You’d think that Matt Damon broke out as a star in the early 2000s with The Bourne Identity, but he had already delivered a handful of major hits in the 1990s. The first was Good Will Hunting, which grossed more than $225 million worldwide and won Damon and Ben Affleck Oscars for their original screenplay. The very next year, Damon played the titular role in Steven Spielberg‘s Saving Private Ryan, which grossed nearly $500 million worldwide. In 1999, he showed the world that he could also play more complex characters and delivered arguably his slipperiest performance ever. The 1999 movie is currently streaming on Peacock in the United States, but not for much longer.
It was based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith and directed by the late Anthony Minghella. The movie also featured Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Produced on a reported budget of $40 million, it grossed nearly $130 million worldwide and received five nominations at the Oscars. It was nominated in the Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor categories, but Damon was curiously overlooked at both the Oscars and the BAFTAs.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Here’s How Long You Have Left To Watch Matt Damon’s Psychological Thriller
We’re talking, of course, about The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which Damon played the titular murderer who targets a wealthy playboy in Europe. The movie now holds a “Certified Fresh” 85% critics’ score and an 80% audience score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, “With Matt Damon’s unsettling performance offering a darkly twisted counterpoint to Anthony Minghella’s glossy direction, The Talented Mr. Ripley is a suspense thriller that lingers.”
A ravishing new adaptation of Highsmith’s novel was written and directed by Scott Frank for Netflix. It featured Andrew Scott in the role made famous by Damon, and was critically acclaimed for its monochrome cinematography, tense writing, and Scott’s central performance. Damon’s movie, on the other hand, will be available to stream on Peacock until June 1. You can check it out in the run-up to possibly his most ambitious project yet, Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey, which is slated for a July release. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
