Caged Heat is inspired from start to finish.

What Coppola achieved is a psychodrama about the dangers of being locked in your own private world, of slipping on noise-canceling headphones of any variety. Listening and hearing are not the same thing. Confusing one for the other can have dire consequences.

Dark Star has a stoner sardonicism: The movie feels like the product of long nights at the dorm passing around The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics and Arthur C. Clarke paperbacks.

The Three Musketeers...is superficially little more than a high-spirited adventure in the form of a string of beautifully executed moments of physical comedy.

A pulpy, violent tale of revenge based on a comic serialized in a popular Playboy-esque men’s magazine, Lady Snowblood didn’t have to be art. But director Toshiya Fujita treated it as such, utilizing a complicated flashback structure and expressionistic cinematography to tell the story of Yuki Kashima, a highly skilled assassin trained from birth to find and kill the men (and woman) responsible for murdering her father and raping her mother before she was born.

Remove all the crime-movie trappings—and there aren't that many, once Altman gets through with them—and the film would still endure for its surface alone, capturing the Depression-era South with brushstrokes of language, décor, and radio-plays on the soundtrack.

No comic trope, however musty or studded with whiskers, is off limits, including bad puns, physical shtick, pie fights, goofy names and accents, song-and-dance numbers, Jewish Indians, or just having a bunch of cowpokes farting around the campfire. Some of the jokes drop like lead, but the film's anarchic spirit carries a lot of excitement, because Brooks' anything-goes philosophy means that no comedic possibilities go unconsidered.

In an era full of auteur-driven turbulence in Hollywood, The Sting stands out as a model of old-school craft, a richly appointed studio production with big stars and a premium on efficiency and pace.

Singularly haunting.

Director Sidney Lumet (working from a screenplay by Waldo Salt and Norman Wexler) chooses not to press the superheroic aspect of his protagonist. Serpico is more street-level, tracing a decade of NYPD change--and refusal to change--through an episodic, often elliptical structure.

Poised on the edge of camp, Horror Express nimbly cycles through genres, with drawing-room mystery and procedural elements bleeding into Universal-style monster effects and science-fiction hokum.

Fantastic Planet uses an accessible medium to show the evils of propaganda and express the need for individuality. Laloux's vision of a Dali-meets-Krazy Kat alien landscape populated by twisted creatures is quite striking, even if the film's psychedelic elements haven't exactly aged well.

Witty, disgusting, eye-popping, and incomprehensible, The Holy Mountain is every bit as pop-philosophical as Jodorowsky's earlier work, but it also contains original visual ideas nearly every 30 seconds, from frogs in armor to crucifixes made out of painted bread.

Redford and Streisand are the whole show, so scenes with various supporting characters drag. But Pollack’s film still manages to function as a glossy rebuke to the Hollywood standard of the unlikely romance.

A low-key, tough little thriller punctuated by casual bursts of brutality and deadpan humor, Charley Varrick is informed by a quiet professionalism that suits a movie about feds and criminals doing their jobs, whether that means laundering money, making fake passports, or robbing banks.

Critics don’t tend to talk about this much—it’s tantamount to a confession that we don’t always know what we’re doing—but it’s often the case that the most powerful, haunting aspects of a movie are those that we don’t fully understand.

A galvanizing piece of personal filmmaking.

It functions reasonably well as a straightforward, agonized melodrama, but it’s first and foremost a master class—co-taught by famed cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (Goodfellas, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Quiz Show), who got his start with Fassbinder—in the dynamic visual use of a constricted space, and proof that a tiny budget is no excuse.

As in the best films of John Cassavetes, The Mother And The Whore transcends the medium of film altogether and appears to capture life as it is lived, in all its messy, painful, infinite sadness.

Even though the movie was, in a lot of ways, a glorious mess, it turned out to be a huge success on just about every level.

However dated stylistically (everybody’s dressed, to put it baldly, like hippies) it remains immensely powerful.

A funny, touching, nearly cliché-free, and thoroughly considered evocation of a time, place, and state of mind. Released just 11 years after the events it depicts (it usually takes about 20 years for nostalgia to set in), the film both captures the enormous societal changes between the early '60s and early '70s and winningly dramatizes the lives of its characters.

In one of the movie’s most famous scenes, Fox practices with his specially engineered rifle (which has been built into a pair of crutches), and as he takes his shots at a practice melon, he keeps tweaking the aim. It all looks very cool, until Fox finishes his adjustments, and fires a bullet that makes this stand-in for de Gaulle’s head explode.

So much about The Friends Of Eddie Coyle feels locked into 1973—from Dave Grusin’s jazz-fusion score to the shaggy hair and wide collars—but the dialogue is almost David Mamet-like in its specificity and rhythm, and it remains bracing even now.

Tati's most elaborate film, Playtime stands as his masterpiece, an awe-inspiring work of intricate choreography with a heart to match its technical expertise.

The bloodiest of the Apes films, and one of the most despairing.

A dry, dour film where the moments of poetic Americana barely cohere.

Though the mystery has been spoiled somewhat by an over-revealed twist ending, Soylent Green still succeeds thanks to director Richard Fleischer's sure command of one of the grimmest and most sadly plausible dystopias put to film.

Snappy patter reigns again, but by letting the story develop in open spaces rather than through tight edits, Bogdanovich fosters an atmosphere of freedom and promise.

Romero’s second horror film, made after Night Of The Living Dead, Season Of The Witch looks significantly less impressive than its predecessor. Where Night Of The Living Dead sandwiched some undistinguished, talky bits featuring actors of widely varying skill between the zombie horror, Season Of The Witch is nearly all undistinguished talky bits featuring actors of widely varying skill. Frankly, it’s kind of a slog.

The Mack certainly wasn't the first film to invite audiences to identify with a gleefully transgressive antihero, but its combustible take on sex, class, capitalism, and race made it an important touchstone not only for black film, but also for hip-hop culture.

As a filmmaker most often comfortable working within a genre, De Palma also knows how to deliver thrills, a skill he displays with remarkable regularity in Sisters, which still looks like one of his best.

Maybe the broad gestures, colorful costumes, and exaggerated acting worked in the theater. As a movie, it's actively, fascinatingly terrible, with a vision of Christ more likely to instill in viewers a fear of traveling bands of loony street performers than a desire to embrace the Holy Spirit.

Romero doesn’t have the best handle on the film as a whole, but he still manages some perfect moments that bring the era’s potential horrors into the heart of America, like a man losing his mind, then his life, against the misty backdrop of a small-town bridge at dawn. The suggestion is inescapable: one small push, and this could be your life.

On one hand, it's an ultraviolent revenge fantasy, and on the other hand, it's a masterpiece of over-the-top unintentional hilarity—with a clenched-toothed performance by Baker serving as its centerpiece. It's in the latter capacity that Walking Tall can be highly recommended as an unconscionably good time.

Though certainly dull and didactic at times, Tout Va Bien is remarkable foremost for its sustained twilight mood of exquisite resignation, of exhausted sadness and bone-deep world-weariness.

Black Mama, White Mama is a cheerfully sleazy romp made with the easily distractible drive-in audience in mind.

Not especially gag-driven, May's deadpan style clears the way for some remarkable performances by Jeannie Berlin, Eddie Albert, and especially Grodin, who has to remain likable even while doing stupid, mean things.

Brutal but hugely entertaining.

There's ample overacting by the likes of Stella Stevens, Ernest Borgnine, and Shelley Winters, but the movie's one-obstacle-atop-another plot—and active meditation on faith—remain sharp and surprising.

Asylum was written by Robert Bloch, the author of the original novel Psycho, and produced by the U.K.’s Amicus Productions, which was responsible for a series of horror anthologies during the ’60s and ’70s. Asylum remains, by far, their finest offering, in part because of its pitch-perfect gothic mood, and in part because its stories present varied perspectives on the depths of obsessive madness.

Wes Craven's The Last House On The Left occasionally plays like the longest, grisliest drug-scare film ever made.

Rarely has a movie made for kids been so devastatingly honest about how relationships can sour over time.

Superfly is in many ways classic pulp, but O'Neal and Mayfield push it toward a sort of epic grandeur.

A different director might have fashioned the same basic material into something grandiose, but Huston errs on the side of understatement. Shot largely on location, this raw, pessimistic portrait of people struggling to keep from slipping all the way down reinvigorated the veteran director’s reputation, and stands as one of his best and most accomplished films.

Deliverance is a film about finding the place where ideas mean less than instinct.

Each shot in Late Spring is striking on its own; the mature Ozu belongs to that rare category of filmmakers whose work can be recognized from a single frame. But together—with all their abrupt shifts in visual perspective and time—they become a mosaic, deeply poignant and ultimately mysterious in the way it envisions a relationship between two people trapped by how much they care for one another.

Not particularly complicated, and sometimes as confused as it is concise, 1972’s Joe Kidd is nonetheless a lean, reasonably satisfying slice of Clint Eastwood outlaw badassery.

Le Samouraï is a terrific film, at once a tense thriller and a fascinating character study, and only as cold as it looks until its unforgettable final scene.

Twins Of Evil, like the best of Hammer, is about entering a world of castles, creatures, and torch-wielding mobs, all a little darker and more colorful than expected.

Almost anyone could dig up and film someone with the ability to lip-synch using his a**hole, but it takes genius to set the scene to Surfin' Bird.

Above all, Hara's smile and Ryu's sigh are a touching show of good faith and the genuine pleasure they take in each other's company–which, of course, makes their response to life's disappointments all the more poignant.

The hyperactive humor grates at times, but is rarely as labored as many '60s comedies, thanks mainly to Bogdanovich's indulgence of the spontaneously absurd, and his inventive way of letting gags work their way across long, wide sets.

Though studio interference and his own personal demons hampered his later work, Straw Dogs shows a master in control of his effects, which made an artist of Peckinpah's sensibility an especially dangerous man.

In the end, Harold And Maude metes out these life lessons directly and without much ambiguity, yet that does little to diminish its power.

A slim Richard Matheson story that Spielberg padded into a 90-minute feature by artfully assembling a string of insert shots.

By preserving the exoticism and making sure the audience left the theater humming, Jewison made a grubby, European-flavored movie that Yanks could embrace.

This psychologically dense, genuinely erotic vampire thriller lacks fangs, but it has plenty of bite.

I'd seen moments from that chase for years, held up as an example of what makes the film great. And it is a great sequence. But it's even better in context, arriving after many scenes of false starts, wrong turns, and frustrating dead ends, like a brilliantly staged cat-and-mouse game on the subway involving Doyle and Fernando Rey's smooth French gangster. The explosions have even more impact when you first get to see the fuses slowly burning down...It's also what most imitators don't get. You can put together the most exciting sequence ever filmed, and it won't matter—or at least won't matter beyond the seconds it takes to unfold—if the material around it isn't there.

The last half of The Murder Of Fred Hampton shreds the official statements of Chicago law enforcement.... But the first half is all about the life and times of Hampton, as he rouses the rabble and defends the new socialism, while cautiously inspired by the ever-present cameras and microphones.

It's a classic B-movie move of making much out of little, and while Let's Scare Jessica To Death isn't quite a top-rank B-movie classic, it at least offers further proof that all the teen-idol stars and CGI effects—or a logical plot, for that matter—mean nothing if they don't make you scared to turn out the lights.

The film, which bears many marks of the Vietnam era, isn’t against any particular war, it’s against war itself. By immersing viewers in the horrors of one man’s suffering, it forces them to consider the implications of sending soldiers out to fight for a cause.

If nothing else, The Omega Man remains worth seeing for its remarkable shots of Heston wandering through an abandoned metropolis.

Russell’s penchant for aesthetic excess is thoroughly indulged, as the director stages grotesque human tableaus straight out of Hieronymus Bosch over Derek Jarman’s intricately detailed sets. The result gives the story a sort of wanton, overripe feel, with such ostensibly austere environments as a cloistered convent about to explode with repressed sensuality.

Hellman gives viewers plenty of time to study every detail, dwelling less on action than on quiet, small-town vistas, rundown diners, and forgotten stretches of Route 66.

Roeg’s film contrasts Western corruption with native goodness, but it’s naïve by design, and ultimately concerned more with the way all innocence passes than with the politics and particulars of any single part of the world.

For a children's film, Willy Wonka is surprisingly malevolent, which is most of its fun. But the refreshing malice and twisted whimsy only kick into high gear after 45 minutes of plodding setup and film-padding songs.

Nearly 50 years since it premiered, Klute still offers relevant feminist considerations about what it means to want to be an object of desire while also lashing out against the people and the patriarchal system that only values you as such.

Escape From The Planet Of The Apes gets the series back on track, sending three apes back to the 20th century for a story that begins comically and ends in fear and loathing.

Newman picks up speed and symbolic baggage as the movie progresses, and much of the film’s brilliance lies in the way Sarafian balances the two elements.

The ability to find performers who never seem for a moment to be performing is also here, giving Bleak Moments, like all of Leigh's films, an almost voyeuristic feel.

Nothing about The Aristocats is pitched at the level of an unforgettable night at the movies for the whole family. It's a programmer, pure and simple.

In the earthly realm, it’s a sledgehammer-subtle social satire filled with cartoonish Keystone Kops haplessly pursuing their elusive prey, and crudely drawn authority figures behaving like petulant children. On a more ethereal level, it’s an intermittently lyrical, strangely poignant fantasy powered by the beatific, magnetic presence of Cort and Shelley Duvall in an electric debut, and “Papa” John Phillips’ lovely songs.

El Topo is never boring, but neither does it hit the trippy heights of something like The Saragossa Manuscript, or the best of Luis Buñuel and Federico Fellini. And with its emphasis on one virile stud's journey to manhood—with women grasping at his cloak—El Topo isn't just drippily New Age-y, it also offers the kind of stealthy paternalism common to the counterculture.

John Cassavetes’ films ostensibly explore what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real, but his conception of stark, unvarnished reality sometimes feels awfully artificial.

Original Cast Album: Company would be worth viewing solely for Sondheim's witty lyrics and infectious music, but the human drama makes the session especially riveting.

The careful balancing of the two sides produces its own interesting effect, however, showing how war goes from possible to inevitable, whatever the wishes on either side. Had Tora! Tora! Tora! taken the notion a bit further, it might have created a portrait of escalating tension chilling enough to rival its carefully orchestrated climactic bombing raid.

It's a flawed film, hampered by weird tonal shifts and an overpopulated cast. But, 31 years later, Catch-22's chilliness seems forgivable, its vision of a military (and a nation) ruled by gung-ho capitalists, shameless opportunists, and evil yes-men as prescient and incisive as ever.

Together, Ebert and Meyer produced an unhinged spoof of soapy melodramas and hippie iconography, so over-the-top in its violence and libertine sexuality that no one in 1970 quite knew what to make of it.

The pounding prelude to a cultural and cinematic revolution, Watermelon Man nearly bubbles over with the rage that exploded outright with Van Peebles' follow-up, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.

Beneath The Planet Of The Apes is a joyless retread that at least has the distinction of ending with the nuclear annihilation of Earth.

The film captures a moment, playfully but without losing sight of the stakes, when the hot political temperatures of the late ’60s and early ’70s made change of one kind or another look inevitable.

Rush undercuts the subgenre's innate didacticism with a light touch and a playful, assured visual style; he never lets audiences forget there's a surplus of authorial intelligence behind the camera. Gould is in a unique position to see the weaknesses of the stodgy academic establishment and the confused counterculture alike, but as it enters its third act, the film grows less ambiguous and more heavy-handed.

Wadleigh crafted a film with a thoughtful flow; it tells the full story of the event, from the paranoia (and eventual acceptance) of the locals to the helpful attitudes (and eventual paranoia) of the throng. [1994 version]

Whatever a person's opinion of the play's accuracy, William Friedkin's 1970 film adaptation remains gripping, translating a story that takes place in a cramped apartment into a movie that rarely feels stagey.

A giant Rorschach blot of a film, Patton can be read any number of ways, from a sly satire of gung-ho militarism to an epic glorification of Patton's old-school mentality.

That nauseous mixture of laughs and shocks, and the fact that real passion drives Kastle's characters even when they plot against each other, is what makes The Honeymoon Killers such an enduring one-off.

The movie is so unrelievedly pessimistic that only the most dedicated misanthrope could love it. But there’s something oddly bracing—noble, even—about a Hollywood picture that’s willing to say, without even a hint of soft-pedaling, that life isn’t worth living, and that it’s squalid, unfair, and disappointing.