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.