Morgan Freeman’s 5 Favorite Movies: Westerns, Tigers & Whales, Oh My!

For film fans, the next best thing to actually watching movies is talking about movies. There’s not much in this life that’s better than having a great conversation about the films that move us, exasperate us, confuse us, and change us. This is probably why we love when celebrities get asked about their own favorite movies, whether they’re listing their Letterboxd top four or gushing about their five favorites to Rotten Tomatoes. It’s simple: we learn more about people, and love them more, when we get to see them light up talking about the movies they love. Esteemed actor Morgan Freeman has shared his five favorite films with Rotten Tomatoes twice now, and his choices are wide-ranging and unexpected.

The first time the Oscar-winning star of such films as “Million Dollar Baby,” “The Dark Knight,” and “Driving Miss Daisy” was asked about his all-time favorite movies, in 2011, he dropped a list that spanned half a century and included plenty of spectacle, drama, and character work. Rotten Tomatoes checked back in with Freeman twelve years later as well, and while four of his initial choices remained the same, he swapped out one for a more modern flick. We’ll talk about all of them here. If you need some ideas for your next movie night, God’s got you covered.

“Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?” One of Tony Soprano’s favorite films is also one of Morgan Freeman’s. Freeman has cited the 1952 Western as one of the all-time greats at least twice, noting both times how much he loves its lone gunslinger theme. “I’ve always been a big fan of Gary Cooper’s, and this was a very interesting story of a man finding himself alone to face a man who hates him,” Freeman told Rotten Tomatoes in 2023.

In 2011 he went more in-depth with a spoiler-filled assessment of the movie. “What sticks with me about that movie is that the woman that he loved, who was completely anti-violence, stood up with him, ultimately,” Freeman said. “And at the end, when all the townspeople had run away, he took that badge off and threw it in the dirt.” 

Despite getting caught up in Hollywood’s Red Scare (and writing it into the script), “High Noon” won four Oscars upon its release, including one for Cooper. Written by Carl Foreman from a story by John W. Cunningham, it’s often been recognized for the subversive ways it approached the Western, tweaking and arguably progressing from some of the genre’s more historically damaging archetypes. It’s also, by all accounts, just a damn good movie.

I’m not sure what kind of movie I imagine Morgan Freeman watching in his spare time, but it’s not Baz Luhrmann’s overwhelmingly spectacular musical odyssey “Moulin Rouge!” Yet Freeman cited it as one of his all-time favorite movies for two decades in a row, calling it “perfect” in 2011. If you haven’t been introduced to one of Luhrmann’s most dazzling stories, you should know that “Moulin Rouge!” stars Ewan McGregor as a lovestruck poet who falls for a sultry cabaret star played by Nicole Kidman. Set at the dawn of the 20th century, the movie uses modern songs like Elton John’s “Your Song” and Madonna’s “Like A Virgin” to tell the star-crossed lovers’ story.

Like “High Noon,” “Moulin Rouge!” is an Oscar winner, taking home two trophies after earning eight nominations. The movie inspired a stage musical, produced a number-one hit single (remember “Lady Marmalade”?), and had more than a few detractors. At LA Weekly, Ella Taylor wrote at the time that the movie was “hard work,” “fatally cluttered” and “overwhelmingly red.” Still, the big emotions and even bigger musical numbers worked well for many people, and Freeman was one of them. “I think one of the best movies ever made was Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Moulin Rouge!'” he said in 2011. “It was just an extraordinarily well done film. Editing, directing, costuming — just everything about it was perfect.”

Another revisionist Western that Freeman has cited more than once, “The Outlaw Josey Wales” has the distinction of featuring Clint Eastwood, who would eventually direct and act opposite Freeman himself. “I like all movies with Clint, but ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’ is one I can’t pass up,” the actor told Rotten Tomatoes last year. “If I’m scrolling through and I come across it, I’ve got to watch it.” 

Eastwood also directed the 1976 picture, which counted Philip Kaufman among its writers. In it, the actor plays a farmer with Confederate ties caught up in the bloodshed of the Civil War and its aftermath. It’s an ethically strange movie about governmental betrayal, found family, and the brutal toll of war. Though some of its messaging and depictions may feel dated today, it broke new ground upon release, and it apparently still holds up. In 2023, /Film named Josey Wales as the fourth-best character Eastwood has ever played.

“The Outlaw Josey Wales” was one of Eastwood’s earliest directorial success stories, earning rave reviews and making money at the box office. In his three star review of the movie, Roger Ebert called it “a strange and daring Western” that went “against the rules” of the genre in interesting ways. In 2011, Freeman singled out Chief Dan George, the Tsleil-Waututh Nation tribal leader who starred opposite Eastwood, as the movie’s secret weapon. “I don’t know what it is about ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’ that sticks,” Freeman noted, before correcting himself. “Oh, I do know what it is: it’s the relationship with Chief Dan George. The narration, as it were, of Chief Dan George in that movie, you know. He’s so dry, and it’s humorous, but true.”

Adaptations are tough, but there’s one that Freeman thinks filmmakers got just right. “‘Moby Dick.’ Yes. Now that was filmmaking,” Freeman said in 2011, referencing John Huston’s 1956 epic. He continued: “I read the book, and there are very few books that I have read and seen the movie and liked the movie.” A decade later, he noted that he saw the movie when it was new at age 19, and it sounds like it was a pretty formative moviegoing experience. “I couldn’t have imagined it any different than it was when I saw it in my mind when I read the book. It was all there. Gregory Peck was just awesome.”

Peck stars as the obsessive Captain Ahab in Huston’s take on the classic doorstop of a Herman Melville novel. Perhaps the least acclaimed movie on this list, “Moby Dick” didn’t score any major awards, and it’s not talked about as often as movies like “High Noon” or “Moulin Rouge!” today. Yet it shares with those movies an attention to cinematic spectacle, to adventure, and to moral complexity — not to mention some great performances. Freeman cites Peck as one of his favorite actors, along with Cooper and Humphrey Bogart. He also notes that Peck was in a second, rare as-good-as-the-book adaptation: “To Kill A Mockingbird,” the beloved 1962 adaptation of Harper Lee’s coming-of-age classic.

Curiously, one movie Freeman listed in 2011 is absent from his Rotten Tomatoes list in 2023. His most recent top five includes “Life of Pi,” Ang Lee’s dazzling, emotional adaptation of Yann Martel’s 2001 novel. “Ang Lee is, I think, probably one of the best directors in the business,” Freeman says, calling the movie a “very interesting fable.” As with “High Noon,” the rest of Freeman’s take on the film gets into heavy spoiler territory, so we’ll spare you the details while noting that he called the fantasy-filled survival movie “phantasmagorical” and praised its ambiguity.

Lee won an Oscar for his work on the film about a shipwrecked boy (Suraj Sharma) trapped in a boat with a gaggle of zoo animals, which was also a commercial success. It’s not, however, the only fifth movie Freeman has listed in interviews. Back in 2011, he named the original 1933 “King Kong” film not just as one of his favorites, but as his favorite of all time. “My number one favorite film was the first film I ever saw — I was six-years-old before I ever went to the movies — and that film is the original ‘King Kong,'” Freeman said. “It’s still, I think, the best ‘King Kong.'” You can’t argue with the magic of a kid’s first moviegoing experience, especially when it was a franchise-starting stop-motion marvel and one of the most influential horror films in history.