This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Some movies you watch and never forget—because you can’t. Who could fail to remember the first time they saw Nazis in space, or Nicolas Cage ranting and raving about honey in a matriarchal commune? There’s a fine line between what’s weird but enjoyable and what’s too weird to sit through, so we asked Atlantic writers and editors to share which bizarre films they’d actually recommend.
Iron Sky (streaming on Prime Video and the Roku Channel)
Iron Sky is the sort of movie that demands a long-form investigation into how many hallucinogens were consumed during its production. The premise: Facing defeat in 1945, a group of Nazis flees to the moon and establishes the Fourth Reich, waiting for the right time to retake Earth—that is, until they are inadvertently discovered by an American astronaut. One of the most expensive Finnish films ever produced, this science-fiction farce has everything: a swastika-shaped Nazi base on the dark side of the moon, a U.S. space warship named after George W. Bush, and an American president who sends people into space as a reelection stunt, complete with campaign posters on the lunar lander (a move that no longer seems so implausible).
When Iron Sky was released, in 2012, its concept was comical for situating Nazis on the moon, of all places. In 2026, the concept remains comical for putting Nazis on the moon rather than on your social-media feed or in a local political group chat. Perhaps recognizing that reality has caught up with satire, the filmmakers announced last month that they are planning a new trilogy—this time about communists on Mars.
— Yair Rosenberg, staff writer
***
Jupiter Ascending (available to rent on YouTube and Prime Video)
Jupiter Ascending is like no other movie ever made. What if Mila Kunis were a house cleaner named Jupiter who secretly owned all of planet Earth? What if Channing Tatum were a dog-human hybrid who skated around the sky on levitating boots? What if Sean Bean were also there?
There is nothing better than a film that dares greatly. A film that says, “I have a nearly $200 million budget, so Mila Kunis will have the most spectacular gown imaginable for her wedding to an evil space alien. Also, a spaceship will be flown by someone with an elephant trunk who will trumpet at crucial points.”
What other science-fiction fantasia revolves around space inheritance law? What other movie includes a line about how bees are genetically designed to recognize royalty, as uttered by Sean Bean (a human-bee hybrid)? Or a prolonged sequence about filling out paperwork at the space DMV, culminating in a cameo from Terry Gilliam? Or Eddie Redmayne DELIVERing EVeryTHING like THIS, fluttering between a whisper and a SHRIEK?
I always suggest the film as a joke, remembering the absurd sequences, and then I get invested and can’t tear my eyes away. It’s a fairy tale. It’s a thrill ride. You will be entertained every single minute of Jupiter Ascending. I wish I were watching Jupiter Ascending right now.
— Alexandra Petri, staff writer
***
The Wicker Man (streaming on the Roku Channel)
The year 2006 was full of cultural shock waves: Twitter was loosed upon the internet, Pluto was declared a dwarf planet, and Neil LaBute released his reimagining of Robin Hardy’s 1973 folk horror film, The Wicker Man.
Edward Malus (played by Nicolas Cage) is a cop whose ex-fiancée asks him to investigate the disappearance of a young girl on an isolated island off the coast of Washington State. As he digs into the mystery, he gets caught up in the local matriarchal commune’s ancient rituals. LaBute’s The Wicker Man is intent on being a detective procedural; to modernize the story, it eschews the moralistic dissonance (and the musical elements) of the original, producing instead a madcap, paranoid thriller that is as absurd as it is fun.
The Wicker Man has since become a cult classic, and for good reason. There are memorable lines such as “How’d it get burned? How’d it get burned, how’d it get burned?!” and Cage’s Charlton Heston–esque delivery of “Killing me won’t bring back your goddamned honey!” (These jarring scenes and the over-the-top acting have lately infiltrated the internet’s meme machine.) But perhaps the most fitting quote of LaBute’s production comes in the first 10 minutes, when Malus’s colleague exclaims, “Wow, the plot thickens. Didn’t even know you had a plot.”
— Jesse Convertino, senior editor
***
Frozen (streaming on Prime Video and Tubi)
This is not your granddaughter’s Frozen. There are no trolls, reindeer, or enchanted snowmen—just a young man, his best friend, and his girlfriend trapped on a ski lift on a Sunday night. The resort won’t open again until Friday, and a storm is rolling in. I recommend this film not necessarily as a gratifying viewing experience—though I love it in a so-bad-it’s-good sort of way—but as a conversation starter. Frozen is a horror movie in which so many implausible things happen, and the characters make so many unfathomable errors, that you can spend hours debating its events with your friends and family. What sort of wolves roam the ski resorts of New England? What is the best way to drop 20-something feet onto hard-packed snow, in the dark, while wearing ski boots? How could three people be stupid enough to board a ski lift after closing time—and how could none of them have a cellphone in the year 2010? If you’re a skier, you get a bonus: The next time the lift stops while you’re on it, you and your companions can entertain yourselves by plotting how you’d get down if you were truly stuck.
— Rachel Gutman-Wei, senior editor
***
But I’m a Cheerleader (streaming on Tubi and the Roku Channel)
A comedy about a high-school cheerleader sent to conversion-therapy camp could already be a bit of a bizarre premise, but even that description doesn’t cover how wonderfully weird this movie is. Megan (Natasha Lyonne) is thrust into the blue-and-pink-washed world of True Directions, where the girls learn how to vacuum and the boys are taught how to fix cars, among other activities, in the name of counteracting their homosexual tendencies. (These undertakings all, somehow, get pretty horny.) The gender parodies are ridiculous and intentionally so, laying bare the subjective standards by which people determine the right and wrong ways to exist.
Amid the goofiness, Megan falls for her sullen co-camper Graham (Clea DuVall), and their sweet-but-fraught romance carries the story through to the end. I watched this film for the first time in college, almost certainly after coming across it on some lesbian-movie recommendation list, and I’ve rewatched it many times since. There are so many fun things that have stuck with me: RuPaul’s earnest delivery of the line “I, myself, was once a gay”; a truly heinous set of rainbow pajamas; and, of course, a romantic confession in the form of a cheer, complete with pom-poms.
— Elise Hannum, associate editor
***
Strawberry Mansion (streaming on Tubi, Prime Video, and the Roku Channel)
Christopher Nolan’s Inception may be the most famous film about dreams, but it fails in one regard: It doesn’t capture their ephemeral beauty, and how strange they can be. The 2021 movie Strawberry Mansion offers a more familiar vision of them, if that vision involves sailing through various purgatories in a pirate ship manned by bipedal rats or reincarnating as a caterpillar destined to inch across the planet for centuries.
The film is a modern spin on a Kafkaesque story. It takes place in 2035, a dystopian time when people’s dreams are taxed by the state. James, a mild-mannered dream auditor, visits an elderly artist, Bella, and ends up living in her guest room while he surveils her dreams.
Initially, the dull bureaucrat enforces labyrinthine procedures that he doesn’t understand or care to. But then he falls in love with a younger version of Bella whom he meets in his dreams; while awake, he grows closer to the older Bella, who reveals that dreams are being sold as ad space to megacorps. (That explains all the buckets of fried chicken James was seeing.) Bella gives James a device that blocks out intruding advertisers, and he starts to really dream for the first time, discovering the freedom of going spelunking in his subconscious and investigating how deep the conspiracy goes. It’s a film that will make you want to go to sleep—in the best way possible.
— Amogh Dimri, assistant editor
Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
“We need to do McCarthyism to the tenth power.”The impossible predicament of the uninsuredCalifornia’s deadliest avalanche turned on one choice.
The Week Ahead
The Oscars, Hollywood’s biggest night honoring the year’s best films and performances (streaming on ABC on Sunday)The Gates, a thriller about three friends trapped in a gated community after witnessing a murder (out Friday in theaters)Judy Blume: A Life, a biography by Mark Oppenheimer on the writer who transformed young people’s literature (out Tuesday)
Essay
Daily Mirror / Mirrorpix / Getty
Literature Has a Stay-at-Home-Dad Problem
By Eric Magnuson
A decade ago, when I became a stay-at-home dad, I was too busy sanitizing baby bottles and washing reusable diapers to read a short story, let alone an entire novel. Now I have a pair of night-owl elementary schoolers, and although bedtime can still be draining, I at least have the energy to enjoy a few chapters once they’re asleep. So when I learned last year about two well-reviewed novels featuring stay-at-home-dad protagonists—Something Rotten, by Andrew Lipstein, and The River Is Waiting, by Wally Lamb—I was curious to pick them up. Within the first few pages, however, I was disappointed to find that these characters were essentially a collection of the same old incompetent-dad tropes: unemployable, emasculated, blundering, or, in the case of Lamb’s book, tragically negligent.
I never used to be a reader who needed to see himself in a novel. But as a dad who takes pride in bringing fun and, if I may say so, some skill to the role, I’ve grown tired of cultural stereotypes that reduce stay-at-home fathers to undignified buffoons. So I decided to go hunting, to see where else these dads show up in literature, in the hope of finding a character whose experience might reflect my own.
More in Culture
A novel about a secret no one wants to knowThe tyranny of the relationship gapThe sickening fairy tale of Yasmin HananiWhy Iranians are weeping for a tyrantIn defense of effeminate boysThe McDonald’s CEO’s big burger-eating mistake
Catch Up on The Atlantic
Why Trump changed his mind on Kristi NoemKarim Sadjadpour: Trump has lost the plot in Iran.Pete Buttigieg in the wilderness
Photo Album
A mother polar bear shelters two tiny cubs at the mouth of a wind-carved snow den on Baffin Island. (© Sunita Mandal / Sony World Photography Awards 2026)
Take a look at the top and shortlisted entries from this year’s Sony World Photography Awards Professional Competition.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
Explore all of our newsletters.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic*.*
From The Atlantic via this RSS feed
You must log in or # to comment.