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 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 Kasi Lemmons • 1997 • United States
Starring Jurnee Smollett, Meagan Good, Samuel L. Jackson

“The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old . . .” So begins Kasi Lemmons’s spellbinding feature debut, an evocative journey into the maze of memory steeped in fragrant southern-gothi...

Directed by Charles Laughton • 1955 • United States
Starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—incredibly, the only film the great actor Charles Laughton ever directed—is truly a stand-alone masterwork. A horror movie with qualities of a Grimm fairy tale, i...

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 Lee Daniels • 2012 • United States
Starring Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey

Lee Daniels’s follow-up to his breakthrough feature PRECIOUS is a deliciously pulpy, swamp-steamy slice of Southern gothic delirium featuring an all-star cast led by Matthew McConaughey, playing...

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 Douglas Sirk • 1956 • United States
Starring Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack

The Technicolor expressionism of Douglas Sirk reached a fever pitch with this operatic tragedy, which finds the director pushing his florid visuals and his critiques of American culture to their sub...

Directed by Martin Ritt • 1958 • United States
Starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Orson Welles

Sex, pyromania, and epic family drama heat up this southern-gothic scorcher adapted from three works by William Faulkner. In his first screen pairing opposite his soon-to-be wife Joanne Woodward, P...

Directed by John Huston • 1979 • United States
Starring Brad Dourif, Ned Beatty, Harry Dean Stanton

In this acclaimed adaptation of the first novel by legendary Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, John Huston vividly brings to life her poetic world of American eccentricity. Brad Dourif, in an imp...

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1986 • United States
Starring Tom Waits, John Lurie, Roberto Benigni

Director Jim Jarmusch followed up his brilliant breakout film STRANGER THAN PARADISE with another, equally beloved portrait of loners and misfits in the American landscape. When fate brings together t...

Directed by Ethan Hawke • 2023 • United States
Starring Maya Hawke, Laura Linney, Philip Ettinger

Directed and cowritten by Ethan Hawke, WILDCAT invites viewers to weave in and out of the mind of the celebrated southern gothic writer Flannery O’Connor as she ponders the great questions of her wr...