The Ultimate 420 Watchlist

Here's the canon. Watch responsibly.

Dir. Lou Adler

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Cheech and Chong didn't invent slacker comedy so much as they accidentally became it. Two guys with nowhere to be and no particular urgency about getting there end up driving a van built entirely out of compressed product across the US-Mexico border without realising it. The plot is genuinely beside the point. What matters is the energy — two people who are constitutionally incapable of stress, coasting through chaos on pure mellow. Everything that came after owes this film something.

Dir. Tamra Davis

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A police horse dies after eating junk food. Three guys have to bail their friend out of jail. The plan: sell pharmaceutical-grade mary jane lifted from a research lab. Written by Dave Chappelle and Neal Brennan before either of them became household names, Half Baked is the kind of film that reveals its actual intelligence slowly, mostly after you've already laughed yourself horizontal. It earns its reputation every single time.

Dir. Danny Leiner

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Two friends get lifted and decide they need sliders from White Castle. That's it. That's the whole premise. What happens between the decision and the destination involves a cheetah, Neil Patrick Harris playing a version of himself that has completely lost the plot, and a series of escalating disasters that somehow feel entirely inevitable. It's the most committed the genre has ever been to a simple idea, and it pays off completely.

Dir. Joel & Ethan Coen

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Jeff Bridges plays a man who asks almost nothing of the world and finds that the world, annoyingly, keeps asking things of him. A case of mistaken identity turns into a kidnapping plot he can barely track. The Coen Brothers made a noir parody that works both as parody and as noir, which is harder than it sounds. The Dude remains the most quietly aspirational figure in all of cinema — a man who has genuinely figured out what he wants and is only unhappy when other people interfere with it.

Dir. David Gordon Green

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A process server witnesses a murder while sharing a rare strain with his dealer, and suddenly two people who had absolutely no business being in an action movie are in one. Seth Rogen and James Franco have a chemistry that shouldn't work as well as it does — Franco in particular is doing something genuinely strange and funny that holds up completely. The violence escalates beyond any reasonable expectation. So does everything else.

Dir. Richard Linklater

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The last day of school, Texas, 1976. Nothing happens in any dramatic sense — people drive around, they light up, they talk, they end up at a keg party in a field. Linklater made a film about the strange suspended quality of being young and bored and not yet required to be anything in particular. Matthew McConaughey shows up as a guy who peaked in high school and never found that troubling. It's the most accurate portrait of a certain kind of summer afternoon ever made.

Dir. Terry Gilliam

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Calling this a session film feels slightly inaccurate — the substances involved are more of an industrial cocktail — but it belongs here because the spirit is right. Terry Gilliam turned Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo memoir into something visually deranged in a way that matches the material exactly. Johnny Depp disappears completely into Raoul Duke. The film has no interest in redemption arcs or lessons learned. It just goes, and keeps going, until it stops.

Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

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Paul Thomas Anderson adapted the most unadaptable novel in Thomas Pynchon's catalogue and made something that feels genuinely unlike anything else. Joaquin Phoenix plays a private detective in 1970s Los Angeles who is almost always too relaxed to follow the case he's on — which turns out to be the right way to experience a conspiracy thriller where the conspiracy itself might not exist. The mood is the whole thing. Don't try to follow the plot. Let it wash over you.

Dir. Richard Linklater

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Richard Linklater filmed real actors and then had artists paint over every frame, which gives the whole thing the quality of watching someone else's dream at 3am. The film doesn't have a plot so much as a current — it drifts from one conversation to the next, each one about consciousness or free will or what it means to be awake inside a life. It's the kind of film that feels brilliant while you're watching it and leaves a residue that lasts for days.

Created by Duncan Trussell & Pendleton Ward

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Duncan Trussell and Pendleton Ward made a show that shouldn't work — a podcast interview series set inside an animated multiverse where the visuals have almost nothing to do with what anyone is saying. Trussell wanders through collapsing realities while having genuine, unscripted conversations about death, meditation, addiction, and what it means to be conscious inside a body. The last episode, a conversation with his late mother recorded shortly before she died, is one of the most quietly devastating things available to stream. It starts as the kind of thing you put on for the visuals. It ends somewhere else entirely.