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Portlanders love old movies. That’s obvious each weekend at our independent cinemas, where crowds line up coffee in hand for noir matinees at Cinema 21, slosh IPAs onto the carpet of the Hollywood Theatre while hitting a 35 mm kung fu feature, and sell out revival showings everywhere from the Academy to Cinemagic. There’s a reason why WW’s weekly film coverage is anchored by a repertory screenings column. We never have to look far to find a flick—from 1910 to 2010—that absolutely slaps.
And Oregonians like seeing our state on the big screen. Even when a movie is the rankest of trash—say, The Postman or Without a Paddle—we’ll still pause from clicking to see which town it was shot in (Redmond and Estacada, respectively).
You wouldn’t be crazy, however, for feeling like many of Oregon’s best films are turning into ancient history.
The cream of our state’s Westerns (Canyon Passage, Day of the Outlaw) are best remembered by academics. Our biggest Oscar winner (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) turns 50 this month. Gus Van Sant’s iconic visions of Old Portland are, well, getting old. Most of the people who made Animal House are dead. So is the whale from Free Willy. Even The Goonies (made in 1985) lands outside the current nostalgia cycle for the 1990s and early 2000s.
But a new quarter century is now in the books, and while the name recognition of movies shot in Oregon may be slightly less than it was 30 years ago, the quality of filmmaking is as daring, ingenious and homegrown as ever. During that time, Oregon grew a powerhouse stop-motion studio, as well as one genuine, world-class auteur—who isn’t a household name like Van Sant or Todd Haynes, but rivals them both for a personal vision. (You’ll find her work four times below, including all over the top 10.)
To make the list that follows, we set some rules. Movies had to be shot either entirely or significantly in the state, with extra points awarded if Oregon acts as a character in the film. So no British Columbia standing in, à la Antlers. No one-scene wonders like The Ring or Into the Wild. Film quality and Oregon bona fides are the backbone of the list.
From animated neoclassics to enamel-grinding thrillers, these are the 25 best Oregon-made movies of the past 25 years. Read on, and find some new movies to love.
25. Twilight (2008)
Director: Catherine Hardwicke
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson
Oregon locations: Silver Falls State Park, Vernonia, St. Helens
Where to watch: Hulu, Disney+, Jan. 3 at Tomorrow Theater
The first entry of the Twilight Saga—easily the best of the bunch due to Catherine Hardwicke’s love affair with green tinting and gleefully strange tone management—has aged into a piece of singularly fun low art. No Hollywood studio today would ever allow prized intellectual property to glitter, pout and play 1920s-inspired vampire baseball this way. Better yet, everything strange about Twilight feels like an unconscious byproduct of the core Bella-Edward sexual repression the movie has no idea what to do with, so it spills out into eccentricities you could never intentionally replicate.
24. Calvin Marshall (2009)
Director:Gary Lundgren
Starring: Alex Frost, Steve Zahn
Oregon locations: Ashland, Medford
Where to watch: Tubi, Amazon
Gary Lundgren is among the most dependable Oregon filmmakers of the past 15 years, but the charm of his debut remains his high-water mark. Playing like Bull Durham for Southern Oregon JUCO baseball, Calvin Marshall soaks in the ever-comforting vibes and paradoxes of amateur sports. College athlete hopeful Calvin (Alex Frost) chases his version of small-time glory opposite a comedically bittersweet Steve Zahn performance. Zahn’s the ball coach who’s torn up inside that he didn’t make it further than this. One man’s shame is another’s highest ideal.
23. Borrufa (2020)
Director: Roland Dahwen
Starring: Heldáy de la Cruz, Alma García, Antonio Luna
Oregon locations: Portland, Sauvie Island
Where to watch: Kanopy
When slow cinema is successful, a switch flips in the audience’s psyche. The work of patience turns to total freedom, as viewers sense they’re free to notice and ponder anything they like during the many entrancing, seven-minute static shots of Borrufa. Inspired by the work of directors like Abbas Kiarostami and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Portland filmmaker Roland Dahwen lets his nonactors command the frame with their body language, finding subtlety in the immigrant experience of a Guatemalan family struggling to cope with marital betrayal. If you want an audience to understand a character, have them observe that character’s life in unbroken time.
22. Why Dig When You Can Pluck (2024)
Director: Cambria Matlow
Starring: Sol Marina Crespo, Patrick D. Green
Oregon locations: Arch Cape, Southern Oregon Coast
Where to watch: Coming to streaming mid-2026
Dramatizing the psychological tug-of-war inside artists raising kids, Why Dig When You Can Pluck is a bracing look at a family vacation sliding gradually off the rails. Portland indie filmmaker Cambria Matlow (Woodsrider) lays the trap of expectations, as Spring (a filmmaker played by Sol Marina Crespo) hopes to explore her muse on this trip alongside a child and a partner with other ideas. What ensues is an ever-shifting balance of attention, concern and familial power. Sure, inspiration can be plucked from even the most compromised experiences. But, oh, the cost.
21. The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal (2001)
Director: Matt McCormick
Starring: Miranda July (narrator)
Oregon locations: Burnside Bridge, Western Meat Market, Centennial Mills
Where to watch: YouTube
Multidisciplinary artist Matt McCormick earns this spot for exploring an art form that 99% of Portlanders probably haven’t noticed, much less considered art: the off-color rectangles on urban architecture created by government efforts to paint over street art. Narrated by Miranda July, The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal both demonstrates how prevalent and varied these splotches are via a silent bike tour around town, and makes a convincing case that graffiti removal is “the ruling class” creating art through repression. In 13 mesmerizing minutes, the evidence of municipal conservatism turns from comically ugly to accidentally beautiful.
20. Strange Darling (2023)
Director: JT Mollner
Starring: Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner
Oregon locations: Portland metro area, Mount Hood National Forest
Where to watch: VOD (Fandango, Apple TV)
With a first act resembling a silent Quentin Tarantino movie, the breakout film by JT Mollner (director of The Long Walk) sees an encounter between a serial killer and a would-be victim spiral savagely into the woods. Strange Darling’s twists and turns are bolstered by expertly calibrated overacting by its two leads and a color-obsessed debut cinematography effort by actor Giovanni Ribisi. Oregon ferns are represented many times on this list, but they’re a different magnitude of green when stylishly juxtaposed with Willa Fitzgerald’s bleeding ear and blindingly red hospital scrubs, as she runs for her life in slow motion.
19. Wild (2014)
Director: Jean-Marc Vallée
Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern
Oregon locations: Ashland, Smith Rock, Crater Lake, Bridge of the Gods
Where to watch: VOD (Amazon, Apple TV)
Cheryl Strayed’s 1,100-mile soul search up the Pacific Crest Trail was transformed into inspirational rocket fuel by this 2014 movie adaptation. But more importantly, the film does a beautiful job of preserving the author’s lyrical narration, and Reese Witherspoon’s performance as Strayed is equally watchable during self-destructive and perseverant moments. There aren’t many great movies that use the Oregon wilderness for uplifting ends. So Wild gets the nod as a testament to the paradoxical empowerment that comes from feeling dwarfed by natural wonders. Leave the baggage on the trail and walk it off.
18. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
Director: Scott Glosserman
Starring: Nathan Baesel, Angela Goethals, Robert Englund
Oregon locations: Banks, Troutdale, Multnomah County Central Library
Where to watch: AMC+, VOD (Amazon, Google Play, Apple TV)
Jamie Kennedy’s “rules” speech from Scream looks like kindergarten analysis compared with Behind the Mask’s full-tilt deconstruction of the slasher subgenre. The indie horror film is boldly inventive, positing a world where horror icons (like Freddy, Jason and Michael) are accepted as real, and a young clout-chaser named Leslie Vernon (Baesel) is looking to join their pantheon with one grand stabby night. Mixing mockumentary, parody and audio commentary over hypothetical scenarios, Behind the Mask is a fun diagnostic right up until it brazenly challenges viewers whether they’ve been paying attention.
17. Elephant (2003)
Director: Gus Van Sant
Starring: Alex Frost, Eric Deulen
Oregon locations: Whitaker Middle School, Northeast Portland
Where to watch: VOD (Amazon, Google Play, Apple TV)
For anyone with the stomach to revisit Gus Van Sant’s Palme d’Or winner, Elephant has aged fascinatingly. The formalist school-shooting drama is both prescient and naive about the decades of horror to come. Van Sant’s close third-person camerawork simulates the terrifying blindness of most characters. And there’s no more fitting metaphor for America’s school violence quagmire than the drunken dad who opens the movie, crashing his car while driving his son (Duelen) to school. The kids may not be all right, but the adults are asleep at the wheel.
16. The Hunted (2003)
Director: William Friedkin
Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Benicio del Toro
Oregon locations: Silver Falls State Park, downtown Portland
Where to watch: Paramount+
It’s hard to argue that The Hunted is top-tier William Friedkin (see: The Exorcist, The French Connection, Sorcerer). But this once lukewarmly received action movie looks better crafted with each passing year. After all, we aren’t getting a lot of ruggedly shot, Old Testament-inflected, knife-fight-driven films starring two Oscar winners in theaters today. Behold the brutal Sayoc Kali blade choreography, stoic performances and themes of a tracker (Jones) and a fugitive (del Toro) being reduced to the mere shape of their violent natures. Also, in true Friedkin fashion, he added another chase to the script just because he thought the Hawthorne Bridge looked awesome.
15. Lean On Pete (2017)
Director: Andrew Haigh
Starring: Charlie Plummer, Steve Buscemi
Oregon locations: Portland Meadows racetrack, Burns
Where to watch: Tubi, VOD (Google Play, Apple TV)
Portland Meadows closed for good in 2019, but it lives on in Lean On Pete. At the track, 15-year-old orphan Charley (Plummer) becomes so attached to a third-rate racehorse that he kidnaps the animal and absconds eastward across Oregon looking for his long-lost aunt. Based on a Willy Vlautin novella, Andrew Haigh’s Oregon feature is a heartbreaker to be sure, but it speaks clearly to the way teenagers need to feel guided by something—anything—that feels true to them, even if it makes no sense in the bigger picture. The bigger picture, as seen in the addiction, violence and destitution of Lean On Pete, makes no greater sense anyway.
14. Thumbsucker (2005)
Director: Mike Mills
Starring: Lou Pucci, Tilda Swinton, Keanu Reeves
Oregon locations: Tualatin High School, Mount Tabor Park, Portland International Airport
Where to watch: VOD (Google Play, Apple TV)
Mike Mills (director of 20th Century Women and Beginners) has always had a way with families, even going back to his feature debut. Here, we follow a doe-eyed Portland teenager (Pucci) who covertly sucks his thumb to cope with all the standard teenage indignities, plus the broken dreams of his parents (Swinton and Vincent D’Onofrio). But the show is stolen and whisked to another dimension by Keanu Reeves, who plays the thumbsucker’s concerned orthodontist. Reeves’ character is hilariously freewheeling with his advice (from self-empowerment to hypnosis) while also seeming to go through his own identity crisis every time he reappears in the movie.
13. Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023)
Director: Rachel Lambert
Starring: Daisy Ridley, Dave Merheje
Oregon locations: Astoria, John Day River
Where to watch: Mubi
All due respect to The Goonies and the lost reels of The Fisherman’s Bride (1909), Astoria has never looked better in a movie than in Sometimes I Think About Dying. The in-town deer, the bridge in morning light, the rain forest—their grandeur act as the externalization of protagonist Fran’s inner world. She’s a timid port authority office worker who experiences ornate, self-annihilating fantasies, and Daisy Ridley delivers a master class in drawing the audience toward her while pushing other characters away. It’s a sticky, thematic question whether Fran needs professional help or just exists in harmony with the mythic dreariness of Astoria, where all life threatens to slide into the river eventually.
12. Mean Creek (2004)
Director: Jacob Aaron Estes
Starring: Rory Culkin, Josh Peck
Oregon locations: Boring, Sandy, Estacada
Where to watch: VOD (Apple TV, Amazon)
Winner of the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award in 2004, Mean Creek is a gut-punch cousin of Stand By Me tailored to the Bush era. A canoe trip becomes the locus of innocence lost as a group of friends invites their bully onto the river to embarrass him. Instead of “You guys want to see a dead body?” Mean Creek’s central question becomes “What’s the worst that could happen if we hurt this guy?” Rory Culkin’s kicked-dog facial expression serves as a haunting avatar for the whole proceedings, as director Estes carefully endeavors to show how all the kids still possess private, innocent worlds that are completely undone by posturing once they’re together.
11. Wendy and Lucy (2008)
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Starring: Michelle Williams, Will Patton, Larry Fessenden
Oregon locations: North Lombard and Russell streets, Salem
Where to watch: Mubi, Tubi
Jon Raymond and Kelly Reichardt saw into Portland’s street-level future in this quietly harrowing story of a solitary woman (Wendy) and her loyal pup (Lucy) stranded with their busted car. Wendy and Lucy anxiously translates the geometric problem of doing anything without a social safety net. Feeding the dog, negotiating with a mechanic, making a phone call, getting a safe night’s sleep—the most basic actions become terrifyingly dramatic. And they’re all given extra juice by the film’s “stranger comes to town” premise. We’re wondering how Wendy got here just as much as whether she’ll make it.
10. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Gregory Mann, Ewan McGregor
Oregon locations: ShadowMachine
Where to watch: Netflix
Visually arresting, proudly unsettling, and the closest thing this century to Will Vinton’s tonally unbound vision for stop-motion animation, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio inhabits the darker side of this Pygmalion fable. Gepetto’s a trauma-stricken drunk, Mussolini reigns over the 1930s Italian setting, and Pinocchio must confront the meaning of his unnatural life through constant cycles of death and reanimation. Del Toro’s take on the underwater leviathan scene (a dogfish here, not a whale) is especially breathtaking, and the character designs appear more carved than molded—an apt presentation considering the craggy aesthetics of the wooden boy.
9. Leave No Trace (2018)
Director: Debra Granik
Starring: Thomasin McKenzie, Ben Foster
Oregon locations: Eagle Fern Park, Tumala Mountain
Where to watch: VOD (Google Play, Apple TV)
Debra Granik may have the sharpest eye for young talent in independent film. She discovered Jennifer Lawrence for 2010’s Winter’s Bone, and in Leave No Trace, she launched Thomasin McKenzie’s career. Here, McKenzie plays a preteen girl living in Forest Park with her reclusive father (Ben Foster). It’s an incredibly well-studied drama, the kind that considers how combat veterans could teach their kids to camouflage themselves inside sword ferns or use downed evergreen branches to insulate body heat on a freezing night. But what really drives Leave No Trace are the conflicts between an overprotective father and a daughter whose life deserves to be more than survival.
8. Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)
Director: Travis Knight
Starring: Art Parkinson, Charlize Theron, Matthew McConaughey
Oregon locations: Laika Studios
Where to watch: Netflix
Kubo and the Two Strings isn’t quite Laika’s best film (read on), but it is the Hillsboro animation studio’s most impressive flex. Kubo takes the devoted, handmade qualities of all Laika’s films and explodes them into a fantasy-action epic. At the time of its release, this tale of an orphan boy questing across feudal Japan certainly boasted more sets, characters, folklore, katana duels, and overall frame-by-frame wizardry than any prior Laika film. Director Travis Knight and his animators rightfully nabbed Academy Award nominations (Best Animated Feature, Best Visual Effects) for their efforts.
7. How to Die in Oregon (2011)
Director: Peter Richardson
Starring: Cody Curtis, Raymond Carnay, Nancy Niedzielski
Oregon locations: OHSU, Portland Japanese Garden, Dexter
Where to watch: Tubi, VOD (Apple TV, Amazon)
From 1997 to 2008, Oregon was the only state to have a Death With Dignity law, giving terminally ill Oregonians the right to end their lives with prescription medication rather than suffer. Even though 10 other states have since followed suit, the documentary How to Die in Oregon hasn’t lost an ounce of its wrecking-ball power. This kind of intimacy doesn’t age, as we witness the final acts of Oregonians processing their mortality. No screenwriter could approximate the pure, existential clarity that these ordinary people communicate in the days and minutes before undertaking the ultimate act of self-determination.
6. Meek’s Cutoff (2010)
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Starring: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Paul Dano
Oregon locations: Central Oregon High Desert near Burns
Where to watch: Mubi, Peacock
The unforgiving beauty of Eastern Oregon’s high desert sets the stakes for Kelly Reichardt’s feminist Western. Meek’s Cutoff presents the survival dilemma of an 1840s wagon train guided by real-life frontiersman Stephen Meek (Greenwood). The pioneers are hopelessly off course, and the women in the party (Williams, Zoe Kazan, Shirley Henderson) must decide whether they’ll follow the guide and the husbands who got them lost or the Cayuse stranger (Ron Rondeaux) the party has kidnapped. Suggesting both the lunacy and relentlessness of Manifest Destiny, Meek’s Cutoff feels like a miracle if you consider that Reichardt had run out of money, time and actors for the film’s poetic ending.
5. Coraline (2009)
Director: Henry Selick
Starring: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Keith David
Oregon locations: Laika Studios
Where to watch: VOD (Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon)
Having launched Laika Studios and cemented Henry Selick’s reputation as a stop-motion genius, Coraline stands above all other animated movies on this list. It’s a stunningly realized fantasy tale of a girl who moves to Southern Oregon with her wet-blanket parents and discovers a portal to a vibrant mirror image of her boring new existence. This is stop-motion at its best because the painstaking attention to craft inflects the story. After all, Coraline explores a constructed reality in the mirrored world, so there’s a real resonance to the seams showing, as though it’s the artists themselves both luring and warning the protagonist about this netherworld. Coraline is also arguably the movie on this list whose reputation has grown the most since its release, grossing more than $52 million from a 2024 theatrical rerelease alone. (The reputation of the source material’s author, Neil Gaiman? That’s another story.)
4. Green Room (2015)
Director: Jeremy Saulnier
Starring: Patrick Stewart, Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat
Oregon locations: Clackamas, Astoria, Mount Hood National Forest
Where to watch: VOD (Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon)
The best Oregon action movie of the past 25 years, Green Room is a rip-shit, claustrophobic throwdown between a cornered punk band and neo-Nazi rock club proprietors. Director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin, Rebel Ridge) proves via pit bull jaws, box cutters, and shotgun blasts that the only upper limit to his intensity is the audience’s ability not to have a collective aneurysm. Come for the tragically brief glimpse into Anton Yelchin’s leading-man career; stay for the haunting prediction of how emboldened Oregon’s ultra-far right would become in the years immediately after Green Room’s release.
3. Old Joy (2006)
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Starring: Daniel London, Will Oldham
Oregon locations: Bagby Hot Springs, Colton Market, Northeast Portland
Where to watch: HBO Max
Kelly Reichardt’s first Oregon-made feature memorializes the last gasp of a friendship. Two middle-aged Portlanders, Mark and Kurt (London and Oldham), embark on a meditative, melancholic camping weekend, culminating in a stunningly photographed Bagby Hot Springs soak (back when Bagby was a hidden gem). Mark and Kurt clearly represent contrasting takes on adulthood but also two ways of being in Portland—the settler and the drifter—testing what they still have in common as the city changes around them. Scored with any eerie sadness by Yo La Tengo, Old Joy is Reichardt’s first of six collaborations with Portland author Jon Raymond. He’s responsible for the unforgettable sentiment of the paraphrased title: “Sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy.”
2. Pig (2021)
Director: Michael Sarnoski
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff
Oregon locations: Skyline Tavern, Saucebox (RIP), Estacada
Where to watch: Netflix, VOD (Apple TV, Amazon)
This critical text in Nicolas Cage’s recent renaissance is courageously quiet, as Cage dispenses with freak-outs and trusts first-time filmmaker Michael Sarnoski to bare the actor’s soul. A standout scene at the now-shuttered Saucebox restaurant is one of the most restrained, yet affecting, of Cage’s career. That said, Pig is also a thriller about a woodland hermit bare-knuckle boxing his way through Portland’s fictional culinary underground while trying to recover his prized truffle-hunting pig. The only way it could be more of an Oregon film is if the truffle hunters who trained Cage in their foraging ways—Stefan and Christopher Czarnecki—hadn’t stopped the actor from eating dirt while getting into character, per Willamette Week’s 2021 reporting.
1. First Cow (2019)
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Starring: John Magaro, Orion Lee
Oregon locations: Oxbow Regional Park, Sauvie Island, Elkton
Where to watch: Tubi, VOD (Google Play, Apple TV)
Reichardt’s most recent Oregon film finds the director at the absolute top of her game: utterly controlled, richly imaginative, and historically obsessed. First Cow is a glimpse into Oregon’s territorial years via an unexpected friendship between a cook (Magaro) and a fugitive (Lee). Together, they secretly start milking the territory’s first (and only) cow, stealing the key ingredient for their version of a doughnut pop-up. The sweet-faced bovine becomes a microcosm for the next 200 years of ingenuity, inequality and unstoppable modernity to come. In addition to being superbly acted and deeply tender, First Cow gets the No. 1 spot because it confirms a key Reichardt quality: She doesn’t just make movies in Oregon; she makes movies of Oregon. What’s more, in a contemporary cinema landscape where settings are increasingly likely to be green screens and afterthoughts, she cultivates a sense of place better than any other active American filmmaker.
Honorable Mentions:
Film Geek (2005)
Zerophilia (2005)
Clear Cut: The Story of Philomath, Oregon (2006)
Dance Party USA (2006)
Paranoid Park (2007)
Cold Weather (2010)
ParaNorman (2012)
C.O.G. (2013)
Redwood Highway (2013)
Our Bodies Our Doctors (2019)
The Mortuary Collection (2019)
Clementine (2019)
Forgive Us Our Debts (2020)
Frank & Zed (2020)
Showing Up (2022)
