O'Toole plays his seductive, grand, and dangerous director part as if this might be the role he wants to be remembered for.

Only a couple years removed from his screen super-success in Saturday Night Fever, Travolta struts his way through Urban Cowboy’s modern-West parable about machismo, cowboy manqué, and mechanical bulls. Travolta captures some of the confusion of a little big man on the new prairie, Debra Winger provides a vixenish challenge to his manhood, and Scott Glenn plays the guy in the figurative black cowboy hat.

Who would have ever thought to pair up Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King? But weird as it sounds, this creepy thriller works.

Despite its age, The Long Riders remains quite fresh. By combining elements of classic Westerns with a modern narrative, Hill and his capable cast render a thrilling look at characters often misinterpreted by Hollywood.

Humanoids features a number of strong female characters, including a lead scientist and another who defends her homestead from the marauding creatures.

If the hilarious soundtrack isn't ample motivation for those intimidated by the freakish sex and violence, the side-splitting sight of shrimpy Villechaize coupling with the 225-pound, 6-foot Queen (Tyrrell) is reason enough to slog through the insanity.

Wonderful performances anchor this biopic of country star Loretta Lynn's rise to fame. In a time before the TV music channels made star biographies into such a formulaic joke, Coal Miner's Daughter was the real deal.

Disturbing and grim in its portraits, Wise Blood is nevertheless marvelous storytelling and its performances are virtually divine.

Cruising is more of an exploitation effort as opposed to a genuine mind-bender. The film concentrates on the gay underground in New York City, although Friedkin's take on a sexually charged mystery is more funny than challenging

The split screen is distracting enough, but it is the choppy scenes representing the passage of time that make the story hard to follow. More American Graffiti is not without its moments, though, and Cindy Williams' moment of realization -- when she defies authority to lead a police wagon full of women in singing Baby Love-- is a joy.

The young Dillon effortlessly portrays the thuggish Richie, and Kramer is believable as the misunderstood kid turned miscreant. Add a pulsating soundtrack featuring the Ramones, Van Halen, and Cheap Trick, and you have a vibrant depiction of confused teen life.

Peter Weir made this unsettling, atmospheric film early in his career, and it is still one of his most successful projects to date.

Boasts a smart screenplay by Robert Benton and David and Leslie Newman, striking cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth (especially in the Smallville sequence), bright comic turns by Margot Kidder and Gene Hackman, and of course, that winning performance by Christopher Reeve in the title role. Believe a man can fly? You bet!

Not entirely without some laughable or dated scenes, Halloween remains an original that continues to inspire a genre and probe middle America's fears about what's really lurking in the laundry room after midnight.

Director Alan Parker milks naturalistic performances out of his small cast and creates a brutal intensity rarely matched in cinema today. Michael Serensin's cinematography is oddly sedating yet intense, giving the prison and the whole country of Turkey a frightful, alien sort of feel.

Cheech & Chong's first movie is still their best. The duo wrote the genial script about the never-ending search for great pot, and a good supporting cast co-stars.

Some movies are like Dorothy's twister; they just pick you up and whisk you away from the commonplace world you know to a world wondrous and astonishing. Days of Heaven is such a movie. [27 July 1998]

Martin is relentlessly downbeat and has a molasses pace, but is nonetheless worthwhile to watch if you're in the mood for an uncomfortable, depressing Romero-style take on the vampire legend.

This embarrassingly stupid, cheap, and hokey film owes huge and obvious debts to Seventies gems Death Race 2000 and Rollerball, but with none of the brains or budget of those films.

1900 is a marvelous movie, Bertolucci is one of the best directors who has ever lived.

Truly, this is some kind of wonderful. (Horrific, hilarious, disturbing … but wonderful.)

Cross of Iron is a WWII movie seen through the eyes of German protagonists. Incredible montage sequences and another parable about Peckinpah’s embattled position within the film industry can be found within.

Mikey & Nicky is commonly, and unfairly, categorized as a John Cassavetes knock-off, which diminishes the originality of Elaine May's screenplay and this character study she crafted especially for co-stars Cassavetes and Peter Falk. She unleashes the darkest, most mercurial side of Cassavetes, and in Falk finds the actor's moral ambiguity that had been obscured as a result of his then-popular run as TV's Columbo.

[A] prescient and sharply drawn comedy about the depths to which one unscrupulous station will sink.

Sharp-eyed viewers will spot director Corman, Martin Scorsese, Sylvester Stallone, Joe Dante, and Paul Bartel in bit parts while Mary Woronov takes an incredibly long time to maneuver her van through a multi-car pileup. Sure, it's a ripoff. Sure it's brainless. Cannonball is still a definitive drive-in car chase flick that's gonna make you want to tromp the gas pedal and burn rubber on the way home.

Drawn from the true adventures of the Washington Post reporters and their illustrious editor Ben Bradlee, the movie heroically recounts the dogged journalistic sleuthing that cracked the story of the Watergate break-in and cover-up.

This seminal kids movie broke new ground in terms of its realistic portrait of young people and their use of foul language.

In a way, it's an archetypal car-chase flick, with next to no plot and a lot of cars flying through the air, engines roaring, tires roasting, sheetmetal bending.

If nothing else, the performances of Connery and Hepburn are welcome delights.

Hustle is a great modern love story disguised as a neo-noir police procedural.

Ryan O’Neal has never been better cast than as the shallow and opportunistic hero of Thackeray’s early 19th-century novel.

A one-of-a-kind essay centered on art forgery and hoaxes that is built from spare parts, questionable coverage, obvious overdubbing, and outright bluff, 'F for Fake' is a masterwork most often hailed for its hijacking of documentary form to tease cinema's capacity for making truth out of bullshit

This comic Disney Western is at its best when Don Knotts and Tim Conway are onscreen as the bumbling bandits who try to steal from a bunch of orphans. Few people remember anything about this movie apart from the hilarity generated by this scene-stealing duo.

This is some dumb, thoroughly predictable, drive-in flotsam, but between the cast and the nonstop action, it's fun nonetheless.

This opulently romantic celebration of American imperialism certainly presents the contradictions and is one hell of an epic.

One of Disney’s best and most popular live-action movies, this one is a favorite among those who grew up in the Seventies

Hooper's vision is horrid yet engrossing... But the worst part about this vision is that despite its sensational aspects, it never seems too far from what could be the truth.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a profound existential adventure, twistedly comic and openly bitter, brought to life by those two maniacs: Peckinpah and Oates.

To extend the boxing analogy, poker’s Raging Bull is the 1974 Robert Altman masterpiece, California Split.

Brooks’ early reputation as a film director rests with the success of this raunchy Western spoof. A great cast is eclipsed by the hilarious performances of Korman and Kahn, who plays a Marlene Dietrich-like chanteuse.

Nic Roeg here offers one of the most disconcerting portraits of otherworldliness ever seen on the screen.

This tear-jerkiest of rom-coms about a couple struggling through fundamental differences will hit you right in the feels.

The three-and-a-half-hour-long movie revels in talk as this man ponders life, philosophy, the sexual revolution, the workers' revolution, love, death, and so on. He smokes, drinks, flirts, and talks –­ and the movie is exquisitely of its time.

Teen tales don’t get much better than this.

Like Night of the Living Dead, The Crazies offers no hope, no comfort and sure as hell no happy ending.

The Hanna-Barbera animation is better than the studio’s usual bare-bones mediocrity, and the voice cast is superb.

Adapted from the Leonard Gardner novel, Fat City is long on character and short on plot (at times nearly playing like a Cassavettes film), but it's a crawl through the mud that'll stay in your psyche for days.

To this day, Dueling Banjoes still gives me the willies.

From its silent opening moments to its breathtaking double-cross conclusion, Le Samourai is the work of one of the film world's great directors working at his expressive peak.

Frenzy is one of the great latter-day Hitchcocks; great technique, great suspense, and very black humor drive this tale of an innocent man hunted by Scotland Yard for a series of sex murders.

It's that rare horror-comedy that is both comedic and horrifying.

Director Pollack and scriptwriter John Milius transform Vardis Fisher's novel Mountain Man into a gritty, cinematic tall tale that resonates across geography, time, and the loneliest regions of the solitary heart.

Just about as great as a movie's ever gonna be... As for the storytellng, The Godfather is an intricately constructed gem that simultaneously kicks ass.

Pink Flamingos is, in its own unique way, the quintessential American Family Film. Not my family, certainly, and probably not yours, but a family nonetheless. So here's to family values. And shock values, too.

Minnelli and Grey sparkle, and the Fosse flash is everywhere in evidence.

This sophomore effort (his first feature after Night of the Living Dead) is difficult and often exasperating, but worth watching nonetheless. It's kind of a quasi-existentialist counterculture love story, rife with bad rock music and hipster dialogue.

If The Wild Bunch was Peckinpah's most violent film, surely Straw Dogs has to be his coarsest and most intense. Peace and love? Forget it.

A chilling classic, the movie is a scabrous satire about human deviance, brutality, and social conditioning that has remained a visible part of the ongoing public debate about violence and the movies.

Between Plenty O'Toole and Tiffany Case, the diamond smuggler, this film is as over-the-top as they come.

Oscar-winning special effects and animation sequences by Ward Kimball make this musical fantasy a perennial favorite.

Although slowly paced, it is always stunning to look at -- decadent and perverse in that certain Eurotrashy way.

Roeg's points about the contrasts between noble savages and civilized effetes don't stand up terribly well over time.

Fonda (who received an Oscar) and Sutherland are at the top of their game in this mystery/thriller that also provides a fascinating look into the mind and soul of a top NYC call girl.

Sembène achieves this balance of tone with a mix of absurd and biting dialogue and a modest mise en scène.

Bleak but exquisitely fashioned microcosm of American life during the Depression.

Fonda and Hopper’s now-classic film hit the old guard with the force of a rifle shot to the head. [Review of re-release]

Peckinpah's grasp, for once, matches his reach and in this Western story he achieves a mythological tone for his moral fable.

This multi-Oscar-winner nails its characters, time period, and locale so perfectly that it becomes even more compelling as time goes by. Fueled by two riveting character studies and its exposure of New York City's seamy underbelly, the movie screams “contemporary” and “eternal” at once...It's one of those rare movies that comes together just about perfectly, so check out this theatrical release while you can.

Visually inventive cartoon is complemented by clever, whimsical narration and 11 songs from the Beatles.

One of the cinema’s very best car-chase sequences – set amid the hilly, windy San Francisco streets – caps this quintessential Steve McQueen policier.

This is a gritty, criminally underrated, true-crime drama, with innovations in editing and structure that would do well to be included in today's thrillers.

It makes virtually no sense, but the costumes are fetishistic gems and the set design trips the light fantastic. A camp classic.

Due more to how it makes you think rather than to what it shows, Night of the Living Dead gets under your skin and burrows into your blood and psyche.

Felix and Oscar are now part of the American mythos.

This is the way this ground-breaking monument was meant to be seen: in mind-boggling 70mm.

Simultaneously creepy and hilarious, this is the perfect slice of Grand Guignol for a humid summer's night.

Hoffman and Bancroft are phenomenally cast in a script co-written by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham that is by turns sly, touching, and amazingly fresh 30 years later. [Review of re-release]

You won’t want to miss a word of the deliciously bad dialogue in this Hollywood tale of twisted sisters.

It's almost dreamlike in its weird little tone, a Manischewitz hangover of a nightmare that's giddy enough to usher chuckles and is thoroughly unique.

One of the sharpest prison dramas ever, although it's graced with some very humorous portions as well.

So definitive in so many ways, Bonnie and Clyde has become a 20th-century touchstone.

Good performances elevate the material.

Connery didn't want to play Bond anymore, and it shows in this forgettable picture. From a stirred, not shaken, martini to the ninja training school to the "surgery" to make Bond Japanese (by shaving his chest hair), there's nary a moment of this film that doesn't make any viewer cringe.

Certainly one of the very best films in each of Donen and Hepburn's careers, this devastatingly lovely remnant of Hollywood's anything-goes Sixties (with a script by Frederic Raphael) tells the story of a marriage by showing a couple over the course of successive trips to the south of France.

The first in a series of popular Django movies helped define the Italian tradition of spaghetti Westerns with a tormented antihero, extreme, sadistic levels of violence, and loud, heroic music.

Wonderful but improbable tale about a group of mercenaries sent to Mexico to rescue their employer's wife from bad man Jack Palance.

Though casting this mediocre screen hunk as an uptight businessman's alter ego was a stroke of pop genius for director Frankenheimer, it was Hudson's idea to have two actors play the lead, and his surprisingly thoughtful performance galvanizes this harrowing, cerebral thriller (and suggest Hudson's talents were under-utilized).

This is an amazing allegorical study of the life and death of a donkey named Balthazar, whose nasty, brutish life as a slave parallels that of a young farm girl.

The cast is great and the scene in which Carl Reiner and vaudeville vet Tessie O'Shea are lashed together is unforgettably funny.

It's definitely quite the spectacle as directed by the modern-day king of epics, David Lean. The movie is something that should be experienced by everyone at least once in a lifetime.

The director's distinctive editing style, so commonplace today but so unusual for its time, is scarcely apparent in this movie. Also, Meyer's films tend to share a ribald and genuinely funny sense of humor that here gets usurped by a mean and nasty impulse that tends to block out the humor and exaggeration.

Visually, Lumet's use of gritty black-and-white realism to locate the story is also powerful.

This 1964 film, featuring an enduring Lerner and Loewe score, is a classic.

For my money, this Freudian tale about a beautiful kleptomaniac and liar is one of Hitchcock's best accomplishments, certainly one of his most perverse.

This film began the fine tradition of deviating from Ian Fleming's novels, which gave us the suave, sophisticated Bond over Fleming's monosyllabic misogynist.