A mind-bending sci-fi symphony, Stanley Kubrick’s landmark 1968 epic pushed the limits of narrative and special effects toward a meditation on technology and humanity.

Popularly viewed as one of the best American films ever made, the multi-generational crime saga The Godfather is a touchstone of cinema: one of the most widely imitated, quoted, and lampooned movies of all time.

Outrageously violent, time-twisting, and in love with language, Pulp Fiction was widely considered the most influential American movie of the 1990s.

We see Alex and his droogs go out for a little bit of the old ultraviolence, but when Alex is caught and forced to undergo controversial treatment that will make it impossible for him to commit violent acts, the side-effects lead to profound retrospection.

Orson Welles first feature film proved to be his most important and influential work, a ground-breaking drama loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst which is frequently cited as the finest American film ever made.

In 1964, with the Cuban Missile Crisis fresh in viewers’ minds, the Cold War at its frostiest, and the hydrogen bomb relatively new and frightening, Kubrick dared to make a film about what could happen if the wrong person pushed the wrong button.

Directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver is an homage to and reworking of cinematic influences, a study of individual psychosis, and an acute diagnosis of the latently violent, media-fixated Vietnam era.

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” or, rather, a homicidal boy in Stanley Kubrick’s eerie 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel, starring Jack Nicholson.

One of a cluster of late-1970s films about the Vietnam War, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now adapts the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness to depict the war as a descent into primal madness.

Francis Ford Coppola’s legendary continuation and sequel to his landmark 1972 film, The Godfather, parallels the young Vito Corleone’s rise with his son Michael’s spiritual fall, deepening The Godfather’s depiction of the dark side of the American dream.

In Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai), sixteenth-century villagers hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits. This gripping three-hour ride is one of the most beloved movie epics of all time.

Dismissed when first released, later heralded as one of director Alfred Hitchcock’s finest films (and, according to Hitchcock, his most personal one), this adaptation of the French novel D’entre les morts weaves an intricate web of obsession and deceit.

Michel Gondry directs this surreal story of man who decides to erase from his mind his memories of love, only to find that he wants to keep them after all.

In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock was already famous as the screen’s master of suspense (and perhaps the best-known film director in the world) when he released Psycho and forever changed the shape and tone of the screen thriller.

One of Alfred Hitchcock’s very best efforts, Rear Window is a crackling suspense film that also ranks with Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) as one of the movies’ most trenchant dissections of voyeurism.

Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love) directs this loose adaptation of an Upton Sinclair novel about a ruthless turn of the century oilman, ferociously played by Daniel Day-Lewis.

One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8½ (Otto e mezzo) turns one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema.

A blend of science fiction and noir detective fiction, Blade Runner was a box office and critical bust upon its initial exhibition, but its unique postmodern production design became hugely influential within the sci-fi genre, and the film gained a significant cult following.

The plot of this Raymond Chandler-esque comedy crime caper from the Coen brothers pivots around a case of mistaken identity complicated by extortion, double-crosses, deception, embezzlement, sex, pot, and gallons of White Russians.