10 Controversial Movies That Are Still Worth Watching

A lot of the best art is provocative, and movies are no exception, but not all provocations are created equal. Some great movies don't age well over time and offend newer generations. Others are meant to offend for all time, and they do. Controversial movies tend to push boundaries, but they don't always do it intentionally. In spite of the controversy, however, or at times because of it, they may still be worthwhile watches.

Below is a collection of movies that, for one reason or another, provoked controversy, if not at the time of release, then subsequent to it. There's racial content that reflected some mindsets at the time and doesn't — or at least shouldn't — any more, envelope pushing sexuality and violence, and satire both ahead of and behind the times. In every case, there are still merits to the artistic achievement, even if the controversial elements are disqualifiers. We're not telling you to support these movies; you must vote with your conscience on what your personal level of acceptability is. What we are saying is that there's more to these movies than just the controversy.

Here are 10 controversial movies that are still worth watching.

"South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone set out to make a marionette action movie, in the style of Gerry Anderson TV shows, with no idea just how difficult it would be. Finally released in 2004, "Team America: World Police" was one of the first to skewer George W. Bush's War on Terror from both the left and the right, mocking both military overreach and left-wing celebrity preachiness. Like so many "South Park" episodes that took the both-sides-bad approach, however, not everything about the movie has aged well. (Though that's not why it was temporarily banned 10 years after its release.)

Some of it, such as the lisping "Engrish" spoken by the Kim Jong-il puppet as well as several casual slurs, was problematic to start with, but a strong argument can be made that, like the slurs in "Blazing Saddles," the movie is spoofing the racial stereotypes of the movies it's parodying by bringing them to the surface. Anyone who didn't grow up with Simpson-Bruckheimer or Michael Bay movies might not understand the joke as intended. Additionally, while the portrayal of terrorists yelling "Durka durka!" is funny when viewed as Parker and Stone being so clueless about Middle East cultures that they just make up nonsense, it's less so when videos show American soldiers yelling the same thing while shooting at Iraqis.

It's not necessarily the fault of "Team America" that ignorant people see it as justification — the entire point is to never be certain you're always in the right.

Not to be confused with the acclaimed, Oscar-nominated Brazilian drama, this 2010 movie directed by Casey Affleck is quite a different beast, purporting to be a documentary about actor Joaquin Phoenix transitioning away from the thespian trade to become a rapper. The reality of "I'm Still Here" was a little different.

For about a year, the public was led to believe that Phoenix was legitimately having some sort of mental breakdown in public, appearing at catastrophic "concerts" that devolved into chaos, and appearing to freeze up on "The Late Show With David Letterman," in a mumbly interview that was frequently parodied afterward (Letterman was in on it too). In fact, it was all a put-on worthy of the late Andy Kaufman and a chaotic prank that Phoenix's "Joker" character might have appreciated. In and of itself, "I'm Still Here" is a hilarious deconstruction of the self-aggrandizing celebrity documentary, and Phoenix's natural shyness made it possible to create a plausible new and awful persona. And yet ...

Phoenix emerged untarnished, but Affleck didn't — the chaotic nature of blurring the lines between reality and fiction reportedly led to an unprofessional set and several sexual harassment charges against the actor-director and crew members, which were settled out of court. Though he did go on to win the Best Actor Oscar for "Manchester by the Sea," he has never entirely shaken the stigma. Plus, in hindsight, the appearance of Sean "Diddy" Combs as one of many celebrities playing himself doesn't exactly mitigate the issue.

The first "Human Centipede" movie was just a mad scientist horror tale with a particularly disgusting hook that captured the pop culture imagination: Three people surgically sewn together, anus-to-mouth. As it became a trilogy, however, it didn't just get more disgusting but also more on-point about just how we consume media in this day and age. The second film was about a super-fan of the first film, who dementedly idolized the Nazi doctor character and fantasized about putting the lead actress into a real human centipede. The third involves a prison warden in the southwest, loosely based on Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is inspired by watching both previous films to punish criminals with the specific tortures shown onscreen.

As a whole, the "Human Centipede" trilogy spiritually resembles the titular critter, feeding back upon itself in ever nastier cycles. It also resembles many of our current news cycles, where fascist fever swamps on the Internet start a rumor or a horrible thought, toxic fans eat it up and amplify, until eventually TV pundits pick it up and funnel it directly to elected politicians. Yet this film came out in 2015 — a good decade before the time of writing.

Yes, this third one is horribly gross, and its lead characters are among the worst human beings ever depicted onscreen. In its prescience about our current moment, however, it has proven arguably more accurate than "Idiocracy," a movie whose morons in charge were at least pleasant sometimes.

It won two Oscars — Best Original Song and a special award for actor James Baskett. It inspired the popular Splash Mountain attraction at Disney theme parks, all but one of which have been rethemed. Yet Disney has metaphorically locked "Song of the South" up in the vaults since the '80s, stung by criticism that it's a racist film that trivializes slavery. The original Uncle Remus stories on which it's based followed a similar trajectory. In the 19th century, author Joel Chandler Harris' attempt to accurately capture the folk stories and literal phonetic pronunciations of slaves was hailed (and condemned by segregationists) as racially progressive. To modern eyes, however, it may read as appropriation or mockery of African-American Vernacular English.

The sin of "Song of the South" is arguably the same one as in every Disney live-action film that depicts a historical period — it offers a PG sheen and an innocent, kid's-eye view that risks sanitizing past evils. ("Mary Poppins" doesn't exactly go into the fact that most chimney sweeps were child labor). Yet it's not a complete whitewash either — set during Reconstruction (not slavery), it portrays Uncle Remus as the smartest man in the room, but also makes it painfully clear that he's frequently forced to hold his tongue and know his place.

"Song of the South" is definitely controversial, and it shouldn't be watched without context, but the ground-breaking mix of live-action and animation and Baskett's performance are worthwhile.

In real life, no serial killer exudes Freddy Krueger or Hannibal Lecter energy right off the bat, or nobody would ever get close enough to them to be killed. Evil is usually more banal than that, found in all types of people who simply do not empathize with potential victims nor see them as equals in any way. Shane Ryan's "Amateur Porn Star Killer" is disturbing precisely because the killer, named Brandon (Ryan), is unassuming, nonthreatening, and the last person a girl might expect to murder her.

Filmed in a single weekend and shot to mimic an actual snuff film made by the killer himself, it simply depicts Brandon bringing a teenage girl (Michiko Jimenez) to his motel room, gradually talking her into sex on camera, and then murdering her. The power of the movie is its uninterrupted gaze that uncomfortably resembles the kind of thing a real psychopath would make. Like Nine Inch Nails' longform "Broken" video that's also meant to mimic a snuff film, "Amateur Porn Star Killer" has frequently been booted from online streaming platforms, possibly because to some people, it's simply too convincing. Ryan made two sequels that mimic the initial movie's structure with new victims, and he was planning to make a fourth as a 3-D parody version until his computer ate the footage.

Nobody was harmed during the making of these movies.

Adjusted for inflation, "Gone With the Wind" remains the highest-grossing movie ever made, and with good reason. It's another epic film based on a bestseller, helmed by "The Wizard of Oz" director Victor Fleming and featuring bona fide movie star Clark Gable and impressive then-newcomer Vivien Leigh. With lavish sets, sweeping locations, and visuals like a city on fire, it swept audiences away in a narrative that took protagonist Scarlett O'Hara (Leigh) to hell and back, through not just the Civil War but also a turbulent romance with hard-drinking Rhett Butler (Gable).

The controversy comes when one looks at what all that suffering is in aid of — the thing that is gone with the wind is Scarlett's dreamy Southern plantation life, and by extension, the slavery that goes along with it. If a spoiled rich girl has to be made to suffer so an abused class of people can be freed, why should she be the one we care about? It doesn't help matters that the Black servants, especially Butterfly McQueen's Prissy, are depicted as over-emotional caricatures, though Hattie McDaniel would become the first African American to win an Academy Award — for Best Supporting Actress — in the role of Mammy. It began more conversations about racial depictions in Hollywood, spurring positive changes in subsequent films.

Best viewed by people old enough to understand that it's not literal history (and why), "Gone with the Wind" is still a larger-than-life drama that can captivate a viewer.

In "The Crying Game," Irish Republican Army fighter Fergus (Stephen Rea) watches over British prisoner Jody (Forest Whitaker, in one of his 16 best movies), to whom he makes a promise that he'll tell his girlfriend Dil what happened if he dies. When he dies, Fergus seeks out Dil and is instantly attracted, but all is not as it seems, and Fergus' former IRA associates need him to keep making trouble.

Initially a failure in its native Ireland, Neil Jordan's "The Crying Game" was picked up for distribution in the U.S. by Miramax, which, instead of selling it as an IRA crime drama, emphasized that the movie had a big secret, asking audiences not to tell. By 2025 standards, it's a relatively banal surprise — a woman who appears to be cisgender turns out not to be. The character of Dil (Jaye Davidson) reads today as a trans woman, though Jordan has said he considered her a cross-dressing gay man (Davidson identifies as male).

The twist marketing worked, gaining the film six Oscar nominations, with Jordan winning for Best Original Screenplay. It also became a pop culture moment, referenced in many other movies for the scene in which Fergus first sees Dil naked and vomits in shock. Both "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and "Naked Gun 33-1/3: The Final Insult" spoofed the scene, but by crucially omitting the follow-up context in which Fergus legitimately falls for Dil, these films came off mainly as transphobic and mean-spirited. Jordan had more on his mind than that.

In the waning days of the Hays Production Code, it's remarkable to think that the acclaimed director of "Spartacus" would get to make a movie adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's book about hebephilia (attraction to early adolescents aged 11-14). That, however, is what Stanley Kubrick's "Lolita" is, and no amount of Peter Sellers mugging can take away the fact that it asks you to sympathize with an icky, abusive man in James Mason's Humbert Humbert.

To make the subject matter more palatable, Kubrick cast Sue Lyon to play Lolita older than 12 (she was 14 playing 17), kept all the sex stuff implied rather than outright mentioned or shown and played things broadly, almost as parody. Movies based on acclaimed novels tended to get more leeway from the Code, and while "Lolita" is less graphic than many of today's crime dramas and nowhere near as erotic as Kubrick would have wanted, it was a lot for 1962.

The heightened sense of exaggeration both allowed Sellers to don multiple disguises and accents as Humbert's equally unsavory competitor Clare Quilty, and allowed audiences to think that none of these characters should be taken too seriously. Adrian Lyne attempted a more graphic and noncomedic take on the same material in 1997, and it's strangely forgettable next to Kubrick's distinctive quirkiness.

"The Painted Bird" is based on a novel by Jerzy Kosinski that was initially acclaimed when it was presumed to be a Holocaust autobiography, but lost a lot of respect when it was proven to be completely fictional. The movie adaptation by Vaclav Marhoul doesn't have that issue, as it's artistically staged in impeccable black-and-white photography throughout. However, it doesn't skimp on depicting the book's explicit, dark, and extreme content.

During World War II, a young boy in an unspecified Eastern European country is set to live with his aunt, and when she dies, he accidentally burns her house down. In a journey of survival, he encounters terrible person after terrible person, seeing rape, suicide, animal cruelty, eye gouging, pedophilia, and murder. It hardens him to the point that he learns to efficiently kill for survival too.

Though it received some critical praise, others have decried it as art porn, and audience members (including a critic for Variety) ended up walking out. Its cavalcade of horrors does have a point, though (SPOILER alert!) when the boy finally reunites with his father, and explodes at him for leaving him with the aunt, we see the Holocaust tattoo on his arm, and realize that as terrible as the boy's experiences without his father have been, his dad spared him from the death camps. As the boy finally remembers his name, the movie ends on a sincere note of hope that he might not be destroyed as a human being after all.

For parents, "Kids" is the ultimate nightmare: a movie that confirms their worst fears that, indeed, the teens of today spend all their time having unprotected sex, doing drugs, skateboarding, and assaulting people. In 1995, it proved too extreme for even the usually edgy Miramax, which was forbidden by Disney corporate owners from releasing NC-17 rated films. The Weinstein brothers had to create a one-off new distribution company called Shining Excalibur Films to release it, but that bet paid off, as it grossed $20 million worldwide on a $1.5 million budget.

"Kids" was directed by photographer Larry Clark, whose specialty was pictures of juvenile delinquents, and written by a teenaged Harmony Korine, who has gone on to direct an eclectic filmography that includes the likes of "Gummo," "Trash Humpers," and "Spring Breakers." It's the story of Jennie (then-newcomer Chloe Sevigny), who learns she's HIV positive after her first sexual encounter and tries to seek out Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), the boy who gave it to her, to let him know. Telly is convinced he only ever has sex with virgins and, therefore, cannot get AIDS.

Boosted by a hit single from the Folk Implosion (Sebadoh frontman Lou Barlow's side project) and a notable big-screen debut for Rosario Dawson, "Kids" became a hit with exactly the crowd it was raising the alarm about — it was the nihilistic '90s, and the movie depicted excess without overtly preaching. Today, it still shocks — here's a fuller explanation of the "Kids" controversy — but also serves as a time capsule.