Clint Eastwood’s prolific, uneven directorial career unsurprisingly began with a stinker. The story of a disc jockey named Dave Garver (Eastwood) who has a one-night stand with an obsessive listener, Play Misty For Me is a schlocky, laughable precursor to Fatal Attraction. Appreciate the film, then, for its unintentional laughs, which go beyond the dated

An early Alfred Hitchcock effort, when he was still making films in England, The Lady Vanishes begins as an ensemble farce before it settles into the familiar motions of mystery and suspense. The movie opens in a small European hotel, where a band of international travelers vie for limited rooms and meals before leaving on

Brick employs a simply brilliant movie high concept: It’s a classic film-noir detective story set in a contemporary high school. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays an intelligent teen loner who has been recently dumped by his social-climbing girlfriend. He’s still infatuated, of course, so when she disappears he sets out to find her by winding his way

Spike Lee borrows a page from Woody Allen’s recent book for the heist drama Inside Man, in which the idiosyncratic director (Do the Right Thing) plays servant to genre material (as Allen did with Match Point). The result reminds us that even the most familiar of movies needn’t always be formulaic. Denzel Washington (as the

This lyrical import from director Peter Weir may be a thriller, but it essentially runs on anti-suspense. Set in 1900 in Weir’s native Australia, the film follows a field trip taken by boarding-school girls to the title locale, an isolated, desolate outcropping where the rock formations look like melting faces. When three of the students

This gory take on the Jack the Ripper legend, starring Johnny Depp as an opium-addicted detective, wants to be a thinking person’s slasher flick, even quoting the killer as saying, “I gave birth to the 20th century.” That’s an intriguing boast, but sibling directors Albert and Allen Hughes, adapting a graphic novel by Alan Moore,

Criterion’s exhaustive The Complete Mr. Arkadin includes not two but three versions of Orson Welles’ disputed mystery for critical comparison. Sort of a freak-show spin on Welles’ own Citizen Kane, Mr. Arkadin follows a con man (Robert Arden) on an investigation into the past of the shady title character (Welles), an eccentric billionaire whose business

This John Le Carre adaptation strips the spy game of its romantic trappings and depicts its players, as one character says, ‘as men playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives.’ Director Martin Ritt uses stark, black-and-white cinematography and a documentary-like distance. Like many of its characters, the movie wears a poker face.