Part of the ma🐎gic of the movies is that they can take us anywhere, but not 𝔉every movie is an epic that spans a person's lifetime or tracks the rise and fall of an empire. Some of the best movies only need 24 hours to find all the drama, laughs, or scares to create an unforgettable classic.
In a way, having a movie that takes place in just one day (or one night, or some combination of both) makes a certain amount of sense. They might not always be real-time, but by focusing on just a 24-hour span, these movies make the audience feel connected with how immediate and intimate the action on the screen feels. A lot can happen in a day, and the 32 movies below are the best films thꦬat understand how much great cinema there is to be found in one rotation of the Earth.
32. Groundhog Day
Year: 1993
Director: Harold Ramis
Is it cheating to put Groundhog Day on a list of movies that take place in just one day? Technically, everything that happens to weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) takes place on February 2nd. It’s just that he relives February 2nd over and over and over again, stuck in a t🔯ime loop that lasts the equivalent of decades. Hilarious with a dark edge and plenty of earnestly philosophical implications, Groundhog Day is a classic comedy for a reason. (Don't worry: The rest of this list isn't just Groundhog Day repeated again and again.)
31. Cloverfield
Year: 2008
Director: Matt Reeves
What makes this J.J. Abrams-produced movie special is its sense of scale. Typical Kaiju movies, like the Godꦅzilla series, tend to emphasize how big the giant monster destroying the city is. By keeping to its found-footage conceit, Cloverfield ensures that our POV is that of these average citizens of New York, fleeing in confused, overwhelming terror during the worst night of their lives as an alien monster attacks the city. A wider focus or a longer time that more fully told the story of this monster attack would be self-defeating, as it’s the immediacy of this one, chaotic ev൩ent that makes Cloverfield so visceral.
30. The World’s End
Year: 2013
Director: Edgar Wright
In the final film of Edgar Wright’s Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, Simon Pegg plays a man who really should’ve grown up and quit drinking years ago. However, Gary King is determined to keep living in the past, so he gets his old buddies to attempt an epic pub crawl they failed to complete during their wild youths. Over the course of the evening, as they make their way from bar to bar, the old friends realize how much things have changed. Oh, and also, there seems to be some sort of Invasi✱on of the Body Snatchers-esque alien invasion happening.
29. Bodies Bodies Bodies
Year: 2022
Director: Halina Reijn
A group of friends decide to wait out a hurricane with a party in a mansion owned by one of their families, but when they decide to play a murder mystery whodunit game, things take a turn when one of them ends up dead for real. The rest of the night devolves into chaotic infighting and par🎉anoia as these Gen Zers turn against each other, each wondering which one among th♐em is the killer. Amandla Stenberg, Rachel Sennott, Pete Davidson, Maria Bakalova, and (amusingly) Lee Pace star.
28. 200 Cigarettes
Year: 1999
Director: Risa Bramon Garcia
You&rsq🎐uo;d think that this ensemble comedy, which counts Paul Rudd, Christina Ricci, Kate Hudson, Courtney Love, Dave Chappelle, and both Afflecks among its cast, would be a classic. And maybe that would be the case if 200 Cigarettes wasn’t notoriously impossible to rent or stream. But, if you do manage to get your hands on a physical copy, there’s plenty to love in this fun story about a group of young adults all trying to make it through New Year’s Eve in 1981, New York City.
27. Saturday Night
Year: 2024
Director: Jason Reitman
This showbiz flick takes place more or less in real-time on October 11, 1975, the evening that Saturday Night ♕Live’s first-ever episode would air. The Fabelmans' Gabriel LaBelle stars as SNL producer Lorne Michaels, who must do everything he can to keep his talented, outlandish cast of future icons like Chevy Chase and Gilda Radner in check while also fending off demands from network executives who don’t have faith in the untested sketch comedy show. Saturday Night gets a smidge treacly, but it’s a🐷 propulsively funny look at one of the more storied evenings in pop culture history.
26. Trap
Year: 2024
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
It’s actually not that big a deal that the first trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap spoiled the twist. Josh Hartnett plays a loving father of a daughter who takes his kid to a pop concert only to learn that the entire show is a trap because the authorities believe a dangerous serial killer is in attendance. The twist? Hartnett’s #GirlDad is secretly the Butcher! Trap is much more than just this fairly early reveal, though, and most of the movie is high-stakes thrills as you wonder how the Butcher is going to get out of this one time and time again. You might even findꦿ yourself rooting for him.
25. The Vast of Night
Year: 2019
Director: Andrew Patterson
This indie sci-fi flick takes place over one night in 1950s New Mexico when a disc jockey (Jake Horowitz) and his switchboard operator girlfriend (Sierra McCormick) p🐻ick up signals that could be alien visitors. As they go all across town trying to solve the mystery, these signals soon become more than just sound waves. Inspired, loosely, by a “real” UFO incident, The Vast of Night is an eerie, stylish throwback to an older, retro era of sci-fi with impressively modern cinematography.
24. Crawl
Year: 2019
Director: Alexandre Aja
Kaya Scodelario stars as a college swimmer who goes back hoꦦme to ensure that her estranged father (Barry Pepper) is heeding warnings to evacuate as a Category 5 hurricane barrels in. Once there, she finds her dad injured in the crawlspace—and there’s a huge alligator down there with them. As the water begins to rise due to the flooding and even more gators come looking for a meal, the father-daughter duo must find a way 🅺to avoid getting chomped on.
23. Margin Call
Year: 2011
Director: J. C. Chandor
A fictionalized account of the 24 hours before the 2008 financial crisis began in earnest, Margin Call stars Zachary Quinto as a young investment banker who stumbles upon something in the numbers that doesn’t look right. He passes it up the 💜chain to boss after boss (Paul Bettany, Kevin Spacey, and finally Jeremy Irons), and the firm scrambles to make sense of the data—and to try to do what they can to stay ahead of the looming financial disaster by any means necessary. Margin Call is as thrilling as any movie that’s just about people in suits talking about financial moves can possibly be.
22. Shiva Baby
Year: 2020
Director: Emma Seligman
Danielle (Rachel Sennott) is an aimless young woman who attends a shiva (part of the Jewish funeral process) for a family friend, only to discover that her ex-girlfriend and her current sugar daddy are both in attendance. Her parents are there, too, and so is the sugar daddy’s wife, and the tension mounts as Danielle tries to navigate a fraught and excruciating awkward afternoon. At just ☂78 minutes long, Shiva Baby is quite slight, but that’s also about probably all you can take because it's so wonderfully uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing that it’s a borderline horror movie.
21. Mikey and Nicky
Year: 1976
Director: Elaine May
Peter Falk and John Cassavetes star as the titular M꧑ikey and Nicky in Elaine May’s crime drama about a run-down petty crook, Nicky, who is convinced that the mob is going to have him killed because he stole a little money. Not knowing what else to do, he calls his oldest friend, Mikey, for help. The two friends, who seem to be drifting apart, spend the evening catching up and trying ꧂to get Nicky, who is erratic and difficult, to safety. Will this night end in renewed friendship or sadness?
20. Duel
Year: 1971
Director: Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg was only 24 years old (!) when he made his debut film, but this television movie is proof that Spielberg, arguably the greatest living director, was the real deal from the start. Duel follows David Mann, a salesman (Dennis Weaver) driving for business through Southern California, when he makes the innocent mistake of passing a semi-truck. The unseen driver of the truck develops a vendetta and spends the rest of the film trying to run down or otherwise terrorize David in his little sedan underneath the desert♛ sun. It’s basically Jaws with a truck.
19. Collateral
Year: 2004
Director: Michael Mann
One of the great Los Angeles moviܫes (and one of the relatively few that has nothing to do with Hollywood), Michael Mann’s Collateral stars Jamie Foxx as Max, a cab driver who has the misfortune of picking up a hitman (a subtly terrifying Tom Cruise) as a passenger. The killer, Vincent, holds Max hostage and forces him to drive him around LA all ni꧂ght while he takes out his targets. Jada Pinkett Smith and Mark Ruffalo also star in this cool, intense thriller.
18. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Year: 1986
Director: John Hughes
It’s right there in the title. Matthew Broderick’s supremely confident high schooler decides to play hooky, getting his best friend and girlfriend (Alan Ruck and Mia Sara, respectively) to ditch class with him and have the time of their lives in Chicago. Meanwhile, Ferris’ sister and his school’s dean of students are determined to catch him in the act. An ‘80s comedy classic from the great John Hughes, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is an effortlessly fun and charismatic story of youth, luck, and one really, really fun day. It's also still one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best teen movies of all time.
5. Tangerine
Year: 2015
Director: Sean Baker
Sean Baker, director of the Oscar-winning Anora, filmed this 2015 movie entirely on iPhones, but it's much more than just a cinematic gimmick. (And it looks pretty great, for what it was worth.) Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) is a trans hustler who gets out of ja𒁏il on Christmas Eve just in time to discover that her boyfriend is cheating on her. Together with her friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor), she traverses Hollywood looking for him in this energetic, very funny, and very compassionate look at 🤡an underrepresented community.
4. Night of the Living Dead
Year: 1968
Director: George A. Romero
Few cinematic nights are scarier than the Night of the Living Dead. One of the most important and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best horror movies ever made (and arguably the first "true" zombie movie), George A. Romero's masterpiece was an independent film made on a s🍃hoestring budget, 🐟but none of that takes away from how disturbing it is. Duane Jones and Judith O'Dea star as two individuals who, along with a few others, find themselves trapped in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse when the dead start emerging from the earth to feast on the living.
3. Die Hard
Year: 1988
Director: John McTiernan
Debate all you want if Die Hard is a Christmas movie or not: it is definitely a movie that takes place in just one day. Bruce Willis stars as John McClane, a New York cop who lands in Los Angeles to visit his estranged wife just in time to find himself in the middle of a hostage crisis when terrorists, led by Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber, take over the building where her company Christmas party is being held. As the night progresses, McClane must use all his cunning to overcome the odds and save the day in this, one of the all-time 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best action movies.
2. 12 Angry Men
Year: 1957
Director: Sidney Lumet
Henry Fonda leads this cast of a dozen in Sidney Lumet's iconic legal drama, which takes place on one, sweaty afternoon as members of a jury d🐻eliberate their verdict. Almost all of them think the defendant, an 18-year-old boy accused of killing his father, is guilty, but Juror 8 (Fonda) has his doubts. It's up to him to convince his fellow members of the jury that there are indeed reasonable doubts. One of the greatest films ever made, 12 Angry Men is a masterpiece, proving that you don't need a huge scale to have a massive movie; a handful of great actors working off a great screenplay in one room over one afternoon can be enough.
1. Do the Right Thing
Year: 1989
Director: Spike Lee
It's the hottest day of the summer in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, a masterful look at race in America. In Brooklyn's Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood, tensions are simmering between the African American population and the owners of an Italian-American pizzeria, and Mookie (Lee, who stars in addition to directing) soon finds himself right in the middle when things eventually come to a tragic, cathartic, and seemingly inevitable end. John Turturro, Rosie Perez, Bill Nunn, Danny Aiello, and Martin Lawrence also star in Do The Right Thing, a Great American Film that's as entertai🎐ning a✤s it is important.
James is an entertainment writer and editor with more than a decade of journalism experience. 🌜He has edited for Vulture, Inverse, and SYFY WIRE, and he’s written for TIME, Polygon, SPIN, Fatherly, GQ, and more. He is based in Los Angeles. He is really good at that one level of Mario Kart: Double Dash where you go down a volcano.
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