The performance footage alone makes this worthy of study by musicologists and historians. There are too many great scenes to mention.

A fiercely poetic study of violence. Stunningly shot in black-and-white. [14 Dec 1989, p.23]

It's hard to turn a stoner comedy into a franchise – those require a little too much follow-through. But Cheech & Chong pulled it off with the immortal trilogy of Up in Smoke, Cheech & Chong's Next Movie and Nice Dreams. And like the Godfather and Star Wars trilogies, this one peaks with Chapter Two – with some help from Pee-wee Herman. "Man, if you had a second brain," says Cheech, "it would die of loneliness, man."

The Stunt Man is a bravura piece of moviemaking — a true popular work of modernist art. It makes the audience experience the uncertainty of the contemporary world in a visceral, often hilarious way.

A vibrant, bizarre hybrid of sci-fi and fantasy with avant-garde, jazz-inflected music by the composer, Forbidden Zone still remains unique decades after its inception.

Nicholas Meyer deftly mingles fish-out-of-water comedy and touching romance with discreetly gory danger.

Red herrings, rabbit holes and oddball detours lurk around every corner. It’s a film that can’t decide whether it wants to be a comedy or a nightmare, so it splits the difference. Even by 1979 standards, it’s a seriously warped film.

Appearances by Adam Ant, the Slits and Siouxsie and the Banshees, along with U.S. trans icon Jayne County, ground it in the moment, but Jarman's suggestion that even the most vocal nihilists would sell out their ideals — if given enough encouragement, naturally — provided a glimpse of the future.

Easily among the greatest remakes ever made, Philip Kaufman updates Don Siegel's McCarthy-era classic to 1978 San Francisco. Kaufman proves singularly adept at keeping multiple genres and tones in play, from noirish mystery to heady paranormal thriller to face-squishing sci-fi horror. There's truly no recovering from the film's final the enemy-is-us parting shot.

As in all of his movies, Malle exhibits in Pretty Baby his characteristically detached, skeptical, lucid, moral — not moralistic — attitude toward life.

Gadgets abound, especially a Lotus sports car that transforms into a submarine. But the scene-stealer is 7'2" Richard Kiel as Jaws, a shark-eating man with steel teeth.

A snooze-fest without any scares.

How did Cammell convince a studio to back a movie in which Julie Christie is violated by what looks like a copper Rubik's snake? Better not to ask, or to dwell on the film's less savory aspects, and soak in its moments of visionary hysteria, including the pulsating geometry of images borrowed from experimental filmmaker Jordan Belson.

Rowdy, raunchy, hilarious, absurd, deeply depressing and profoundly human – often all at the same time – Slap Shot is refreshingly devoid of phony uplift or showy monologues. There's no jerking of tears or pulling of heartstrings, no big lessons to be learned beyond the harsh reminder that sports is a business; the passion of its fans and the heroics of its players are ultimately less important than the clang of the cash register. It's the rare combination of both team-spirit uplift and period-appropriate downer.

For better or worse, Song captures Zeppelin at a time when their brute force, young-stud stamina and unchecked excesses were peaking; it’s as exhilarating and exhausting as the decade it came out of.

While not as memorable as its predecessor, Futureworld ratchets up the camp, adding samurais, space travel and, most terrifying of all, an erotic dream sequence with Yul Brynner.

The Bad News Bears is about kids, but they're real kids, not bland, cutesy, lovable Hollywood moppets. These pre-teens are unwashed, obnoxious, cynical, fractious, gleefully profane, unrepentantly juvenile, and deeply untrusting of any sort of authority — in other words, just like the kids you probably played team sports with.

The skate-rink action, which culminates in an apocalyptic death match, remains rabble-rousingly brutal.

The All-American imagery, coexisting with occasional shots of swastikas and socially-sanctioned cruelty, give it the feel of a surreal, funny fever dream about national purpose gone horribly awry.

Roger Moore already seems winded in his second outing as Bond. And the film's comedic approach to martial arts justly rankles true 007 afficionados. Compensation comes in the form of Christopher Lee's delicious take on evil as Scaramanga and Herve Villechaize's verve as Nick Nack, Scaramanga's dwarf manservant.

The story is stock, but thanks to the behind-the-scene fire wranglers, you can practically feel the heat.

This Burt Reynolds offering is a look at both prison life and the sport, and offers two hallmarks of classic 70's cinema: gritty, no holds barred action – and Reynolds' chest hair.

Bridges in particular is quite excellent, taking his character's surface sweetness to at times almost psychotic extremes.

The special effects vacillate between defiantly shitty and endearingly resourceful, and Carpenter and O’Bannon's sense of humor covers a similarly narrow ground between Loony Tunes goofiness and dorm-room stoned.

There's something elemental about The Exorcist, even with the new hopeful ending that betrays the bleak original. [2000 re-release]

The overall tone is one of melancholy rather than sci-fi wonder, and the film's cynicism is hard to shake.

The effects here run the gamut from grandiose to goofy, but watch the upside-down ballroom sequence again. It's a set piece of pure destructive bliss, set to a symphony of screaming and breaking glass. Awesome.

A movie that has everything — if by everything you mean Bruce Dern as a long-haired homicidal intergalactic treehugger playing poker with droids, talking to bunnies, and feeling really passionately about salad.