3. ‘The Night of the Hunter’ (1955)
Robert Mitchum had cinematic villainy in his bones, and he never used it to a more chilling effect than as Reverend Harry Powell. Powell, a serial killer, marries and murders the widowed mother of two young children who know the location of a stash of stolen loot and proceeds to hunt down the children he just orphaned. It was Charles Laughton’s only directorial effort, and it’s unique — a lyrical thriller that feels like a horror film and looks like a fairy tale, and reminds us that there are few people more dangerous than someone who’s convinced he’s a man of God and is anything but.
2. ‘Eraserhead’ (1977)
No American director crafts cinematic nightmares that linger in the psyche longer than David Lynch. His first featurelength film was a labor of love, shot over the course of several moneystrapped years on grainy black-and-white film stock. Henry (Jack Nance) discovers that his estranged girlfriend Mary (Charlotte Stewart) has given birth to his baby, a mewling, hideously deformed creature that serves as a totem of all of Lynch’s fears of the body, sex and fatherhood.
1. ‘Chinatown’ (1974)
A private eye hired to investigate a romantic affair gets pulled into a far more gnarly mystery of murder and the power struggle over the Los Angeles water supply. But Robert Towne’s twisty screenplay makes for a movie that’s less about municipal corruption than about the corruption of the soul. And at the center of that corruption is
The best-picture winner was notable for presenting onscreen a family drama that wasn’t familiar to moviegoers at the time: a custody battle in which the mother clearly does not deserve to win. More than that, though, it was a challenge to a system that said she did anyway. When Mrs. Kramer (Meryl Streep) walks out on Mr. Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) and their young son, the suddenly single father rises to the occasion — and then rises even higher when she comes back to reclaim him.
After a four-year disappearance, Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) silently wanders out of the Texas desert and is picked up by his brother (Dean Stockwell), who takes him to his family in LA. There, Travis is reconnected with his 7-year-old son, whom he’d left with his brother when he disappeared. Not the best start. But, slowly forming a bond of trust, the two set out on a uniquely American trip through the Southwest in search of the boy’s longlost mother and the discovery of what left Travis so shell-shocked by life. This meditative Wim Wenders redemption story won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.