A movie that manages to feel violent even though there’s not a single gunshot or stabbing in it, this is the story of a powerful Broadway columnist named J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) who uses his considerable weight to force a slimy press agent (Tony Curtis) to break up a budding relationship between Hunsecker’s sister and a jazz musician. This movie is all-seeing dialogue and shady dealings—the kind where you actually notice the script, in a good way. The lines shoot back and forth, with Lancaster in particular wielding Hunsecker’s words like a sledgehammer.

It feels almost a disservice to call Rosemary’s Baby a “horror film,” because although the story of a young couple who move into an apartment building populated by Satanists certainly fits the bill, this is not a horror movie in the traditional sense. A scary story made for people who normally avoid such things, the movie eschews jump scares and gore for a mounting sense of dread, tantalizing glimpses of the unusual, and a surreal final punchline. Gripping and artful, it’s a benchmark for the genre that had come a long way from old castles and bats.

When Gladiator hit theaters in 2000, there hadn’t been a serious “sword-and-sandals” epic in a long, long time. Director Ridley Scott and star Russell Crowe removed all of the stock cheesiness that had come to define the genre and delivered a powerful historical epic that mixed a painstaking recreation of ancient Rome with some legitimate stand-up-and-cheer action sequences. Based on a rare non-horror short story by Stephen King, Shawshank Redemption stars Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman as inmates who develop a friendship over time in a harsh prison in 1950s Maine. What makes this movie exceptional is, first and foremost, the chemistry between the two leads—this is a high point in the careers of both Robbins and Freeman (which is saying something). The other thing is the unexpected twists and turns of the story that veer from dour to tragic to comic to…unexpectedly hopeful.

The two embark on an odyssey back to the States with his fighting rooster Macho in tow. Richard Nash’s novel that moves at the same pace as its 91-year-old headliner, the film moseys along from one minor incident to another, playing a familiar Western tune with sweet sensitivity. Eastwood may be physically past his prime, but he’s still got plenty of grit and grace. Things go horribly wrong in The Vigil for Yakov (Dave Davis), a young man who–having left his ultra-orthodox Jewish community for a secular Brooklyn life–accepts a job sitting vigil for a recently deceased Holocaust survivor. That task not only returns him to the neighborhood (and faith) he rejected, but puts him in the crosshairs of an evil demonic force that, it turns out, plagued the dead man over whom he watches, and his wife (Lynn Cohen), who behaves creepily around David in her darkly lit Borough Park home.

• As the hesitant-to-come-out Lupe, Moroles is a consistent delight, and Verma is even better as the frazzled Sunny, in what may be the breakout performance of the year.
• A wry and funny (but also genuinely romantic) adventure, it’s the kind of movie that the word “timeless” was made for.
• The term “blockbuster” was coined for Jaws (because people lined up around the block to see it) and it’s easy to see why—it’s one part buddy comedy, one part family drama, one part horror movie, and one part action film.
• In other cases, as in Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, Malick’s The New World and The Tree of Life, and Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, there were ardent supporters but also just-as-ardent detractors.

Leave it to director Rob Reiner and writer Nora Ephron to create a romantic comedy about two people determined not to be in a romantic comedy. Tracing the relationship of Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) as they meet, break up, get back together, break up, etc. is anything but overly cute and schmaltzy—it’s incredibly funny, sharp, sarcastic, and, before it ends, genuinely romantic. Movies are generally meant to be entertainment, but every so often it’s good to remind yourself that http://moviesnreviews.com/ they can be more than that. Jeanne Dielman by French director Chantal Akerman runs three and a half hours long and forces you to watch a lonely French woman painstakingly go about her daily routine. ” It’s not a movie to pop on when you want to kick back and just enjoy a good show, but it’s an astounding example of just how far movies can push the envelope. Prior to Psycho, the idea of a “horror movie” still involved cobwebbed castles and Eastern European actors in plastic fangs and capes.

When a man mysteriously plummets to his death from a mountain, detective Jang Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) is sent to determine if he could have been murdered. Ultimately, he begins to suspect that the dead man’s wife, Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei) might be the guilty party … but he’s also starting to fall for her. It’s not a new trope, but in this director’s hands it may as well be. Jordan Peele’s Nope didn’t make as much noise as Get Out or Us, but it might be the director’s most accomplished film. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star as OJ and Em Haywood, siblings who—with their father Otis (Keith David)—provide and train horses for film and TV productions. When Otis is killed by a coin falling from the sky, OJ and Em set out to investigate.

Alfred Hitchcock turned the genre on its head by refusing the tropes of traditional horror (save a spooky house on a hill) and lulling you into thinking you’re watching a movie about a secretary embezzling cash and going on the lam. It’s a stylish and scary thriller movie with a closing shot that will send shivers down your spine. With 2005’s Batman Begins, director Christopher Nolan showed that you can actually make the idea of a billionaire who fights crime dressed as a bat grounded and believable. With this follow-up, he delivers a dark and complex urban crime drama that barely feels like a “comic book movie” in the traditional sense. It all revolves around an absolutely riveting performance by the late Heath Ledger, whose Joker changed everything you thought you knew about the classic Batman villain and still has never been topped. He is all twitchy menace, and he kicks the movie up several notches every time he’s onscreen.

The term “blockbuster” was coined for Jaws (because people lined up around the block to see it) and it’s easy to see why—it’s one part buddy comedy, one part family drama, one part horror movie, and one part action film. It’s a masterclass in building and maintaining tension—only showing you enough of the shark to keep your fear levels stoked without overdoing it at any point. A problem with movies that take place in a harsh and distant future is that they often get cartoonish in their depiction of a world gone to ruin. There are no elaborately-costumed marauders or killer robots in Children of Men, just an unnervingly plausible and realistic look at a world where natural disasters, war, and terrorism have rendered most of the world uninhabitable, and the rest locked in an oppressive police state.

A recent graduate tries his best to avoid planning his future and instead has a tryst with a married woman before falling for the woman’s daughter. Funny, satirical, and masterfully acted all around, it’s a real gem that deserves its place among the all-time classics. This is the movie that really cemented Robin Williams as a gargantuan talent. Everyone knew he was funny, but few movies corralled his gift for inspired improv with his sizable talent as a dramatic actor. Dead Poets Society is about a progressive teacher who comes to a repressive boarding school and inspires his students to be free thinkers despite the concerns of the conservative staff and the boys’ disapproving parents. Williams is remarkable, but so are the kids, led by future stars Robert Sean Leonard and Ethan Hawke.

His movies are whimsical and sweet, but also soulful and affecting. Spirited Away is one of his haunting and beautiful masterpieces, telling the story of a 10-year-old girl who escapes into a world of fantastical beings. Riots, Boyz in the Hood now seems like a prescient forecast of the tensions bubbling up all over the region at that time. You can enjoy In the Heat of the Night on its own merits—of which there are many—and you can also appreciate how many ways the movie sent ripples culturally with its tale of a black Homicide detective investigating a murder in a Mississippi town in the 1960s.