Nicolas Cage’s outré acting style first fully flowered in his portrayal of an effete New York literary agent who, when not chasing one-night-stands or terrorizing a demure coworker (Maria Conchita Alonso), comes to believe he’s a vampire. The film is a fairly standard ‘80s indie, but Cage does something coc more »

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Satanism rears its horned head in Hollywood for the first time in this vintage spooky story starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. The “ordinary” honeymooners that set the story in motion are duds throughout, but the two stars bring the first-class creeps and scenery gnawing as they spar over deadly old gr more »

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Freddy Krueger creator Wes Craven rejoined the franchise as a screenwriter for the second sequel, and the quality jumps. Patricia Arquette and her top-drawer scream make their screen debuts among a group of troubled teens in a mental hospital who are being run through the wringer of the horror series’ oneiric logic and spectacul more »

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The young special-needs son of a single father gets in trouble thanks to his pathological lies and trusting nature—he’s soon being trafficked, falling into substance abuse, and unhoused. Perhaps the most grim and yet most beautiful of the early Disney features. -Lee Gardner more »

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Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece isn’t just a film—it’s a device that resets your internal sense of time, its deliberate pace bringing you back to 18th-century Europe more effectively than any periwig. Ryan O’Neal’s character offers a lesson for us all as he grasps and elbows his way up the ladder of society only to hit most of the more »

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Fleeing both the cops and the crooks, James Fox’s cocky Cockney gangster stumbles into a den of hippies, who dose him, ball him, and mess with his mind. Not all of the far-out ‘60s editing tricks have aged well, but watching Fox’s character’s psyche dissolve around Swinging London royalty Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg (playin more »

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From the dawn of talkies comes one of the greatest crime films ever made. Paul Muni’s performance as the scuffling street guy who shoots and schemes his way to the top of the rackets lacks contemporary subtlety, shall we say, but Howard Hawks’ direction dazzles with its skill and vision, and the whole thing moves like a scalded more »

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Screenwriter Oliver Stone and director Brian De Palma faithfully transposed Howard Hawks’ gangster classic 50 years forward to the ‘80s coke boom, inspiring a generation of rap tropes and kindling the conflagration of Al Pacino’s “Big Al” late acting style in the process. Pacino is still arguably great here, but the secret sauce more »

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This is the end—or so it was understood at the time, before original IP became a value proposition for shareholders. Pros: George Lucas upped the ante on set pieces and the three leads remain magnetic. Con: The first recurring use of blowing up the doomsday thingy as a stock climax and, of course, Ewoks. more »

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Andrei Tarkovsky’s unconventional account of the life of a 15th-century Russian painter is likely to live on as long as its subject’s icons. Tarkovsky muse Anatoly Solonitsyn never paints a stroke as Andrei. The film instead shadows his episodic struggles with making art in light of the cruelty and venality of the muddy world. A more »

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Smart move on Terry Gilliam’s part adopting a cockeyed steampunk aesthetic here. It places the film slightly outside the typical pop-culture timescale and keeps a fable-like veneer slapped on top of what is, at root, a dystopian tale of repression, stupidity, and cruelty. Jonathan Pryce stars as the most everyman Everyman ever. more »

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One of the great ‘70s paranoid thrillers rests on the narrow shoulders of Dustin Hoffman. Working his annoying-kid vibe to his advantage, Hoffman’s everydork seems suitably overwhelmed when he’s dragged into an international conspiracy involving shadowy government agents and Nazi war criminals (e.g. a delicious Laurence Olivier) more »

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Peer around Robbie Robertson’s ego to locate a top-five greatest concert film. Not only does the Band tear through a heap of their Americana-ground-zero hits like it was the last time, but the murderer’s row of special guests can’t be topped: Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, and more. Boomer heav more »

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Toshiro Mifune in a crisp white suit and cap presents one of the underrated iconic looks in cinema. His rookie detective loses his pistol to a pickpocket in a heat wave and leads the audience on a tour of postwar Japan’s sweaty mean streets as he tries to get it back before it’s used in more crimes. This is where Akira Kurosawa’ more »

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Naked space vampires! If that logline doesn’t sell you, please note that Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist) directs and duly manages to squeeze considerable mileage out of some cool production design, coulda-been-worse practical effects, and C-list actors like Steve Railsback and Peter Firth. Not to mention n more »

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Barbara Stanwyck’s nightclub-singer moll lams it from the cops and hides out amid a clutch of milquetoast encyclopedia researchers led by hunky grammarian Gary Cooper. Cooper’s character finds her slangy argot fascinating, then falls for the rest of the package. With Howard Hawks directing and Billy Wilder co-writing the script, more »

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Random people keep turning up gruesomely murdered, their placid killers unaware of having done the deed. The unrelated victims sport an “x” carved deep into their throats. From that premise, Japanese dread master Kiyoshi Kurosawa weaves one of the great modern psychological thrillers and perhaps his deepest meditation on the lon more »

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Playwright Martin McDonagh first flashed his potential staying power as a filmmaker with this crime-flick pass on Waiting for Godot. Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell play two hitmen hiding out in the title Belgian tourist burg after a botched job and sightseeing until fate reveals itself. One expects depth and delight from Glee more »

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Canadian filmmaker Bob Clark’s oeuvre somehow spans A Christmas Story, Porky’s, and this proto-slasher classic. A bunch of college girls played by pushing-30 actresses (headlined by Olivia Hussey and Margot Kidder) are stalked by an obscene-phone-calling psycho as Yuletide draws near. Clark’s use of POV killer-cam broke ground a more »

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Michael Caine tears into the role of the miserable Ebenezer Scrooge as if he never noticed that most of his co-stars were made of felt—sneering, glowering, and groveling like an Oscar was on the line. As such, the Muppets’ version of Dickens’ classic tale is no joke, though, of course, there are plenty of jokes. 1992 Brian Hens more »

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A feminist treatise and a crime yarn and a Christmas movie and a John Waters film? Yes, it’s everything we always wanted all in one untidy package. Divine’s troubled teen goes astray, gives birth, goes mad, goes showbiz, and gets the chair. Even with all that, Waters regular Mink Stole nearly steals every scene she’s in. -Lee Ga more »

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William Powell ditches his usual urbane trappings to play an unhoused man who meets a family of ritzy ditzes and lands a job as their new butler. Will he and most adorable ditz Carole Lombard fall for each other despite the apparent class chasm? Have you ever seen a screwball comedy before? The plot stretches credulity like taff more »

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Arguably the best Shakespeare adaptation ever put onscreen. Akira Kurosawa couldn’t rely on the Bard’s iambs when transposing Macbeth to feudal Japan, but he created visuals of competing richness—blanketing mists, lunar plains, tangled thickets, a Noh witch, flights of fateful arrows. Toshiro Mifune’s intensity embodies the usur more »

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One of the great live bands of the late 20th century hit the stage with a show designed to make the most of their prowess, add to the impact of the performance, and distract the least from the musicians and songs. They got one of the best and most adaptable directors of the era to film it. Together, they created one of the top f more »

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Woody Allen’s Woody Allen shtick hasn’t aged well, to say the least, but you’re really here for the late Diane Keaton, right? In truth, she only embodies the title caricature—big hat, menswear, gawky demeanor, bad driver—for a few minutes here. Otherwise, she’s a remarkably three-dimensional character who, as more »

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A slice of life about the courtship rituals of young white affluent Manhattanites about 5 seconds before AIDS changed everything and 10 years before the entire island began bending to their will. Whit Stillman’s comedies of the mannered retain their droll charm, and sharp turns from Chloë Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale, and Stillman s more »

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You think your family is odd? Meet the Crumbs. Charles is a mentally ill shut-in. Maxon is an ascetic mendicant. Robert is celebrated as one of the 20th century’s great artists and damned for the sexism and racism in his work. Terry Zwigoff’s engrossing documentary not only lays bare R. Crumb’s life, it gets at something deep an more »

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Who doesn’t love dogs? Who doesn’t love Christopher Guest’s improvised comedies? A cast of Guest regulars (including Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Michael McKean, John Michael Higgins, Parker Posey, Jane Lynch, and Jennifer Coolidge) embody obsessive dog-show types angling for blue ribbons. Fred Willard arrives late and puts th more »

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True story: Jacques Tati shot his wry comedy epic on 70 mm in order to capture every purpose-built mid-century architectural detail, every bit of odd background business, and every sight gag, no matter how broad or subtle. The film’s loving sendup of the modern world still works a half century later because of Tati’s read on peo more »

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Todd Haynes’ astonishing second feature has aged a bit, but it’s also deepened and gained in its disturbing power. Julianne Moore’s suburban lady who lunches is such a virtuoso blank that her descent into inexplicable illness and malaise functions as a kind of skeleton-key metaphor, fitting a dozen social ills over the past 30 y more »

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Leos Carax faced two nearly insurmountable challenges here: shooting on the Pont Neuf bridge, one of Paris’ major thoroughfares, and making Juliette Binoche look haggard. He rose to the occasion for his breakout, combining documentary grit with classic melodramatic amour as Binoche and the great Denis Lavant play two star-crosse more »

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Tim Robbins delivers mail in gritty old NYC, but visions of demons and literal Vietnam flashbacks interrupt his shackup bliss with girlfriend Elizabeth Peña.The this-is-a-true-ish-story frame is kinda dumb, but class-trash peddler Adrian Lyne plays way over his head here and makes no errors as the dread creeps. Endlessly ripped- more »

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Yes, it’s a fairytale princess story, but the venerable Disney adaptation also resembles a Tom and Jerry cartoon for a good chunk of runtime as a cartoon cat and a gang of mice wage goofy war. There’s also female undermining and patriarchal machinations. And some stunning hand-drawn animation, of course. -Lee Gardner more »

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A woman disappears on a barren Mediterranean islet during a yachting jaunt. Her fiance (Gabriele Ferzetti) and her best friend (Monica Vitti) search for her. The mystery lies not in the disappearance, but in what happens to those left behind, as director/co-writer Michelangelo Antonioni crafts one of the richest texts of mid-cen more »

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Jim Jarmusch transposes Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï to urban East Coast America for this genre gem. Forest Whitaker tools up as a taciturn hitman who follows the ancient honor code of feudal Japan, bringing him into conflict with his employers, the local Mob. Isaach de Bankolé’s ice cream man and the RZA’s bumping score b more »

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How does that saying go about good deeds? Silvia Pinal’s nun-to-be loathes her creepy old uncle (Fernando Rey) but nonetheless consents to visit him one last time before she takes her final vows. What ensues represents one of Luis Buñuel’s most thoroughgoing savagings of the Catholic Church, and that’s saying something. -Lee Gar more »

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A boy shouldering a cross-shaped weapon wanders a war–ravaged waste. A young girl cradles a round belly — in fact, it’s a large egg hidden under her dress, an egg she’s convinced is special. Writer/ director Mamuro Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) and illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (Final Fantasy) teamed up for this terse mindblower, nev more »

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Everybody’s broke, people are being rounded up on the streets, and Nazis are on the rise. Yes, it’s Germany between the world wars, the setting of Bob Fosse’s screen adaptation of the Broadway smash. The ambisexual bed-hopping at the heart of the plot is au courant, too, though the film is at its louche best on the grotty stage more »

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Madonna was never going to be a great actress, but she’s undeniable as a screen presence. She shot to stardom while Susan Seidelman was shooting this downtown romp with Rosanna Arquette as a Jersey housewife whose amnesia leads to her swapping lives with the Material Girl’s title wastrel. Lots of fun, not least for Manhattan pre more »

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Humphrey Bogart stars, though you don’t see his face for a third of the film. Delmer Daves shot the early reels from Bogart’s character’s POV—a bold gambit/ gimmick that helps enliven this solid noir. After plastic surgery, Bogart tries to prove his innocence with the help of Lauren Bacall. Several tense sequences and a kindly c more »

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Turns out you can film pretty much any novel, though apparently there are limits to how queer you make it. David Cronenberg’s take on William S. Burroughs’ subterranean classic leans into surrealism, squalor, and ick as Peter Weller’s authorial stand-in infiltrates a nightmare demimonde undercover as a straight guy. If nothing e more »

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Womanizing workaholic substance-abusing chainsmoking Bob Fosse transformed his decline into one of the great American films, as clear-eyed about death, creativity, and denial as any movie ever made. You might not imagine Roy Scheider as the star of a musical, but then it’s tough to imagine a director making a film about his own more »

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It’s reductive to call it the French Do the Right Thing, but not inaccurate. Vincent Cassel, Saȉd Taghmaoui, and Hubert Koundé star as three young men living in a Parisian slum in the wake of an uprising. A friend lying near death after a beating by police and a cop’s lost gun complicate matters. Director Mathieu Kassovitz’s sil more »

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Peter Greenaway’s prickly cinema finally hit big with arthouse audiences here. Food and sex will do that. Everybody despises Michael Gambon’s vile gangster, but he holds money and violence over restaurateur Richard Bohringer, just violence over wife Helen Mirren. That doesn’t prevent her from pursuing an affair in the restaurant more »

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There’s so much testosterone sluicing through this movie that the print probably needs a shave. And that’s part of why it’s so much fun—big dudes with big guns meeting their otherworldly match in the sweaty jungles. That and spotting all the memes. -Lee Gardner more »

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Lumetland is full of courthouses and bars and unappealing apartments, with the occasional posh paneled room just to make the regular Joes feel inferior. Paul Newman is a serious Lumet guy, a clay-footed lawyer with scotch for blood who gets a chance to turn it all around and blows nearly every shot at it. You’ve seen it all befo more »

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That this movie ever existed, much less continues to, seems like some fake Wikipedia entry that will get taken down any minute. Nicolas Cage plays screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman, who was hired to adapt Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief. He did. That’s the film you’re watching. But it’s mostly about Kaufman’s inability more »

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Godzilla returns! As do Rodan, Mothra, Baragon, and a host of other kaiju in the film series’ grand battle royale. Invading mind-controlling aliens unleash the pacified monsters on Earth’s capitals, and it’s up to a cadre of plucky astronauts to battle the aliens and free Godzilla and his friends to fight the real enemy. The mid more »

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In the first career-spanning documentary of the legendary and prolific artist and the world’s first generative feature film, Hustwit set out to decode Eno's creative strategies and examine his lifelong search for the meaning of music. Defying the hagiographic impulses of the music doc genre, Eno draws from original interviews an more »

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David Cronenberg’s last low-budget Canadian film before Scanners blew him up remains one of his most psychologically fraught and visceral. Good-looking blank Art Hindle tries to raise his daughter while estranged wife Samantha Eggar undergoes intensive therapy with radical psychiatrist Oliver Reed. But the subjects of her therap more »

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It’s always worth remembering that war is a brutal and often cynical affair. Mike Nichol’s prestige project drew from a canonical source and features an all-star cast but has gone down in history as a bomb. Perhaps audiences weren’t ready for a film as assured yet caustically absurd as this. Allan Arkin’s terrified bombardier pl more »

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Super-saturated color, wide-angle lenses, endless filters, oddball angles—music-video auteur Hype Williams only made one standalone feature film, but it still stands out. DMX and Nas star as the kind of around-the-way gangstas they rapped about, the former escalating into the drug game, the latter turning to Self-Improvement. Su more »

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Despite the patently surreal tale, Disney’s take on Lewis Carroll’s novel isn’t one of those old-school animated films that tempts the viewer to quip that the animators must have been on drugs. The colors are vibrant, and characters like the Cheshire Cat and Caterpillar seem like they should be stoner icons, but Alice’s romp is more »

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Normalize releasing four-hour films theatrically! If Brady “The Brutalist” Corbet can do it, there’s no reason why Quentin Tarantino, near the peak of his Hollywood heat, should have been forced to split his globe-spanning action opus in half, especially when it plays so well welded back together. more »

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John Boorman was left out of Peter Biskind’s canon-setting book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, but there’s an argument to be made that the New Hollywood began here. Boorman’s adaptation of Richard Stark’s hardboiled fiction infuses a classic noir tale with existential fatalism and downright experimental techniques. Oh, and many beli more »

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If you know the name Gloria Swanson, this film is probably why, and that is perhaps as it should be. A darling of the silent cinema, she was brought out of retirement by Billy Wilder to play the reclusive bygone star at the center of his Hollywood-insider masterpiece. It’s thus easy to mistake her for her character, which unders more »

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Humans evolved to make meaning, but what if they can’t? That’s the question that lies at the heart of the greatest true-crime film of them all. Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, and an exquisite supporting cast chase after the serial killer who slew five in the Bay Area in the late 1960s. David Fincher’s maniacal more »

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For most filmgoers, Gloria Swanson = Nora Desmond. But she filled those slippers thanks to silent classics such as Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly. Swanson plays a convent lass who catches the eye of a rakish baron, propelling our flirty ingénue on a fateful course. Queen Kelly is an unfinished film, technically, but there’s no more »

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Let’s face it: John Boorman’s ‘70s succès de scandal put the image of Appalachian people back 50, maybe 100 years. Viewed more than 50 years on, however, the entitled proto-bro hubris of Burt Reynolds’ would-be Natural Man and his crew of Atlanta slickers (Jon Voight, Ronnie Cox, and Ned Beatty) makes their brutal fates seem eve more »

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Budd Boetticher’s archetypal Westerns with Randolph Scott are finally getting their dusty, parched flowers, and it’s about time. Scott plays his usual lone, upright cowboy, this time tangled up with three murderous thugs and frontier damsel Maureen O’Sullivan. The motor driving the plot is that Scott is more admirable than every more »

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Akira Kurosawa’s final collaboration with Toshiro Mifune features the topknots and kimonos of Seven Samurai and Yojimbo and embodies an ethic of stoic service. But this time Mifune plays a doctor running a ramshackle clinic in a poor neighborhood of Tokyo who has to teach a social-climbing young physician (Yūzō Kayama) how to ca more »

Paul Thomas Anderson’s golden-age porn-biz epic isn’t really about porn, or even sex. It’s about family. None of PTA’s flash one-ers or dead-on needle drops would matter if it weren’t for the keen insight of his script or the performances of his killer cast: Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Burt Reynolds, Heather G more »

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Emily Bronte doesn't need pomo frippery or textual hair-splitting to work. William Wyler's 1939 adaptation cast Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon as Heathcliff and Cathy and shot the outdoor scenes in Southern California. It'll still clutch your heart and tweak your ducts. - Lee Gardner more »

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Ridley Scott's breakout is so well made that, except for the computer displays, you could release it new tomorrow and it would still look fresh. Its sci-fi/horror mashup still gets ripped off on the regular more than 40 years later. When Scott revisited it for a pointless "director's cut," he barely touched it. It is that good. more »

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Francois Truffaut ranks as perhaps the most overrated Nouvelle Vague director, but his semi-autobiographical debut feature will live forever. Fourteen-year-old Jean-Pierre Leaud's extraordinary performance as an urban adolescent let down by his loser parents, school, and society and running out of good options channels an more »

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The premise was going to work almost no matter what: Dennis Hopper's mad bomber has rigged a city bus to blow if it drops below 50 mph as it careens through bottlenecked LA. But director Jan De Bont, editor Jon Wright, and athletic young star Keanu Reeves create kinetic cinema magic here. more »

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Minor Hitchcock once best known for having been shot as a series of long oners, Rope now fascinates more for gay subtext that is just barely "sub." John Dall and Farley Granger play adult roommates who murder a pal to see if they can get away with it, then serve a light supper on the chest containing the corpse. Jimmy Stewart pl more »

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Yorgos Lanthimos enjoys the awards and the stars and the big budgets now, but nothing he's done lately is as original, shrewd, outrageous, or deadpan hilarious as his second feature. A Greek family man and his wife have decided to protect their children from isolating them from it. That's already telling you too much. Just see i more »

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The first of Yasujiro Ozu's classic collaborations with Setsuko Hara amply demonstrates why he cast her five more times. She plays the adult daughter of fellow Ozu stalwart Chishu Ryu. They have become comfortable with her tending him, but as they both age, he knows she must start her own life. Ozu and Ryu work their usual minim more »

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The film that made Pam Grier a star. Nurse by day, badass by night, she's out for revenge against the pusher who hooked her sister. But as she kicks ass up the ladder toward Mr. Big, she runs into more than she bargained for. Grier easily handles the sex and violence inherent in classic Blaxploitation, but it's the vulnerability more »

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Every year hundreds of women flock to temporary harvesting jobs in the rice paddies of Northern Italy, a perfect setting for working-class drama and romance. Doris Dowling is soaking in it - on the lam from the law, torn between a crook boyfriend and an upright soldier, trying to get on with her fellow workers. Giuseppe De Santi more »

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John Woo was just another struggling Hong Kong filmmaker before this story of brotherhood, sacrifice, and many, many round of 9mm ammunition rebooted his career. Ti Lung and the uber-charismatic Chow Yun-fat star as down-and-out gangsters dragged back into the life. Woo himself plays a small role as well as choreographing the pi more »

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Marcello Mastroianni stands in for director Federico Fellini as a celebrated cinema auteur besieged by the demands of his life and career and blocked over the creation of his next film (which you are currently watching). But no capsule logline captures the mindmeld effect of Fellini's mix of reality, memory, dreams, and fantasy, more »

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Amy Heckerling transposes Jane Austen's Emma to Southern California mall culture with Alicia Silverstone as the contemporary stand-in for Austen's title busybody, matchmaking and Pygmalioning it up even as her own life gets a bit random. Even laden with 30-year speech and standards, the director's script sparkles. A perfect film more »

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Is Close-Up a documentary? An Iranian man who pretended to be a famous Iranian director appears as himself, as does the family he hoaxed and the journalist who broke the story. Filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami secured permission to film the man's trial, and asks questions of the defendant on camera during the proceedings. Issues of pe more »

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Thank god for Val Kilmer. Even Kurt Russell and his vigorous mustache can't quite save this epic Western saga from its self-seriousness and open-range sprawl. But Kilmer's Doc Holiday - a consumptive dandy and cardsharp quick with a pistol and a withering quip - makes every scene he's in a hoot and sticking around well worth it. more »

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