Eric Henderson

Without spoiling its increasingly ludicrous (and ludicrously believable) escalations, American Fiction ultimately gets off scot-free clinging doggedly to the middle ground.

At once an excoriating satire of the performativity of homosexuality within a social media-addled community as well as a seemingly earnest lament for the total loss of collectivity, the film minces neither words nor bodily appendages.

The sense that they don’t make mass entertainments like this anymore is palpable.

The clothing may be couture, but Funny Face’s plot is strictly wash, rinse, repeat.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear now seems much less like Salt of the Earth-as-a-potboiler and a lot more like the spiritual godfather to every testosterone-fueled thrill ride since.

Has the time come to ask if the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction?

As dumb as Tag is on the surface, it offers amity, emotional support, awkward tears, the specter of death, and the spectacle of ass-punching slapstick all rolled up in one somehow cohesive collection of all-good spare parts.

The makers of this rescued-footage documentary ultimately understand the power of its subjects' personalities.

It's a boldly attempted strike against the monolithic corporatization of fan service, and arguably one of the few films that defines dystopia as nothing less than a marketplace of trademarked, cross-promotional intellectual property. In other words, our here and now.

Thor: Ragnarok is the flamboyantly roller-disco entry in an already uncomplicatedly cartoonish side franchise.

Kathryn Bigelow hyper-realistically, almost dispassionately, covers her ensemble’s actions in the manner of a somber disaster film.

Malcolm D. Lee's film at least it goes down easy. Easy like a Sunday-morning hangover.

It presses the case that the complexity of the human condition distracts us from the pure dignity of a noble act.

Much like with Neighbors 2, Mike and Dave’s obvious ace in the hole is its commitment to gender parity.

A pop sonata of stand-up comedy routines layered with, if not vitality, then at least honest energy.

It feels less like an cautionary adventure movie or the classy Hollywood equivalent of a Reader's Digest "Drama in Real Life" and much more like a disaster epic.

When the trademark Shyamalan twist finally arrives, it doesn't synthesize anything other than the director's devotion to his signature gimmick.

George Miller orchestrates the rubber-burning pandemonium with the illicit smirk of someone who knows he's giving us exactly what we want.

Its dedication to the transgressive power of frivolity remains the franchise's greatest weapon.

You can't help but be impressed by how much it represents a natural, even defensive evolutionary step on its creator's part.

Tom Cruise's participation transmutes, as it always does, everything around him, turning the movie's series of false starts, dead ends, and hard lessons into a working metaphor for his own career.

In form, it's no wham-bam VFX sizzle reel replete with sputtering, ejaculatory climaxes. It's the magnificently sustained equivalent of Ravel's "Bolero," with nuclear warheads in place of timpani rolls.

Freed from the burden of starting anew, the film restores the Muppets' rightful place as stars of their own show.

With Travis Mathews's help, James Franco's persona forms a kind of symmetry: 1980's dubious homophobia against 2013's risible homophilia.

Strangers on a Train, though undoubtedly effective as a classic Hitchcock thriller, is also nothing more complicated than one elongated gay cruise joke-cum-horror story.

Lee deftly follows the actions of two dozen people on what turns out to be one of the longest, hottest, most memorable and maybe most tragic days of their lives. And he does it without so much as a single lugubrious or extraneous moment.

Here, a pessimistic Romero dares to tackle the very essence of man’s inhumanity to man. And in the end, Day of the Dead is every bit as compelling and unsettling as its more lauded predecessors.

Inscrutably powerful and brutally honest about diva worship as another form of male domination, Mommie Dearest is to camp what Medea was to Dr. Benjamin Spock.

Rosemary’s Baby is one of horror cinema’s all-time slow burns, drawing viewers gradually into entertaining the possibility that the movie’s series of strange coincidences and accumulating sense of dread are only subjective representations of Rosemary’s unraveling mental state.

With Malcolm X, Lee doesn’t so much inject his sensibilities into the lifeline of his subject, but rather comes to see how his place as a film director can be integrated within the social movement of X’s message.

Lewis, through sheer force of will, turns the script’s easy ways out into the essence of blunt, adolescent sexual flowering.

From the very first scene, The Howling plays around with the notion of vulnerability as a role-playing exercise, a pseudo-sex game.

The Passion of Joan of Arc remains the moment that [Dreyer] guided his medium to new heights, and also crafted a work that would endure outside of any specific context.

White Hunter, Black Heart finds Eastwood reaching a peak in the fields of both film direction and acting.

Cruella De Vil is so much a tour de force that she single-handedly snatches the movie away from any retroactive comparisons to the likes of The Rescuers or Robin Hood or any of the other post-classical Disney features whose sloppiness is their only saving grace.

Kümel’s impulse to remain on the waning edge of eroticism turns what could’ve been another cheap thrill into a genuinely unsettling examination of the human race’s most happily sanctioned form of vampirism: man-woman couplings.

White Heat’s ultimate message: love’s a bitch…even crypto-incestuous love.

With Playtime, Tati made one of the most fully inhabitable films ever.

Romero’s own Belle du Jour, a tale of a lonely, neglected housewife whose discontent and suppressed erotic desires are efficiently conveyed in a series of bondage-tinged dream sequences.

Magnoli’s professional, downright neorealistic approach to filming the concert clips almost disguises how audacious a structural conceit is the film’s climax: nearly a half-hour of musical numbers that render the solipsism of Prince’s vanity project entirely justifiable.

Cross of Iron would almost seem a proper mea culpa by Peckinpah for his controversial career, and the pre-Dogville closing credit sequence featuring a risible, anti-patriotic photo slideshow reveals a director still capable of new and inventive provocation tactics.

Chantal Akerman’s 1975 experiment in film form, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is an astonishing work of subtextual feminism which has to count as one of the seminal films of the 1970s.

Au Hasard Balthazar possesses a strictly balanced, bemused-unto-neigh-indifferent attitude toward delineating between the wry and the glum, the sacred and the profane.

Pinocchio redeemed Disney from the parlor trickery of Snow White and suggested animated features could indeed dance without strings.

Carrie, on the other hand, is frighteningly feminine, a slap in the face of those charging De Palma with misogyny as fierce as the one Betty Buckley whales across Nancy Allen’s face.

It’s the experience more so than the actual content of The Shining that radiates cold, anti-humanly indifferent terror.

The frothy May-September (well, closer to June-July) romance All That Heaven Allows is the fountain from which directors as disparate as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Todd Haynes, and John Waters have all drunk, marking it as the most influential of the 20-plus films Sirk directed during the 1950s.

The Bad Seed might not have the lurid veneer of Oedipal conflict that turned The Good Son into a supreme guilty pleasure, but it’s got more false-façade performances than you could ever hope for.

A highly impressive effort.

Poltergeist's most canny conceit is how it takes the concept of a haunted house—up to that point a gothic, remote icon (you practically had to accept a dare and then drive halfway across the state to ever find yourself in one)—and plops it in the middle of the most mundane of all possible locations: American suburbia.

What separates Texas Chainsaw Massacre from its predecessors is its anarchic, cynical hysteria—its bizarre and dark-as-hell gallows humor.

Its truly unnerving quality is that its existence is a brutal reminder from the past that homosexuality is not heterosexuality, and that any attempt to reconcile the difference will only breed resentment, confusion, and violence. Or perhaps it will only lead to more lame Hallmark movies of the week like Brokeback Mountain.

Rose’s dizzy, Jungle Fever-ish romanticism is juxtaposed against his cold, Cronenbergian dystopia to create Candyman‘s uniquely baroque use of modern urban blight, subtle political undercurrents, and hints of fallen woman melodrama. It creates a startlingly effective shocker that gains power upon further, sleepless-night reflection.

Ichikawa Kon’s 1956 film The Burmese Harp is a tender almost-musical film about the horrors of war and the obliteration of identity.

Gaslight is an expertly directed and evenly paced slow burn (and Dame May Whitty is a stitch, though underused, as a nosy neighbor lady), but its lack of a sound moral and psychological center renders it totally transitory and forgettable.

The punchlines come quick and thick, with little foreplay or consideration for anything other than getting a physical reaction from the audience.

Though Bonnie And Clyde may have been conceived as a proto-European hybrid and The Graduate a California thoroughbred, the violent hemorrhage that closes the Depression-era/Vietnam-era touchstone makes as good a case as anything in filmed entertainment that American mass media operates in the declarative.

Blake Edwards’s discontent-but-charmed portrait of a long-lost New York state of blithe is, like most Blake Edwards films, narratively scattershot but reliably fixated on the cinematic chemistry of social relations in a mod (and post-mod) era, which invariably boil down to genders and the extent to which individuals ascribe to their assigned sex roles.

The Crazies lacks the nightmarish momentum of Romero’s best zombie flicks, but it’s no less astute with its allegorical potshots.

In its scant 64-minute running time, the big-top melodrama of Dumbo reduces me to a blubbering, mucus-drizzling wreck at least once with every viewing.

The sense of moral responsibility in Hitchcock’s films may have never felt more imperative and succinct.

Serial Mom is the strongest film of the post-midnight-movie chapter of John Waters’s career.

The film, meekly directed far across the soundstage by former actor Paul Henreid, is a potboiler filled with oh-so-convenient plot twists and purely incidental characterizations.

Death Race is a maladroit but exuberantly gamey mix of social commentary and blue-collar goofiness.

The film is simultaneously an act of revisionism as well as a parody of then-revitalizing neo-noir.

Altman’s disgruntled comedy California Split, aside from its typically busy soundtrack (it was the first movie Altman used eight-channel audio to capture all the dialogue), seems a relatively straightforward buddy film...it’s also an anti-buddy parable in which George Segal and Elliott Gould’s homosocial behavior is equated unflatteringly against their obsessive gambling addictions.

This lack of force-fed moralizing, coupled with its diffuse plot and hazily psychedelic imagery, makes it hardly surprising that the film’s revival came about when it developed a cult following.

Decolonization in Black Girl isn't only a myth, but also a myth that actually strengthens the consumerist caste systems.

An extraordinarily imaginative director, Tran fashions Cyclo into a sensualist nightmare.

The Italian Job isn’t the first movie to take car chases into strange and new environments, but it sure is creative.

Altman directs the complex web of social interactions with a frame that’s both inclusive and prying. And the actors he collected and dropped in Malta’s simulated community help evoke an atmosphere that is genial yet guarded. Shelly Duvall couldn’t possibly have played Olive Oyl badly.

Look, fun is fun, and there’s plenty of the kitschy brand to be had from the riot of late-‘60s production design and lurid plot developments.

Robert Bresson's film hits with the effect not so much reflecting a cleansing of the soul, but rather a ransacking.

Kiki presents a world of fantasy in such a genteel, unforced manner that it only seems ordinary and mundane. As such, it feels like a touchstone for all of Miyazaki’s later, even greater works of cartoon storytelling art.

Rather than clarifying, De Palma’s technique with Raising Cain effectively obliterates the audience’s bearings. Which gives the film’s final sequence—on the surface a shameless swipe from Dario Argento’s killer reveal at the climax of Tenebre—a nasty twist.

The Patsy reflects a genuine affection for the artisans and jacks-of-all-trades that make careers like his possible.

Barker’s vision cribs equally from the mythos of vampires and zombies, but Hellraiser‘s overriding ridiculousness (and nagging budgetary shortcomings) can’t disguise the fact that the movie is at least unwittingly a product of the AIDS crisis.

It’s unquestionably among Disney’s masterpieces.

All That Jazz may be Fosse’s finest cinematic achievement.

A quaint portrait it’s not, and aside from the conditions of the rat-trap midtown hotel where the competing queens are put up in, it’s hardly fly-on-the-wall either. While it presents its subjects at arm’s length, The Queen consistently recognizes the constraints they face.

Viva‘s intentionally flat performances and flatter double entendres...mercilessly satirize the Playboy mindset even as the film revels in the kitschiness of it all.

School Daze is, if nothing else, a compelling time capsule of racial politics in the late ‘80s, ethnographically sealed-off in a hothouse micro-environment (an all-black college campus) that’s as constrictive as Lee’s varying plot threads and stylistic whims are profuse.

Magnificent Obsession was a decisive turning point for Douglas Sirk, kicking off a beloved string of loopy ’50s melodramatic masterpieces.

Body Double, while not his finest, is the best candidate as De Palma’s signature film. It’s a wicked, feature-length double entendre from a Doublemint era. Take it at face value, take it for its prurience or take it for all it’s worth. Hell, try taking on all three at once.

Lee’s first film statement conveys the communal experience.

Romero’s distinctly Pittsburghian sensibilities can’t be underestimated when explaining Dawn’s appeal; the Monroeville Mall perfectly evokes the feel of a hollow monument standing at the center of a community that couldn’t be bothered to define itself any more distinctively than could be represented by their choice between Florsheim or Kinney’s shoes. The mall, in essence, shoulders the burden of their identity.

Undoubtedly [Cronenberg's] best from this period and also the most troubling.

My Beautiful Laundrette is still fresh and remains a model case for creating moving, liberating cinema from an oppressive environment. It’s every bit the landmark gay film it deserves to be.

The quintessential Brat Pack vehicle, hampered by Hughes’s willingness to pigeonhole his protagonists in exactly the same manner as they accuse Vernon of doing, The Breakfast Club is hopelessly tethered to its era in ways that the same year’s other major high school-themed blockbuster, Back to the Future, isn’t.

Bujold’s enthusiasm as a performer redeems the entire picture, especially when she’s asked to perform flashback scenes that shouldn’t work, but, thanks to her, represent another of De Palma’s fearlessly experimental whims.

The title alone of Kirby Dick’s alleged documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist practically screams: This is not your standard biopic!

The major saving grace of The Hills Have Eyes is that it’s better acted than probably any other film from Craven’s early period. Because of his emotionally bare nature, Robert Houston’s achingly implosive terror is more complex than your average male lead in a horror film.

Showgirls is truly one of the only ’90s films that treats pop culture as a vibrant field of social economics and cerebral pursuit, and not merely tomorrow’s nostalgia-masturbation fodder.

It stands as maybe the only great film by the director that I feel an unconscious crisis of conscience that makes me want to view it without an auteurist context.

Fargo, more than any of the Coens’ other work, is a study in contrast, namely in the sense that it’s made by two people who were clearly at one time insiders, but who have now taken the opportunity to see the Midwestern template from the outside. As such, every interaction in the film registers as a direct reflection of incongruous elements and repressed tensions.

McDowall deftly keeps one foot in the here and the other in the hereafter, which allows Burton a unique opportunity to juggle two sets of funhouse effects.

As easy as it would be to make rude connections between the film’s raunchy shenanigans and Polanski’s own history, the fact is that Bitter Moon doesn’t feel like either an explanation, an apology, nor a defense of the kinky sexual games adults play. Think of it as Polanski’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

In its galvanizing portrait of a body ravaged and sexual stasis infected by bugs, The Fly might be Cronenberg’s most direct horror film ever.