From the jargon-heavy dialogue to the loving shots of tricked-out autos, Corvette Summer is heaven for people who love hot wheels.

There are moments when Big Wednesday strains under the weight of Milius’ ambition, but they’re balanced with lively authenticity and a brisk lack of sentiment.

Eventually, the film’s old-fashioned, shtick-friendly tone stops seeming charming and becomes exhausting because DeLuise exerts so much effort where none is necessary.

F.I.S.T. is another in a long line of well-made films that excel in their particulars, even if they fall a little short as complete, complex pieces of cinema.

A big reason why The Kentucky Fried Movie worked so well (and became a substantial cult hit) is that in the 1970s, subversion thrived after prime time, on late-night TV and at midnight movies.

A defiant, mad gesture of a film that features some of the most exhilarating sequences in movie history.

In combining the dread and survival politics of George Romero and The Night Of The Living Dead with the macho heroics and succinct wit of Howard Hawks, Carpenter found his own voice and changed the course of genre filmmaking.

Part of the reason Grey Gardens—named for the dilapidated East Hamptons mansion Little Edie shares with her mother, Edith “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale—is so deep and endlessly rewatchable is that the Beales’ pleasure in being seen is matched by the Maysles’ joy in watching. These exhibitionists found the perfect voyeurs, and vice versa.

The film plays like the work of a creator trying to grapple with the big issues before the clock runs out.

It’s tempting to characterize Cooley High as the inner-city answer to American Graffiti—trading out Modesto’s hot rods for Chicago’s elevated trains—but there’s a specificity to screenwriter (and Good Times co-creator) Eric Monte’s memories of growing up on the Near North Side in the early 1960s that transcends mere imitation.

In Nashville, the background is just as important as the foreground, and this diffusion of focus allows Altman and his collaborators to build a whole world out of minuscule interactions.

The film is memorable for its action scenes—from an opening raid that erupts on an eerily quiet day through a Sam Peckinpah-inspired finale—but also for the reflective moments from which those action scenes are born.

But it’s also edited so crisply, and shot with such an overpowering sense of decay, that it’s hard not to look on all the dismemberment and despair and think, “Man, that’s pretty.”

In form, Phase IV isn’t that different from monster movies of old, though the ants never grow to monstrous size. In execution, it’s much more striking, offering a study in contrasts between ants and humans, and one that doesn’t always reflect favorably on the humans.

Part of what makes The Parallax View so unnerving is that it also offers no explanation.

As a film, it’s ramshackle, with none of the narrative drive of Leone’s best work. But it’s held together by Fonda and Hill’s terrific odd-couple teaming, remarkable action scenes, and one of Ennio Morricone’s best, strangest scores.

Both Kennedy and Lewis turn in colorful performances, but it’s Eastwood and Bridges’ film, and their ill-defined, tender friendship makes the movie.

Like Antonioni, Coppola was wrestling with the properties of his chosen medium and showing how art can conceal and deceive as much as it can tell us something plain and true.

If Foxy Brown falls just short of being peak Grier, though, it’s only because it’s a weaker version of Hill’s Coffy, from the year before.

Don’t Look Now culminates in a shock for the ages, the grim payoff to Roeg’s editing scheme. But it would all be mere supernatural hokum if the film weren’t so persistently insightful about the gnawing pain of losing a child, and how the mind can keep that wound from scarring over... It would all be unbearably sad, if it weren’t chilling to the bone.

What’s most notable is how Eastwood holds fast to the rebel spirit of the spaghetti Westerns and revisionist New Hollywood Westerns of the previous decade, but packages it in a film that’s slicker and more mainstream-friendly. 

It isn’t simply a nostalgic movie, it’s a nostalgic movie about nostalgia. Lucas could have set the film in 1959, when Steve, Curt, and John were still in high school and still cruising night after endless night. Instead, Graffiti begins right as the fun is about to end, and gives its characters just enough self-awareness to recognize that this is last call at the party. George Lucas isn’t the only one mourning for this magical lost era; the characters onscreen mourn right along with him.

There’s so much distance between where Blacula started and where Scream Blacula Scream ends up that the sequel quickly exhausts its thin purpose.

A sobering story kept at street level.

Sometimes important plot-points unfold through windows, too, and The Long Goodbye as a whole peels back the surfaces of private-eye stories, paying special attention to their macho bluster and abused women.

Eastwood didn’t overreach with Play Misty For Me. It’s a tense thriller that’s inside his comfort zone in more ways than one. But he does overdeliver in the best way. Co-star Jessica Walter plays an obsessed fan, and Eastwood wrings every ounce of tension from a scenario in which a casual affair turns into a life-threatening mistake, and the film executes a potentially trashy scenario with respect for its audience.

Billy Jack is a film of violent contradictions. It is a fortysomething über-square’s tribute to the promise and potential of the hippies, as well as an intensely violent homage to non-violence.

Five Easy Pieces is the very definition of a character study, and one of the best American cinema has produced.