a homicidal daughter (Mia Wasikowska), and the most reprehensible famous child actor son (Evan Bird) ever brought to life on film. Robert Pattinson also co-stars as a self-proclaimed “actor/writer” who hasn’t booked a gig yet but drives limos in the meantime. This is a very funny, surreal and wildly mean-spirited condemnation of the industry by a dude who managed to become famous working mostly outside of it. _{Available for rental and purchase on VOD.}

10. eXistenZ (1999)

The coinciding release of The Matrix really fucked eXistenZ when it came to market visiblity. Both are thrillers about virtual reality gaming where the whole concept of what even is reality is brought into question and frankly, The Matrix is just better. However, eXistenZ is a fascinating little movie that chooses to lose the high-tech visuals of most films involving future gaming and go for a more lived-in, gritty, “organic” approach. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a game designer, whose game, eXistenZ, is accessed through a beige, fleshy squish box that players hook up to USB ports installed in their spinal cords. When a live test run of her game is ambushed by anti-gaming terrorists, her and a nerd (a miscast Jude Law) must go on the lam and protect the game at all costs. Cronenberg manages to always keeping us guessing if what we’re seeing is part of the game or real life. There’s a good deal of body horror from everything involving spines (my god, mine hurts just writing this) and a bone gun that shoots teeth. I’m glad people are rediscovering this after they finally got over The Matrix. _{Streaming on Kanopy.}

9. The Dead Zone (1983)

The same year he found himself in Videodrome, Cronenberg directed an adaptation of the famous Stephen King novel, The Dead Zone. Far more conventional than the positively batshit Videodrome, the story follows a teacher (a great Christopher Walken) who after a terrible car accident is burdened with the powers of clairvoyance. His sixth sense eventually leads him on a journey to stop an awful political candidate (a slimy Martin Sheen) from starting a nuclear war in the future. It’s a pretty straightforward screenplay by Lethal Weapon 2 and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade‘s Jeffrey Boam that hits all the right beats for a thriller, while allowing for little pockets of Cronenberg absurdity. The biggest being the suicide-by-scissors sequence that stands as one of the most hard to watch things that the director has shot. For the most part though, this is very Diet Cronenberg if you will, serving some mild cheddar vibes, but it would be a good entry point for someone unfamiliar with his work. _{Streaming on Paramount+ and MGM+.}

8. The Brood (1979)

When I originally saw this back in my early college days I really didn’t get it. I thought it was silly and cheap and wasn’t really able to understand the deeper themes Cronenberg has at play here. Themes like the contradicting joy and burden of motherhood as well as authoritative males not quite understanding postpartum depression or “the baby blues.” She must hate her child if she’s sad! Bad mom, etc. While the director’s previous two films Shivers and Rabid also dealt with body horror, this does it in a much more visceral and taboo way that’s ultimately more effective. Samantha Egger delivers a very big performance as a woman locked away by her full time psychotherapist (Oliver Reed) who basically treats her like a glorified lab rat. Every time she gets angry, her rage manifests as a disfigured mutant child that beats people to death with hammers and shit. Eventually there’s like a baker’s dozen of these kids running around and delivering brutal murder to whoever even marginally upsets the mother. The movie is notorious for its still shocking sequence where she pulls one of these mad babies out of her, bites the placenta with her teeth and licks the bloody infant like some kind of wild animal. The Brood would pair nicely with David Lynch‘s Eraserhead for a “Why the Fuck Did I Have a Kid?” double feature. _{Streaming on Max.}

7. Videodrome (1983)

The first Cronenberg film that truly felt Cronenbergian, Videodrome may be outdated in some ways but in others it feels more prescient than ever. Sure, VHS tapes no longer circulate and TV has switched to streaming, but the idea that organizations would use media to warp minds exists today in social media. The fear that reality and fiction are merging and that we may be transitioning to artificial ourselves exists on the fringe of every A.I. argument. In 1983’s Videodrome, James Woods is perfectly cast as Max Renn, a sleazy president of a small Toronto-based television station that is desperate for a breakout hit. Scouring the airwaves with a satellite dish, they find a broadcast named “Videodrome” which is basically low-grade, snuff programing without a plot. It’s just guys in hazmat suits beating naked women to death. Max correctly predicts the general public will go apeshit over this but what he doesn’t realize is that the transmission is infects viewers to have wild hallucinations in their real life. The whole thing builds to a wild climax that looks really cool but is a bit muddled in what it’s trying to say. Still, visually, this is one of the director’s most on-brand adventures and where he finally found his groove, so to speak. _{Streaming on Peacock.}

6. Naked Lunch (1991)

I’ve attempted to read William S. Burrough‘s Naked Lunch several times in college but I’m apparently too stupid. This is a hard motherfucking read written by a dude who clearly had issues, a novel where a single sentence can lose you. The film on the other hand, while no less confusing, managed to engage me from beginning to end. This is one of Cronenberg‘s most accomplished features and also one of his grossest, with all sorts of bugs squishing and squashing and even having squirting orgasms. The always dead-pan Peter Weller (Robocop from Robocop) is perfectly cast here as William Lee, an exterminator/struggling writer addicted to shooting up roach poison and a clear stand-in for the author. As strange things happen to him, his barely-reactions are quite entertaining and play into how bizarre this is a whole. The great Judy Davis plays his wife while Ian “Bilbo Baggins” Holm plays a rich socialite who shares Lee’s passion for writing. A lot of folks have pegged this. as homophobic and while the book may be, Cronenberg‘s movie sure isn’t. This is evident in its ability to create fully-dimensional gay characters. Naked Lunch is however about a closeted homosexual (William Lee) who can’t really come out because its the 1950s and deeply hates himself for reasons even beyond his queerness. _{Streaming on Cinemax.}

5. Eastern Promises (2007)

With the exception of maybe Fast Company, this is Cronenberg‘s most conventional film, far more so than its older sister, A History of Violence, but more on that later. Eastern Promises follows an Oscar-nominated Viggo Mortensen as a Russian mob enforcer. When a trafficked, underage, heroin-addicted sex worker “belonging” to their mob organization drops dead at a Walgreens, she leaves a baby and a diary behind that incriminates the organization’s leader (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and his dipshit son (Vincent Cassell). Naomi Watts plays a fairly two-dimensional role as a nurse who tries to get the diary translated and save the baby and maybe also falls in love with Viggo‘s bad boy. This is a wonderfully well-executed crime drama, but its missing the bigger ideas and weirdness of most Cronenberg productions. Only the naked sauna fight starring Viggo, his flaccid wiener, and a bunch of Russian gangsters seem iconically on par with Cronenberg‘s other signature showstoppers. We also get a couple of real brutal throat slashings and finger choppings. _{Streaming on Max.}

4. Crash (1996)

Hands down the director’s most controversial movie and also his least accessible. While Martin Scorsese went as far to say Crash was one of the ten best films of the 90s, Francis Ford Coppola famously hate the film so much that he tried to campaign against it at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, where the Godfather glutton served as Jury President. Cannes ended up giving Crash a special award because Coppola was acting like such a little bitch. The film went on to harshly divide critics and mostly piss off and confuse general audience members. As entertainment, it flat out doesn’t work. As art, it’s incendiary. This is a film that has no interest in human dynamics, only human behavior from a clinical perspective. Following a bunch of car accident victims whose sexual fetishes surround car accidents and fingering/eating out patched wounds/healed scars earned from car accidents, the movie juxtaposes the dry mechanics of sexual intercourse with the scraping metal of car crashes. Roger Ebert put it best when he said Cronenberg is trying to make a porno that goes through the motions but is absent of any eroticism whatsoever, and he very much succeeded. I think this is a fascinating and deeply cerebral movie that allows us to pick apart the act of sex or even the basic human reaction to being aroused by something, by removing anything even remotely arousing. Needless to say, this Crash is much different than the 2005 Best Picture winner about racism. _{Not Available for Streaming.}

3. The Fly (1986)

Cronenberg‘s biggest hit that made him a household name is a remake of dumb 50s sci-fi movie about a brilliant scientist who is transformed into a human fly after an insect slips into his transportation machine. Here, the scientist is played iconically well by Jeff Goldblum, a brilliant but possessive asshole who puts the progress of science before anyone. He ends up falling in love with a journalist (Geena Davis) who falls in love with him and is forced to watch him slowly deteriorate and die as he becomes more and more like a fly. The effects are amazing in this, but they wouldn’t be hardly as effective if the human drama wasn’t on point. You completely buy into this relationship and the performances and chemistry of Goldblum and Davis are so fucking good that the movie practically eats your soul while you watch his transformation tear their relationship and each other apart. _{Streaming on Max.}

2. A History of Violence (2005)

A History of Violence is top to bottom, Cronenberg‘s tightest and most focused film. Running a blisteringly fast 96 minutes, it utilizes every second perfectly to the tell a simple but highly parabolic tale of small town business owner (Viggo Mortensen) who after fending off a couple of psychos at his diner, gets mistaken for an Irish mob boss’ brother who went AWOL twenty years prior. When the menacing, one-eyed Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) appears with his crooked entourage, insisting Viggo is not who he says he is, everyone from the bumbling sheriff to his wife (a fantastic Maria Bello) start to question how much they actually know this guy. A History of Violence was nominated for two Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for William Hurt who has a brief but memorable role as Viggo‘s mob boss brother. It checks all the boxes of a good thriller while also very thoroughly but subtly examining human violence as an instinctual survival tool. _{Available for rental and purchase on VOD.}

1. Dead Ringers (1988)

After The Fly, Cronenberg could make anything so it’s amazing he chose to make the finest film of his career – Dead Ringers. While The Fly told a deeply human story with visceral and brutal special effects, Dead Ringers internalizes all of its nastiness to tell a tale of two less sympathetic but no less human characters – Elliot and Beverly Mantle, a pair of identical twin gynecologists played by Jeremy Irons in one of the greatest and most carefully observed performances the medium has ever known. It’s truly impressive how Irons is able to make these brothers different enough that you never confuse them but similar enough to where you never doubt for a second they’re lifelong co-dependents. They fall in love with a television actress visiting Canada, Claire (a fantastic Geneviéve Bujold), who they attempt to secretly share, each pretending to be the same twin. However, because she’s an actress, she’s observant enough in human behavior that she’s able to suss out their predatory schtick. Mainly the brothers are obsessed with her because of her trifurcated cervix, because they are clinically obsessed with vaginas and don’t really understand people, other than each other. This is a very disturbing but rewarding character study that will put off many people in how cold and clinically it approaches its subject matter, but that’s more or less the point. With Dead Ringers, Cronenberg has made a psychological horror movie about not only your gynecologist being a male, but that there’s two of him. _{Streaming on Tubi, Shout Factory! TV, and Kanopy.}