This is a fascinating and easy-to-take set of musings on a fascinating artist.

A fascinating anomaly.

As directed by Rob Reiner from a script by Lewis Colick, it offers the most decent and convincing portrait of the contemporary south I’ve seen in ages (apart from Sling Blade).

Not all of these ideas are successfully dramatized, and you may have trouble believing in most of the characters, but as a deeply personal work about free-floating existential identities, this 1989 film has the kind of grit and feeling that few action comedies can muster, with Eastwood and Peters interesting and unpredictable throughout.

The existential allegories are pretty blunt—star Dennis Weaver’s character, a symbol for all mankind, is literally named Mann—but the filmmaking is electric, an early testament to Spielberg’s prowess.

A lesbian love triangle becomes a schema of sexual power plays in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most harshly stylized and perhaps most significant film.

Part of the grace and beauty of The Plot Against Harry stems from the fact that although it has at least three dozen characters and a complicated plot, it glides past the viewer with the greatest of ease.

All in all, an unusually amiable and well-made comedy.

As Nick and Nora Charles, William Powell and Myrna Loy function as the most sophisticated, insolent, and healthy married couple on-screen.

This 1987 film doesn't quite leave its slasher antecedents behind, but the styling is never less than assured, and Ruben knows how to put bland, unruffled surfaces to sinister Hitchcockian uses.

This special effects extravaganza from 1966 has proved surprisingly enduring, despite a technical quality crude by contemporary standards.

Corman's filmmaking runs on unchanneled energy and apocalyptic emotions; his is an art without craft.

A first-rate police thriller (1948) directed by Jules Dassin when he was still in his prime and before he was blacklisted, shot memorably in New York locations.

Robin Hardy's 1973 cult horror film passed through several distributors, several versions, and several bankruptcies, picking up a powerful reputation along the way.

The loose, graceful script is by Preston Sturges (one of his last before he turned to directing), and it partakes of a softness and nostalgia that seldom surfaced in his own films. Mitchell Leisen, the director, serves the material very well with his slightly distanced, glowing style.

Wellman’s splendid direction animates an otherwise static script, deftly blending comedic moments with surprisingly dark undertones. This 1931 drama may lack the punch of Wellman’s The Public Enemy, released the same year, but it’s still a fine display of his talents.

The story, from a book by Daniel Mannix, was Disney's best material in a decade or two, the stuff of rending family melodrama on the order of Dumbo or Lady and the Tramp. Unfortunately, the execution is only adequate: the character work relies too much on celebrity voices (as was Disney's habit in the dark 60s) and the whole film has a sketchy, underpopulated feel that hardly represents Disney at the studio's baroque best.

A little windy and rhetorical for my taste, but still one of John Huston’s best efforts (1948), a melodrama of ethics that soundly represses the Maxwell Anderson play it was based on (the ending is actually a lift from To Have and Have Not).

This eroticized vampire tale resulted from the last significant surge of creative energy at Britain's Hammer Films, which thereafter descended into abject self-parody.

Beginning with almost no dialogue at all, Le samourai unfolds like a poetic fever dream.

Harry Kumel's stylish Belgian vampire film with a cult reputation (1971) is worth seeing for several reasons, not least of which is Delphine Seyrig's elegant lead performance as a lesbian vampire who operates a luxury hotel. The baroque mise en scene is also loads of fun.

Experimental films are frequently criticized for being boring because they say and do too little, but the best of them put us in exhilarating overdrive because they offer too much.

A few of the set pieces are fussy or overly extended, but the rest is tolerable bone-crunching diversion.

Siegel manages to keep the action wound pretty tight, though he doesn’t seem to sympathize much with Rose’s bleeding-heart liberalism.

Robert Stevenson directed, and it's one of Disney's more watchable live-action efforts.

It’s overlong, talky, and sometimes stolid, but these are all familiar Mankiewicz failings. He shines in his deft verbal wit and novelistic propensity for detail, backlit by a highly personal blend of romance and cynicism. An imperfect film, but its excesses are as suggestive as its subtleties.

Legions of Brando impersonators have turned his performance in this seminal 1954 motorcycle movie into self-parody, but it’s still a sleazy good time.

A very good movie (1946), and by far the best Raymond Chandler adaptation, but it isn’t one of Howard Hawks’s most refined efforts—it lacks his clarity of line, his balance, his sense of a free spirit at play within a carefully set structure.