David Cronenberg turns 80 on March 15, and for 54 (and counting) of those years, he’s been entertaining audiences as a storyteller, visualist and sometime actor. He’s credited with being one of the inventors of “body horror,” but the organ he’s stimulated the most consistently is his viewers’ minds — with concepts that are hypnotic, frightening, erotic, disturbing, prescient and generally provocative, often at the same time. Where many filmmakers astutely capture the prevailing feelings of the present, Cronenberg’s creativity anticipates a limitless but not always optimistic future where humankind and the technology it has created become increasingly intertwined, then filters those ideas through riveting, pulpy narratives that reinvent genre tropes as nimbly as his characters do their bodies.
This endless fountain of imagination has produced some of the best and most indelible movies of the last five decades — and even when the total package hasn’t endured, there’s almost always an idea or an image that sticks in the mind’s eye, if not lodged itself in the intellectual, artistic or cultural canon. To celebrate his incalculable effect on filmmaking, genre storytelling and popular culture itself, Variety ranks the films of David Cronenberg.
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Crimes of the Future (1970)
Image Credit: Courtesy of New Cinema Enterprises Having nothing in common with his 2022 film of the same name, the 1970 “Crimes of the Future” is best seen as an early artifact of Cronenberg’s obsessions with flesh and sex. An art-house film developed when he was a student, the director wears nearly every other hat on this project as well, writing, producing, shooting and editing it. For a microbudget production, it looks quite sharp, with the filmmaker showing a keen eye for creative blocking and camera placement. Yet the experimental vibe makes this “Crimes” more of a curio than anything else, as the oppressive voiceover and nasty plot — heavy on foot fetishism and pedophilia — definitely limits rewatch value.
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M. Butterfly (1993)
Image Credit: ©Geffen Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection Based on David Henry Hwang’s play of the same name, Cronenberg’s story about a French diplomat’s 20-year affair with a Peking opera performer feels oddly too classy for the filmmaker who would just a few years later start “Crash,” his adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel of the same name, with four sex scenes in a row. Jeremy Irons navigates with sensitivity the seeming impossibility of his character René Gallimard’s ignorance of the truth about his Chinese lover, while John Lone does not quite manage to square the circle of Song Liling’s subterfuge on behalf of the People’s Republic, his actual feelings for Gallimard and his generally conflicted sexuality. Nevertheless a well-intentioned and self-aware adaptation of Hwang’s source material, Cronenberg stages the unlikely but apparently loosely true story with typical proficiency, but seemingly little personal investment.
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Stereo (1969)
Image Credit: Courtesy of Film Canada Presentations Cronenberg’s feature debut is cleverly presented as an educational film about test subjects granted telepathy, who are encouraged to test their limits sexually among their peers. It’s an audacious premise that Cronenberg would revisit in different ways throughout his career. Out of necessity, the director shot in black and white on his college campus, and the results are stark and gorgeous, with brutalist architecture accenting the cold, clinical philosophy of the world. It’s astonishing that Cronenberg had such control of his craft, both visually and thematically, in his mid-20s, and would refine it through a litany of projects that rode the same wavelength.
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Maps to the Stars (2014)
Image Credit: ©Focus Features/courtesy Everett Collect / Everett Collection Cronenberg’s mad-as-hell Hollywood satire “Maps to the Stars” is a bit of a bumpy ride, as Bruce Wagner’s script takes a few too many obvious swings at Tinseltown, railing against nepotism, Scientology, sequels and bad behavior of the rich and famous. A loaded cast including Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack and Robert Pattinson keep things moving, but the film’s structure and pacing are inert, and Cronenberg’s regular collaborator, the cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, can’t help the film’s artifice from feeling unintentionally cheap. The melodramatic ending is wild enough to snap things back into focus, but ultimately “Maps to the Stars” feels like a halfhearted effort.
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Fast Company (1979)
Image Credit: Courtesy of Danton Films From “Crash” to “Cosmopolis,” Cronenberg’s obsession with vehicles is well-documented, but this early B-movie about the world of drag racing remains an outlier in his oeuvre. While it is totally competent and would go down smooth alongside a cold beer at a revival house, it has a lack of personality that is surprising for an artist who is all style and substance. Genre heavyweights William Smith and John Saxon star alongside magnetic love interest Claudia Jennings, who would die months later in a car accident, in this ode to big engines, bigger muscles and enough testosterone to power a racetrack. Forever known as the outlier of Cronenberg’s career, this fluffy film moves fast and delivers on the title, if not much else.
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Shivers (1975)
Image Credit: Everett Collection / Everett Collection Cronenberg’s first commercial film was a low budget spin on zombie flicks, but this disease travels by slug-like STDs and quickly take over the tenants of an apartment building. The director’s fingerprints are all over this project and its blend of sex, gore, body horror and indelibly gross imagery. “Shivers” caused a mild uproar in Cronenberg’s native Canada on release, but beneath the lewd and lascivious premise, there is plenty of skill, elevating it from the drive-in to be considered one of the great ’70s horror movies. With scenes and visuals flipping from funny to outrageous to disgusting, often within the same scene, “Shivers” is the earliest example of must-see Cronenberg.
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Rabid (1977)
Image Credit: Courtesy With a similar premise to his previous film “Shivers,” “Rabid” is about a woman, played by Marilyn Chambers, who grows a blood-sucking stinger that begins to turn people into zombie-like creatures driven by violence. The makeup and practical effects are top-notch, and the pace is breathless, packing even more of a punch in a post-COVID world. While the film lacks the cultural criticism of Cronenberg’s most realized work, it makes up for it with good old fashioned gory fun, making for one of the most pleasing titles for a midnight crowd. The bleak ending is a stunner on par with the conclusion of “Night of the Living Dead,” and many of the images throughout stick with fans long after the credits roll.
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Spider (2002)
Image Credit: ©Sony Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection Ralph Fiennes is excellent in this difficult, dour entry in Cronenberg’s canon. Playing a schizophrenic man named Spider, Fiennes tries to hold on to reality as he navigates life at a halfway house, trapped by the ghosts of his past and the tragic loss of his mother. A spare, cold plot allows him to unravel the crimes imprinted in his mind, be them true or imagined. While the set design and visual storytelling perfectly complement “Spider,” there are too many slow scenes and on-the-nose elements to elevate it among the director’s best work.
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Cosmopolis (2012)
Image Credit: Entertainment One/Courtesy Everett Collection Taking aim at the fiscal fat cats who threw the world into economic turmoil a few years prior, “Cosmopolis” finds Cronenberg working with another “unfilmable” novel, bringing Don DeLillo’s story of greed to life. Robert Pattinson stars as Eric Packer, an extremely wealthy man whose only goal is to make more money — and get across town for a haircut. The film, which primarily takes place during the long limo ride Packer is taking for a trim, investigates his life as a bacchanal of sex and meetings, and how his world might fall apart when the market plunges. Pattinson sheds his “Twilight” skin as Packer, and a parade of great actors — including a scene-stealing Paul Giamatti — add texture to this nihilistic tale. Even though it doesn’t champion repulsive body horror, “Cosmopolis” remains one of Cronenberg’s most divisive films, but there is plenty of value if you can get on his wavelength.
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Naked Lunch (1991)
Image Credit: ©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection Cronenberg took on William S. Burroughs’ famously “unfilmable” novel, writing and directing a piece with as much hallucinatory imagery as the book. “RoboCop” star Peter Weller is unflappable as the drug-addled William Lee, an exterminator who gets high on his own supply and accidentally kills his wife, setting off a long, strange trip filled with conspiracies and giant, talking insects. The practical special effects are simultaneously charming and stomach-churning, and Weller and Judy Davis, who plays his wife, are both strong in challenging roles. One of the most complex projects Cronenberg ever took on, it also inspired an all-time backhanded compliment from Roger Ebert: “I admire what he did, and I hate it!”
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A Dangerous Method (2011)
Image Credit: ©Sony Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection Though this fussy semi-biopic feels a bit too polished and award-hungry to come from an iconoclast and transgressor like Cronenberg, his depiction of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung also seems like a dialectic that could serve as the legend to a road map of his creativity. Are his stories objectively diagnostic or actively therapeutic? Is there a single answer to explain what he does with his stories? That there isn’t perhaps explains why this movie trails off with a title-card coda rather than a more satisfying resting place or catharsis between the two psychologists’ perspectives. Then there’s also the matter of Keira Knightley, an extraordinarily gifted actress doing the absolute most in every single scene — to the occasional detriment not only of what is obviously meant to be an empathetic character study of real-life psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein, but to her role as the catalyst for both Freud and Jung’s collaboration and their tragic conflict.
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Crimes of the Future (2022)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Making this in his late 70s, you can’t help but just be happy that Cronenberg is not only still working, but still doing really solid (if not quite his best) work. Largely unrelated to the film of the same name that started his career, the filmmaker revisits some ideas and dynamics that have become calling his cards, such as the impact of technology and the environment upon humankind, the shifting predilections and appetites that come with those changes, and their unconventional navigation by individuals living — and seeking — the margins of society. The film doesn’t quite follow through on every one of its ideas (wherefore art thou, Inner Beauty Pageant?) and for better or worse feels like a burst of pandemic-era creativity we as fans should be grateful to have, but he’s still testing audience boundaries, and getting great, weird performances from people like Lex Seydoux and (especially) Kristen Stewart. So let him keep committing crimes as far into the future as he wants.
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eXistenZ (1999)
Image Credit: ©Dimension Films/Courtesy Everett Collection Slight though this film stands in the ranks of Cronenberg’s best work, his exploration of gaming, virtual reality and identity manages to carry even more weight than it did at the time of its original release. Jude Law, just months away from Dickie Greenleaf beauty in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” is still slightly too pretty to be convincing as a nerdy p.r. flack pressed into service when an attack is made on the life of game designer Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), but together they find an accord as they explore multiple layers of reality and interactivity in the kind of biologically-queasy way that only Cronenberg can. “eXistenZ” lacks the flash of its higher-profile counterparts in his filmography, but it’s a terrific thriller that keeps you guessing while impressing you with its endless sense of imagination — and still-timely paranoia.
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The Brood (1979)
Image Credit: ©New World Releasing/Courtesy Everett Collection For many casual fans, “The Brood” is the Cronenberg movie that sticks out most in their mind — after all, it’s filled with kids killing adults in a manner far more traumatizing than “Children of the Corn.” It’s also one of the director’s most personal works, as he attempted to exorcise the demons of his fresh divorce through this tale of a woman’s unconventional treatment for mental illness. Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar and Art Hindle are all at the top of their game, and the haunting cinematography, shot by frequent collaborator Mark Irwin, creates an overwhelming dread long before those creepy-as-hell kids come on the scene. It’s an unforgettable work in a career filled with bold visions.
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Crash (1996)
Image Credit: ©Fine Line Features/Courtesy Everett Collection The much-maligned and controversial adaptation of Ballard’s novel about individuals developing an attraction to vehicular destruction suffers only from taking itself slightly too seriously: as sexually adventuresome couple James Ballard and his wife Catherine, James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger prove unconvincing only when they’re fucking while describing sex in po faced, clinical terms. But then again, the point of the movie is not to transfer arousal from the characters to the audience but to explore the notion that one’s sexuality — and indeed, their identity — can, and does, change with our exposure to elements that are unexpected, but in other circumstances otherwise mundane. Featuring controlled but fearless performances and an absolute mastery over the material — including what needs to be shown, and what doesn’t — by Cronenberg, the film earned its special award for “daring” at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, and continues to push all the right buttons today.
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Scanners (1981)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Like “The Brood” before it, Cronenberg classed up his scifi thriller about telekinetic revolutionaries by hiring a venerated actor — this time, “The Prisoner” star Patrick McGoohan — to serve as an authoritative voice among the scrappy character actors (Cameron Vale and Michael Ironside) trying to explode people’s heads with their thoughts. But even though it’s the memeified moment of literal mind-blowing for which the film is best known, Cronenberg’s story astutely explores the generational reverberations of medical treatment, as two descendants of McGoohan’s well-meaning but visibly anguished doctor battle for the fate of humanity like a couple of Jedis from “Star Wars” willing to kill for what they believe in.
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Eastern Promises (2007)
Image Credit: ©Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection Reuniting immediately after “A History of Violence” for this story written by future “Locke” filmmaker Steven Knight, Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen spin gold yet again exploring sex trafficking through the perspective of a low-level Russian mafia operative names Nikolai Luzhin. Its most famous scene, of course, involves Mortensen fighting off a group of Chechen assassins wearing nothing but his birthday suit, but the actor’s inherent goodness makes Nikolai charming no matter what violence he perpetrates (how is it almost sexy to watch a man put out a cigarette on his own tongue?), and makes the character’s tenuous relationship with a London midwife (played with steely tenderness by Naomi Watts) the skeleton key that unlocks humanity simmering underneath its mob-dealing machinations.
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The Dead Zone (1983)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Firmly in the top-tier of movies based on Stephen King novels (alongside the equally icy “The Shining”) is Cronenberg’s “The Dead Zone,” the story of a schoolteacher named Johnny who develops precognition after a life-threatening accident. With Christopher Walken as Johnny, it’s easy to imagine that the character had such powers even before his near-death experience, but Cronenberg wrings his plight for maximum personal heartbreak even as it offers unique wish-fulfillment opportunities to, first, solve a series of grisly murders, and later, to intervene in the electability of a presidential candidate whose dangerousness presaged some well-known counterparts a few decades before they entered politics.
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Videodrome (1983)
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Long live the new flesh: after an ambitious television producer happens upon an illegal broadcast of “Videodrome,” a plotless series where individuals are tortured or murdered, he receives a dose of his own medicine when it literally poisons his brain. As always, Cronenberg’s finger is on the pulse of the zeitgeist, here examining the boundaries of good taste in the early days of cable television by telling the story of a programmer searching for ratings by any means necessary. Casting James Woods as an unscrupulous narcissist would prove more prescient than the director possibly knew at the time, but Woods delivers a performance as Max Renn that’s both appropriately loathsome and leads to a deserved comeuppance — complete with a flicker of an epiphany as he realizes it’s too late — on behalf of the awful stuff craven provocateurs subject audiences to on the airwaves.
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Dead Ringers (1988)
Image Credit: ©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection Especially as it prepares to be rebooted as a television series starring Rachel Weisz in dual leading roles, “Dead Ringers” endures among his films as one of the filmmaker’s best character studies, for better or worse, hiding beneath the mischievous imagination and filmmaking precision consistent in all of his work. Playing a pair of twin gynecologists, Jeremy Irons perfectly differentiates the confident Elliot Mantle from his more studious, insecure “baby brother” Beverly by degrees that are exactly convincing yet almost too understated to identify. The inevitable descent into addiction and madness takes them a long way down from the heights of their shared romance with a troubled actress (Geneviève Bujold, nakedly vulnerable in depicting the vagaries of her chosen career) while Cronenberg drills deep into the dysfunction that evolves out of the siblings’ interchangeability.
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A History of Violence (2005)
Image Credit: ©New Line Cinema/Courtesy Everett Collection Though it can be looked at purely as a crime thriller or even one of the best graphic novel adaptations of all time, Cronenberg transforms those genre elements into an absolutely riveting character study and a portrait of a family in existential crisis with this story of a local diner owner whose quick-thinking act of heroism unravels hidden identities and deeper impulses in him, his wife and his children. Viggo Mortensen captures both Tom Stall’s gentility and his alter ego Joey Cusack’s capacity for uber-masculine ruthlessness, a disparity that sends his wife Edie reeling with alternate repulsion and desire. The film’s violence is as upsetting as its sexuality is feverishly appealing, while Cronenberg holds a moral and intellectual position in the middle distance between them, observing how base instincts can be masked but never contained — and how repression only makes them stronger.
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The Fly (1986)
Image Credit: ©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection Cronenberg truly brings together everything that not only makes for a great Cronenberg film, but a great film in general, with this adaptation of the 1957 short story/ remake of the 1958 film of the same name. It’s provocative, paranoid, sexy, gross, terrifying and tragic, anchored by Jeff Goldblum at his obsessively nerdy best and especially Geena Davis as an inquisitive journalist compromised simultaneously by the excitement of a revolutionary scientific breakthrough and her palpable love for its creator. For ‘80s moviegoers, its depiction of the science of teleportation felt so convincing it launched a million what-if conversations, the biggest of which was whether an actor (or actors) in a horror film were worthy of awards recognition (Geena Davis was robbed!); decades later Seth Brundle’s ambition and hubris continues to read appropriately like the cautionary tale it was meant to be, amplified by some truly great performances and blockbuster gore gags.