While it would be unduly dismissive to write off Night of the Comet as a cult film merely by association, a good bit of its ancillary charm is obviously owing to its resonant casting choices: Reuniting Beltran and Woronov in the wake of Paul Bartel’s blistering black comedy Eating Raoul adds extra spice to the one longish scene they share.

Silent Night, Deadly Night brought the idea to new levels of cold sleaziness.

Paris, Texas may be missing a crucial piece of authentic Americana, but it still evokes an America most Americans yearn to gaze on. An America as thorny and carnivorous as a hawk talon, as raw and smug as a downtown mural, and as sweetly enigmatic as a vacant lot that doesn’t—that can’t—exist.

Body Double, while not his finest, is the best candidate as De Palma’s signature film. It’s a wicked, feature-length double entendre from a Doublemint era. Take it at face value, take it for its prurience or take it for all it’s worth. Hell, try taking on all three at once.

Russell’s wild style and shameless exhibitionism places it on a par with the contemporary work of Brian De Palma in terms of its vicious satire of ‘80s kitsch and repression.

Not yet a master, Woo here nonetheless demonstrates far more than mere potential as he starts to lay the foundations for his breakout successes.

What if Reagan’s America got a taste of her own interventionist foreign policies? Apocalypse, wow.

Gradually, Crimes of the Future becomes a surprisingly thorough and anticipatory working draft of the prototypical Cronenberg body-horror film, dramatizing, with characteristically repulsed fascination, a series of biological mutations that usher in a micro-culture given to cannibalism, pedophilia, and other practices that indicate a looming erasure of personal identity.

Magnoli’s professional, downright neorealistic approach to filming the concert clips almost disguises how audacious a structural conceit is the film’s climax: nearly a half-hour of musical numbers that render the solipsism of Prince’s vanity project entirely justifiable.

The Karate Kid might have been more endurable, maybe even endearing, if its runtime had been trimmed of a solid 30 minutes.

As a magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in America falls just a few point tragically shy of greatness.

Walter Hill’s 1984 film combines everything from seedy bars, street fights, motorcycles, beefy heavies, and tough dames in a smorgasbord of tawdry, moral-flouting clichés that distills decades of imagery that represents youth in cinema.

Temple of Doom doesn't so much pay tribute to the serial adventures of yore as it does embody them. Here, frivolity and evil blithely coexist—and women are a lot more likely to scream than win drinking contests.

Even though we would see more of Jason over the years (first as a zombie, then battling a telekinetic super-girl, taking on Freddy Krueger within his own warped dreams, even hacking teens to bits in outer space), this one certainly felt as if it properly closed out the Friday the 13th series before it devolved into unadulterated camp.

In the end, Suburbia’s greatest strength lies in its assertion of youth as a political state of mind.

Directed by an unimaginative Robert Zemeckis three years after Raiders of the Lost Ark, it uses Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones franchise as the template through which to bolster Douglas’s public machismo.

Robert Bresson's film hits with the effect not so much reflecting a cleansing of the soul, but rather a ransacking.

Pressed, it’s hard to think of five American studio pictures as original as Repo Man. The utter weirdness of Alex Cox’s remarkable debut—a document of L.A.’s hardcore punk scene that’s also an ode to its car culture, a critique of the American middle class, and a kind-of sci-fi comedy about a radioactive Chevy Malibu—would seem to preclude its existence.

Tenebre is a riveting defense of auteur theory, ripe with self-reflexive discourse and various moral conflicts. It’s both a riveting horror film and an architect’s worst nightmare.

El Norte deserves credit for being one of the first films to engage American cinema in a discourse on the immigrant experience, but its approach to the material—shallow, condescending, and hectoring—undermines its stabs at brutal realism.

Perhaps Tarkovsky’s most opaque film, Nostalghia is nonetheless one of his most personal.

Ignoring the fact that BMX Bandits is as intimate as a trip to Toys “R” Us, it has almost nothing to offer in the way of impressive stuntwork, carefree yuks, or semi-competent acting. Trenchard-Smith, a master at condescending to his audience, clearly diluted Hagg and Edgeworth’s already toothless concept; that said, there was probably no good way to dress up a line as dire as “You’re right in the poo now, sister” or even “Your little walkie talkies have gone walkies.”

Seriously, watching Angela (and to a lesser extent Ricky) being targeted throughout the film is like watching a group of shrill brats shooting rocks at a baby bird—if it wasn’t so obvious that everyone’s non-stop cruelty was in service of some big-reveal, or if the performances weren’t so damn preening, the film would be completely intolerable.

Amityville 3-D—one-dimensional in every way but its hokey visuals—is too poorly written, awkwardly staged, and pathologically stupid to register as campy fun.

Even by Argento standards, Fulci’s film is nonsensical to the point of distraction.

It fuses documentary and dramatic sequences into a free-form narrative that exists somewhere between essay film, political manifesto, and exploitation.

Many directors have taken full advantage of Adjani’s exotic, ethereal French beauty; only Zulawski saw beyond the exquisite surface to something unsettling. Most disconcerting is the way Adjani can register almost demonic ill-intent while never losing some trace of the alluring.

The titular “stuff” is shown to be a combination of courage, determination, and recklessness, but, as Kaufman’s stirring epic reminds us, an equally important motivation for greatness is the fear of being merely second best.

As though this ridiculousness weren’t sufficiently groan-inducing, the scenes depicting the mischief Brace wreaks on the corporation while he’s mid-hack undergo a bizarre tonal shift into Keystone Kops slapstick.

A prisoner-of-war drama as fever dream, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence fascinates mostly for the hit-and-miss alchemy of its discordant elements: in performance, pop-star charisma versus British actorliness; in narrative style, genre expectations coming up against modernist psychosexual undercurrents.

To be blunt, because there was just barely enough material in the source text to pad out the film, the filmmakers also used a lot of the stuff that worked in novel form but came off as stultifying on the screen.

Director Richard Franklin and screenwriter Tom Holland can’t seem to figure out if Psycho II should resemble a film from the 1950s or the 1980s, so they split the difference, and the result is a bland, meandering movie with no real look or tone at all.

Much like Body Heat, which valorized noirish archetypes instead of examining their original social contexts, Breathless simply has a hard-on for Hollywood lore, as convertibles, rockabilly, and monochromatic lighting are utilized to enshrine dominant legacies rather than invert or, at least, probe them.

Scott’s film scarcely has its pulse on the encroaching conservatism of the nation. In the end, it’s just a shallow lesbian fantasy so aggressively spit and polished as to suggest a 96-minute White Diamonds commercial. Of course, that’s not to say that it isn’t fun.

Koyaanisqatsi is enraged with modern societal convention, but still expresses awe of the spontaneous, incidental poetry that can exist despite invisible oppression.

Raimi's script is riotously deadpan, his compositions undeniably breathtaking and inventive. [6 March 2002]

Throughout, artists intermingle in scenes that have been rendered with an Altman-esque sense of personal panorama.

Though Kingsley’s saturnine poise is much more interesting in roles which call for varying degrees of slipperiness, he nevertheless manages to bring shades into the inherently monochromatic saintliness of the role with life-sized, profoundly felt gravity and dignity, all while executing that marvelous, peculiarly British trick (remember Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr. Chips) of seeming to age from within.

The film, as a whole, isn’t quite up to the phenomenal dexterity of its lead’s exertions. But there’s a legitimate reason people love this movie so much: Pollack syphoned Hoffman’s ecstatic electricity off into a popular and old-fashioned romantic-comedy formula, bringing it back to life. Tootsie is a remarkably gentle and human pop movie that informs the term “escapism” with an almost cleansing sense of decency.

Though the film is obviously coated with a veneer of nostalgic sentimentality, Eastwood never lets Honkytonk Man veer into maudlin territory.

Much more than a punk artifact, Smithereens is a landmark that showcases how the urge of self-creation and the seduction of reveling in self-destruction dance side by side.

That plot gives you an idea of how casually insane this movie is, but if you’re able to radically suspend your disbelief (the story is an illogical shambles), the film offers a number of modest pleasures.

Subscribing to the belief that the eyes are the windows to the soul, Tarkovsky locates Stalker’s spiritual center in his protagonists’ weathered countenances.

Lookin’ to Get Out, however, though pieced together with Ashby’s trademark character sympathy and technical aplomb, is one toke over the line: Unkempt and unconvincingly funny, the film is infused with the thin, despondent languor of a mourning man’s second-hand marijuana smoke.

Supremely awful.

No matter how much director Mark Lester attempts to hide his sermonizing behind sensationalistic-pedagogic terrorism, he does himself in whenever a jaded cop shrugs his shoulders and grunts, for the umpteenth time, What can we do, they’re juveniles?

The horny teenagers all seem like banal, plastic, eager-to-please refugees from a sitcom, desperately hoping with their every line of dialogue for a canned laugh.

The sequel to Grease is not much more than a remake, wherein every minute detail is nothing more than an attempt to pilfer the magic of the first film.

Poltergeist's most canny conceit is how it takes the concept of a haunted house—up to that point a gothic, remote icon (you practically had to accept a dare and then drive halfway across the state to ever find yourself in one)—and plops it in the middle of the most mundane of all possible locations: American suburbia.

Unjustifiably compared to the original film upon its release, Schrader’s Cat People is more of an erotic reinvention of the Bodeen story. Though Schrader keeps the Fangoria crowd at bay with a series of grisly tableaus, he remains less concerned with the body-horrific than he does with the rituals of sex—mandatory and otherwise.

Henenlotter’s consistent blurring of the line between horror and comedy is one of the more perverse side effects of his warped sensibility, keeping viewers off balance, so that they never know whether the punchline to one of Basket Case’s many gags will be just that, a crude joke, or the sight of someone getting their face ripped to shreds.

As a collage of glossy gangster conventions and one-liners, The Long Good Friday explodes with energy, but it’s the political and social tensions that make Mackenzie’s film a lasting vision of British tragedy.

A delirious rejoinder to the post-sexual revolution counter-culture wars, director Paul Bartel’s script crosses the let’s-get-down-to-social-brass-tacks satire of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which was respectfully vindictive of Los Angeles’s middle-class hedonism, with the straight-faced über-misanthropy of Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Dick Fontaine and Pat Harley’s documentary makes the political personal at every turn.

It all adds up to a surefire cult film in the making.

The Border is marvelously detailed. The script, by Deric Washburn, Walon Green, David Freeman, is peppered with lively obscenities and slights that communicate the debauched cynicism of this world.

An ambitious monster movie that attempts to explore the metaphorical ghosts lingering over the atrocities committed by the residents of a small, noxiously chummy Southern town, and whose collective closets obviously symbolize the troubled historical legacy of the American South at large.

Reds is finally just an appealingly conventional epic movie-star romance with radical trimmings, but it contains several sharper elements that suggest the colorful period it seeks to recreate.

Good as the cameos are, however, the lasting draw of the film is its exceptional aesthetic. Gilliam keeps his camera low in a child’s perspective, and wide-angle lenses only exacerbate the magnified sense of scale that everything has.

What the film lacks in narrative drive, coherence, and performance, it makes up with thoughtful lighting, strong cinematography from Raoul Lomas and an uncredited João Fernandes, and, of course, Savini’s lovingly overblown and impossible splatter effects.

The fact that people don’t talk like this in real life isn’t a flaw in the film: It’s a tragic social deficiency.

With eerie atmosphere to spare, and an emphasis on communal terrors and long-buried secrets, this surprisingly wistful film hews closer to folk horror, suggesting Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man by way of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s Messiah of Evil.

Inscrutably powerful and brutally honest about diva worship as another form of male domination, Mommie Dearest is to camp what Medea was to Dr. Benjamin Spock.

Southern Comfort is a thriller that twists one up in knots, whipping the audience up to a point where they may wish that director Walter Hill would just spring the damn gore already so as to relieve the tension he masterfully coils.

The film’s indisputable centerpiece is the protracted werewolf transformation sequence.

Supposedly created as a showcase for Stratten (whose tragic death cast a pall over the film’s release), the picture instead offers a splendid ensemble, from Gazarra’s world-weary suavity and Ritter’s slapstick acuity to Hepburn’s autumnal grace and, above all, Colleen Camp’s marvelous blend of abrasion and snap. Indeed, the actress embodies the garrulous yet vulnerable charm of They All Laughed, which, for all the Hawksian ping-pong of the dialogue, is closer to the melodic élan of a Jacques Demy film, as wistful and fragile as a sand castle.

More often than not, the movie only glancingly burrows beneath America’s attitudes toward rural evangelism that surfaced concurrently with the advent of the Moral Majority.

Blow Out is not known as one of Brian De Palma’s horror movies, but of all his films, it’s the one that feels most like a nightmare.

A wounded and unresolved movie free of the expected Disney cutesiness and complacency.

These fantastical He-Man epics were common in the early ’80s (Legend, Conan the Barbarian, and The Beastmaster were all variations of the same theme), and while Clash of the Titans remains one of the genre’s homelier entries, there’s no faulting a film this lovingly and aptly arcane.

Notable mostly for its prime-era Savini bloodshed and a few quick glimpses of a young Holly Hunter (uttering about as many lines of dialogue as won her an Oscar a dozen years later for The Piano), returning to The Burning three decades later is like contemplating any summer at camp: Peel away your nostalgia, and you’ll be left with 20-second sex bouts and insect bites.

By now, everyone knows what to expect from this kind of movie, but what’s surprising is how the low-budget rawness, cheap film stock bubbling over with grain, and washed-out lighting schemes give the film a kind of base in reality.

From the very first scene, The Howling plays around with the notion of vulnerability as a role-playing exercise, a pseudo-sex game.

One of the final triumphs of the New Hollywood era, Cutter’s Way belongs on the shelf of fans of both Cassavetian hyperreal melodrama and Pakula-esque political thrillers.

Maniac simply exists as a wretched yet unforgettable succession of scenes meant to corrupt even the purest of minds, if you can help yourself from laughing uncontrollably at its overwhelming amount of inconsistencies.

The most interesting dimension of Altered States has to be the way Russell sexualizes Eddie’s relationship with godly figures, most notably symbols of Jesus, crucifixion, and his father.

Altman directs the complex web of social interactions with a frame that’s both inclusive and prying. And the actors he collected and dropped in Malta’s simulated community help evoke an atmosphere that is genial yet guarded. Shelly Duvall couldn’t possibly have played Olive Oyl badly.

Tess is thus an almost unprecedented example of sweeping historical epic that also functions as an intense personal meditation on the capricious vicissitudes of love and death.

The Apple is an Old Testament movie in more ways than one, and its relentless bad taste is sure to appeal to the same audience that won’t even realize they’re being slapped in the face.

To his credit, Cimino renders us helpless not before carnage or greed, but before his epic’s breadth of motivation and circumstance. It’s not the past’s ugliness that terrifies us in Heaven’s Gate, but its far more intimidating immensity.

Scorsese might never again find a subject as ideal as Jake LaMotta, the Bronx-based boxer whose public bouts and private demons Raging Bull chronicles with such bruising acuity.

This film’s pleasures are extremely mild, but they’re discernable for the curious fan of retro redneck horror, or, far more likely, for the genre critic looking to finish their dissertation pertaining to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s vast influence on the 1970s and 1980s grindhouse movie’s vision of gleeful small-town Americana hypocrisy.

A time-jumping narrative that’s rooted inside the linear temporal unfoldings of a pre-determined trial, Breaker Morant is like a conventional bloke in art—house clothing—but oh, what garb he has.

The film vibrates with a profound respect for historical veracity, the busy intersection between political sociology and psychology, and grunting, portentous masculinity.

Cassavetes and Rowlands lend a screwball energy to this thriller, ably playing conflicting moods of suspense and silliness off each other to complicate an otherwise straightforward genre film.

One of director Alan Clarke’s most uncompromising docudramas.

While the soundtrack is evenly split between Newton-John ballads and power-pop from ELO, neither of which sounded particularly revolutionary at the turn of the decade, Xanadu's collage of musical styles and fads inadvertently suggests the utopia of post-disco no wave, hip-hop's emerging legacy of sampling and the DIY spirit of mash-ups. (I mean, if you want to be kind.)

The pleasures of Dressed to Kill flat out do not translate to print, but for what it’s worth it is the most perfectly-directed film ever, provided you, like me, bust into orgasmic laughter when De Palma’s double-shuffling editing makes it seem like the only threat Nancy Allen and a wooden cop can see boarding the subway is a 250-pound bag lady.

Taken on its own terms, it works quite agreeably as a visceral blow to the breadbasket, with one of the most outrageous and apocalyptic final scenes in the entirety of the subgenre.

The punchlines come quick and thick, with little foreplay or consideration for anything other than getting a physical reaction from the audience.

It’s the experience more so than the actual content of The Shining that radiates cold, anti-humanly indifferent terror.

The Long Riders takes more than a few cues from John Ford, favoring laconic characters whose projected confidence masks an inability to vocalize basic desires.

It's a formula with no pretensions.

The Tin Drum, adapted from the eponymous novel by Günter Grass, doesn’t cast the story in a new light, though it does deepen a few of its subplots.

Dario Argento undervalues his material, but his set pieces are glorious enough that the film’s plot contrivances can be forgiven.

Huston’s Wise Blood is a sharp, busy canvas that, like a man with a good car, doesn’t need to be justified.

Its truly unnerving quality is that its existence is a brutal reminder from the past that homosexuality is not heterosexuality, and that any attempt to reconcile the difference will only breed resentment, confusion, and violence. Or perhaps it will only lead to more lame Hallmark movies of the week like Brokeback Mountain.

Even the most desensitized, ghoulishly amoral gleaners of deviant cinema can’t just stare down the nastiness on display in Cannibal Holocaust and just shrug it off.