Directed by Nicholas Kazan • 1993 • United States
Starring James Spader, Mädchen Amick, Fredric Lehne

What begins as a dream relationship gradually turns into a nightmare in this sultry psychological thrill ride. Successful architect Ray (James Spader) is reeling from a recent divorce when he me...

Directed by Brian De Palma • 1976 • United States
Starring Sissy Spacek, John Travolta, Piper Laurie

The very first film adaptation of a Stephen King novel remains one of the finest—a still-shocking horror classic that has engraved itself onto the pop-culture consciousness thanks to the operatic...

Directed by George Armitage • 1990 • United States
Starring Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Fred Ward

Based on the novel by crack crime writer Charles Willeford and produced by Jonathan Demme, this marvelously offbeat, black-comic caper features a totally unhinged performance from Alec Baldw...

Directed by Martin Scorsese • 1991 • United States
Starring Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange

Martin Scorsese fuses his bravura stylistic command and personal themes of sin and guilt with the pulp-pleasure mechanics of genre filmmaking for this brutally effective thriller, a morally unse...

Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni • 1970 • United States
Starring Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, Rod Taylor

Italian art-cinema titan Michelangelo Antonioni delivered a jolt of jarring modernist abstraction to Hollywood with this startling journey into the 1960s counterculture, one of the most d...

Directed by Todd Haynes • 2007 • United States, Germany
Starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin

How can a film portray the many sides of the shape-shifting enigma that is Bob Dylan? Director Todd Haynes’s audacious gambit is to enlist six actors to play him in this innovati...

Directed by J. Lee Thompson • 1962 • United States
Starring Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, Polly Bergen

Screen legends Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum face off in this terrifying tale of revenge built around one of the screen’s all-time great villains. Mitchum is mesmerizingly menacing as Max Cad...

Directed by Don Siegel • 1971 • United States
Starring Clint Eastwood, Geraldine Page, Elizabeth Hartman

This chilling, Civil War–set western casts Clint Eastwood stars as a wounded Yankee soldier who finds himself convalescing in a Confederate all-girls school, a charged setup that precipitates...

Directed by Elia Kazan • 1956 • United States
Starring Carroll Baker, Karl Malden, Eli Wallach

One of the most controversial films of the 1950s, this scorching black comedy was condemned by the National Legion of Decency and singled out as “just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture...

Directed by Curtis Hanson • 1990 • United States
Starring Rob Lowe, James Spader, Lisa Zane

Weak-willed Los Angeles yuppie Michael Boll (James Spader) finds his life transformed when he meets a mysterious stranger named Alex (Rob Lowe), whose charm and confidence gradually rub off on him. As Ale...

Directed by Vincente Minnelli • 1958 • United States
Starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine

Master stylist Vincente Minnelli applies his spectacular visual flair to this feverish melodrama, a scorching indictment of small-town hypocrisy that sets every inch of the CinemaScope fram...

Directed by Stephen Herek • 1989 • United States
Starring Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, George Carlin

It’s a totally bodacious odyssey when slacker SoCal teens Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves)—in danger of failing their high school history report, with potentially disastrous consequences f...

Directed by Henry Hathaway • 1953 • United States
Starring Marilyn Monroe, Joseph Cotten, Jean Peters

Marilyn Monroe dazzles in her star-making turn as a devious femme fatale in this sultry tale of seduction and murder. While on vacation at Niagara Falls, Rose Loomis (Monroe) plots to murder her...

Directed by Vincente Minnelli • 1960 • United States
Starring Robert Mitchum, Eleanor Parker, George Peppard

Vincente Minnelli’s baroquely stylized melodrama casts Robert Mitchum as the patriarch of a wealthy Texas family who must confront their hidden secrets when his philandering ways come bac...

Directed by Lewis Allen • 1947 • United States
Starring John Hodiak, Lizabeth Scott, Burt Lancaster

Lurid Technicolor, deep-dish melodrama, and gay subtext abound in this pulpy noir firecracker. In the desert town of Chuckawalla, Nevada, tempers flare, passions spark, and violence erupts when Pa...

Directed by John Schlesinger • 1990 • United States
Starring Melanie Griffith, Matthew Modine, Michael Keaton

It’s the ultimate yuppie nightmare when a young couple rents their spare apartment to a psychopath in this twisted thriller starring a memorably villainous Michael Keaton. After renovati...

Directed by Steven Spielberg • 1977 • United States
Starring Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon

Pure movie magic of the highest order, this beloved science-fiction landmark from Steven Spielberg gazes, with awe-inspiring wonder, into the infinite unknown. In the night skies near his Mun...

Directed by Joel Coen • 2000 • United States, United Kingdom, France
Starring George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson

The Coen brothers’ (extremely loose) take on Homer’s “Odyssey” is a marvelously freewheeling journey through the Depression-era South overflowing with comic adventure, ir...

Directed by Sofia Coppola • 2006 • France, United States, Japan
Starring Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis

Sofia Coppola brings Converse sneakers and a dreamy synth-pop soundtrack to eighteenth-century Versailles for this exuberantly subversive, extravagantly stylized anti-biopic of o...

Directed by David Lynch • 1990 • United States
Starring Laura Dern, Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe

David Lynch throws pulp melodrama, THE WIZARD OF OZ, surreal-kinky violence, and Elvis into a cauldron and brews this nightmarish soap opera in which outlaw lovers Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura...

Directed by Miloš Forman • 1996 • United States
Starring Woody Harrelson, Courtney Love, Edward Norton

Director Miloš Forman brings his slyly subversive sensibility to this wickedly entertaining, stranger-than-fiction look at one man’s notorious public persona and unconventional private life. Wo...

Directed by David Lynch • 1999 • United States
Starring Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Harry Dean Stanton

In between the dark, florid surrealism of the LA-set neonoirs LOST HIGHWAY and MULHOLLAND DR., director David Lynch took a detour to America’s heartland for this surprisingly down-to-eart...

Directed by Luis Mandoki • 2002 • United States, Germany
Starring Charlize Theron, Courtney Love, Stuart Townsend

When their daughter (Dakota Fanning) is abducted and taken for ransom by a gang of serial kidnappers, a young doctor (Stuart Townsend) and his wife (Charlize Theron) are held hostage...

Directed by Leo McCarey • 1939 • United States
Starring Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer, Maria Ouspenskaya

Golden-age Hollywood’s humanist master Leo McCarey brings his graceful touch and relaxed naturalism to this sublime romance, one of cinema’s most intoxicating tear-wringers. Irene Dunne and Char...