[PRESS OFFICE] Showmax is now home to 11 of IMDb’s 30 Top-Rated Movies Of All Time, more than any other streaming service in South Africa
The second and titular film in five-time Oscar nominee Christopher Nolan’s unforgettable Dark Knight Trilogy, The Dark Knight won 159 awards, including two Oscars (with a further six nominations), and was voted the greatest superhero movie of all time in a 2014 poll by Rolling Stone. The script, by Christopher and his brother Jonathan Nolan (his co-writer on Memento and Interstellar, and the co-creator of Westworld), was also nominated for a Nebula Award.
The cast is led by Oscar winners Christian Bale (The Big Short, Vice, American Psycho), Sir Michael Caine (Inception), Gary Oldman (Mank, Darkest Hour, Léon), and Morgan Freeman (Seven, The Shawshank Redemption). The late Heath Ledger (10 Things I Hate About You, Brokeback Mountain) was posthumously awarded the Best Actor Award at the 2009 Oscars, BAFTAs and Golden Globes for his unrecognisable portrayal of the anarchic villain, The Joker. Oscar nominees Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Deuce, Crazy Heart) and Eric Roberts (The Expendables, Runaway Train), Golden Globe nominee Aaron Eckhart (Rabbit Hole, Thank You for Smoking), and BAFTA nominee Cillian Murphy (Inception, Peaky Blinders) also feature.
“An ambitious, full-bodied crime epic of gratifying scope and moral complexity, this is seriously brainy pop entertainment that satisfies every expectation,” says Variety.
Also watch Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises on Showmax.
Steven Spielberg’s magnum opus, Schindler’s List, won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, as well as seven BAFTAs and three Golden Globes. As the critics consensus on Rotten Tomatoes says, “Schindler’s List blends the abject horror of the Holocaust with Steven Spielberg’s signature tender humanism to create the director’s dramatic masterpiece.”
Liam Neeson (Gangs of New York, Michael Collins) was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor as German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved more than 1 000 Jewish refugees from the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland during WWII. Ralph Fiennes (The English Patient, The Grand Budapest Hotel) was also nominated for an Oscar and won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor, while Oscar winner Ben Kingsley (House of Sand and Fog, Gandhi) was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor. The cast also includes South Africa-raised actress Embeth Davidtz (Matilda, Old).
The screenplay picked up an Oscar for writer Steven Zaillian (The Night Of, The Irishman), while the Oscar for Best Cinematography went to Janusz Kamiński (Saving Private Ryan, War Horse, Lincoln) and the score, by 52-time Oscar nominated and five-time Oscar-winning composer John Williams (Star Wars, Superman, Harry Potter) won both an Oscar and a Grammy. The main theme is performed by violinist Itzhak Perlman, winner of 16 Grammys.
#7, #10 AND #14: THE LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY
The ultimate epic fantasy binge, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy comprises The Fellowship of the Ring at #10, The Two Towers at #14, and the concluding chapter, The Return of the King, at #7 on IMDb’s Top-Rated Movies of all time.
The trilogy won 17 Oscars, with The Fellowship of the Ring voted the greatest fantasy movie of all time, and The Return of the King in third place and The Two Towers at #4 in a reader’s poll conducted by Wired in 2012.
Based on the classic, bestselling novel by Bloemfontein-born JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings follows hobbit Frodo Baggins (Critics’ Choice winner Elijah Wood) as he and the fellowship are set on a dangerous quest by the wizard Gandalf (Oscar nominee Sir Ian McKellen) to destroy the One Ring and ensure the downfall of its maker, the Dark Lord Sauron (Bram Stoker Awards Lifetime Achievement winner Christopher Lee).
Taken together with The Hobbit trilogy, An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug, and The Battle of the Five Armies, the Middle-earth saga is the 10th biggest franchise of all time, with a global gross of $5.9 billion. And there’s no better time to undertake an epic 17-hour quest to binge the lot than on Hobbit Day, 22 September, in celebration of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins’ birthdays.
Christopher Nolan earned his second and third Oscar nominations (for Best Original Screenplay and Best Motion Picture, along with his wife and co-producer, Emma Thomas) for the mind-bending 2010 film Inception, which won 157 awards, including four Oscars.
Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street, The Great Gatsby) stars as Cobb, a thief who steals corporate secrets by hacking into the subconscious minds of his targets. Emmy winner Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Lincoln, Looper, The Dark Knight Rises) co-stars, along with Oscar winners Marion Cottilard (La Vie en Rose), Sir Michael Caine (The Dark Knight, Tenet), BAFTA nominee Cillian Murphy (The Dark Knight, Peaky Blinders), and Oscar nominees Elliot Page (as Ellen Page) and Tom Hardy (Mad Max: Fury Road).
Inception holds an 8.8/10 score on IMDb and an 87% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics consensus says, “Smart, innovative, and thrilling, Inception is that rare summer blockbuster that succeeds viscerally as well as intellectually.”
Sci-fi action blockbuster and cult classic The Matrix made pop culture icons of Keanu Reeves (John Wick) as Neo and Carrie-Anne Moss (Jessica Jones, Memento) as Trinity, Laurence Fishburne (Black-ish, Ant-Man and the Wasp) as Morpheus, and Hugo Weaving (The Lord of the Rings, V for Vendetta) as the iconic villain, Agent Smith.
Written, directed and produced by the Wachowskis (V for Vendetta), The Matrix won four Oscars, including for Best Visual Effects, thanks to the groundbreaking action choreography and pioneering “bullet-time” slow-motion camera techniques that helped make it the fourth-biggest movie of 1999.
The Matrix has an 8.7/10 score on IMDb and an 88% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Slate saying, “Keanu Reeves makes a lean, strikingly beautiful tabula rasa hero, twisting out of the way of bullets that elongate like silver beads of mercury, and he’s partnered by the equally hard, blank, and androgynously gorgeous Carrie-Anne Moss.”
Best of all, The Matrix Trilogy, which includes the sequels The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, is about to become a quadrilogy with the long-awaited fourth instalment, The Matrix Resurrections, due out at the end of this year.
The Oscar-nominated 1995 blockbuster psychological crime thriller Seven has an 8.6/10 rating on IMDb and an 82% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics consensus calls it, “A brutal, relentlessly grimy shocker with taut performances, slick gore effects, and a haunting finale.”
Seven follows retiring police Detective William Somerset (Oscar winner Morgan Freeman from The Dark Knight) and rookie David Mills (Oscar winner Brad Pitt from Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood) on the trail of a serial killer who’s theming elaborate and grizzly murders around the seven deadly sins.
Directed by triple Oscar nominee David Fincher (Mank, The Social Network), with a BAFTA-nominated screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker (Sleepy Hollow), Seven also stars Oscar winners Gwyneth Paltrow (Shakespeare in Love) and Kevin Spacey (L.A. Confidential).
Dr. Hannibal Lecter and FBI Agent Clarice Starling remain the most iconic roles of the Oscar-winning juggernauts – Sir Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster – who played them three decades ago in The Silence of the Lambs, which follows Starling as she is forced to seek out the help of a manipulative cannibal in order to track down a sadistic new serial killer.
The seminal psychological horror was the fourth-biggest film of 1991 and won five Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actor (Hopkins), Best Actress (Foster), Best Director for Jonathan Demme (Philadelphia), and Best Adapted Screenplay for writer Ted Tally’s (All the Pretty Horses) adaptation of Thomas Harris’ best-selling novel.
The Silence of the Lambs has an 8.6/10 score on IMDb and a 96% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Rolling Stone called it “mercilessly scary and mercifully humane at the same time,” and Boston Globe “stylish, intelligent, audacious… and stolen by a suave monster you’ll never forget.”
Also watch the brand-new follow-up series Clarice on Showmax.
The #10 biggest film of 2014, with a worldwide gross of $677 million and global acclaim from audiences, critics and real-life scientists alike, Interstellar sees a team of explorers travel through a wormhole in space in a bid to ensure the survival of humanity.
The film is among Empire Magazine’s best films of the 21st Century, with a five-star review that called it “brainy, barmy, and beautiful to behold … a mind-bending opera of space and time with a soul wrapped up in all the science.”
Written, directed and produced by five-time Oscar nominee Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, Dunkirk), Interstellar won the 2015 Oscar and the BAFTA for Best Visual Effects, with four additional Oscar nominations, including for Best Original Score by Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer (Dunkirk, Blade Runner 2049).
Interstellar’s stellar cast includes Oscar winners Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club, The Wolf of Wall Street), Anne Hathaway (Les Misérables, The Dark Knight Rises), and Sir Michael Caine (The Dark Knight, Inception), and Oscar nominees Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty, The Help), Timothée Chalamet (Lady Bird, Beautiful Boy), and John Lithgow (The Crown, Perry Mason), as well as Emmy nominee David Oyelowo (Nightingale, Selma) and Mackenzie Foy (The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, The Conjuring).
Considered one of the best films of the century so far, the South Korean black comedy thriller Parasite won over 300 awards worldwide, including the Cannes Palme d’Or, a Golden Globe, two BAFTAs, and four 2020 Oscars: Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best International Feature Film and – a first-ever for a non-English-language film – Best Picture.
Co-written and directed by Bong Joon Ho (Snowpiercer, The Host, Mother, Okja), Parasite weaves a tale of class discrimination and greed as a poor family schemes to infiltrate a wealthy household by posing as highly qualified, unrelated individuals. Vulture calls Parasite “a nerve-racking masterpiece,” saying, “You expect Parasite to be one thing, but it mutates into something else,” while New York Times says it’s “Bong at his best” in “an urgent story of class, told in the most sensationally entertaining way.”
With an 8.6/10 score on IMDb and a 98% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Parasite grossed over $250 million at the 2019 global box office. In IndieWire’s 2019 poll of over 300 critics, Parasite ranked #1 in the Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Foreign Film categories.
EVERYTHING ON SHOWMAX IN SEPTEMBER2021
To see everything on Showmax in September 2021, including the critically acclaimed The White Lotus, 2021 Emmy nomineeGangs of London, 2021 Oscar winner Minari and nominee Tenet, and Flatland, the South African film that opened the Berlin Panorama, click here. Please note this release schedule is subject to change.
