These three form a fascinating trio—especially when Eddie inevitably begins to revert to the chaotic choices of his youth—but in truth, that camera is the story. Working with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese doesn’t just offer an endless array of exciting movements and cuts. He also gives each one emotional heft and thematic purpose, evoking adrenaline, uncertainty, antagonism, anger, and hubris at just the right moments.

This is handsomely made (cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth lights the reunion as if it were already part of some magical realm), but what lingers about the movie are the quieter, actorly moments.

The audience is never fully let in on either character’s interior life, as we skip from incident to incident. This is despite Streep and Nicholson working overtime—a strange sight for two effortless actors.

When Cryer eases up and lets Duckie’s vulnerability show, there’s an undeniable sweetness to the character. Ringwald, though, is the true wonder: Andie’s head is always held high—and she frequently backs that up with a self-empowering speech—but her facial expressions are constantly in flux, revealing the many other things she’s feeling: uncertainty, insecurity, her own vulnerability.

Director Joe Dante provides a loving, detail-filled snapshot of youthful camaraderie and creativity – I love how their cockpit is a Tilt-A-Whirl – before indulging in the sort of bizarre satire that can be found in most of his films (especially Small Soldiers and Gremlins).

Nelson is jarring, scary and brilliantly bitter.

Even here, in a calling-card genre exercise, the Coens are clearly interested in existential, quasi-spiritual concerns about guilt, justice, revenge, and violence. All that good Old Testament stuff.

If Starman works at all, it’s because of the way Allen gazes at Bridges, as if his mystery is her answer. We believe she’d seriously fall for this doppelganger because we understand how badly she’s hurting.

Watching Dune is a bit like trying to dig your way out of a sandstorm. Wave after wave of lore and nomenclature pile up around you until you finally succumb, and are buried. At which point you’re best off giving up on the movie as any sort of coherent, compelling piece of science-fiction and simply embrace it as camp.

In a sense, the film only works because, in the real world, the system is rigged against someone like Axel Foley. Yet when Murphy seizes the screen, all bets are off, resulting in a work of racial subversion that’s both hilarious and cathartic.

Paris, Texas has an undeniable power. There is certainly a sort of transcendence to be found in the sight of Travis, wearing those 40 miles of rough road on his face, finally finding a measure of peace.

Those nightmares we’ve all had about being chased by some relentless, unstoppable monster? This is the movie adaptation.

Thankfully a sharp cast and goofy wit mostly keep the movie light on its feet.

Once Upon a Time in America paints a portrait of the United States as a land of shadows and violence, yet one that nevertheless has an irresistible, romantic pull. [2014 re-release]

Turner and Douglas have great chemistry—in their best moments, they recall Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable on the road in It Happened One Night—helped by the fact that Douglas is willing to be undercut by both Turner and the screenplay.

Nostalghia is further evidence that Andrei Tarkovsky might not be a filmmaker, but a sorcerer.

Before it goes completely off the rails into yoga sex and ill-advised special effects, The Keep manages to establish an intriguing sense of atmosphere and dread.

The structure doesn’t work and the characters feel like screenplay concoctions (despite being drawn from a Larry McMurtry novel), but that hardly matters considering the three performances at the center of Terms of Endearment.

Not nearly as uproarious as I remember it being upon its release, when I would have seen it around the age of 10 or 11, Mr. Mom nevertheless has an endearing time-capsule quality as a slapstick consideration of gender roles in the early 1980s.

Sure, Risky Business is partially an adolescent fantasy, but it’s even more about how the prosperity pressures placed upon Joel Goodsen have frayed his nerves to the point that he can’t even bring his erotic dreams to fruition.

A tender miracle, Tender Mercies presents itself as a parable—though one of those tricky ones where you’re not quite sure of the takeaway. The biblical allusion is apt, because the movie is faith-soaked, yet not sopped. Immersed in religion, it nevertheless resists pandering to either touchy religious audiences or scoffing irreligious ones.

If Local Hero is ultimately less complicated than its reputation might suggest, writer-director Bill Forsyth navigates the tale with a warmth and wry humor that wins you over, while the seaside vistas—captured by cinematographer Chris Menges—are ridiculously beautiful.

Sophie delivers three “confessions” over the course of the film, each delivered by Streep with what can only be called a commanding fragility.

When it comes to 1980s comedies about urban anxiety, I prefer this Ron Howard lark to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. Partly this is due to the manic brio of Michael Keaton in his feature debut, but it’s also the fact that the movie—written by the team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel—has a better control of comic pacing and energy. Not all the jokes land (and some are problematically dated), but an awful lot of them do, with exactly the right timing and intensity.

Part post-apocalyptic Western, part midnight motorcycle flick and part Rocky Horror Picture Show, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is, when you add it all up, a nutty, B-movie masterpiece.

At least in Kinski you can see why Schrader thought Cat People might work. Her feline eyes are part of it, but it’s the mystery behind them, especially in the second half, that almost redeems the project.

Reds is about the personal and the political and the intermingling of the two—what it meant for Reed and Bryant as a couple and, for Bryant particularly, separately. Both performances support the movie’s overall project: to demonstrate that these “reds” were real people, with good intentions, brave convictions, naive expectations, and—first and foremost—complicated hearts.

Prince of the City mostly feels like a competent procedural, but it occasional startles with images of similar artistry.

Ballooning. Biking. Swimming. Parachuting. The Great Muppet Caper represented a giant leap for Muppetkind, in only their second big-screen outing.

A sequel that retains the gee-whiz geniality of the original while still going in interesting new directions.

The film is an admirable argument for the legitimacy of psychotherapy, especially for the time, played out in an affluent Chicago suburb.

The Shining is terrifying for what it doesn’t do.

A woefully bad low-budget slasher flick, complete with a requisitely inept cast (including Kevin Bacon in uncomfortably tight shorts); laborious pacing; and an interminable catfight climax.

Bob Fosse’s half-confession about what a jerk he was to the women in his life may pull a lot of punches, but there’s just too much art on the screen to completely disregard the effort.

You can see the movie’s influence on everything from Forrest Gump to Idiocracy to Elf, all comedies with oblivious, world-changing simpletons at their center.

After a bumpy, Mr. Mom-style start, director Robert Benton settles the film into a quietly observed depiction of the challenges and rewards of single parenting, anchored by a Hoffman performance that mostly shakes off his gesticulating instincts in favor of a relational rootedness (he’s particularly good with young Justin Henry as the boy).

You have a literally commanding Duvall at the center of it, wearing that uniform like a second skin. He’s more than willing to play Meechum as a monster of a father, while also giving hints, in small moments, that this is a man who has had tenderness of any kind ground out of him by a macho, mercenary system.

This is a creature flick, yes, but Alien is also on par with a genre masterpiece such as Jaws. The craftsmanship is that sound, the inventiveness that clever, the characterization that strong. And then there is the not-small matter of Alien being a seminal feminist action flick.

The fabulous 1970s fashions don’t hold up too well, but what still resonates is the movie’s empathetic attention to what it’s like if your sexual identity doesn’t neatly fit into traditional norms.

It’s astonishing, and a bit sad really, how prescient Real Life was in retrospect. In 1979, Albert Brooks had already predicted and skewered the contrived inauthenticity of reality television with this biting mockumentary, yet we’ve gone ahead and given over much of our entertainment hours to the format anyway.

Superman is a bastion of blockbuster innocence, a movie that’s a studio product, certainly, but also something that could have grown from one of Smallville’s sun-kissed cornfields.

You know those countless slasher flicks in which a psychotic maniac slices his way through horny teenagers, only to be thwarted by the virginal heroine in the end? Halloween is the fountainhead. Despite countless imitators, however, few have been able to match the level of craft and psychological depth on display here. Halloween is a landmark, and a legitimately enduring classic.

Ultimately, Jeanne Dielman registers not as a condemnation of domesticity, but a document of the exhaustion that comes from caring for others and never receiving care in return.

As a document of some of the top musical talent of the 1970s, The Last Waltz has a time-capsule quality that’s off the charts.

Rowlands takes the movie by the throat in the dramatic, onstage sequences, just as Brando would have done, yet she’s equally compelling in the film’s smaller moments.

This is never really scary, but it isn’t quite funny either. The movie strikes its own demented chord.

The movie is a collection of ghoulish creative impulses (some of them gorily sadistic, as when a character is trapped in a room of barbed wire) rather than a coherent story.

Clearly May is invested in the material — she wrote it — and deserves credit for creating a fruitfully improvisational atmosphere. Yet she doesn’t leave a very distinct signature here, such as the social satire she brought to A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid.

In its erratic narrative, random assortment of characters, and omnipresent soundtrack, Car Wash captures something perfectly: the rhythms of a working-class work day.

Yikes! I understand we can’t always hold films from earlier eras to the social standards of the current moment, but even beyond the rampant offensiveness of Murder by Death, the fact that this whodunit spoof relies on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and disability for the vast majority of its jokes speaks to a paucity of comic imagination that’s timelessly disheartening.

The ingeniousness of screenwriter William Goldman and director Alan J. Pakula’s film is that it’s framed as a detective mystery.

Gazzara is riveting as man who exudes cool and calm—style—while also stinking of panic.

Barry Lyndon is a costume epic that pokes fun of other costume epics even as it outdoes them.

In Forman’s hands, McMurphy becomes more than a rebel in this specific time and place. He becomes mythic—a symbol for irrepressible Life.

There is something unseemly in its choice to document the Beales at all. It’s not exactly that mother and daughter are being unwittingly exploited (though one wonders what a psychologist would make of their mental states). It’s that Edith and Edie – who both pursued show-business careers at different points in their lives – are such eager subjects, so willing to let the camera roll with little thought to what, aside from their immediate selves, it might be capturing. If Grey Gardens doesn’t exactly exploit that, the documentary certainly takes dubious advantage.

Cooley High has the same youth-movie energy that defines some of the genre’s greats: American Graffiti, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. All of these films run on the mischievous, unfounded optimism that characterizes our teenage years. They make you nostalgic for naivete.

Perhaps the defining moment of Robert Altman’s legendary career. It was here, after all, where Altman’s signature traits were all assembled and perfected: the extensive ensemble cast, the fluid and unforced narrative, the overlapping dialogue that freed the movies from the stilted patter of the stage and injected them with the interrupted babbling of real conversation.

If Mel Brooks has a masterpiece, it’s this homage to the Universal horror movies of the 1930s and ’40s.

When the plot is this much of a lark, it’s in need of far lighter execution than this.

A Woman Under the Influence made me wonder: What’s the point of only showing a mentally challenged character’s distress? Is it fair to reduce Mabel to her rock-bottom experiences?

For much of The Conversation you think you’re watching a person unraveling, but then the horrifying ending—where the editing and sound design become really sinister—reveals that the movie has been deconstructing the audience as well.

The Exorcist is provocation at its ugliest.

This adaptation of Don’t Look Now by director Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, The Witches) is primarily an achievement in hallucinatory editing.

Not quite one of the Disney classics, yet still delightful, this little ditty owes much of its charm to its precise anthropomorphization.

This is largely another of Malick’s impressionistic tales of paradise lost, but here the dreamy approach feels fresh and exciting.

Coffy is at once a notable moment in female-empowerment cinema and a pervasive exercise in the objectification of women. It’s as if Gloria Steinem wrote a screenplay that was then handed off to Hugh Hefner to direct.

The Long Goodbye is cheeky and often cheerily meta, but I certainly wouldn’t call it a lark.

Ultimately, Charlotte’s Web is too potent a tale of life and death, as first learned by observing life on a farm, to keep even this so-so effort from ringing true.

The Heartbreak Kid is a war of the sexes comedy that leaves no side unscathed, thanks largely to the combined sensibilities of screenwriter Neil Simon and director Elaine May.

A pileup of technology, population movement, and dehumanization, traffic is a natural subject for writer-director-star Jacques Tati, whose perceptive pratfall comedies are often concerned with how our humanity gets lost in the particulars of “progress.”

Deliverance is a harsh film asking harsh questions, less a thrilling adventure movie than an ecological, existential nightmare.

We observe family dynamics that could take place in any home, at any time; as Noriko and Shukichi tentatively negotiate the future of their family, they’re enacting a story that’s both distinct to post-war Japan and straight from the pages of Jane Austen.

Tokyo Story is a work of considerable restraint. And all the more affecting for it.

The movie is both vile and risible.

A Clockwork Orange ultimately asks: how deep is sin’s hold—on Alex, and on us? This being a Kubrick film—and considering that it leaves us with Beethoven’s Ninth triumphantly, transgressively ringing once more in Alex’s ears, after a fall from a window knocks the Ludovico out of him—the movie doesn’t seem to think humanity is worthy of an answer. To A Clockwork Orange, we’re all droogs at heart.

Nearly every frame of Shaft is intent on doing one thing: establishing its hero – private detective John Shaft – as a powerful, independent, innately good yet still devilish man in complete control of his own destiny.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller is less a deromanticized Western than an emasculated one. It’s a de-pantsing, really, of the strong, silent men who have long dominated the genre. Drop a stronger, louder woman into their midst, and they’re done.

Keeping in mind that he was well aware of the presence of the camera—as was everyone during the cast recording session for the Broadway hit Company—lyricist-composer Stephen Sondheim comes off as the kindest, gentlest genius you can imagine in Original Cast Album: Company.

By the time Streisand takes over the entire movie with the title number, in which the massive waitstaff of an upscale restaurant gathers to sing and dance her praises, I couldn’t help but wonder what all the fuss was about.

A thrilling and infuriating burst of movie id, The Wild Bunch makes you want to slump into the dust and stare dumbly into the distance.

One of Hollywood’s true curiosities. At times a charming, kiddie Western, this John Wayne vehicle also has a real nasty streak.

Black Girl gathers a forceful and lasting emotional power.

There is a lot of joy in Faces—John Cassavetes’ second real “Cassavetes” film, 10 years after Shadows—and there is also a lot of anger. Often there’s a drunken combination of the two. But no matter what emotion dominates, the movie itself has the same edge, the same itchiness. It’s constantly scratching its own skin.

Bullitt earned its reputation for Steve McQueen’s lengthy car chase through the hills of San Francisco, and the sequence does have a gritty, low-tech authenticity. Yet there’s more to the movie than squealing wheels.

The definitive zombie picture.

Wyler is smart enough to plant the camera fixed on Streisand, from the shoulders up, for her final number, “My Man.” Always willing to let his stars be the star, Wyler may have been the perfect choice to center her, for the first time, on the big screen.

Farrow admirably bears the burden of carrying the movie’s dread, portraying Rosemary as sharp and wary, but with too many social forces arrayed against her for her to have a fighting chance.

The incessant, rhythmic swishing of the chain gang’s scythes burrows into your brain – and then adds Newman’s supernova performance. It’s a gulag melodrama, if such a thing is possible.

As for the two leads, they have charm to spare, and it’s startling to see Hepburn bring bitterness to bear on her trademark wit, but the relationship and all its foibles still feel prescribed by the overall structure, not borne of real life.

Au Hasard Balthazar has the transcendent beauty of a Renaissance painting and the inspiring fire of a sermon. It’s one of those rare movies that could change your life, by making you rethink how you live it.

What Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh did for Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Burton and Taylor do for Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? They remind us that sometimes writing and directing must simply step aside and concede the power of performance.

The songs don’t offer much distraction from the silly story.

This is a crazed and lurid character portrait that spends most of its time psychoanalyzing itself.

In some ways, this second Bond film was already too self aware to remember to be itself.

This sounds a bit like Hitchcock, but Charade—written by Peter Stone and directed by Stanley Donen—isn’t nearly interested enough in humanity’s dark side to qualify. The movie just wants to have fun.

Intricate blocking keeps these early scenes visually engaging, but there’s no doubt High and Low takes off once the exec agrees to pay and we’re treated to an elaborate money-drop sequence, with the kidnapper staying one step ahead of the police.

Stray Dog is methodically paced, with long sequences of Murakami tailing a suspect or wandering crime-ridden alleys while undercover. He and Sato stake out another mark at a baseball game, which seems to go on forever. Yet if the movie drags, at times, it’s also enlivened by occasional visual flourishes.

Certainly the movie’s two nods toward the grim reality of warfare – the shooting of one prisoner and an offscreen mass execution at the end of the film – carry less weight than they should because of what surrounds them. Such glibness makes The Great Escape an enduring entertainment, not a classic.