
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Modern Hollywood begins here: Lucas told the oldest story there is inside a universe that looked used and lived in, and the blockbuster has run the business ever since.

Modern Hollywood begins here: Lucas told the oldest story there is inside a universe that looked used and lived in, and the blockbuster has run the business ever since.

The romantic comedy has never recovered from it: Allen talks to the camera, walks into his own memories, drops subtitles over small talk, and breaks every rule the form had.

Spielberg made the rare first-contact film that treats the aliens as something to hope for: an ordinary man starts building a mountain in his living room and cannot say why.

Real minor-league players filled most of the roster and three of them became the Hanson Brothers: Paul Newman coaches a dying team that discovers the crowd will pay for violence.

The ski jump off the cliff opening a parachute painted like a Union Jack is the single best Bond stunt: Roger Moore's finest hour, with Jaws and an underwater Lotus.

Sam Peckinpah's only war film, told entirely from the German side of the Eastern Front: Orson Welles called it the finest anti-war film since All Quiet on the Western Front.

Chris Marker assembled hours of the global left arguing with itself between 1967 and 1977: a chorus of narrators reads his commentary, and none of them is given the last word.

It was the second biggest film of 1977 behind Star Wars, which nobody remembers: Burt Reynolds runs beer across state lines in a black Trans Am and grins at the camera throughout.