By Brandon W. Irvine

Beetlejuice - 1988 – dir. Tim Burton

You often hear that movies are a “visual medium,” but a list of the most popular movies that emphasize the power of what is seen would start off with animated children’s films, comic book adaptations, and Transformers. Though at times their avid visual invention can become glorious spectacle, ideologically these movies usually limit themselves to reiterating conventional bromides about love and loyalty winning the day or tolerance being a virtue.

But what would a film be like if it reveled in dazzling entertainment without also resorting to moral comfort food?

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By Adam Shalvey

Badlands – 1973 – dir, Terrence Malick

In 1972 Terrence Malick ran out of money while editing Badlands, his first feature film, and with no studio backing or distribution deal, he turned back to freelance scriptwriting to drum up the last $35,000 he needed for 10 extra months of postproduction editing and sound rerecording. This was the second cash infusion that Malick personally invested into the feature, having earned about half of the initial funding for principle photography from his stint as a scriptwriter after graduating from the AFI Conservatory in 1969.
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By Leo Racicot

Top Hat – 1935 – dir. Mark Sandrich

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made only ten movies together but oh, what a ten they are!  Top Hat is the best of them. After Astaire’s Easter Parade, it was the most successful movie of his long career. Certainly, it is the loveliest, best-looking the pair ever made, and the most expensive to produce; the cost of the lavish Art Deco sets — what the industry used to call “The Big White Set” — reached up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, an astronomical sum for those times. Remember that this was The Depression — 1935 — and savvy movie producers knew that people suffering in a bleak economy survived by going to the movies; they flocked to the theaters in droves to live and dream vicariously, watching their favorite movie stars carouse and cavort in fabulous costumes on luxuriant sets, dressed in tuxedos and bundled up in minks, sipping champagne and tripping the Light Fantastic.

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By Brandon Walter Irvine

Gates of Heaven – 1979 – dir. Errol Morris

How do you get stuff this good from the raw material of average folks? Certain filmmakers have a knack for finding interview subjects worthy of our rapt attention, and that’s just what director Errol Morris does in “Gates of Heaven,” his 1978 documentary about the pet cemetery business in northern California.

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By Peggy Nelson

They Live – 1988 – dir. John Carpenter

They Live may be the most realistic horror movie you’ll ever see. A train pulls away, revealing a tiny figure in the middle distance, perhaps some kind of modern day hobo with a flannel shirt and a pack, dwarfed by the rail yard, the overpasses, and other impersonal architecture of transport and edges of cities. That figure, of course, is Nada, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, drifting into town in search of an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work. Set in a nearby present, Nada’s American Dream has devolved into massive unemployment, industrial flight, tent cities, and radical income discrepancy. “I just want to work,” says Nada, with the incongruously sweet expression that belies his history as a “heel” in wrestling. “I still believe in America.”

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