
The Graduate
A generation was told their parents were wrong and believed it: Nichols made aimlessness look cinematic, and the soundtrack put Simon and Garfunkel into every house in America.

A generation was told their parents were wrong and believed it: Nichols made aimlessness look cinematic, and the soundtrack put Simon and Garfunkel into every house in America.

Every filmmaker who has ever shot a hitman putting on a hat is quoting this: Melville stripped the crime film down to ritual, silence and a trench coat.

New Hollywood starts here: the violence was unlike anything American films had shown, the Newsweek critic who panned it printed a retraction a week later, and the studio system collapsed.

Bunuel's most seductive film, and the role Deneuve never quite escaped: a bored bourgeois wife takes afternoon work in a brothel, and her fantasies blur in without warning.

American English took a line about failure to communicate from it, and Newman his best role: a man who will not be broken, on a chain gang that keeps trying.

Tati built a working modern city on the edge of Paris and it bankrupted him: there is no plot, no close-up, and something funny in every corner of the frame.

Poitier refused to film in the Deep South, so Mississippi was recreated in Illinois: a Philadelphia detective is arrested for being Black in a small town and then asked to solve its murder.