Big Trouble in Little China
Directed by John Carpenter
1986
It flopped completely and then found everybody on video: Kurt Russell's swaggering trucker is really the useless sidekick, and nothing in it is ever explained to anyone.
★ 3.6
The Movies canon
Sourced and screened.
Every film chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
Browse all 731 films or filter by genre, director, place, and year.
Basic Instinct
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
1992
Paul Verhoeven made the decade's most notorious mainstream thriller and never once blinked: an interrogation scene everyone still knows, and a novelist who may be writing what happens next.
★ 3.9
48 Hrs
Directed by Walter Hill
1982
Eddie Murphy's first film role and he takes the whole thing over: Walter Hill built the interracial buddy-cop formula here, and the bar scene made a twenty-one-year-old a movie star overnight.
★ 4.0
Bullitt
Directed by Peter Yates
1968
The San Francisco car chase runs almost eleven minutes with no music at all, only engines: everything since has been a response to it, and Steve McQueen keeps his talking to a minimum.
★ 4.9
Blue Jasmine
Directed by Woody Allen
2013
Cate Blanchett plays a Manhattan wife whose husband's fraud has taken everything, arriving in San Francisco with nothing but luggage and manner: Allen's harshest film, and she is unsparing in it.
★ 5.4
Escape from Alcatraz
Directed by Don Siegel
1979
Shot on the actual island, in the actual cells: Don Siegel films a 1962 escape as pure method, spoons and paint and papier-mache heads, and explains nothing to anyone.
★ 5.6
Milk
Directed by Gus Van Sant
2008
Van Sant shot in the actual Castro Street storefront where Harvey Milk ran his campaigns: Sean Penn plays the first openly gay man elected to major office in California, and plays him delighted.
★ 5.7
Harold and Maude
Directed by Hal Ashby
1971
It failed on release and then ran 115 straight weeks at a single Minnesota theater: a death-obsessed teenager falls for a seventy-nine-year-old, and Cat Stevens scores the whole thing.
★ 6.0
The Birds
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1963
Alfred Hitchcock threw live gulls at Tippi Hedren for five days and gave the film no conventional score: only electronic shrieks, a quiet California town, and crows gathering on a schoolyard jungle gym.
★ 6.4
Dirty Harry
Directed by Don Siegel
1971
Pauline Kael called it fascist and the argument has never really ended: Eastwood's inspector chases a Zodiac-like killer through San Francisco with a .44 Magnum and open contempt for procedure.
★ 6.4
The Conversation
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
1974
Written years before Watergate and released at its climax, it looked like prophecy: a surveillance expert starts hearing something terrible inside his own recording, and his paranoia does the rest.
★ 7.7
The Maltese Falcon
Directed by John Huston
1941
Huston's first film as a director, and the one that finally made Bogart a star: everyone chasing the black bird lies about it for a hundred straight minutes.
★ 7.7
Vertigo
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1958
Nobody has ever made obsession look this beautiful or this sick: a man falls for an image instead of a person, and Hitchcock follows him past every point it should stop.
★ 9.9