10 Greatest R-Rated Masterpieces of the Last 50 Years, Ranked

What's in a rating? They are certainly no guarantors of a film's quality, but they can sometimes be pivotal to its success. It's hard to make a proper raunchy comedy or hardcore horror film when you're hamstrung by a PG-13 rating. Sometimes, for a film to tell its story properly, it needs to be free of any limitations on its content to make maximum impact. In other words, it needs to be rated R.

To be sure, there are plenty of bad R-Rated movies that use their freedom to explore darker or more extreme content like an edgelord teenager, but there are also those that use the rating wisely. They might employ it for a few well-placed expletives, or go much further with some over-the-top violence, but they are all using the rating as it was intended. The R-rating has only been in use since late 1968, and in the last 50 years, there have been hundreds of great movies that could have only been R-rated, but these ten are absolute masterpieces.

10 'The Big Lebowski' (1998)

R-Rated comedies can earn that rating in a lot of different ways. They can be foul-mouthed, like Clerks, or surprisingly violent, like Tropic Thunder, or feature lots of nudity, like any number of raunchy sex comedies. Those films and more are among the masterpiece comedies that have come out in the last 50 years, but if there's one hilarious comedy that earns its R-rating with a little bit of all the aforementioned elements, it's the Coen Brothers' ultimate cult classic, The Big Lebowski.

A Raymond Chandler noir filtered through a shaggy dog joke, this '90s comedy features Jeff Bridges in one of his most iconic roles. The Dude is a California slacker-stoner whose easygoing lifestyle is rudely interrupted when he is mistaken for a millionaire with the same surname and has his favorite rug soiled. That singular act pulls the Dude into a convoluted plot of colorful characters, including a group of nihilists, John Turturro's sex offender and John Goodman as his gun-toting, puppy preening, Jewish high holiday observing best friend.

9 'Before Sunset' (2004)

Richard Linklater's trilogy of romantic dramas starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy — Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight — are not the kind of R-rated movies that wear the rating on their sleeves. Instead, these thoughtful, introspective films, which chronicle the evolving relationship of Hawke and Delpy's characters over three separate days, each nine years apart, use the rating to create authentic dialogue unencumbered by any restraints.

Watching these two characters interact in such soft, intimately observed ways can often feel like overhearing a conversation of two real people as opposed to watching two actors play pretend on screen. Collectively, the Before trilogy is a masterpiece of post-modern cinema, with each film a perfectly crafted, singular piece. Everyone might have their favorite, but it's hard to argue with the warmly poignant middle film.

8 'Perfect Blue' (1997)

Animation isn't just for kids. That's a plainly obvious observation, but one that bears repeating given the consistent disservice with which the medium is treated by some. There are numerous R-rated animated masterpieces that have been released in the last 50 years, with classics as varied as Akira, Waltz with Bashir, and Anomalisa. There's also the surreal R-rated entries by Satoshi Kon, which include the mesmerizing Paprika and the brilliantly disturbing masterpiece Perfect Blue.

This highly influential psychological thriller follows Mima, a one-time Japanese pop star whose transition to full-time acting in an emotionally distressing role, coupled with an obsessive fan stalking her, causes her to lose her grip on reality. As people in her life begin to get murdered, Mima becomes further unraveled, questioning her sanity and capacity for violence. It's a stylish, psychological horror masterpiece from a master filmmaker gone too soon.

7 'Alien' (1979)

Not all science fiction lends itself to R ratings. The vast reaches of space or the far-flung future of Earth don't always necessitate explicit content, but when you've got an alien species with acid for blood that gestates in a human host's chest before bursting out, the rating helps. Ridley Scott's Alien is as visceral and atmospheric a sci-fi film as has ever been made, with a tactile, lived-in quality to its spaceship setting that makes the horrors that unfold there all the more harrowing.

When a group of space truckers' journey back home is interrupted by a distress signal from an alien planet, they touch down to investigate, only to have one of them get a faceful of alien attached. Alien is as perfectly designed a film as its antagonist is a killing machine. The set design, creature effects and cinematography are all iconic, as are the performances by the incredible cast, with Sigourney Weaver evolving into a movie star right before the audience's eyes.

6 'The Thing' (1982)

Alien isn't the only extra-terrestrial terror to make the most of its R-rating. John Carpenter's Earth-bound horror masterpiece also features an alien antagonist that rips its way through a small cast of character actors, only this one prefers to imitate its prey in order to hunt it. The Thing is that rare remake that fully improves upon the original, by going back to the source material, the novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr., and upgrading the monster into a true terror from hell.

When a shapeshifting alien makes its way to an Antarctic research station, it quickly goes to work shredding through the crew and then imitating its victims in order to stay hidden. The paranoia of the plot is palpable, thanks to Carpenter's masterful pacing and eclectic casting, including a world-weary Kurt Russell in the lead. When paranoia gives way to full-blown horror, it's the incredible practical effects work by Rob Bottin that takes center stage with some truly astounding gore that earns that R-rating and then some.

5 'Mad Max: Fury Road' (2015)

R-rated action doesn't get more blistering than in George Miller's fourth entry in his post-apocalyptic franchise, Mad Max: Fury Road. The series started as a dystopic revenge thriller married to its exploitation roots, evolved into a full-blown wasteland Western in the sequel, then softened for a Peter Pan-inspired fable. It all came roaring back to bloody, diesel-fueled life for this belated sequel. Fury Road puts its title character right in the middle of a full-throated feminist rebuke of a bloated patriarchy that rules with a toxic fist.

The plot involves Max becoming a reluctant accomplice to Furiosa, a truck-driving badass who rebels against her overlord in order to save his slave wives and take them to a new home. That's all the exposition that's needed to kick off one movie-long car chase that cuts across the desert with reckless abandon in a flurry of stunts, effects and some bone-crushing kills. Mad Max: Fury Road is as perfect an action film as has ever been made.

4 'Unforgiven' (1992)

Hollywood's Western output in the last 40 years pales in comparison to the genre's golden age, which saw gunslinging classics slung out at an impressive rate. While the quantity may have dropped since then, the quality certainly hasn't, and with the lifting of the production code and loosening of content restrictions, many more modern Westerns have brought violent revisionism to the genre in some gritty masterpieces. That grit doesn't get any truer than in Clint Eastwood's final Western, Unforgiven.

Bringing the weight of a career forged in the genre, Eastwood plays aging outlaw William Munny, who's killed just about everything that's walked or crawled at one time or another. He's called out of retirement for one last job, which puts him into conflict with Gene Hackman's heinous sheriff, Little Bill. Unforgiven washes away all the sentiment of the Old West to give a dusty, dirty account of the hardened men who inhabited it and the violence they used to tame it.

3 'Do the Right Thing' (1989)

Some dramas demand an R rating, like those that deal with sensitive subject matter that shouldn't be sanitized, or which depict cultures where soft language can't possibly accurately depict them with any true authenticity. Both are true for Spike Lee's pulsing Do the Right Thing, which deals with race relations in America through the microcosm of a Brooklyn neighborhood on a hot summer's day.

Lee himself plays the pivotal character of Mookie, who works at the Italian-owned pizzeria centered in a now predominantly Black neighborhood. The changing racial makeup of the neighborhood is front and center in the minds of the characters, and tensions eventually boil over to violence in the film's incendiary climax that demands attention and implores discussion. Do the Right Thing is vibrant cinema and a raw R-Rated masterpiece.

2 'Zodiac' (2007)

Thrillers don't often need to rely on more explicit content to create suspense. Just look at almost every one of Alfred Hitchcock's films for proof of that. That doesn't mean that R-Rated thrillers haven't found ways to up the ante on the genre with more unrestrained content that makes the terror and intensity all the more palpable. The last 50 years have given us all sorts of sordid thrillers, including The Silence of the Lambs, Prisoners, Nightcrawler and David Fincher's greatest masterpiece, Zodiac.

A recounting of the Zodiac killings that haunted the Bay Area through the late '60s and '70s, Fincher's immaculately made serial killer chronicle focuses more on the obsessiveness of the men who devoted themselves to solving the murders than the man who perpetrated them. That obsessiveness doesn't inherently bring with it the need for blood and carnage. Still, it's in the harrowing recreations of the Zodiac crimes that the film earns its rating, and they are some of the most unsettling and dispassionate depictions of violence ever committed to film.

1 'Goodfellas' (1990)

If there's any genre that simply cannot be made in the modern era with any real authenticity without an R rating, it's gangster movies. These are films dealing with violent criminals who don't speak softly or politely, and they've featured in some of the greatest masterpieces of the last 50 years, including Pulp Fiction, City of God and The Long Good Friday. Those are all must-sees, but they aren't Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas.

Based on the Nicholas Pillegi novel Wiseguy, the film chronicles the rise and fall of real-life gangster Henry Hill, played with electric intensity by Ray Liotta, who rose through the ranks of the Lucchese crime family. Far from the romanticism of The Godfather, Scorsese's film focuses on the workaday gangster. It illustrates the lure a life of crime can have, the grind that it can be and the inevitable death that it results in. Goodfellas is an American masterpiece by one of the greatest directors of all time.