Eric Henderson

There’s only so much that director Charles Stone III can do with the script’s “head held high” cornpone.

The film doesn’t break a single mold, and it doesn’t take long to realize that’s entirely the point.

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.

Few, if any, single-shot movies ever justify the conceit. In fact, most of them do their material a disservice through the distraction that emerges naturally from the trickery.

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

There are only clichés in this rise-and-fall material, with the sole distinctive wrinkle being the weight given to the rise versus the fall.

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

This new Boys in the Band is a Matryoshka doll of period piecery, a flashback of a flashback of a flashback.

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?

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is the true Tower of Babel, the movie star who with each film gets closer to God and whose films always come tumbling down around him.

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.

Novelty and Melissa McCarthy’s comedic chops only carry Life of the Party to midterms, and it soon becomes apparent that it’s a star vehicle without any engine.

Unlike 2014’s Godzilla, which benefited from director Gareth Edwards’s patience with the Jaws-style slow burn, RAMPAGE is all noise without crescendo.

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.

Father Figures, which finished shooting more than two years ago before spending endless months without a release date, is both meandering and bloated, suggesting the Frankensteinian result of brutal test screenings.

Any potential subtext of Munro Leaf's children's book has been bleached out in the marketplace-oriented Ferdinand.

Since “humbug” is already spoken for by Ebenezer Scrooge, “opportunistic” would be the most apt word for The Man Who Invented Christmas.

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

Marshall arguably intends for societal 20/20 hindsight to provide the bulk of perspective throughout.

Far from seeming like a strategic element created to define Lady Gaga's reinvention, the documentary instead feels like a natural outgrowth of it.

It cashes in on trendy retroism instead of utilizing the perspective of, to borrow from Joni Mitchell, seeing clowns from both sides now.

It's no surprise that Nick Broomfield finds little use for the moments of unabashed triumphalism in Houston's life, as he's doggedly fixated on the humiliating swan dive.

Right from the very beginning of Rob’s cruel cycle that sees him repeatedly returning to the floor of that elevator every time the church bells at his wedding begin to ring, Naked besmirches the reasons that Groundhog Day's Möbius-strip construction worked.

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.

The only wish that ends up satisfyingly granted is, in Wish Upon's final and utterly predictable tableau, the audience's.

The film's plot crux isn't romantic fatalism, but 2017's cutest manifestation of trendy gaslighting.

The truly depressing thing about a thriller as undercoocked as Unforgettable is its failure to fly on dark fantasy.

No one in Going in Style seems to really know what the hell they’re doing or why. And even though that goes double for the filmmakers, at least no one succumbs to taking any of it seriously.

Life, an incredibly square and familiar studio product, baits and switches on two disappointing propositions, moving swiftly from something expectedly cliché to something dismayingly derivative.

Every Republican regime gets the ludicrous devious-baby saga it deserves.

Monogamy, Passengers seems to suggest, is tantamount to existing in a world where nothing else matters outside of the bond you and your partner share.

David Frankel's film argues that the power of miracles can be manufactured by those who can fund them.

The film exists resolutely outside of salience and doggedly within the comfort of escapism.

Maybe it's not the worst thing in the world that Storks doesn't take many cues from Pixar's tear-jerking playbook.

The Pinkberry solipsism of this particular franchise all but requires our heroine persist as a lovelorn martyr for her audience’s benefit.

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

The film is unrepentantly cynical when it comes to the global business of warmongering, but proves unsurprisingly earnest when it comes to the lure of the American dream.

There's something to be said for a summer movie that offers up Chris Colfer as an unapologetic misogynist hairdresser.

If Ice Age: Collision Course gleefully fails at being a history lesson, at least it offers an energetic recess from reality.

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

It's a pity that no one else involved in the making of the film had Dwayne Johnson's sly intuition.

It punks its impressionable audience into believing a lie, then punishes them for their foolishness.

The Angry Birds Movie is a lot of things, but none of them true to the app's appeal.

Keanu is declawed by design, but it's hard not to wonder what the cat could've dragged in.

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

The incongruity between Melissa McCarthy's eagerness as a performer and her character's total lack of compassion makes the film somehow both restless and tedious.

As far as shameless excuses to rehash crowd-pleasing gags from the first film go, it doesn't particularly go about its duties cynically.

It's an episode of Without a Trace: Jerusalem presented with all the panache of a Trinity Broadcasting Network TV special.

Most Nicholas Sparks adaptations say, in cinematic terms, nothing so complicated as "roses are red." This one just points to a garden and shrugs.

The sense that children’s attitudes toward rampant militarization are being gradually normalized is the film's objectionable given.

Like any serving of junk food, it seems engineered to give you that initial rush of satisfaction, but leaves you in a dead zone where the only thing you want is more of the same.

Though Will Ferrell has made a career out of his own debasement, the film quickly becomes too cruel to generate laughter for anyone who would empathize with him.

In the film, Alvin and the Chipmunks proudly align themselves not with Dr. Demento, but with Kidz Bop.

Billy Ray unfurls the parallel time structure with the same flat, procedural monotony applied by Juan José Campanella to the original film.

Billy Ray unfurls the parallel time structure with the same flat, procedural monotony applied by Juan José Campanella to the original film.

Sloppy and haphazard where it should be calculatedly chaotic, it can't ever seem to settle on an appropriate tone.

The flick is an artless, puerile shadow of the likes of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's Cornetto trilogy.

It only serves to validate George Clooney's devotion to showmanship as Hollywood's current reigning poster boy for blue-state morality.

It's the screenwriting equivalent of Ryan Adams sucking the pop vitality out of Taylor Swift's deliriously produced tunes.

Whatever drugs director Joe Wright may or may not have been on when he wrestled Pan to the ground, pulverizing the material into a quivering mound of monkey-bread dough, you can trust that they were synthetic. Not a single emotional moment in this entire origin story for J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Captain Hook, and Neverland feels organic.

It risks offense by putting a typically Adam Sandler-ian twist on a tired familial trope, though such risks can often be the only thing enlivening forced franchise installments like this one.

Nancy Meyers is unquestionably committed to her auteurist signature of giving her female protagonists their cake and letting them eat it too.

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.

It adds more grist for the mill to the notion that studios don't hit the big red "reboot" button in any other state than a panic.

Father doesn't just know best, he's the only one whose knowledge or lack thereof means anything at all.

To hose down the white elephant in the room right off the bat, yes, it falls into place as a coming-of-age spin on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype.

The script doesn't revel in Amy's quite harmless flaws, or at least examine them in the spirit of benevolence.

It's a buzzkill to enter the world of Minions primed for a tidal wave of gibberish-talking lemmings to tear the roof off, only to see them once again led astray by the ordinariness of human affairs.

The film is sstrictly a high-tech spin on one of those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

It hits its Red State beats so hard that its target audience likely won't notice they're being not only condescended to, but insulted outright.

If ever there was a movie equivalent of dad bod, Entourage is it.

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

The only thing that could've made Sofia Vergara's misguided contribution grislier would have been to fellate a Chiquita banana.

There's little doubt where Cormac McCarthy-bashing Sparks's allegiances lie. The Longest Ride is truly no country for old ambiguity.

Home's exposition is a mess of forced zaniness, which leaves the rest of the film with a Swiss-cheese foundation.

A Little Golden Book version of drastically simplified socialism accompanied with a healthy dose of warmongering bravado.

The whole point of Vince Vaughn's cinematic existence is that he's a paragon for reformed chauvinism. He's an irrepressible but highly tamable id. Not so here.

The film deposits its heroine and everyone in the audience looking toward her for image-maintaining guidance back at square one.

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

Kevin Costner scowls and darts around the dubious thin line between "racism" and un-sugarcoated "truthfulness" that only anti-P.C. wingnuts actually believe exists.

2014: Annie's America makes director John Huston's elephantine, synthetically charismatic 1982 adaptation look like a Minnelliesque model of focus and concision.

It doesn't take long to realize that Ridley Scott's adaptation is only aiming for certain forms of credibility, and callously eschewing others.

If your answer to the question "When are rape jokes funny?" is anything aside from "never," the good news is that you may still find a lot to hoot over throughout the film.

There's much more plot floating around during the sequel, all leading up to a climax at the "KEN Conference" that suffers in comparison to Silicon Valley's mockery of the same milieu.

The film consistently settles for the cheapest shock devices and the most shopworn totems of our current neo-gothic moment in the genre.

Even permitting that the movie's setup counts almost by default as one of Nicholas Sparks's more complicated scenarios, that makes his failure to draw up compelling, flawed, human characters all the more conspicuous.

The expansion has the unintended and unfortunate effect of doing exactly the same thing to Alexander he accused his family of doing in the first place: marginalizing him.

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

And the jury's still very much out over whether Shawn Levy is an inept comedy director masquerading as an opportunistically dramatic one, or vice versa.

Roger Donaldson embellishes an already overly plotty scenario with hollowly attractive genre superfluities.

Jim Caviezel commits only to the level of God-like omniscience that Mel Gibson whipped into him a decade ago, and as such his character often seems less a teacher than an appropriately shadowy figurehead of authority.

Just as Michael Douglas doesn't have it in his guts to make Oren a real son of a bitch (a grandpa Gekko), Diane Keaton's jangled neurotic tics lack any dramatic import.

It's not even made clear whether the machines can feel pain. But after sitting through Fire & Rescue, interminable even at a lean 83 minutes, I sincerely hope they do.

That this retrograde "straight talk" somehow managed to emerge on screen as a reasonably genial ensemble comedy speaks to the strength of its performers.

It has the core of a genuine crowd-pleaser, but unfortunately something bigger and more all-consuming keeps getting into its head.

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.

The filmmakers only bother to lay out comedic set pieces that are simply family-friendly big-budget variations on Jackass stunts.

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.

Only the very charitable would characterize this strain of providence as anything other than dumb, or at least incredibly forgetful.

If you programmed an algorithm to figure out how The Lawnmower Man might be retold by Snake Plissken at the conclusion of Escape from L.A., you'd still wind up with a more recognizably human effort.

The net effect is a shapeless would-be diversion in which things just happen independently, a string of effects missing any cause.

Despite one or two moments of Venture Brothers-worthy fancy, the film is as by-the-numbers as any this series has ever offered.

Once the money shots of Darren Aronofsky's version recede, it becomes ever more clear that his intention is to tackle the capriciousness of Old Testament logic. And, ultimately, to assent to it.

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

The film transcends the déjà vu of its borrowed trappings but ironically sacrifices all momentum in favor of a long series of physical tests.

Beyond the forthright identity politics and titillating theatrical misdemeanors, one still comes away wondering about the things that remain concealed.

The film spent roughly a dozen years in development, and the moronic, corporate detritus from that long time warp is strewn about like so many improbable history lessons.

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

Ultimately the film is, like the Faux News programming it caricatures at face value, a deck-stacking simulation of a dialogue it isn't even remotely interested in opening.

Martin Scorsese's keyed-up, irreverent tone frequently fails to distinguish itself from the grunting arias sung by the oily paragons of commerce his film evidently intended to deflate.

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.

Child’s Play is only a shade more terrifying than Teddy Ruxpin.

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.

If it’s possible for a parable to be too simple to even qualify as a parable, the convincingly dim Snow White represents the dopey standard.

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.

Though the film is obviously coated with a veneer of nostalgic sentimentality, Eastwood never lets Honkytonk Man veer into maudlin territory.

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

The Seventh Seal, assisted by cinematographer Gunnar Fischer’s richly overexposed images, operates as though it contains the undiluted essence of life’s fueling dialectic formula. Occasionally it does, most notably in the terrifying arrival of the self-flagellants to a weak-willed village. But the road-trippers in Bergman’s follow-up, Wild Strawberries, achieve a far greater grace and clarity with only a fraction of the heavy lifting.

Imagine parents sitting in the audience with their naughty children (who used their Cabbage Patch dolls as driveway obstructions for their Big Wheel obstacle courses) and feeling ruefully double-crassed.

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

The film is riddled with an unmistakably misogynistic bent, and can’t be bothered to supply one single likable soul.

Great auntie to waking nightmare movies about distaff insanity as diverse as Images, 3 Women, A Woman Under the Influence, and Mulholland Drive, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death spends 90 minutes tapping lightly but incessantly on its heroine’s fragile sanity, as though it were some sort of Fabergé S&M model egg.

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.

To be blunt, because there was just barely enough material in the source text to pad out the film, the filmmakers also used a lot of the stuff that worked in novel form but came off as stultifying on the screen.

Unfortunately, the haphazard, showy cross-cutting between Laine’s to-the-camera narration and the flashbacks (sometimes to scenes he couldn’t possibly recollect) do little to hide the fact that Romero, like his aimless protagonist, seemingly couldn’t care less.

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.

Silent Night, Deadly Night brought the idea to new levels of cold sleaziness.

In the theater, whenever Mike, Crow or Tom Servo flub a punchline or resort to a fart joke, you almost want to lean forward and shush them.

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.

Uneven and amateurish, with a sense of vulgarity that’s now dated enough to seem downright Victorian, The Kentucky Fried Movie proves the maxim, “comedy is in the eye of the beholder.”

No matter how much director Mark Lester attempts to hide his sermonizing behind sensationalistic-pedagogic terrorism, he does himself in whenever a jaded cop shrugs his shoulders and grunts, for the umpteenth time, What can we do, they’re juveniles?

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.

A bald-faced lamprey hitching its razor-tipped maw on the chassis of The Exorcist, The Omen’s Sunday-school parable of gothic Cathsploitation comes twice as thick and thrice as pious.

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.

A limp, shapeless mess of a film trades in a genuine respect for westerns’ tropes for purile vulgarity and joy-buzzer showmanship.

The really frustrating thing about Tomatoes is the toothlessness of its satire.

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.

Despite its prodigious charms, it has probably destroyed more lives than any other Disney film, forcing a specific, unrealistic romantic archetype that truly does only exist in fairy tales onto generations of impressionable children, who would grow up desperate, needy, and crushed.

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.

The sequel’s cure proves infinitely bloodier than the original’s disease, and its over-the-top depictions of brimstone and flesh are so loopy and unmoored, you’d swear the place where nobody dared to go suddenly became Xanadu.

The choreography, the performances, the set decoration, the dialogue, everything about Hello, Dolly! is played directly to the back row of the theater, which would be fine on the stage, but on anamorphic widescreen close-ups tends to be more frightening than mirthful.

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.

Oliver & Company is as out-of-touch as anything the studio ever made.

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.

Peter Pan, in retrospect, seems much more a footnote among the studio’s 1950s output.

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.

Unabashedly lefty sentiment colors the whole film.

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.

Saludos Amigos and its sequel (or, more accurately, expansion), The Three Caballeros, had a shelf life significantly shorter than that of your standard MRE. Together, they kicked off nearly a decade’s worth of anthology-based wastes of time and resources that all but derailed Disney’s manifest destiny to rewrite children’s dreams in the corporation’s own latently art deco, actively anti-twat image until Cinderella put the needle back on the record.

Haunting, remote, and workmanlike, Blast of Silence may be the only film I’ve ever seen with a trip on the Station Island Ferry in which I expected a tumbleweed to flit across the deck.

It’s an amateur star performance-as-Stanislavski mail order catalog: a powerhouse of Method-ology (born more from a lack of acting experience than pop singers’ already refined sense of emotive abandon), complete with ingénue tics, a self-conscious display of age range, tentative ad-libs, flailing limbs, leaky eyes, precariously receding eyelids.

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.

Slap together a modestly budgeted horror film with an unmistakable resemblance to a recent hit film (Gremlins) and a notable inversion of another popular film’s ending (Poltergeist), insert just enough Podunk camp to ensure Joe Bob Briggs would catch its scent and you’ll guarantee yourself the birth of a franchise.

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 Little Mermaid is the story of one packrat pre-tween princess whose undersea kingdom is only matched in depth by her remarkable sense of consumer-minded entitlement.

As if trying to put quotation marks around its disposability, 1949’s Neptune’s Daughter uses a perpetually underwhelmed narrator to undercut its central love story, surrounded by polo antics and swimwear fashionistas.

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.

Befitting its middle-ish chronological position, it’s not surprising that the serviceably cute but mundane Lady—a turn-of-the-century ditty about two love struck dogs from opposite sides of the gated community—might be the most ignorable, least assertive production of their golden era.

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.

It’s Lifetime. It’s camp. It’s seriously confused, and it should speak directly to drag queens in straight relationships everywhere.

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.

Despite some satisfyingly gut-busting moments, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue retains a very British stiff upper lip.

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.

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.

A true amalgam of creative forces individually pooling their studio-contract talents like a hive of bees.

When the lights go out at the end of the film, so did the lights in the movie theaters.Terence Young’s tense cinematic adaptation so ruthlessly tightens the screws of tension that one could be forgiven for not noticing an earthquake, much less dimmed house lights.

If The Best Years of Our Lives emerges as a more contemporary-seeing film than almost anything else to which its ingredients could compare, it’s because of how it wrestles with the burden of patriotism. The nation’s problems are right there in plain sight, just as clear as cinematographer Gregg Toland’s typically precise deep-focus shots.

The sequel to Grease is not much more than a remake, wherein every minute detail is nothing more than an attempt to pilfer the magic of the first film.

Maniac Cop is the type of movie that you would want to watch through the slits in a sewer grate, only its execution sits perched well above its scummy aim, and the end result is that you feel guilty for wishing for something more perverted.

William F. Claxton’s film is a radically dull riff on the nature-run-amok genre, utilizing what must’ve felt at the time like the only animal not yet exploited to scare audiences. But scares are exactly what the filmmakers didn’t get.

Though Sisters is an undeniably tight homage to Hitchcock from an obviously indebted De Palma, I am still inclined to place it at least a tier below the likes of Dressed to Kill and Body Double.

Throughout, Pennebaker’s camera moves in as close as it can to capture every moment of doubt, disappointment and rage in Stritch’s face. That even still viewers debate whether Stritch was playing up the drama of the moment for the cameras only underlines how deftly Pennebaker’s brief and unassuming film resides at the heart of the interplay between work, art, and performance.

Varda captures the fairy-tale essence of early-’60s Paris with a vivacity and richness that rivals Godard’s Breathless.

I Confess ultimately reveals itself to be one of Hitchcock’s most successful examinations of the tension between public image and private turmoil.

The progression of Ozu’s style seems to parallel that of Jacques Tati, who moved from the mutable likes of M. Hulot’s Holiday into the glass-cut inflexibility of Playtime.

Even the most desensitized, ghoulishly amoral gleaners of deviant cinema can’t just stare down the nastiness on display in Cannibal Holocaust and just shrug it off.

Benny’s Video is a smug, contemptuous, passive-aggressive attack on the dehumanizing effects of media, without even the common decency to offer shrill sensationalism to punch up its subsequently feckless, reactionary, pomo assertions.

The Apple is an Old Testament movie in more ways than one, and its relentless bad taste is sure to appeal to the same audience that won’t even realize they’re being slapped in the face.

Grey Gardens remains one of the greatest and possibly only disaster movies that clearly benefits from not having seen the moments of reaping.

A bald rehash of Jaws, only with the Moby Dick elements played up even further, Orca isn’t a cheap thrill (producer Dino Di Laurentiis was also the man behind the idiotic-but-exhilarating King Kong remake), but it sure does seem like it’s in a rush to finish.

The Bellboy clearly sets a standard of self-involvement and examination in Lewis’s work that is so successfully hermetic that it scarcely needs the approval of the audience.

Inge’s scenario unravels alarmingly once the two would-be lovers start to drift apart thanks to Deanie’s nervous breakdown and the simultaneous (almost psychically connected) market crash of 1929, but the first half of the film is a tour de force of deferred urges, contortion acts of awkward intimacy, and the thrill of adolescence.

Back to the Future stands up on its own as a well-oiled, brilliantly-edited example of new-school, Spielberg-cultivated thrill-craft, one that endures even now that its visual effects and haw-haw references to Pepsi Free and reruns seem as dated as full-service gas stations apparently did in 1985.

At its best, Poltergeist III recalls that surreal mix of DIY ingenuity and narrative ineptitude that mark some of Lucio Fulci’s lesser efforts. At its worst, well, it’s just another soulless, hacky-tacky horror sequel.

Vincente Minnelli’s most acclaimed musical, Meet Me in St. Louis is a fresh breath of stale air, a tart ode to nostalgia.

Ultimately, The Fury is a film about pre-pubescence by a director whose work had finally reached the level of confidence reflecting a post-pubescent talent. The best of both worlds, baby, and barely legal.