Much of Kiki’s charm comes from Miyazaki’s understated approach to the material. Instead of grabbing the viewer by the lapels and insisting everyone’s having a great time, Miyazaki leads the audience into the story with unobtrusive grace.

Fireflies is, at times, unbearably sad, a eulogy for a bleeding nation but also a hugely imaginative tale that reminds us of art’s power to lift us from the ramparts of our own devastation.

Like all of the best comfort food, Tampopo tastes familiar but not derivative, something more than the sum of its ingredients. If Tampopo resonates with you in ways you might not expect or be able to name, it’s because Itami also engenders the same respect for everything that goes into the making of a movie.

The Wraith is hardly more than it’s surface. The synopsis says it all and there’s very little character development outside of gang leader Packard (Nick Cassavetes, making his parents so proud) being motivated to pound on or murder other guys because they talk, let alone make love, to a girl he likes (Sherilyn Fenn).

Wiped from the eyes like so much sea-wash, his 1986 disaster Pirates is considered a rude, humiliating smear on an otherwise thematically sophisticated, if uneven body of work that, yes, occasionally courts the vulgar.

Wise Guys proves that a tone deaf, dumb-ass comedy with a bunch of nifty split diopter shots is still a tone deaf, dumb-ass comedy, and for all its frenetic energy it can’t muster much enthusiasm in those watching.

Subway is a rush of youthful energy so raw and well-realized that it steamrolls any of the director’s attempts to cohere it into an actual story.

It doesn’t make a lick of sense, and all of the supernatural gobbledygook definitely slows things down. But as an early indicator of the director’s ability to conjure forth wide-eyed wonder, Making Contact is a delightful little romp, and at only 79 minutes, it won’t take up too much of your time.

It has everything a growing horror freak needs: extreme violence, tons of nudity, vampires, mummies, and apocalyptic bedlam. The movie is slyer and smarter than people give it credit for, and absolutely gorgeous-looking.

Beyond Walken and Jones’ considerable contributions, A View to a Kill also contains a robust assortment of action sequences.

A dismal softcore romance, a sort of film version of a housewife paperback bonk-buster.

Jim Jarmusch’s breakthrough film Stranger Than Paradise — famously described by its director as a neo-realistic black comedy in the style of an imaginary Eastern European director obsessed with Ozu and The Honeymooners — captures something essential about the American character: the contradictory desire to be anonymous and to be identified, to blend into the crowd and yet still stand out.

Executed with wicked control to induce the sort of gut-level discomfort that is rare even in this genre of perverse pleasures.

This movie unfolds like artwork etched into a cave wall and brought to restless life by an unclassifiable spell that only cinema can muster.

Herzog’s singular vision and Blank’s brilliant capturing of that obsession seem especially worthy of consideration from the adventure film lovers who stay up late.

The film unravels towards the end, devolving into a too-neat shoot-em-up finale that stinks of studio interference, but Nicholson’s performance is a marvel throughout. It’s time it got its due.

Mixing the hooks of Antonioni’s Blow-Up (murder mystery caught via photograph) and Coppola’s The Conversation (murder plot uncovered via sound recording), De Palma made his best film about the power and the limits of film and voyeurism, as well as his most emotionally devastating work.

For all its youthful self-seriousness (or maybe in part because of it), Permanent Vacation is a touching vision of what it was like to be head over heels with art, love, and oneself in late-1970s New York.

There’s something especially primordial, even biblical, about director Lucio Fulci’s grisly spectacle.

Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown has a moody, romantic tone, especially in the second half.

Recouping this one amounts to nothing more than taking part in a Friedkin vanity project. Cruising has been freshly dug up for a new generation of luckily clueless viewers; but, as we know, children shouldn’t play with dead things.

Lester treats the whole thing with breezy exuberance, with colourful cinematography by legendary Carpenter, Zemeckis, and Spielberg collaborator Dean Cundey, and best of all, a killer late-disco soundtrack sweeps all your cares away.

Cronenberg has become known as a purveyor of body horror, in which the monstrous arises from within rather than without. The Brood cunningly turns this motif into a metaphor for psychotherapy itself, which seeks to dredge up and cast out the monsters haunting the unconscious.

Pryor’s best film and his best performance and that’s not taking anything anyway from his co-stars Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto.

There’s no denying that Bill Melendez and his artists were the perfect marriage with Schulz’s delicate vision. The feature also tosses out little “they-didn’t-have-to-do-it-but-they-did-it-anyway” touches throughout.

For all of its profundity, it’s just as funny as the gag-heavy likes of Sleeper and Bananas, and while it has some competition for the title of Best Woody Allen Film, few would contest its status as his most beloved.

A minor cult classic that cast a long shadow. Its cinema verite aesthetic, which combined deadpan narration, publicly available music cues, and chilling reenactments, created a kind of true crime sensationalism that would be borrowed by everything from Unsolved Mysteries to the current found footage horror craze.

The film’s thesis isn’t as clear as his earlier efforts, but it’s still a highly effective story about how the world’s insanity poisons the mind.