
Schindler's List
More people have understood the Holocaust through this film than through any other: Spielberg took no fee, shot it in black and white, and gave the last word to the survivors.

More people have understood the Holocaust through this film than through any other: Spielberg took no fee, shot it in black and white, and gave the last word to the survivors.

The title became a phrase people use without knowing the film: a comedy about repeating one day turned into the most quietly serious argument about how to live.

The moment the first dinosaur appears is the moment audiences stopped trusting their own eyes: Spielberg mixed puppets and computers so well that the seams still do not show.

Nothing happens and that is the entire point: Linklater catches the last day of school in 1976 so exactly that people who were not there remember it anyway.

The train wreck was staged for real because it was cheaper than faking it: a surgeon convicted of his wife's murder runs, and Tommy Lee Jones's marshal is better company than the hero.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays a man convicted of a bombing he had nothing to do with: the Guildford Four case, filmed while the wound in Britain was still fresh.

De Palma's best film with Pacino, and it took people twenty years to notice: an ex-convict tries to go straight in 1975 New York, and the Grand Central chase is a masterclass.

Chazz Palminteri turned down large offers for his one-man play until someone would let him star: De Niro directed his first film out of it, about a boy with two fathers competing.

Tarantino sold this script to pay for Reservoir Dogs and Tony Scott shot it with real affection: a comic book clerk and a call girl leave Detroit with the wrong suitcase.

The first major studio film to take AIDS seriously, aimed squarely at people who had not: a lawyer sues the firm that fired him, and Bruce Springsteen wrote the opening song.

Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday is the reason people keep rewatching it: the film lost its director a month into shooting and still produced the most quotable western since the sixties.

It has become the film American men quote at each other about being eleven: a new kid in 1962 learns baseball on a vacant lot, and the stakes are imaginary and total.

Notre Dame had not allowed a film crew on campus in fifty years: a kid with no size and no grades wants to dress for one game, and everybody tells him no.

Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon had been perfecting this act for twenty-five years and it still lands: two Minnesota neighbors have hated each other since one married the other's girl.