Movies you can only watch once

By Ben Olson Reader Staff

There is something magical about a well-made film. Some are filled to the brim with great writing, acting and a plot that drives itself. These are the gems we watch over and over again because they never get old. I’m talking about films like Forrest Gump, The Shawshank Redemption, Die Hard and others. Hitting play feels like revisiting an old friend you always enjoy spending time with.

Then there are the films that should only be watched once. It’s not that they aren’t great in their own rights. Some might be so raw or gory that a second viewing is not recommended. Others have plot surprises that make watching over again seem futile. Still others are just so emotionally draining, the thought of delving back into that world is painful.

Whatever reason you deem appropriate, the following films are worth watching, but only once. Warning: the following may contain spoilers.

American History X

To call American History X a “tough watch” is putting it lightly. This 1998 film directed by Tony Kaye and written by David McKenna takes a hard dive into racism, hatred, injustices in the prison system and, ultimately, stopping the cycle of passing hate on to the next generation. It’s a violent, unsettling film that is driven by Edward Norton’s Academy-Award nominated performance as a neo-Nazi who goes to prison after killing and wounding two Black teenagers who tried to steal his car (including a horribly graphic scene where Norton’s character curb stomps the would-be car thief). Norton’s character gets out of prison and vows to change his ways, mostly thanks to befriending a Black inmate who showed him a light out of the tunnel of prejudice.

The Whale

Right off the bat, I have to take my hat off to Brenden Fraser for his Oscar-winning performance in The Whale. This 2022 film was directed by Darren Aronofsky, a filmmaker noted for producing surreal, melodramatic works that contain disturbing elements. It was written by Samuel D. Hunter, based on his play of the same name about a shut-in, morbidly obese man who teaches English online and struggles to repair a strained relationship with his teenage daughter.

The Whale is a slow burn psychological drama that takes us along with Fraser’s character as he literally attempts to eat himself to death. It’s not recommended to eat dinner while watching The Whale. Just watching Fraser’s character tuck into an entire bucket of KFC was enough to curb my appetite for the evening.

There are a lot of metaphors at work behind Aronofsky’s film, including how we treat those who are extremely obese and what that says about our own characters. The film isn’t without its flaws, but it firmly helped launch Fraser out of a decade of being greylisted from Hollywood, culminating in a touching six-minute standing ovation after the movie screened at the Venice Film Fest.

The Sixth Sense

When The Sixth Sense came out in 1999, it became a cultural phenomenon thanks to a plot twist ending that seemed to take everyone by surprise. For years after, it was quite common to hear someone say the line, “I see dead people.”

The film was directed by M. Night Shyamalan and starred Bruce Willis as Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist whose patient Cole Sear, played by Haley Joel Osment, claims he can see and talk to dead people.

Months before working with the boy, Malcolm arrived home with his wife to find a former patient waiting in his home. The patient shoots Malcolm and then himself and we pick up months later as Malcolm works with the troubled 9-year-old Sear.

Throughout the course of the film, we are firmly inside Malcolm’s world, viewing Cole’s delusions with empathy and concern. As we near the end of the film, as Malcolm returns home to his wife crying and talking in her sleep, it dawns on him that things are not what they band Uncle Tupelo before forming Wilco and finding critical and commercial success. Wilco’s album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot gained widespread critical acclaim and the follow-up A Ghost is Born received a Grammy for Best Alternative Album in 2005. seemed. In a plot twist that had people talking for years, the hammer drops and we find that Malcolm never survived the altercation that started the film off, and his patient Cole really does see dead people.

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The film is made beautifully, with some excellent foreshadowing that is subtle enough to fool you the first watch, but not subsequent viewings (such as the color red only appearing anytime the real world has been affected by the ‘other’ world), making this a perfect one-and-done film.

Schindler’s List

Even films that win Best Picture at the Oscars can be difficult to watch more than once. Steven Spielberg’s 1993 historical epic Schindler’s List doesn’t shy away from showing the horrors of the Holocaust. Telling the story of a courageous man named Oskar Schindler (played expertly by Liam Neeson) credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust, Schindler’s List is powerful, moving and heartbreaking. It’s a film everyone should watch at least once.

By Marcia Pilgeram Reader Columnist

My birthday was last week. Every year as it draws close, I use the day as a yardstick to measure my goals list for the last birthday. I acknowledge the ones I’ve accomplished, then forgive myself and forge ahead with those I didn’t quite get tackled, continuing to chip away at the overly ambitious list I created for my 60th birthday. I also spend an excessive amount of time thinking about my mother.

For years, as my birthday approached, Mom would repeat her mantra to anyone in earshot, “You know, Marcia was supposed to be born on April Fool’s Day, but she fooled me and came a day late.”

For years, I rolled my eyes whenever she delivered this comment. So now I close my eyes, wishing she was near, savoring all my memories of my momma, including her full report of the record snow that fell in Bozeman, Mont., the week I was born: “We barely made it to the hospital; there wasn’t another car on the road (from Trident, where we lived, 25 miles away).”

My mother was salt of the earth, black-and-white factual, never one to embellish a story, but we all know that anecdotal tales have a way of taking on their own life, and it seemed to me that each time she repeated the story, the snow got deeper. So, this year on my birthday, curiosity took me down the information highway for fact-checking. Sure enough, Mom’s memory held to the facts. It was a doozy of a storm and may still keep the record for snowfall.

As I was scouring the internet for the information, I came across another brutal Montana winter, and this one I remembered all too well. It was an arctic cold snap from Canada. Overnight, temperatures plunged to 30 below and