10 Best Movies That Break The Fourth Wall (According To IMDb)
10 Best Movies That Break The Fourth Wall (According To IMDb)
These are some of the best movies that break the fourth wall, including Fight Club, Adaptation and more, according to the film ranking website IMDb.
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The concept of “breaking the fourth wall” comes from theater and it refers to the narrative device in which an actor, still in character, addressing the audience in the middle of the play. The “fourth wall” is the audience, while the other three are the ones that compose the stage walls.
This convention eventually made its way to film, where characters addressed the camera or referenced the fact that they were inside a fictional story. This led to several of the best moments in cinema and became a popular device in comedies and quirky dramas. Here, we tell you about ten of the best “breakers” according to the rankings in IMDb.
10 Wayne’s World – 7/10
Myke Myers and Dana Carvey’s 90s classic is a perfect example of not taking the fourth wall too seriously. Yes, it can be used as a meaningful narrative device, but it also works great for silly jokes. Wayne’s World was based on a popular sketch from Saturday Night Live in which the characters talked to the audience via their public access TV show.
The scene where the protagonists refuse to include sponsors in their program while they not-so-sneakily show different brands to the audience is one of the most hilarious fourth-wall-breaking scenes of all time.
9 High Fidelity – 7.5/10
This romantic comedy was one of the most inventive of its year. An adaptation of Nick Hornby’s book of the same name, the film follows John Cusack’s character, Rob Gordon, and his quest to understand his bad history with women.
The film is full of references to obscure music and Cusack constantly talking to the audience about his taste in music (and everything in his life, really) by ranking it all in top-fives.
8 Adaptation – 7.7/10
Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman has been able to build a career on ground-breaking meta-narrative films. His first big hit was Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, a movie that granted him an Oscar nomination and jumpstarted a career of unique and mind-bending movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York.
The style that made him famous is more evident in his sophomore effort: Adaptation, where Nicolas Cage plays the screenwriter himself and his fictionalized twin brother, during the time in which Kaufman was writing Being John Malkovich.
7 The Big Short – 7.8/10
Adam McKay’s retelling of the 2008’s economic crash used all his knowledge in silly and outrageous comedy to talk about a scary subject. And it was a difficult one, as well, since the reasons for the Wall Street fall of that year involved a lot of economic theory that’s difficult even for Wall Street people to explain.
But in a flash of brilliance, McKay decides to broke the fourth wall to explain to the audience how things happened. Although these scenes touched on serious topics, they were presented via surreal situations, like Margot Robbie in a bathtub drinking champagne.
6 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – 7.8/10
When Matthew Broderick addressed the camera as Ferris Bueller in this 1986 movie, it marked a cultural event. John Hughes’s movie is a staple of the 80s, becoming an instant classic, and the highest-grossing film of its year – not strange since the film was praised for its story, acting, and comedy.
It wasn’t all that common for the time to see such a charismatic character addressing the audience in this way. It has been referenced to oblivion, and even many years later, Deadpool honored the film and its technique with an after credit scene.
5 Annie Hall – 8/10
1977’s Annie Hall is a masterpiece in comedy as well as in meta narration. Woody Allen’s movie took the concept of addressing the audience and elevated it to such an extent it earned him an Oscar for Best Directing and the award for Best Film of that year.
It is a classic piece of cinema that has been replicated, paid homage to, and parodied, countless times in different media forms. It established how character development could be done through this type of narration.
4 Deadpool – 8/10
The now-famous Marvel character was born as a knock-off of another DC character: Deathstroke. But Deadpool’s development took a whole other direction when the mercenary displayed his ability to break the fourth wall and talk to its audience.
Fans may know about the antihero’s antics long before the films, but with the release of Deadpool in 2016, the character became one of the most famous to use this type of narrative device, taking postmodern storytelling to another level and popularizing it in other media.
3 Monty Python And The Holy Grail – 8.2/10
The legendary comedy collective has never been afraid of taking their silly humor to the extreme. They were one of the first ones to break the fourth wall on British television with the cult sketch-comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus. That same energy was brought to their films.
The Holy Grail is the Pythonesque version of several Canterbury Tales, in particular, The Legend of the Holy Grail. The Pythons take this concept to the absurd, making its ending one of the most fourth-breaking endings of all time, as modern times get mixed with the medieval.
2 Goodfellas – 8.7/10
The classic Martin Scorsese’s mobster movie is an intense piece of film that plays constantly with the idea of filmmaking, from the way it’s shot to its editing. It also uses voice-over narration that passively recounts Ray Liotta’s character experience to the audience.
However, where the film really breaks the fourth wall is in the last scene. When Henry Hill makes a deal with justice by ratting out his former partners, he addresses the camera and explains how his life is going to be from that moment on. Then, the movie cuts to an homage of The Great Train Robbery, where Joe Pesci shoots the audience directly.
1 Fight Club – 8.8/10
Chuck Palahniuk wrote the seminal book of the 90s that became one of the greatest movies of the same era. David Fincher’s Fight Club not only adapted the novel but elevated the material, thanks to the medium of cinema. Besides using Edward Norton’s narration to drive the movie, Fincher relied on some other narrative techniques.
The movie sometimes referenced the idea that its characters were in a movie, like in the cigar-burning scene, which shows a mark on top of the screen to illustrate the concept, and the Tyler Durden’s speech, which almost breaks the film itself.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/best-movies-break-fourth-wall-imdb/
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