Oh Ya, The Best Midwestern Movies, You Betcha

Whether people call it flyover country or the real America, there’s no question that the American Midwest plays an important part of the culture and makes a great setting for movies.

And yet, except for Chicago (which we’re leaving off of this list, losing many John Hughes films in the process), too many discussions about the great locales in American cinema focus on New York and Los Angeles, overlooking a vast swath of the country. In states such as Michigan, Nebraska, and Ohio, some of the greatest filmmakers of all time find interesting stories to tell, with a quality unlike those from any other part of the country.

Visit the best midwestern movies here.

1. Fargo (1996)

In the popular imagination, no midwestern movies capture the essence of the culture better than the Coen Brothers’ comedy noir Fargo. It’s not just the outrageous accents that Frances McDormand and William H. Macy adopt to play pregnant police officer Marge Gunderson and hapless car dealer/criminal Jerry Lundegaard. It’s the entire tone of the movie, based on what Joel and Ethan Coen call “Minnesota Nice,” a way of hiding hateful feelings and ideas under a veneer of politeness.

As cynical as that might sound, the climax of Fargo, in which Marge lectures the criminals about the joy of a beautiful day, is Midwestern positivity in a nutshell.

2. The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Yes, much of The Wizard of Oz takes place in Oz, and when that happens, Dorothy Gale and her little dog Toto are “not in Kansas anymore.” And yet, no matter how fantastical the story becomes, Victor Fleming’s adaption of the L. Frank Baum books, written by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf, roots itself in Midwestern sensibilities.

In addition to the twister that sets the whole thing off, Dorothy’s combination of politeness and big dreams, the desire to move off the farm and see something great, allows her to make friends and defeat the Wicked Witch of the West. When a penitent Dorothy says “There’s no place like home” about her Kansas farmhouse, she speaks for every Midwesterner who has gone abroad.

3. Halloween (1978)

Eagle-eyed viewers can tell that Halloween shot on the West Coast, as palm trees and other plants exotic to the heartland show up in the background of the horror film. But director John Carpenter, who co-wrote the film with Debra Hill, understood that the terror of a meaningless figure of destruction like Michael Meyers carries more weight in the Midwest.

When Michael Meyers (portrayed by Nick Castle and Tony Moran) returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, and terrorizes teen babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Leigh Curtis), it represents the ultimate terror invading the ultimate safe space.

4. The Virgin Suicides (1999)

The suburban Detroit setting for Sophia Coppola’s debut film, The Virgin Suicides, comes from Michigan-born author Jeffery Euginides’s childhood, who recalls a babysitter telling him that she and her sisters planned to end their lives.

But Coppola uses 1960s suburban Detroit as a contrast between the idyllic memories of privileged, in this case, middle-class and male, youth and the actual quiet desperation of people living there. With dreamy interludes and a psychedelic soundtrack, The Virgin Suicides reveals the pleasant memories that former neighborhood boys have about Lux Lisbon (Kirstin Dunst) and her sisters as unfounded and wrong.

5. Robocop (1986)

Like The Virgin Suicides, Robocop uses the Midwest to invoke ideas of innocence, contrasted against degradation But instead of staying in the suburbs, Robocop moves into the city proper, as Detroit represented in the cultural imagination a failed city, full of crime and decay.

Screenwriters Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, working with Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, look into the future of Detroit to expose the real cause of decay — businesses like Omni Consumer Products. OCP and its executive Bob Morton (Miquel Ferrer) use vicious criminal Clarence Boddiker (Kurtwood Smith) to destroy Detroit and transform police officer Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) into Robocop, a law enforcement machine they can control.

6. Evil Dead 2 (1987)

Evil Dead 2 director Sam Raimi might represent the quintessential Midwestern filmmaker.

To hear him speak in his reedy, high-pitched voice, one thinks of him as a polite, if reserved, filmmaker. And yet, behind that kind of facade, there’s a brilliant maniac with a fondness for horror and slapstick. Those impulses come to the fore in his masterpiece Evil Dead 2, which he made with his fellow Michigander, his childhood friend, and his muse, Bruce Campbell.

Evil Dead 2 sends Campbell’s Ash Williams back to a secluded Michigan cabin, where he’s beset by mischievous demons. As gnarly as Evil Dead 2 gets, it also has a sense of wholesome fun to it, even in the most gory scenes–a perfect encapsulation of the director’s Midwestern sensibilities.

7. Paper Moon (1973)

The black-and-white photography director Peter Bogdanovich employs makes up one of several throwbacks in Paper Moon.

Written by Alvin Sargent and based on the novel Addie Pray by Joe David Brown, Paper Moon draws from the farces of the 1930s and 40s to tell the story of con man Moses Pray (Ryan O’Neill) and 9-year-old Addie Loggins (Tatum O’Neill) as they scam their way across Kansas and Missouri.

Set in the Great Depression, the Midwestern backdrop of Paper Moon allows Bogdanovich to employ wide, empty spaces, pocked by the occasional desperate person, making the connection between Addie and Moses all the more powerful.

8. A Christmas Story (1983)

The holiday classic A Christmas Story comes from the nostalgic writings of humorist Jean Shepherd, who paints the denizens of his Indiana hometown with a bizarre, but loving, brush.

From the opening shot of a storefront decorated with toys to the final scene of the Old Man (Darren McGavin) and his wife (Melinda Dillon) gazing at the holiday lights, director Bob Clark, who co-wrote the screenplay with Shepherd and Leigh Brown, frames the small town with a Norman Rockwell glow. In that space, the tribulations of Ralphie (Peter Billingsly) feel both epic and safe.

9. Gone Girl (2014)

Few characters capture the tension between American locales like Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), the titular schemer in David Fincher’s adaptation of the Gillian Flynn novel Gone Girl. Working from a screenplay by Flynn, Fincher presents Amy as a New York girl who resents the Missouri town that her husband Nick (Ben Affleck) has brought her to.

When Nick becomes the prime suspect in Nick’s murder, the values of his hometown turn against him, as even accepting food from a concerned female neighbor increases the appearance of his guilt. Gone Girl may not have the highest opinion of the Midwest, but Fincher and Flynn use their character’s distaste to make a great pulp thriller.

10. The Straight Story (1999)

On one hand, The Straight Story is the oddball in director David Lynch’s filmography. The G-rated Disney picture tells a true story about farmer Alvin Straight (portrayed by Richard Farnsworth), who drives his riding lawn mower across Iowa and Wisconsin to make amends with his estranged brother before he dies.

On the other hand, it might be Lynch’s most revealing film, as the Montana-born (but not raised) filmmaker returns to the region of his birth to tell an open-hearted story. Lynch includes some of his signature aspects, including casting Harry Dean Stanton as Alvin’s brother and strange interludes, such as a woman who keeps hitting deer with her car. But The Straight Story remains a love letter to the Midwest by one of this generation’s greatest filmmakers.

11. Take Shelter (2011)

Picturesque though they may be, the open spaces of the Midwest make citizens vulnerable to storms. While that can make for exciting adventure movies such as Twister, it also can create a lot of fear, which writer and director Jeff Nichols explores in Take Shelter.

Take Shelter stars Michael Shannon as an Ohio man haunted by visions of an apocalyptic storm. The visions may be signs of mental illness, a condition that runs in his family. Or they may be God-given warnings he can use to protect his wife (Jessica Chastain) and daughter. Nichols uses the Ohio setting as not just a believable site for a horrible storm, but also as the home of a regular guy thrust into an outsized situation.

12. Barbarian (2023)

About a third of the way through writer/director Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, the movie hard cuts from deep in a Michigan basement to sunny California, where a soon-to-be-disgraced actor (Justin Long) gets some news that drives him back to the Mitten state. That contrast between the two states is not the most shocking quality of Barbarian.

But it does draw attention back to the stranglehold people have put on Midwestern housing markets, and the monstrous creatures they create.

13. A League of Their Own (1992)

Okay, we said we’re leaving Chicago movies off of this list (they got their own list) and A League of Their Own does follow an all-women’s baseball team put together while the male players served abroad in World War II. But the Rockford Peaches travel all around the Midwest, which makes the movie, directed by Penny Marshall and written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel a quintessential Midwestern movie.

Furthermore, A League of Their Own features some fantastic comedic performances from Geena Davis as lead Peach Dottie, Madonna as the sassy Mae “All the Way Mae” Mordabito, and Tom Hanks as former major league washout Jimmy Dugan, who sobers up and becomes the Peaches’ coach.

14. Tommy Boy (1995)

True Midwesterners might object to the inclusion of Tommy Boy on this list, though not because it doesn’t take place in the Midwest. Indeed, when dum-dum Tommy (Chris Farley) and his unwilling sidekick Richard (David Spade) go on a sales tour, they drop by some of the most unique cities in the region.

No, Midwesterners would object because Tommy Boy suggests that the citizens of Sandusky, Ohio go cow-tipping for fun on a Saturday night, framing them as bumpkins instead of people who can visit the greatest roller coast park in the nation, Cedar Point. Despite that flub, director Peter Segal and writers Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner fill the movie with a lot of good-hearted fun, something no Midwesterner can deny.

15. Nebraska (2013)

Director Alexander Payne made his name with complicated movies that combine sour comedy with open-hearted emotion. Payne has found odd-ball characters across the country, from the California wine connoisseurs in Sideways to the New England academics in The Holdovers.

But Payne’s best movies take place in Nebraska, including the 2013 film named after the state. Written by Bob Nelson, Nebraska follows David Grant (Will Forte) as he brings his elderly father Woody (Bruce Dern) from Montana to Nebraska to claim a cash prize he thinks he’s won. The journey opens up old wounds, which portrays one of the most important Midwesterner qualities: the refusal to open up with their emotions.

16. American Movie (1999)

Some viewers of the documentary American Movie might take exception to the portrayal of Wisconsin filmmaker Mark Borchardt. Yes, director Chris Smith does capture Borchardt in some unflattering situations, everything from squabbling with his parents to expressing unwise excitement about getting approved for a credit card. And at no point does Smith give us reason to believe that Borchardt has the directing chops to turn his horror movie Coven into a competent flick.

However, American Movie also captures the unflagging optimism of a man with a dream, no matter how much location, funding, and, yes, talent is stacked against him.

17. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

The dark comedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri gets a lot of things about the Midwest wrong, owing to Irish writer/director Martin McDonagh’s unfamiliarity with the region. His story of a vengeful mother (Frances McDormand) who uses roadsigns to call out the local sheriff’s (Woody Harrelson) failure to solve a brutal crime, seems to confuse Missouri with the deep South, New York, and other regions well-represented in cinema.

Whatever the script and tonal shortcomings, Three Billboards still works as a Midwestern movie thanks to McDormand’s layered and beautiful performance, a woman who makes no apologies for her feelings — except to a random deer she encounters.

18. Hoosiers (1986)

Midwesterners love their sports, whether it is football, baseball, or hockey. Hoosiers looks at the world of high school basketball, the sport that down-on-his-luck Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) coaches when he comes to Indiana to teach. Dale’s straight-shooting ways ruffle the feathers of his polite neighbors, intensified when he recruits alcoholic former star Shooter Flatch (Dennis Hopper).

But as writer Angelo Pizzo and director David Anspaugh dig into Dale’s determination and belief in the best of his team, even the most reserved Midwesterner can’t help but stand up and cheer for Hoosiers.

19. Purple Rain (1984)

One might assume that an artist as flashy and idiosyncratic as Prince would try to bury his Midwestern roots, following in the footsteps of Hibbing, Minnesota native Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan. But Prince embraced his past, even as he mythologized it by playing a fictional version of himself called “The Kid” in Purple Rain.

Director Albert Magnoli, who co-wrote the screenplay with William Blinn, makes use of the Minneapolis geography and local music scene. But by the time the credits roll, few can believe that Prince/The Kid came from anywhere on Earth, let alone the Midwest.

20. Field of Dreams (1989)

“Is this heaven?” asks ballplayer John Kinsella (Dwier Brown) when he walks out of the afterlife through a cornfield. “No,” responds his son Ray (Kevin Costner). “It’s Iowa.”

Of course, Field of Dreams takes place in Iowa. A story about members of the discredited Chicago White Sox coming back to life via a magical cornfield could take place in no place but the Midwest. It’s easy to mock the movie, written and directed by Phil Alden Robinson and based on the novel Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella, as too earnest, too sappy. But its cleared-eyed approach earns every emotional beat.

21. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (1987)

Even after excluding Chicago, John Hughes finds a way onto this list. His 1987 film Planes, Trains, and Automobiles starts out in New York and ends up in Chicago. But along the way, short-tempered ad exec Neal Page (Steve Martin) becomes an unwilling traveling buddy to talkative salesman Del Griffith (John Candy).

As the bickering duo makes their way across the Midwest to return to Chicago in time for Thanksgiving, they get a lesson in boundaries and emotional honesty.

22. Twister (1996)

Flashier places like New York and Los Angeles suit themselves to adventure thrillers, but Twister proves that the Midwest has its fair share of danger.

Directed by Jan de Bont and written by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin, Twister turns Oklahoma into a death trap, a place where tornadoes can arrive with almost no warning and send cows flying into the air. Survivor Jo (Helen Hunt) and her love interest Bill (Bill Paxton) have noble aims, trying to develop a better warning system, but that’s not the film’s true concern. It just wants to show the reckless fun of chasing storms.

Since nothing says “middle America” like tornadoes, Twister deserves mention alongside the best Midwestern movies.