Long takes are used frequently, whether in a seven-minute exchange between Rose and Huston in bed or a staggering high-angle shot that frames Rose in front of a football field while using a payphone, before craning down to capture her in close-up. These visual cues, along with Midler’s presence, give the film an immediacy and dynamism.

Only Imamura could irreverently intertwine Catholicism, brutal murders, and pachinko to produce such devastating ends.

Herzog’s idiosyncratic horror classic remains a vital conversation between two distinct generations of brilliant German filmmakers.

If the narrative is slightly schematic in the way it sets up a binary between Harry and freedom, it’s never didactic. That’s thanks to Armstrong’s clear-eyed direction, which never feels the need to underline its points, relying on selections from Schumann’s “Scenes from Childhood” to lend the film a mood of droll wistfulness.

The only thing Fast Company says about Cronenberg the person and artist is that the dude really, really likes drag racing. Auteurists should probably look elsewhere. Fans of well-crafted B movies, on the other hand, will be right at home.

Of all the questions raised by The Amityville Horror, the most vexing one revolves around the external range of a haunted house’s supernatural powers. Because while it makes sense for a demonic abode to slam windows shut on small children’s fingers, let loose with swarms of buzzing flies, and turn bearded wood-chopping fathers into homicidal paterfamilias, it’s not quite as clear why such a structure would have the ability to sabotage the brakes of a sedan driving on the highway, or to cause a woman’s briefcase, sitting on her car’s passenger seat, to magically burst into flames.

What makes the film so remarkable is the extent to which Ferrara, even at the outset of his career, exploits sex and violence for their popular appeal even as he reflects on the effect of such subjects on both his own art and the culture at large.

The In-Laws never makes deeper, sustained sense of its premise and seems content to revel in the more basic pleasure of seeing Falk and Arkin interact with one another.

What makes Phantasm special is the way it captures a boy's life in 1978. [Remastered]

Undoubtedly [Cronenberg's] best from this period and also the most troubling.

Romero’s distinctly Pittsburghian sensibilities can’t be underestimated when explaining Dawn’s appeal; the Monroeville Mall perfectly evokes the feel of a hollow monument standing at the center of a community that couldn’t be bothered to define itself any more distinctively than could be represented by their choice between Florsheim or Kinney’s shoes. The mall, in essence, shoulders the burden of their identity.

Though its politics are still quite progressive, La Cage aux Folles is ultimately a work of classicism, crafted with precision and efficiently paced.

Even if you don’t go in with a conspiratorial mindset, one viewing of this riotously entertaining, chillingly perceptive film could leave you wondering if some larger force is at play, protecting the targets of this should-be New Hollywood classic by keeping it in the dark after all this time.

Though Duke’s film lacks the warmth and humanism of Something Wild, it’s possessed of a similarly idiosyncratic edginess.

Gordon Willis's too-dark lensing is an ideal match for the Scenes from a Marriage-inspired sequences of marital and amorous discord.

It’s a heady brew of highly improbable extraction that would go on to inspire Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell.

It’s the characters’ ceaseless need to fully understand, outsmart, and undermine nature’s sway that drives them into fervor and, often enough, leads them to shuffle off this mortal coil.

One of the subtlest and most extraordinarily fluid of American horror films, Kaufman crafts textured scenes, rich in emotional and object-centric tactility, that cause our heads to casually spin with expectation and dread.

One can’t mistake I Spit in Your Grave for anything other than a raging political text, a rigorous reminder to the power of a disturbed imagination, be it victimizer or victim.

Not even the Dark Lord Sauron would want to put his name to this movie.

Martin Rosen’s eloquent, wondrous film offers a deceivingly simple yet powerful view of a war-ridden rabbit society.

The really frustrating thing about Tomatoes is the toothlessness of its satire.

Jerry Goldmsith’s ominous score is reminiscent of his Oscar-winning work for The Omen but The Boys From Brazil is pure pomp and circumstance.

Chantal Akerman’s 1975 experiment in film form, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is an astonishing work of subtextual feminism which has to count as one of the seminal films of the 1970s.

That’s the trouble at the center of the benign but tepid ganja-classic Up in Smoke: Its toking Abbott-and-Costello duo are so content to simply drift away in clouds of smoke that the audience is often left behind looking for the jokes.

To hell with equivocation or beating around the bush: Terrence Malick's 1978 Days of Heaven is the greatest film ever made. And let the word film be emphasized, since Malick's sophomore masterpiece earns this exalted designation from its position as a work of pure cinema. [22 Oct. 2007]

Dante makes films that Spielberg’s id might make, movies that double down on pop cultural know-how and riotous thrills without pausing for anything so unentertaining as an earnest assessment of humanity.

A visceral symphony of screeching tires and crushing metal.

At its best, the film finds Peckinpah moving into a new poetry of non-violence, of movement associated with explicit, actualized harmony, but the director doesn’t trust himself, mistaking change of form for impersonal commercial stewardship.

Everything in I Wanna Hold Your Hand is pushed right up to the breaking point of absurdity. The lunacy of pop-culture infatuation is lent the undying fervor of a fever dream.

Ultimately, The Fury is a film about pre-pubescence by a director whose work had finally reached the level of confidence reflecting a post-pubescent talent. The best of both worlds, baby, and barely legal.

Mazursky finds the politics in the wrinkles of human behavior, rather than contriving behavior to suit his politics.

Bleak and unabashedly grubby, Dennis Donnelly’s The Toolbox Murders straddles the line between several intersecting genres.

Eraserhead is an extraordinarily raw film that’s not so much an announcement of its filmmaker’s obsessions, but a complete, intimate, and heartbreaking fulfillment of them.

The Duellists explores its own unique thematic terrain and limns its characters’ psychology with a perspicacity that’s all its own.

Opening Night hits closest to home in its long, haunting, tension-fueled riffs between Cassavetes and Rowlands, playing lovers on stage and former lovers off stage.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s film is a living, fluid organism that spans the distances between several poles of extremity.

Essentially a liberal vigilante film that’s rife with all the contradictions that description implies, Rolling Thunder has a pared, weirdly principled grace that still packs a punch.

Bobby Deerfield is not so much a failed vanity project as it is a groping, often sensitive and rather death-obsessed character study based on Erich Maria Remarque’s fatalistically titled novel Heaven Has No Favorites.

From its engagement with genre tropes (particularly film noir), to its tangibly grimy urban backdrops, to its archetypal hero/villain dramatic dichotomy, there’s no mistaking the film’s American influence.

Equal parts brilliant, baffling, ridiculous, and unwatchable.

Argento’s deliriously artificial horror film owes as much to Georges Méliès and German Expressionism (specifically The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) as it does to Jean Cocteau and Grimm fairy tales. =

Uneven and amateurish, with a sense of vulgarity that’s now dated enough to seem downright Victorian, The Kentucky Fried Movie proves the maxim, “comedy is in the eye of the beholder.”

The major saving grace of The Hills Have Eyes is that it’s better acted than probably any other film from Craven’s early period. Because of his emotionally bare nature, Robert Houston’s achingly implosive terror is more complex than your average male lead in a horror film.

A bald rehash of Jaws, only with the Moby Dick elements played up even further, Orca isn’t a cheap thrill (producer Dino Di Laurentiis was also the man behind the idiotic-but-exhilarating King Kong remake), but it sure does seem like it’s in a rush to finish.

Rather than a fleeting image of violence, however, Friedkin’s cyclical, almost Kafkaesque insistence that politics revolves around now globalized, corporate power delegating hired guns to do under-the-table bidding across national boundaries announces itself through the soundscape, with Tangerine Dream’s electronic basslines substituting for bloodshed. No one escapes the suffocating corrosion of Sorcerer’s polysemous diegesis—not even Friedkin himself, as audiences and industry would have it.

Conversation Piece, as a “last will and testament” (as many have come to indentify it), feels both like a stylistic and thematic reconciliation on the filmmaker’s behalf, and as such a work of important insight into one of the cinema’s great anomalies.

New York, New York, like most Martin Scorsese films, is about the trials and glories of making art.

Cross of Iron would almost seem a proper mea culpa by Peckinpah for his controversial career, and the pre-Dogville closing credit sequence featuring a risible, anti-patriotic photo slideshow reveals a director still capable of new and inventive provocation tactics.

With an enviable, well-stocked cast of character thespians and a carefully dilapidated motel set, Eaten Alive is all ingredients, no recipe.

Woody Allen’s Annie Hall is made of such durable stuff that it’s liked even by many of the filmmaker’s detractors, and yet it had such a troubled production that it’s a miracle it exists at all.

Few films have so exquisitely captured how straight American men reveal their affections and insecurities to one another, as well as how they’re both threatened and awed by each other.

The film is equal parts I Will Survive and pop martyrdom, instigated by a star so enormous that she could likely bankroll the Department of Defense for the year of 1976 and still have money left over.

Carrie, on the other hand, is frighteningly feminine, a slap in the face of those charging De Palma with misogyny as fierce as the one Betty Buckley whales across Nancy Allen’s face.

Alice, Sweet Alice conflates the angst of adolescent sexual development with the fury of Catholic retribution, suggesting at times an analog version of David Fincher’s Se7en.

God Told Me To is one of the key American horror films from the 1970s to mine the internally sexual, racial quandaries of a nation beset by one great civil rights catastrophe after another.

Bujold’s enthusiasm as a performer redeems the entire picture, especially when she’s asked to perform flashback scenes that shouldn’t work, but, thanks to her, represent another of De Palma’s fearlessly experimental whims.

The remnants of war are fractious and far-flung in Clint Eastwood's impressive revisionist western.

Polanski brilliantly evokes an evil society’s almost supernatural ability to recognize weakness in others and to punish all that is good.

A bald-faced lamprey hitching its razor-tipped maw on the chassis of The Exorcist, The Omen’s Sunday-school parable of gothic Cathsploitation comes twice as thick and thrice as pious.

A great horror film about a weak man who, gazing into a vibrant pool of freshly spilled blood, learns just how little he ultimately knows.

A beautiful, gleefully weird vanity project that never quite coheres.

All the President’s Men’s masterstroke is how it rejects mythologizing the pivotal history behind it, appropriately forgoing a climax by closing on a simple telex furiously relaying messages. The film doesn’t present two underdogs bringing down a president; it’s two reporters doing business as usual.

Face to Face feels scattershot and incomplete, never adequately establishing connections between characters, motivations for significant actions, or even the simple causalities of time and space.

It’s Lifetime. It’s camp. It’s seriously confused, and it should speak directly to drag queens in straight relationships everywhere.

Hitchcockian unease permeates the film, but so too does a Godardian use of space and a Bressonian focus on obsession heighten the mounting sense of dread. These elements are groovy for film buffs but are mere icing on the proverbial cake; you don’t need to be in the know to relish Scorsese’s mastery of the form, and what may astonish even more than the creative prowess is how compulsively entertaining the results are.

The film remains a stunning collective of method acting and 1970s social critique.

The film is riddled with an unmistakably misogynistic bent, and can’t be bothered to supply one single likable soul.

Hard Times feels most like a brilliant prerequisite to the cinema of Michael Mann, a focused neo-western where the last man standing is the one truest to himself.

Widely regarded as Ousmane Sembène’s finest achievement, Xala is a cutting morality tale that equally blames the corruption of Senegal’s sociopolitical environment on Euro-centricity and African auto-destruction.

Grey Gardens remains one of the greatest and possibly only disaster movies that clearly benefits from not having seen the moments of reaping.

F for Fake is one of the more wistfully humorous of Welles’s wrestlings with reality. Roguishly comic yet profoundly bittersweet and edited in seizures with a deliberate, manic grace, the film represents the most flamboyant of its director’s magical acts, with Welles himself acting on screen as the narrator/conjuror, pulling the curtain back again and again, each time only to reveal another stage and another curtain in a series of dizzyingly self-reflexive meditations on fakery.

Fonda might have been able to look good in most everything he was in, but even he can’t save a turd like Race with the Devil.

Director Norman Jewison’s Rollerball remains a poignant and unusually prescient vision of our world as defined by Walmart and Exxon-Mobil.

Stunningly, it isn’t even Altman’s best film (that would be McCabe & Mrs. Miller), but Nashville is still the movie that best embodies everything that was so freeing and generous and deceptively casual about Altman’s art, and it’s the film that best represents him as a uniquely American artist.

Because Bresson’s cinematic personality is as deliberate and clean as it is, the viewer is tempted to chalk up the bizarre and moving experience of watching Lancelot du Lac to some latent spirituality or grace.

Despite some satisfyingly gut-busting moments, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue retains a very British stiff upper lip.

Death Race is a maladroit but exuberantly gamey mix of social commentary and blue-collar goofiness.

In Holy Grail, they put their talents to work on a larger scale, mixing wonderful satires on the Medieval legend and lifestyle with tremendous comic timing and blatant dirty jokes.

Forbes’s direction is uncluttered and makes excellent use of the long shot, and though the film threatens to run out of steam at each and every turn, it never runs out of ideas.

Black Christmas just may be the perfect antidote to the saccharine sweetness of most Christmastime fare.

In nearly every reasonable sense it’s the far more accomplished of the two famed Allen disaster epics.

Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s eerily brooding Messiah of Evil remains an undervalued gem of American gothic filmmaking.

This is De Palma pouring the new wine of his formal inventiveness and anti-authoritarian irreverence into the old bottles of archetypal myths, and it remains a supremely entertaining anomaly within his filmography, yet entirely emblematic of his filmmaking sensibilities.

What makes Alice in the Cities so noteworthy is the tender, lifelike rapport cultivated between Vogler and Rottländer.

Jack Hazan’s portrait of David Hockney stands between documentary and fictional film, reality and fantasy.

What separates Texas Chainsaw Massacre from its predecessors is its anarchic, cynical hysteria—its bizarre and dark-as-hell gallows humor.

By turns frightening and heartbreaking, an aspect particularly reflected in John P. Ryan’s tormented performance as the baby’s father, the film is not only perhaps one of Cohen’s best films but one of the finest American horror films of the last 30 years.

Like few modern films, Alfredo Garcia seems to not only be a product of a director’s singular vision, but a virtual window into one man’s fractured, tortured soul.

Altman’s disgruntled comedy California Split, aside from its typically busy soundtrack (it was the first movie Altman used eight-channel audio to capture all the dialogue), seems a relatively straightforward buddy film...it’s also an anti-buddy parable in which George Segal and Elliott Gould’s homosocial behavior is equated unflatteringly against their obsessive gambling addictions.

The exhaustive, labyrinthine narrative is built up like a fortress around this film’s bitter heart.

The Seduction of Mimi is socio-political discourse, Italian style: Sex speaks louder than words on any given subject.

Part elegy for the Old West, part in-jokey celebration of the spaghetti western’s popular ascendance over classical Hollywood models, My Name Is Nobody plays like a deeply schizoid production, albeit an amiable enough one that manages several brilliant passages.

Of all the ’70s road movies, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot may be the only one in which the characters find themselves.

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is the rare exploitation film whose few redeeming qualities make up for its numerous shortcomings.

A shout-out to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up, The Conversation perfectly encapsulates the disaffection, alienation, and paranoia infecting America’s body politic in the era of Watergate.

When The Beast Must Die is ripping off The Most Dangerous Game, it’s an amusing, if minor, genre offering.

A rape-revenge narrative so streamlined that even the gimmick of its achronological editing never muddies the progression of Yuki’s journey.