Waking Life
12 Monkeys
The Matrix
A Clockwork Orange
Memento
Fight Club
Those are my nominations. Supposing you can see the theme here, please add movies you think are equal to these in their ability to truly stimulate the philosophic mind. Also, in terms of the thread’s general direction, feel free to make this much more than a simple ‘list’; i.e. full discussions of any of the films mentioned is fair game.
A few that come to mind:
M
Mindwalk
Rashomon
Blade Runner
dead poet’s society
Definately… waking life and the matrix(es, The Animatrix
Ok let’s see…
Hero
Blade Runner
Mulholland Drive
Eyes Wide Shut
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Appocolypse Now
Requiem for a Dream
The Wizard of Oz
Donnie Darko
Magnolia
the name of the rose
triumph of the will
and of course, the ultimate “heady” movie- deep throat
-Imp
So let’s see, you are asking for movies that are intellectually the equal of The Matrix?
How about
The Magic Roundabout
Smokey and the Bandit 2
Cannonball Run
Earnest goes to Camp
Earnest goes to School
Asterix in Britain
South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut
Finding Nemo
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Goldfinger
Austin Powers: Goldmember
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
I’m deadly serious, each of these movies has about as much intellectual content as the first Matrix movie. Take the South Park movie - like the Matrix it poses a few questions. For the Matrix they are ‘what is reality?’ ‘can you trust your senses?’ ‘is this all an illusion created by dictatorial robots in the future?’ whereas in South Park is it ‘is American military hegemony a good thing?’ ‘can we trust mass media organs?’ ‘should we blame Canada for all our faults?’ all of which are relatively intellectually stimulating questions. Both movies completely fail to answer any of these questions, preferring instead to use them as a narrative conceit to spuriously justify the bits that they really wanted to make (In South Park it is clearly the musical numbers, in the Matrix it is the fight and chase sequences) in true Hollywood ‘paper over the cracks’ style…
I find it ironic in the extreme that even the rules for this website mock the supposed ‘intellectual content’ of the Matrix yet so many posters here consider it some sort of philosophico-cinematic pinnacle…
Anyhow, my list would be
Full Metal Jacket
The Idiots
The 8th Day (the French movie, not the Schwarzenegger vehicle)
Pi
Metropolis (Fritz Lang version)
1984
Brazil
Brave New World
Rear Window
Logan’s Run
Total Recall
The Godfather part 2
Tee hee
Yeah… total recall is way better than the Matrix 
Saitd, when was the last time you watched any of them? And how many times?
Two mentions of Blade Runner, huh? I’ve never seen it nor heard much about it. Two recommendations is good enough for me. I’ll be sure to watch it within the week.
I’m calling your bluff, someone. It’s clear enough you fail to see the irony and hypocracy in your dismissal of The Matrix - namely, in several threads (including our exchange in my TV thread) I’ve noticed your tendency to take a similar stand as you are here: it’s less about concrete philosophical or intellectual content and more about one’s interpretation of that content.
The thing is, this logic applies to The Matrix as well as it does for, excuse me - Ernest Goes To Camp?
I doubt anyone is really claiming The Matrix is some mind-blowing “philosophico-cinematic pinnacle” as much as they might be claiming the film’s metaphorical value can be applied on multiple levels, much the same as you are with your examples above. It seems you have some kind of axe to grind with perhaps the success of the film and in turn have some disdain for its following. In other words, I have a feeling if The Matrix were an underground film no one had ever heard of, you’d be the first one telling everyone how great it is; but because of its mainstream success, you can’t stop yourself from claiming lame-brained 80’s comedies are just as good.
Armchair psychology aside, the simple point is that if it truly is less about concrete philosophical or intellectual content and more about one’s interpretation of that content, then The Matrix has as much material for discussion and thought as anything. You can’t have it both ways.
My LIfe as a Dog.
Pink Floyd’s The Wall
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape
The Piano
Groundhog Day
Solid
It’s my opinion that all good films have a “philosophic” side to them – as does good literature. They all deal with the human experience.
If you really want to get “heady” though, why not try a film by Ingmar Bergman, like “The Seventh Seal”?
Or Kurosawa. (Ditto “Roshomon”.)
Or maybe “Metropolis”?
my real name
I’ve seen the first Matrix movie about half a dozen times, and Total Recall over 20 times (I’m a big Paul Verhoeven fan…). How recently? I last saw the Matrix sometime in the last 18 months when it was on TV. I last saw Total Recall about 6 months ago, when it was on TV.
Tell you what Gobbo, instead of just rolling your eyes and arrogantly sniggering to yourself in your normal lazy, stupid fashion why don’t you produce an argument to contradict my position? Why don’t you say WHY you think that the Matrix is better than Total Recall?
Oh, I know why. It’s because you know full well that I know more about movies than you do, more about movie history and criticism than you do and more about ontology than you do, and am therefore in a position to simply tease you about how crappy your argument is, and you can’t have that because it strikes at the heart of your whole ‘smart jock’ persona. As a smart jock you should be able to present an argument why one popular sci-fi movie is ontologically more complex than another popular sci-fi movie, indeed it’s precisely the sort of thing you should be able to do, being a marriage of high and low culture. However you know I can kick your ass (argumentatively speaking) on both the high issues (film criticism, ontology) and the low issues (the movies themselves, their reception, the way in which they were made) and don’t dare step out of line.
You are a weak man, Gobbo. You haven’t even got the strength of mind to try even when it is likely that you’ll fail. I fail all the time, but I never stop trying.
Why? You know I just love it when people call my bluff and I get to spin out some spurious rhetoric which more often than not once again convinces my critics of my genius…
There is no concrete signified content of a movie, a book, a piece of visual art, an item of clothing. All that exists are the signifiers of the piece in question (the movie, the TV show, whatever) and the signifiers used to describe and interpret the piece in question.
I don’t dismiss the Matrix, I just want it to be seen as what it is - a piece of high-budget, spectacularly-produced, well-advertised Hollywood entertainment. My objection isn’t to the movie itself, but that people so readily put it into the same category as Twelve Monkeys and A Clockwork Orange (and so on).
The Matrix poses a philosophical question ‘what is reality?’ at the start of the film solely to allow for a narrative conceit. The question is never answered and the purpose of the film isn’t to answer it.
In Earnest goes to Camp the question (as in the whole series) is whether or not we can feel sympathy for someone who is a well-meaning buffoon, and the movie draws the narrative from that question in the same way that the Matrix draws the narrative from its question. The key difference is that in the case of Earnest Goes to Camp the movie does actually answer the question in a fully intentional manner. Hence in that regard (formal symmetry and conclusiveness) the Earnest movie is intellectually superior to the first Matrix movie.
However I would argue that it is intellectually inferior to (for example) Basic Instinct.
Well, you stuck it in your shortlist for ‘heady’ movies. Countless people have told me that it’s the most intellectual film they’ve ever seen. The Independent (newspaper) listed it among the 50 most influential movies of all time (in 2002)…
I couldn’t give a toss for ‘multiple levels’ - they are a pseudoconcept deriving from Plato and popularised during the Englightenment. I’ve little or no time for spatial metaphors that masquerade as rigorous concepts…
Success? No. I can see why it was successful, just as I can see why Titanic was successful, and Jurassic Park was successful, and ET was successful and…
Right, so now you think I’m the champion of fringe/underground art? You’ve misjudged me completely, I love mainstream art and culture, and fringe art and culture, and elitist art and culture. The Matrix couldn’t have been an underground film - you can’t get actors of that quality (i.e. profile) and SFX production values that good without a serious budget. The Matrix was always designed to be a mainstream success and was never anything but that. Your point is completely defunct.
Just because I don’t believe in absolute, final standards of determing the intellectual content of films doesn’t mean I think they all have ‘equally valid’ intellectual content. Being a poststructuralist doesn’t equate to being a relativist. However this is a common mistake so I’ll let you off without a beating.
“The Matrix couldn’t have been an underground film - you can’t get actors of that quality (i.e. profile) and SFX production values that good without a serious budget.”
Equilibrium (2002) came close.
Dunamis
I think that the only Matrix movie I truly like myself is Reloaded. The Matrix and The Matrix Revolutions were focused too heavily on the mind blowing special effects. Reloaded suffered from this problem as well, but it compensates for it with good dialogue. I’m still impressed Every time I see the scene with the Merovingian and the scene with Architect.
I can see someoneisatthedoor’s point though. People who think of the Matrix as the most intellectual film ever need to broaden their horizons… I’d like to know what he thinks about the scenes I just mentioned (Merv and Architect).
I don’t think anyone’s mentioned Minority Report. Again, some interesting points (this time about determinism and free will) but no actual philosophy. It’s a good film, though.
I think your average man in the street calls a Hollywood movie “philosophical” if and only if the central McGuffin - the shallow, self-justifying end about which the film will inevitably revolve - is an intellectual truth rather than, say, a bomb or a girl or a large amount of cash. Anything more thought-provoking isn’t a movie, it’s a dissertation on celluloid, and only most ardent philosophers would pay good money to see that. The rest of us go to the pictures just to see the explosions 
I am a little skinny… but trust me, it’s because i don’t care enough about you… or this argument to really type out anything more than 1 line. I’ve already debated why I think the Matrix is a good movie… go look it up.
enough skirting around the issue
[size=150]Philip K. Dick[/size]
"Like other more famous science fiction authors, several of Dick’s stories have been made into movies. Most of these are only loosely based on Dick’s original story, using them as a starting-point for a Hollywood action-adventure story. While the most admired is Ridley Scott’s classic movie Blade Runner (based on Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) the action film Total Recall faithfully translates a number of Dick themes (in particular from Dick’s short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale), as does Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Minority Report. All, however, introduce uncharacteristic violence and replace the typically nondescript Dick protagonist with an action hero.
Dick was apprehensive about how Blade Runner would treat his story; he refused to do a novelization of the film and was critical of it during production, especially with Ridley through articles. When given an opportunity to see some special effects sequences of Los Angeles 2019 Dick was amazed the environment was “exactly as how I’d imagined it!” Following the screening Dick and Ridley had a frank but cordial discussion of Blade Runner themes and characters, and although they had differing views Dick fully backed the film from then on. Tragically Dick passed away from a stroke less than four months before the release of the film.
John Woo’s 2003 film, Paycheck, was a very loose adaptation of Dick’s short story, and suffered greatly, both at the hands of critics and at the box office.
The 2002 film Impostor is based on Dick’s 1953 short story of the same name. Starring Gary Sinise and Madeleine Stowe, the film includes two of Dick’s most common themes: mental illness, which diminishes the sufferer’s ability to discriminate between reality and hallucination, and a protagonist persecuted by an oppressive government.
The film [b]Screamers /b was based on a Dick short story Second Variety; however, the location was altered from a war-devastated Earth in the story to a generic science fiction environment of a distant planet in the film. Second Variety has been cited as an influence on the scenes set in the machine-dominated future of [b]The Terminator /b and its sequels.
The French film Barjo is based on Dick’s non-sf book Confessions of a Crap Artist.
It has been noted, though the connection (if any) is unknown, that the subjective reality created by the cryonic Life Extension system in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky and its Spanish original, Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) strongly resembles that of ‘half-life’ in Dick’s Ubik. The 1998 movie The Truman Show bears a similar resemblance to Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint. The 1999 David Cronenberg film “eXistenZ” features a reference to “Perky Pat”, a recurring name from Dick’s books, and takes as its theme virtual reality, on a number of levels."