The best Norman Mailer’s movies

Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer

31/01/1923- 10/11/2007
Today we present the best Norman Mailer’s movies. If you are a great movie fan, you will surely know most of them, but we hope to discover a movie that you have not yet seen … and that you love! Let’s go there with the best Norman Mailer’s movies.
Genre:

Ragtime

Ragtime
7.3/10
  • Genre: Drama
  • Release: 20/11/1981
  • Character: Stanford White
A young black pianist becomes embroiled in the lives of an upper-class white family set among the racial tensions, infidelity, violence, and other nostalgic events in early 1900s New York City.

When We Were Kings

When We Were Kings
7.9/10
  • Genre: Documentary
  • Release: 25/10/1996
  • Character: Himself
It's 1974. Muhammad Ali is 32 and thought by many to be past his prime. George Foreman is ten years younger and the heavyweight champion of the world. Promoter Don King wants to make a name for himself and offers both fighters five million dollars apiece to fight one another, and when they accept, King has only to come up with the money. He finds a willing backer in Mobutu Sese Suko, the dictator of Zaire, and the "Rumble in the Jungle" is set, including a musical festival featuring some of America's top black performers, like James Brown and B.B. King.

Inside Deep Throat

Inside Deep Throat
6.7/10
In 1972, a seemingly typical shoestring budget pornographic film was made in a Florida hotel, "Deep Throat," starring Linda Lovelace. This film would surpass the wildest expectation of everyone involved to become one of the most successful independent films of all time. It caught the public imagination which met the spirit of the times, even as the self appointed guardians of public morality struggled to suppress it, and created, for a brief moment, a possible future where sexuality in film had a bold artistic potential. This film covers the story of the making of this controversial film, its stunning success, its hysterical opposition along with its dark side of mob influence and allegations of the on set mistreatment of the film's star.

Cremaster 2

Cremaster 2
6.5/10
  • Genre: Drama
  • Release: 01/01/1999
  • Character: Harry Houdini
CREMASTER 2 (1999) is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney's abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1 ...

Maidstone

Maidstone
4.7/10
  • Genre: Drama
  • Release: 01/01/1970
  • Character: Norman T. Kingsley
Over a booze-fueled, increasingly hectic five-day shoot in East Hampton, Norman Mailer and his cast and crew spontaneously unloaded onto film the lurid and loony chronicle of U.S. presidential candidate and filmmaker Norman T. Kingsley debating and attacking his hangers-on and enemies. This gonzo narrative, “an inkblot test of Mailer’s own subconscious” (Time), becomes something like a documentary on its own making when costar Rip Torn breaks the fourth wall in one of cinema’s most alarming on-screen outbursts.

King Lear

King Lear
5.5/10
  • Genre: ComedyDrama
  • Release: 17/05/1987
  • Character: The Great Writer (uncredited)
A descendant of Shakespeare tries to restore his plays in a world rebuilding itself after the Chernobyl catastrophe obliterates most of human civilization.

The Outsider

The Outsider
6.4/10
  • Genre: Documentary
  • Release: 04/12/2005
  • Character: Himself
Nicholas Jarecki follows director James Toback on the 12-day shoot of his thriller, When Will I Be Loved -- a movie made without a script or distribution deal.

Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

Diaries, Notes, and Sketches
7.4/10
  • Genre: Documentary
  • Release: 01/12/1969
  • Character: Self
An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.

Empire City

Empire City
7.5/10
Guided by seasoned New Yorkers, political figures, and cultural connoisseurs, "Empire City" examines Manhattan and its surrounding boroughs in order to paint a portrait of the ever-evolving metropolis. Appearing to be both adaptable and stubbornly stagnant, New York is a city of juxtapositions. As our narrator notes, "The city is too big, too diverse, and too complex for anyone to comprehend. New York is many cities interlaced with one another, each in constant independent motion."

Wild 90

Wild 90
3.5/10
  • Genre: CrimeDrama
  • Release: 08/01/1968
  • Character: Prince
Norman Mailer’s first feature filmmaking effort stars the director and his two longtime collaborators Buzz Farbar and Mickey Knox as a trio of gangsters holed up in a ramshackle New York apartment, drinking, braying, and fighting.

Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale

Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale
6.7/10
In 1955, Tobias Schneebaum disappeared into the depths of the Peruvian Amazon. He had no guide, no map, and only the vaguest of instructions: Keep the river on your right. A year later Schneebaum emerged from the jungle…naked, covered in body paint, and a modern-day cannibal. Titled after Schneebaum’s 1969 cult classic memoir about his formative experiences living in the Amazon, Keep The River On Your Right is the extraordinary stranger-than-fiction story of Schneebaum’s return to the jungle, 45 years after his original visit, to reunite with the very tribesmen he loved and who gave him nightmares for nearly half a century. A deeply affecting and searing portrait, sibling filmmakers Laurie and David Shapiro capture a man in utter conflict, a fearless adventurer, and one of the most charming, enigmatic, and perplexing men ever captured on screen.

The 50 Year Argument

The 50 Year Argument
6.6/10
  • Genre: Documentary
  • Release: 29/06/2014
  • Character: Himself
Follows the waves of literary, political, and cultural history as charted by the The New York Review of Books, America’s leading journal of ideas for over 50 years. Provocative, idiosyncratic and incendiary, the film weaves rarely seen archival material, contributor interviews, excerpts from writings by such icons as James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, and Joan Didion along with original verité footage filmed in the Review’s West Village offices.

Double Pisces, Scorpio Rising

Double Pisces, Scorpio Rising
One of the human trio is Dick Fontaine, the director, a thin, long-haired youth who has put together this highly personal exercise on something or other that runs, mercifully, for 58 minutes and comes from an English group of movie folk called the Tattooists. The second visitor to the animal abattoir is a pretty girl. The third is a porky, middle-aged man addicted to the expression, "Ya know?" The two men carry on a running argument about whether they should make a picture about pigs. "Are we making a movie, ya know?" says Fatso. "Where is it, ya know?" Then a bit later: "I'm making a movie about pigs, ya know?"

The Education of Gore Vidal

The Education of Gore Vidal
8.1/10
  • Genre: Documentary
  • Release: 30/06/2003
  • Character: Himself (archive footage)
A contrarian and wickedly funny man, "The Education of Gore Vidal" explores Vidal's extraordinary life and work, joining him at his cliff-side villa in Ravello, Italy.

Beyond the Law

Beyond the Law
4.4/10
  • Genre: ComedyCrimeDrama
  • Release: 02/04/1968
  • Character: Lt. Francis Xavier Pope
Takes place over the course of one feverish night in a Manhattan police precinct and neighboring bar.

Baby Trouble Hole

Baby Trouble Hole
  • Release: 29/09/1996
  • Character: Interviewed
Malga Kubiak stars in her exploration of sex and self. One woman's love to her own body interlaced with maggots; mixes x-rated porn. Voyeuristically titillating this avant-garde study of horrors of sex.

Town Bloody Hall

Town Bloody Hall
7.2/10
  • Genre: Documentary
  • Release: 03/04/1979
  • Character: Himself
Norman Mailer and a panel of feminists — Jacqueline Ceballos, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, and Diana Trilling — debate the issue of Women's Liberation.

Henry Kissinger: Secrets of a Superpower

Henry Kissinger: Secrets of a Superpower
6.2/10
Though Henry Kissinger is often giving short statements to the media, he refuses detailed interviews about his own life. Now he has agreed to answer questions about his person in an extensive documentary.

Related actors