The 12 Best Movies About the Movies

October 23, 2025

Photo: ©MGM/Courtesy Everett Collection

From the very birth of the moving picture in the late 19th century, the revolutionary medium has had an inherent fascination with its own creation. Like the mise en abyme, or dream within a dream, the movie often seems to hold up a tilted mirror to its own feats of illusion, to enchant its audience while concealing its optical legerdemain. The movie, in other words, has always been in love with itself.

In the Lumière brothers’ short Workers Leaving the Factory (1895), considered by many historians to be the first cinematographic film recording, the onscreen laborers are actually leaving their jobs at the Lumières’ factory, where photographic plates were produced and developed. So the short film becomes an inward-looking glimpse of the filmmaking process at its birth—and also, simultaneously, the first meta film. During the subsequent century, filmmakers returned to this reflexive mode of cinema for a variety of reasons, either to examine their artistic process, explore formal innovations, expose some horrible secret, or, perhaps most often, satirize the ivory-tower industry itself.

On the occasion of Vogue World: Hollywood at Paramount Studios—the location of classic films from Citizen Kane and Double Indemnity to The Godfather and Chinatown—Vogue has put together a list of standout movies about movies and the movie industry. In their copious meta imagery, each of these selections captures something particular and unique about the era during which it was made while also affirming a more universal message about the medium: that all movies are about, in some way or another, the mystery of moviemaking.

The Magic Lantern (1903) and Hugo (2011)

Surrealist and trick filmmaker Georges Méliès was a one-man movie studio in the first days of cinema. The magician turned mogul single-handedly invented the fantasy, horror, and science-fiction genres with classics like A Voyage to the Moon and The Kingdom of the Fairies. Unsurprisingly, as a magician, Méliès never filmed the lineaments of the famous Paris glass house that would become the world’s first dedicated film studio (a place that Martin Scorsese would take as inspiration for his steampunk-flavored childhood drama Hugo). In The Magic Lantern, however, Méliès does briefly show the playful inner workings of a novelty-size toy box turned magic lantern that projects a series of superimposed moving images across a scrim before dozens of costumed people burst from the box and perform an elaborate choreography. Chaos reigns in the studio as ballerinas, toy soldiers, and puppets scatter across the screen. Although only five minutes in length, The Magic Lantern gives us a momentary glimpse of the magic of cinema as a burgeoning medium and the inchoate experimentation that accompanied its first decades as a studio invention.

Sherlock Jr. (1924)

In arguably Buster Keaton’s most experimental film, the silent-era slapstick comedian plays a movie projectionist who dreams of becoming a detective. When he is falsely accused by a local swindler of robbing his own girlfriend’s father, the rejected projectionist leaps onto the movie screen and attempts to solve the crime. Critic Dwight Macdonald later wrote that Keaton’s singular screen-in-screen transformation made similar tricks by Surrealist giants Dalí, Buñuel, and Cocteau timid by comparison. Within the next decade, the enchanting imagism of silent film would be supplanted by the talkies’ emphasis on dialogue and narrative realism, upending the format and studios that had made Keaton a star of the Old Hollywood system. This is one of the greatest paeans to that era of filmmaking.

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

At the juncture between postwar noir and golden-age melodrama is Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, a saturnine elegy to a lost Hollywood of the silent era, when faces and charisma were more desirable than voices or talent. Starring the then démodé Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, a washed-up silent-movie queen in search of a comeback, and William Holden as her raffish, grifter paramour, Joe Gillis, the film also serves as a sly meta commentary on the movie industry’s greed, decadence, and misogyny. When Desmond laments in the film, “Without me there wouldn’t be any Paramount Studios,” it was a near-identical line to Swanson’s when she was told that she would have to audition for the Paramount-produced film. Roger Ebert called Sunset Boulevard “the best drama ever made about the movies because it sees through the illusions, even if Norma doesn’t.” The opening and final sequences of the film’s frame story are some of the most oft referenced in movie history, while the dark, labyrinthine interiors of Desmond’s mansion perfectly reflect the mind of the deluded diva whose success and celebrity are completely behind her.

The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)

Vincente Minnelli’s melodrama about the movie industry followed Sunset Boulevard by only two years, but if the latter is a noirish slice of roman à clef, then the former is an entire scandal sheet of Hollywood egomaniacs and narcissists. Kirk Douglas’s villainous Jonathan Shields was reportedly based on RKO and MGM producer David O. Selznick—a rumor that led his lawyers to review the script during production. The real-life origins of most of the film’s characters, both major and minor, have been the source of speculation for decades and include everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to William Faulkner to Judy Garland. Long before Robert Altman’s The Player skewered ’90s-era Hollywood, The Bad and the Beautiful was the industry’s great poison-pen letter to itself.

8 1/2 (1963)

The follow-up to the uproarious La Dolce Vita, Fellini’s fantastical movie within a movie follows a film director who suffers a creative block during the production of his newest work. The onscreen auteur muses on the stresses of his daily life and past relationships with wives and mistresses, while his fantasies focus in part on an ideal woman, played by Claudia Cardinale, whom he thinks will solve his artistic dilemma. The mise en abyme of the film is reflected in Fellini’s own frustrations during the preproduction of 8 1/2. He later described himself at the time as “a director who wanted to make a film he no longer remembers.” The final sequence on the film’s set is perhaps the director’s most fanciful scene and an exemplar of meta filmmaking.

The Day of the Locust (1975)

Often considered the most scathing film ever made about the movie industry, The Day of the Locust is an adaptation of Nathanael West’s celebrated novel about a down-and-out artist turned set painter and the Los Angeles demimonde during the Great Depression. When painter Tod Hackett moves to one of the city’s many anonymous bungalow courts, he encounters a cast of desperate characters, including a bit-part actress turned prostitute, an aspiring child star, a dwarf, and a charismatic preacher; he also attends a stag party, Holy Roller revival, drag show, and movie premiere, which degenerates into a scene of child murder and a fiery riot. One part satire, one part apocalyptic horror, the film was doubtless an inspiration to later outré directors like David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and Harmony Korine.

The Player (1992)

Robert Altman’s second ensemble film about show business, following 1975’s epic Nashville, blends Hollywood satire with a story of sex, mystery, and murder, tropes that appeared throughout the director’s work from That Cold Day in the Park to his final film, Gosford Park. But this early-1990s time capsule, and now classic Hollywood film, is more dark comedy than murder mystery. Tim Robbins’s turn as a smarmy film executive who kills a screenwriter skewers the movie industry with a wink and a nod. To give the film the feeling of realism, Altman overstuffed it with several dozen cameos from Old and New Hollywood actors, with everyone from Jack Lemmon and James Coburn to Lily Tomlin and Julia Roberts.

Get Shorty (1995)

One of many neo-noir gems from the late 1990s, Get Shorty revels in a post-Tarantino, pre-millennial hodgepodge of genres and visual styles with a retro mid-century nostalgia that was particular to the decade’s independent films. John Travolta’s movie-obsessed heavy travels to Los Angeles to retrieve an outstanding loan for a mob capo but decides to keep the money and get into the movie business. As he tries to make his move on a has-been producer and promising script, he discovers that Hollywood is every bit as venal as the criminal underworld that he left behind. Soon, he is taking power lunches with celebrities at the Ivy while fighting off rival bodyguards and dodging bullets. Despite the turmoil, he still has the time to rattle off classic film dialogue or swap filmographies with his rivals. Get Shorty remains a classic Hollywood satire and one of the great examples of the decade’s foray into meta films.

Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006)

By the turn of the century, David Lynch had reached the midpoint of a career dedicated to the invention of American surrealist cinema. It seems almost natural, then, that he would train his camera on Hollywood. Lynch’s early-aughts films Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire used Los Angeles’s movie industry as a mythscape to explore many of the themes that had consumed his work for decades: dual identities, amnesia, female sexuality, urban legends, mid-century nostalgia, and the everyday sublime. In both films, the city’s fabled history is as much the subject as the characters themselves. But while the first is a sumptuous fever dream of a Hollywood of the past, the second is a digital-video nightmare caught outside of time. Movies about the pleasures and horrors of movies do not get more beautiful and terrifying than these.

Bergman Island (2021)

Mia Hansen-Løve’s film about the struggles of filmmaking and relationships is set on Fårö, the titular Swedish island where Ingmar Bergman once lived and worked. A couple has traveled there for inspiration on their newest film projects but finds only frustration in both their working and personal relationship. In the accompanying film within the film, two former lovers, one of whom is also a filmmaker, rekindle their romance at a weekend wedding on Fårö. Fantasy and reality blur as the latter film’s characters reappear as the real-life actors in the final third. Said to be inspired by Hansen-Løve’s relationship with French director Olivier Assayas, Bergman Island is an unconventional romance film that is about both the difficulties of love and the love of difficult movies.

Honorable mentions: