Maybe it was the fourth Adam Devine Netflix movie you watched in a row, or that season of Bosch you inhaled on Amazon Prime without ever actually paying attention to the story. If you’ve decided to get more creative with your viewing choices, play along with this rough variation on Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. We asked some of our film brains to start with one Kevin Bacon movie — for purposes of availability and ensemble friendliness, we picked Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning 2003 thriller, Mystic River, now on Netflix — then work their way through five more titles … ending on another Kevin Bacon movie.
Option 1
1. Start with Mystic River, then move to
2. Play Misty for Me
Rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
Clint Eastwood’s 1971 directorial debut is a solid entry in the disreputable but irresistible genre of lady-psycho horror-suspense, with Jessica Walter as an impeccably unhinged stalker and Clint as her quarry.
3. Norma Rae
Rentable on Amazon Prime
Misty villain Walter’s late husband Ron Leibman had his best big-screen role as a union organizer in Martin Ritt’s stirring 1979 ode to the power of activism and community. Sally Field’s performance and the film itself have both aged superbly.
4. Hud
Rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
Sixteen years earlier, Norma Rae’s screenwriters, Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., crafted this marvel (also directed by Ritt) about a Texas bad boy (Paul Newman, possibly never sexier, which is saying something) and the lives he wrecks.
5. Terms of Endearment
Rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
Want a good cry about somebody else’s troubles? Watch Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger in this affecting comedy-melodrama (based, like Hud, on a Larry McMurtry novel) about how mothers and daughters are essentially quarantined together for life. With generous supporting performances from Jack Nicholson, Jeff Daniels, and John Lithgow.
6. Footloose
Rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
Lithgow showed up just a year later as Kevin Bacon’s pulpit-pounding nemesis in this early-MTV-era sweet escape.
—Mark Harris
Option 2
1. Start with Mystic River, then move to
2. Live by Night
Rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
Eastwood directed Mystic River, but the vision is Dennis Lehane’s: characters violated, sunk in grief, acting out in ways that make nothing better. So we travel with Lehane to this period gangster epic. Not a great adaptation but lots to muse on: “What you put out in the world will always come back to you.”
3. We Bought a Zoo
Rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
The best performance in Live by Night is by Elle Fanning, who also appears in Cameron Crowe’s underrated film about a family sunk in mourning that returns to life by saving a foundering menagerie. Crowe understands the grief-whimsy continuum that makes life so paradoxical (and movies with only one tone so boring).
4. Margaret
Rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
With Zoo star Matt Damon, we move to Kenneth Lonergan’s story of a teenage girl (played by Anna Paquin) learning to find her moral equilibrium in a post-9/11 New York. See the extended edition, which is a masterpiece.
5. The Irishman
Netflix
We follow the superb Paquin to Martin Scorsese’s old-man’s movie steeped in shame and guilt and incomprehension over how we did what we did — which put us where we are and always knew we would be, somehow.
6. Sleepers
Rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
Follow Irishman star Robert De Niro to this drama, where once more we’re in a Catholic universe of sin and vengeance. And look, there’s Kevin Bacon!
—David Edelstein
Option 3
1. Start with Mystic River, then move to
2. The Hudsucker Proxy
HBO Now; rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
Mystic River co-star Tim Robbins also stars in this satire from the Coen brothers. I admit this film popped into my head first because of Paul Newman’s striking turn.
3. Harper
Rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
A forever beguiling Newman stars as detective Lew Harper, hired by a yearning wife (played by Lauren Bacall) in search of her husband.
4. Written on the Wind
Available on DVD
Bacall also stars in this emotionally extravagant and overheated Technicolor masterpiece by Douglas Sirk.
5. The Big Sleep
Rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
Nestled in this 1946 noir starring the inimitable Humphrey Bogart and Bacall is a sexually charged and flirtatious scene between our detective and a bookstore clerk played with cunning wit by Dorothy Malone …
6. Wild Things
Rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
… That in turn led me to think about this very different sexually charged thriller. An utterly unrepentant, glorious piece of trash, this neo-noir sizzles with over-the-top sexual situations you can only take half-seriously. Starring Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, Matt Dillon … and Kevin Bacon.
—Angelica Jade Bastién
Option 4
1. Start with Mystic River, then move to
2. 976-EVIL
Crackle; rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube
Mystic River screenwriter Brian Helgeland works on semi-reputable stuff like Spenser Confidential these days, but he got his start in horror movies like this one, Freddy Krueger actor Robert Englund’s directorial debut about a premium-rate phone line … to Satan.
3. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
Sandy Dennis, who makes one of her last appearances in 976-EVIL, will forever be best known for playing the part of Honey in Mike Nichols’s epic adaptation of Edward Albee’s legendary play.
4. Toy Story
Disney+; rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
The recent, Laurie Metcalf–led Broadway revival of Virginia Woolf was shut down, but there’s (sigh) no canceling Pixar’s talking-feeling-toy series — and she’s been voicing Andy’s mom since it began in 1995.
5. The Usual Suspects
Hulu; rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
That first Pixar feature nabbed an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, but the prize ended up going to Christopher McQuarrie for this twisty heist-gone-wrong thriller.
6. A Few Good Men
Rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
Comedian turned actor Kevin Pollak played a member of the criminal crew of The Usual Suspects, but he was a lot more straitlaced as a Navy lawyer in this Tom Cruise–starring hit, in which he acted alongside, yes, Kevin Bacon.
—Alison Willmore
Option 5
1. Start with Mystic River, then move to
2. You Can Count On Me
Rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
One of the craziest performances in Mystic River belongs to Laura Linney, playing Sean Penn’s wife. For a more restrained and realistic Linney turn, check out this Kenneth Lonergan film, which should have won her an Oscar.
3. The Mend
Vudu; rentable on Amazon Prime
Josh Lucas gets a solid supporting sleazebag turn in You Can Count On Me, but his best work remains this remarkable no-budget indie drama about two very different brothers who are thrust together in a small New York apartment.
4. My Cousin Vinny
Hulu; rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
Both The Mend and this Joe Pesci–Marisa Tomei courtroom-comedy hit feature one of our most cherished character actors (and legendary drama teacher), Austin Pendleton.
5. The Final Days
Rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, YouTube
Vinny includes another great American character actor, Lane Smith, who got the role of a lifetime in this long-unavailable TV-movie adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein’s book about the last days of the Nixon administration. Smith remains the best onscreen Tricky Dick ever.
6. Apollo 13
Hulu; rentable on Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube
And oh, look, there’s young Gary Sinise in a supporting role in The Final Days. With him, we move on to Ron Howard’s historical space drama (and eternal Dad Classic) about resilience in times of crisis. Starring America’s Dad, Tom Hanks, and America’s Cool Older Brother, Kevin Bacon.
—Bilge Ebiri
*This article appears in the March 30, 2020, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!
