1970s
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
The rare horror film that makes you afraid of your own life, rather than for it. A paranoia masterclass.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
A movie disregarded even in its own series. Flawed and beautiful as the human race it’s about.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Close Encounters is about no less than human curiosity, our capacity to believe that aliens must represent the best in ourselves, and have the answers we’ve been looking for. Though it was sold on its intricate sets and handcrafted spaceships, it’s most reputable for Richard Dreyfuss, and Spielberg’s fathering of him.
Bugsy Malone
The film actually makes the fictional landscape of the gangster film more real, by taking its troublesome boys and distant, unknowable broads and making them children at an age when that’s just the way things are. The mysterious sexual tension is made strangely innocent, though the archetypes haven’t changed from when Bogart and Cagney inhabited them. Bugsy Malone is a gangster film that took a good look at itself and wondered if it could do better. It’s really close.
Carrie (1976)
Beneath its skin, this film is really a coming of age tale. Can you see how horrifying that makes it?
Superman
Watching the original Superman I was not filled with awe so much as a kind of quiet calm, as though a wise person had just reminded me of a well-worn truth. DC is terribly wrong. The old myths still soar.
The Godfather Part II
The film is essentially about how Michael has failed to be his father, to garner real respect, and even to be truly Italian. The failure is a well-made sequel but was it necessary? It distorts the whole picture, as though Vito Corleone died for nothing.
Moonraker
Moonraker skips the part where all is as it seems, a noble approach for a film in a formula series (they might have made it stick as self-aware humor, but even that would have been too “wink-wink” with Moore at the Helm). “You appear,” says Drax after Bond’s fourth miraculous escape, “with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.” Here is an oddity: a franchise that doesn’t know it knows itself.