As one famously privileged go-getter once said, life moves pretty fast. However, for most of us, the persistent need as human beings for food and shelter—and maybe some electricity—often means life must be put on hold to earn the cash necessary to buy them. Punching in is the chief obligation of living in a capitalist society, which means love, family, fun, and the things that make life worth living get shunted aside so we can labor away our days for the benefit of The Man. No wonder movies about fighting against workaday drudgery are so affirming and cathartic: They let us imagine tossing stability, security, and a steady paycheck out the window in exchange for something far more fulfilling.
From mild acts of rebellion during our menial 9-to-5s to the final, defiant refusal to keep oiling the machine, these films set their workers free to live the kinds of lives we so often deny ourselves for that hard-earned dollar. From obstinate, pop-culture-regurgitating counter jockeys to exploited women workers taking revenge on their sexist boss, and all the thrilling examples of occupational rebellion in between, here are 17 films that extol the virtues of anti-work.
Paul Schrader wrangles a trio of all-stars—Yaphet Kotto, Harvey Keitel, and Richard Pryor—in this tense mix of auto plant heist and slacker comedy. The Detroit-set film is mired in its locale’s economy, in the power of its dominant company and of the local union, and in the poverty of its workers. It’s a crushing movie where The Man turns friend against friend, and capitalism eats whole families as a light snack. Yet there are so many glimmers of hope, humor, and camaraderie that it also speaks to the faint joys found in solidarity in after-work spaces; few bonds are as strong as a shared hatred of your boss, even if there’s an ever-present danger of (in a twist on the famous Dark Knight quote) someone staying employed long enough to see themselves become management. [Jacob Oller]
Alien/Aliens (1979; 1986)
Arriving at the spiked-tail end of the ’70s, a decade that gave us such sci-fi views of societal collapse as The Omega Man and Soylent Green, Ridley Scott’s Alien predicts a more mundane future: work will look the same in the future; we’ll just have fewer rights. It’s really just one OSHA violation after another as the Nostromo‘s blue-collar space truckers are waylaid by pop culture’s premier evil corporation, Weyland-Yutani. Without providing proper training, equipment, or instructions, the company interrupts the crew’s homeward journey and strong-arms them into the mouth of a Xenomorph. The Marines of James Cameron’s war-ready sequel, Aliens, don’t fare much better. What’s worse? Being squeezed over a goddamn percentage by Burke (Paul Reiser), or being awoken every hundred years because some dipshit tech company lost control of an alien? In space, no one can get Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) a new job. But, hey: It’s a living.[Matt Schimkowitz]
9 To 5 (1980)
What a way to make a living. Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin face down two villains in Parton’s delightfully silly debut 1980 film: Dabney Coleman, playing sexism personified, and the workplace. Perhaps it’s because of those foes that, compared to most comedies from 1980, 9 To 5 still goes down smooth—full of female solidarity, actualized revenge fantasies, and relatably terrible mundane tasks. It’s a pity the trio can’t hogtie the copy machine, but they fix basically everything else about their office, and all it takes is a couple murder attempts, some kidnapping, and one night getting pretty high together. It’s no wonder that Colin Higgins, the writer of Harold And Maude, was behind this film’s playfully dark (and at times, BDSM-heavy) sense of humor. [JO]
Brazil (1985)
The only film in living memory in which Robert De Niro is literally consumed by paperwork, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil takes place in a world where even the local torture technician is treated as just another smiling cog in the bureaucratic machine. Square peg Jonathan Pryce spends his days keeping his head down in his files, and his nights sweltering at the mercy of a broken heating system, before run-ins with Kim Greist and De Niro—the latter exuding full movie star swagger as a rogue “freelance heating engineer” who refuses to work on anything but his own terms—knock him out of his rut. Rising in the ranks but no happier for it, Pryce’s character ultimately escapes to the same sanctuary so many employees have found when the torture of the workplace becomes too much for them: The safety of the inside of his own head. [William Hughes]
Club Paradise (1986)
Almost every workday fantasy about chucking it all involves a tropical island. And nobody dreams harder than Robin Williams’ burnt-out Chicago firefighter in Harold Ramis’ shaggy but breezily entertaining island romp. After breaking his arm on the job (he’s blown clear out of a burning building into a snowbank), Williams takes his compensation and actually acts on his island fantasy, warily going shirtless and learning how to open coconuts from his oceanside hut. And, sure, the outside world tries to wreck Williams’ idyll (there’s shenanigans involving a corporation trying to build chain hotels) necessitating him teaming up with pal Jimmy Cliff to save the island’s rundown resort. But the good, rum-soaked times keep rolling as Williams is joined by most of SCTV (Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Robin Duke, Andrea Martin, Joe Flaherty), boozy colonial governor Peter O’Toole, and love interest Twiggy, all of whom ensure that island life stays chill. [Dennis Perkins]
Slacker (1990)
There’s a line in Slacker that’s impossible to forget, spoken by actor Charles Gunning: “To hell with the kind of work you have to do to earn a living. All it does is fill the belly of the pigs who exploit us.” It synthesizes Richard Linklater’s marvelous 1990 film, which follows an assortment of people as their paths cross over the course of a single day in Austin, seen through the POV of college students filming a project. The characters mill about their day without worrying about a traditional job, indulging instead in conversations, activities, and daydreaming as it suits them. That doesn’t make them idlers, though; as Gunning’s character states, “I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work to do it.” Linklater’s film is an ode to non-conformity, which is as anti-work as it gets. [Saloni Gajjar]
Joe Versus The Volcano (1990)
Technically, only the first 20 minutes of John Patrick Shanley’s 1990 fairy tale concern themselves overtly with work, as a hypochondriac former firefighter (Tom Hanks, looking sicker than he has in anything this side of Philadelphia) trudges to his job in the advertising department of medical device firm American Panascope. (“Home of the rectal probe!”) But Shanley’s depiction of workplace-as-hell is so hideously, monochromatically bleak—a labyrinth of muddy drudgery, flickering lights, and petty micromanagement—that it hangs over the whole rest of Joe Vs. The Volcano like a brain cloud, making a compelling case that adventurous self-immolation might be genuinely preferable to selling your life to a schmuck like Dan Hedaya’s Mr. Waturi at $300 a week. [WH]
Clerks (1994)
Look at the deadened expression on Dante Hicks’ face, and see a man in his prime on the verge of surrendering fully to the Almighty Buck. At the core of Kevin Smith’s quasi-autobiographical 1994 debut is the tension between Dante’s dedication to his Quick Stop duties at the cost of everything else and buddy Randal’s flagrant refusal to perform his own at the adjoining video store. Clerks thrives on the inane minutiae all too familiar to folks who’ve toiled away in such spaces—the customers with their oblivious questions, the failing infrastructure, the hangabouts who take much and contribute little—all of it culminating in a rare, life-affirming moment of clarity for Dante, courtesy of Randal’s zeal for workplace defiance. Clerks shows us, in belligerent and often vulgar ways, that life’s great gifts require their own commitment, and that one’s job title does not, and indeed should not, always dictate one’s behavior. [Jarrod Jones]
The “clockwatchers” of Jill Sprecher’s acerbic comedy are Iris (Toni Collette), Margaret (Parker Posey), Paula (Lisa Kudrow), and Jane (Alanna Ubach), four temps at a credit company who bond over soul-crushing tedium and soul-reviving happy hours. Each woman strains against her bonds in her own way, though it’s Margaret who proposes a one-day strike to fight back against a dehumanizing security crackdown in the wake of a string of thefts. Few movies have captured the mix of rage and ennui that a job made up of rotating jobs can stir up in a person. The only thing worse than being a corporate drone is being one that must flit in and out of different offices, leaving no trace behind. But there is one thing these clockwatchers have figured out that their go-getting counterparts haven’t: They work to live, not the other way around. [Danette Chavez]
Fight Club (1999)
David Fincher’s Fight Club might be the most misinterpreted movie on this list, directed so ferociously that some viewers mistake its rage against workplace alienation for macho heroism, even when it’s anything but. Still, worker discontent is essential to Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel: The Narrator (Edward Norton) shuffles through a soulless corporate existence until a chance “encounter” with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), cool walking erection that he is, reprograms his whole raison d’être. What follows is a retreat from reality and an aggressive rejection of life’s empty promises in favor of championing man’s primal instincts to fight, fuck, and flout The Powers That Be to the woe of everyone else. In Fincher’s hands, all this libidinous male posturing, coupled with Palahniuk’s absurdist critique of dehumanizing labor and consumerist ennui, turns the Narrator’s chaotic apotheosis into a potent and disturbing lampoon of the frustrated masculine id, neutered by the demands of work. [JJ]
The Matrix/The Matrix Resurrections (1999; 2021)
Upon first jacking into The Matrix, our hero, Neo (Keanu Reeves), the bullet-timing, woah-saying messiah, is a lowly audience surrogate. (Granted, this was 1999, when cubicle occupation was so high, it was passé to hold a salaried job with health insurance.) Times change, Thomas Anderson doesn’t: In 2021’s The Matrix Resurrections, after fighting a thousand Agent Smiths (Hugo Weaving) and grieving Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), Neo’s right back at the desk, in a new Matrix where he’s the genius creator of a video game trilogy called The Matrix. Compromising your integrity and repeating yourself can make even the most creative work into another job, though, turning every day into a monotonous slog that pills alone cannot fix. Working without her other half, sister Lilly Wachowski, first-time solo director Lana Wachowski’s Resurrections still sticks the original’s message (sans gun-fu): Work to live, and live to have a cup of coffee with the one you love. [MS]
Office Space (1999)
A sharp sendup of corporate culture, professional burnout, and the general nightmare that is white-collar cube life, the 1999 cult classic Office Space isn’t just a great anti-work movie; it’s aged into an anti-work survival guide. From the unhinged mind of Mike Judge, its story follows a disgruntled software programmer who embraces professional apathy after a therapy appointment goes wrong. (Technically, his therapist dies in the middle of it.) Packed with painfully true observations about the soul-crushing nature of work, Office Space hilariously eviscerates everything from repetitive paperwork and passive-aggressive bosses to toxic positivity. That it does so using iconic lines we’re all still quoting today—seriously, what does “PC load letter” mean, anyway—is just the icing on the cake. [Lacy Baugher Milas]
The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Under the guise of a breezy chick flick, The Devil Wears Prada offers a significant critique of extremely toxic work culture and, ironically, deglamorizes the concept of serving time to climb up the corporate ladder. A million girls might kill for Andy Sachs’ (Anne Hathaway) job at Runway Magazine—and eventually, it becomes her dream gig, too, because of the doors it opens. But being the assistant to a demanding editor-in-chief, Miranda Priestley (Meryl Streep), comes at too steep a price. The film is an entertaining thesis on the pitfalls of having no work-life boundaries, and it doesn’t glorify the “girlboss.” In fact, it rightfully points out the damage caused by Miranda’s psychological harassment of Andy, prompting her to leave the job to follow her heart’s desires instead of facing constant humiliation. [SG]
Sorry To Bother You (2018)
Boots Riley’s debut feature doesn’t pretend that playing the game and climbing the corporate ladder won’t personally enrich you. But it also makes it clear how those gains can come at a huge cost to the community around you, while also benefiting some of the worst people in the world. Cassius Green (LaKeith Stanfield) learns this the hard way, as the state of the world keeps getting worse the higher his salary (and the floor his apartment’s on) gets. Sorry To Bother You isn’t an anti-work movie in the sense that it finds value in laziness or being a slacker; it’s anti-work in the sense that sometimes work has to stop for a strike. By the end, Cash has become a crucial part of his local union’s organizing effort, and even when he’s transformed into an Equisapien, he’s making sure the others—and the people who exploited them—are getting what they deserve. [Drew Gillis]
Support The Girls (2018)
No Hooters biopic could ever speak to the experience of breastaurant work like Andrew Bujalski’s Support The Girls. Led by a never-better Regina Hall, this low-key comedy is a great food service movie, a great female-driven workplace comedy, and a great film about suburban rot. The film finds all the nuances and chaos contained in a single day of work, including training new employees, dealing with the life drama of old employees, juggling bad customers and worse owners, and hoping that all of this is worth it to (mostly) pay the bills. A killer supporting cast (James LeGros, Haley Lu Richardson, Junglepussy) fills out the margins perfectly as Hall’s big-hearted leader erodes before our eyes. All kinds of work burns us out, breaks us down, stands in for the larger pains pushed by the economy. Support The Girls is smart enough (and funny enough) to make those points inside its chest-forward sports bar. [JO]
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