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.