It's a soulless and dull bit of showmanship, but it sure sounds profound.

Too bad that by the time the volcano shoots its wad, the movie has already died a thousand deaths, ground to a halt by the interminable waiting for the damn thing to blow.

Yet Waiting for Guffman is never mean-spirited. Its weird warmth is perfectly embodied by Guest himself, whose flamboyant, stagestruck choreographer, Corky St. Clair, could have (in less ingenious hands) been a cruel, gay-bashing caricature, but instead becomes a hallucinatory Everyman.

A meta-horror film that hilariously parodies the genre's clichés with smarts to spare. It's also the scariest fucking movie Craven has made since the first "A Nightmare on Elm Street."

A remarkably moving and disturbing film about the possibility of belonging and the genealogy of violence.

The two films bursting out of The English Patient (a chamber piece and a David Lean dune epic) require a juggling of tone, pace and scale that might easily defeat a director more seasoned than Minghella.

When We Were Kings is a wonderfully entertaining, at times thrilling, film. Ali is magnificent, Foreman oddly touching, and their fight, which is shown almost in total, makes for superb, nail-biting suspense--even two decades after the fact.

What counts here aren't the girls, but the boys--and all the sweet and clumsy ways in which they make love to one another without once shedding their clothes.

While the women go through a few of the motions, shifting decorously under the sheets and sucking face, there's no lust in their coupling, just choreography and the conceit of two filmmakers with nothing more on their minds than fake dykes and bloodshed.

Above all, you've got Jennifer Grey, as a rich girl summering in the Catskills and falling for her working-class dance instructor, played by Patrick Swayze. The chemistry between them is red-hot, and they're wonderful dancers.

What dazzles still about David Lynch's Blue Velvet is its total authority: Not a single false gesture. No shock delivered solely for its own sake.

Save for one startlingly staged battle sequence. . .might as well have been titled "Also Ran."

Leonard Schrader adapted the screenplay from the novel by Manuel Puig, and his fearless willingness to explore every corner of human nature serves what is greatest and sweetest in the performances of William Hurt and Raul Julia.

On viewing, the cuts seem negligible, but what is new and clearly improved is the sound, which now booms with each door slam and gunshot.

Remains the most popularly successful film ever to render the inner life of an artist.

The movie can’t always keep its many moving parts in lockstep, what with its hinted-at mythos that obscures more than it elucidates and its cast of enigmatic characters whose precise dealings with one another are never made entirely clear, but its World War II backdrop, ravishing synth score by Tangerine Dream and Third Reich mysticism make for a poppy but brooding atmosphere.

The film's real power to move flows from its low, childlike angles, which, rather than infantalize its audience, bring it down to where the hurt and fear, and hence the comfort, loom larger. [2002 re-release]

Special effects master Tom Savini did the makeup for this overlooked gem (actually, his fingerprints are on a few of the films on this list), and some of the kills are downright ugly (or beautiful, in horror jargon).

A Freudian nightmare with a lead who looks like the guy who runs your local pizzeria, Maniac also features one of the great head explosions in cinema history.

To see this seamless "reconstruction" - consisting of some 15 entirely new sequences as well as augmentations to 23 others - is to behold a masterpiece revealed.

Even amid all the campy, uneven creepiness The Fog unleashes, you have to give it up to Carpenter for continuing his knack of making women just as ready as men to get into heroic, survival mode whenever some strange shit goes down.

Astringently funny masterpiece.

Unfortunately, fulfilling an apparent need to assert absolute control over his early successes no matter the cost, the director has gone ahead and loused up his 1979 masterpiece of gothic sci-fi horror.

To see the film in this meticulously restored and remixed version is like watching it for the first time, so clear is the sound, so vivid the sights.

In the nearly 30 years since the movie was released (it won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1972), one forgets how falling-about-funny is this mad caper.

The Godfather traces the arc of this doomed idealism with a beauty that is still fresh.

Signals the real end of the party, charting a denouement that arcs from blissful ignorance to violence and its ever-present threat to a final retreat.

The Conformist is a great film, drunkenly beautiful and deeply disturbing.