3. Crash
JG Ballard's Crash was one of the most controversial novels of all time on its release (noticing a trend here?), so it wasn't particularly surprising when Cronenberg elected to adapt it for the big screen. The novel covers all of the "big" themes that clearly excite the director, from sexuality to posthuman organic/mechanical cyborgism, and so it was only a matter of time before he elected to make this film. It doesn't disappoint. Even forgetting the amazingly angular soundtrack from Howard Shore or the brilliant lead performances from James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger, the film is a masterpiece. As Mark Kermode puts it, "it's pretty much perfect" in its summation of everything that Cronenberg's cinema is all about. It's his masterpiece. It is basically the story of people who have become so desensitised that they only medium through which they can achieve sexual satisfaction is through intensive car crashes. They get off to videos of car crashes, have sex in cars, touch wounds and scars with deep sensuality and actively look to come as close to death as possible to achieve the ultimate thrills. There are clear links to both a sexual admiration for robots AND an obsession with sado-masochistic fetish cultures, and it is all presented in that typically Cronenbergian way in which the flesh and the machines breathe like human beings. Perfect, yes. But not Cronenberg's absolute best. It is, by its very nature, so disturbingly sterile and mechanical that it is hard to adore. The fleshy weirdness of the two films that place above it in this list make them somewhat more enjoyable, even if technically/thematically they are weaker than Crash. Crash is his finest accomplishment, but it is not his greatest film.