Eric Henderson

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.

This was hot stuff in the mid-’50s, but beneath the sleazy coating covering the film (camp aficionados take note) is an unabashed and moderately retrograde plea for community openness.

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.

If there isn’t a single element in the entire film that’s not derivative of the studio’s then-recent past, you can’t blame them for sticking with what worked best—business models-cum-creative habits conditioned by horsewhip die hard, if at all.

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.

It’s Price that gives House of Wax its characteristic balance of elegance and lurid theatricality.

With an enviable, well-stocked cast of character thespians and a carefully dilapidated motel set, Eaten Alive is all ingredients, no recipe.

3 Women is a daring piece of cinema that glides along the edge of weirdness and somehow manages not to fall off.

Critters 2: The Main Course offers a heaping helping of everything that’s missing from the first film: a reasonably intelligent and witty script, a supple and unchained playfulness, and an anarchic mélange of diverse genre riffs.

Maybe because How Green Was My Valley doesn’t delve as deeply into the heart of darkness as Ford did in his earlier The Grapes of Wrath, it remains one of his most curiously underrated films.

More often than not, the movie only glancingly burrows beneath America’s attitudes toward rural evangelism that surfaced concurrently with the advent of the Moral Majority.

Director Francis films the scenes that center around the vampire with yellow-brown gels around the frames’ edges, giving the impression that they too are from Dracula’s omniscient view. They give Dracula Has Risen From the Grave a musty, jaundiced sensuality (like finding Great Aunt Mildred’s mothball stank-ridden garter belt hidden in the back of her Victorian closet) that characterizes Hammer’s blending of gothic tradition with modern prurience.

If Robin Hood’s charmingly sh**ty animation comes damn close to redeeming the film from utter vapidity, it’s a damn shame they couldn’t manage to supply a villain with the balls of an Ursula, a Cruella, or a Maleficent.

The film vibrates with a profound respect for historical veracity, the busy intersection between political sociology and psychology, and grunting, portentous masculinity.

A nightmarishly schematic fantasia of guiltless discomfort.

Death Becomes Her is one of the few mainstream comedies that you don’t feel even had to try to be outlandish. It was simply born that way.

Steeped in De Palma's glorious violence and sinuous cinematography, but stripped of his tricky sensuality and his anarchic self-reflective wit, The Untouchables boils down to a lot of talk.

The pleasures of Dressed to Kill flat out do not translate to print, but for what it’s worth it is the most perfectly-directed film ever, provided you, like me, bust into orgasmic laughter when De Palma’s double-shuffling editing makes it seem like the only threat Nancy Allen and a wooden cop can see boarding the subway is a 250-pound bag lady.

The “Whistle While You Work” residue of domestic slavery that colors “A Spoonful of Sugar” aside, Mary Poppins is basically Long Day’s Journey Into Matriarchy (cathartic for some, terrifying for others).

Climaxing with a tableau that’s as iconic as it is melodramatic, The Roaring Twenties revels in a relativism that keeps its momentum fresh and elusive.

A relentlessly unforced potboiler that gazes at noir through the looking glass.