It’s Vaughn’s caged-beast charisma (that bounces off the screen long before he is actually caged) and way with a wink or a pithy putdown that keeps us riveted through the substantial sections of the film where heads remain, for the time being, unstomped.

The Villainess confounds its audience on two levels: firstly, how the filmmakers pulled off the elaborate set pieces and secondly, leaving them to wonder what the hell is going on in the plot.

It shows a concern for spatial discrepancies, between characters, between action and intention, between life and death. It’s one of many reasons why The Hurt Locker is one of the most exciting movies you’ll see this year.

Filled with imagery both moving and mordant... 12:08 East Of Bucharest doesn't pretend to have a position on the fallout of the Romanian Revolution. Instead it contends that different questions need to be asked and considered about post-Communist life, about the blame about the current state of the country, and where the future lies for Romania's youth.

Days is the first in a loose trilogy including In the Mood for Love and 2046, but here, amidst all the exquisitely deliberate, drippingly sensual imagery that would become Wong’s trademark, there is still the grit and grain of real life, and it makes this perfectly enigmatic film feel somehow thrilling.

Is it a somewhat middling ’90s dad-core thriller? You bet, but it’s also a totally underrated skeleton key for understanding the careers of its two leads: Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin.

The great, unifying success across all ten shorts is Kieślowski’s representation of Poland, which is political, social, and personal all at once. Each movie is its own experiential encounter.

An acutely defined, starkly realized and profoundly unsettling debut if ever there was one.

Crimes of the Future sounds a whole lot more fascinating than it actually is: it’s a more interesting film to read/write about than to watch, which just goes to show how Cronenberg at this early stage was still closer to a kind of literary, idea-based storytelling, and had not yet mastered the filmmaking side of the equation.

It’s a movie that can feel like several you’ve seen before, yet never distorted in quite this style, beat, or fashion. When the messy trajectory seems as though it might be on its way to the point of reflection, dissension re-ignites, and counter-cultural discord combusts through expressive punctuation, once again.

Elegantly constructed, wittily executed, delightfully ruthless, and scary as hell.

They All Laughed is certainly not a perfect film, but its homespun quality, palpable camaraderie, and playfully loose performances make for a movie that’s easy to harbor deep affection for nonetheless.

Ultimately, Ms. 45 is far more interesting and genuinely enjoyable (versus ironically enjoyable, as many of this vintage grindhouse flicks wind up being) than it has any right to be.

It’s pretty banal, but in the anything-but-banal catalogue of Cronenberg films, that gives it its own weird, sincere charm.

Ted Kotcheff’s film is essentially a workplace comedy, but the employees are braindead and wealthy, and the benefits are glory and groupies in equal amounts.

Still Scott’s greatest film and better than James Cameron’s sequel, the director’s sci-fi horror is an exercise in minimalistic terror, manifesting it in the most unknowable, terrifying extraterrestrial creature ever seen on screen.

Saint Jack is probably Bogdanovich’s loosest film, the one that feels most Cassavetian in execution, in which classical plotting, let alone the kind of manic screwballishness that characterizes the director’s comedies, is entirely absent in favor of a low-key, episodic character portrait embedded in a gritty, exotic, and relatively little-filmed locale.

As visceral and invigorating as classics like “Deep Red” or “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage” might be, they aren’t a patch on 1977’s Suspiria.

Nashville boasts some of the director’s most memorable and emotionally multifaceted characters —not to mention a first-class soundtrack of country, blues and gospel hits.

The film feels like the midpoint of Robert Altman and Hal Ashby, and perhaps one of the reasons it’s been overlooked is that it arrived the same year as two similar masterpieces from those directors, in “Nashville” and “Shampoo,” and if this isn’t quite as flawless as those films (it’s admittedly somewhat sprawling and unfocused), it’s nevertheless worth a watch for many reasons.

California Split keenly and perceptively captures how someone you meet in a chance encounter can become a best friend (at least for a while) in a few short hours.

Undone by a generally detached air, and by lengthy, choking narration (a factor of shooting without sync sound due to the noise of the camera), Stereo (and arguably his next feature too) is most valuable today as a document of Cronenberg the student, the filmmaker-in-gestation, searching for, but not yet finding that perfect balance between kink, thought experiment and actual entertainment.

Sisters never carries any feeling that De Palma is showing off or flexing his cinematic chops because he can, or is above the material. The film is utterly transfixing because it plays its schlock straight, and paired with Hermann’s hair-raising throwback score, the effect is giddy.

Freewheelin’ and almost similar to a long jazz riff that could have been reigned in, Husbands is occasionally fascinating and often tedious.

For all the fun and games, there’s also a depth to it that many Holmes adaptations miss.

Before there was such a thing as a “Fellini” movie, “Variety Lights” established what that would look like as he moved up the ladder in Italy’s movie industry, through humor and melancholy.

Far from the home-run laughs of “The Apartment” and “Some Like it Hot,” Irma La Douce is still a fun if G-rated tour of the seedy Parisian underbelly, but coming in overlong at close to 2 1/2 hours, would have benefited from some tighter editing.

The icicle-sharp, endlessly quotable script is one of the greatest ever written, and the film remains relentlessly entertaining. If it’s not the director’s finest, it’s a testament to how much competition there is for that position.