The best-selling author of “You Will Know Me” on a lifetime of moviegoing

Directed by Billy Wilder • 1950 • United States
Starring William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim

Hollywood’s ultimate poison-pen letter to itself, Billy Wilder’s acerbic masterpiece casts real-life silent-screen icon Gloria Swanson as a faded movie star who draws a struggling screenwr...

Directed by Nicholas Ray • 1950 • United States
Starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame

When a gifted but washed-up screenwriter with a hair-trigger temper—Humphrey Bogart, in a revelatory, vulnerable performance—becomes the prime suspect in a brutal Tinseltown murder, the only person who ca...

Directed by Samuel Fuller • 1964 • United States
Starring Constance Towers, Anthony Eisley, Michael Dante

The setup is pure pulp: A former prostitute (a crackerjack Constance Towers) relocates to a buttoned-down suburb, determined to fit in with mainstream society. But in the strange, hallucinat...

Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1966 • Sweden
Starring Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson

By the midsixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical PERSONA, he attained new levels of visual poetry. In the first of a series of legendary perf...

Directed by Brian De Palma • 1973 • United States
Starring Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, Charles Durning

Margot Kidder is Danielle, a beautiful model separated from her Siamese twin, Dominique. When a hotshot reporter (Jennifer Salt) suspects Dominique of a brutal murder, she becomes dangerously...

Directed by Peter Weir • 1975 • Australia
Starring Rachel Roberts, Vivean Gray, Helen Morse

This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath put director Peter Weir on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema. Based on an acclaimed 1967 novel by Joan Lin...

Directed by John Cassavetes • 1977 • United States
Starring Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara

While in the midst of rehearsals for her latest play, Broadway actor Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) witnesses the accidental death of an adoring young fan, after which she begins to confront th...

Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen • 1984 • United States

Joel and Ethan Coen's career-long darkly comic road trip through misfit America began with this razor-sharp, hard-boiled neonoir set somewhere in Texas, where a sleazy bar owner releases a torrent of violence with one murderous though...

Directed by David Lynch • 1992 • United States

In the town of Twin Peaks, everybody has their secrets, but no one more than Laura Palmer. In this prequel to his groundbreaking 1990s television series, David Lynch resurrects the teenager found wrapped in plastic at the beginning of the show, fo...