A visually stunning and ground-breaking film, the "Matrix" is also a metaphor for modern technology's enslavement of individual passion, will, and creativity: it's so good that it makes even Keanu Reeves look decent.

This very funny movie is also any malcontent's sweet dream: the best film of David Fincher, Edward Norton, and Brad Pitt.

A mesmerizing and haunting descent into depravity: this movie is more apocalyptic than Dr. Strangelove.

This very very long movie is a historical drama that offers stunning cinematography and a twisted tale: Stanley Kubrick and William Makepeace Thackeray together at long last.

Action movie-making at its very best, and the perfect role for Matt Damon: a man with no identity, personality, and memory.

After the horror that is "Batman Begins," director Christopher Nolan returns to meticulous story-telling and brilliant plot twists.

Featuring a mesmerizing performance by Vincent D'Onofrio, "Full Metal Jacket" is a different sort of war parody from "Dr. Strangelove."

Charles Boyer is pianist and puppetmaster in a time when Hollywood knew how to tell a good tale: a fascinating study of a psychopath's twisted techniques.

Money and power translates into greed and corruption in this look at the final mob days of Las Vegas: Sharon Stone's final scene is what she'll be remembered for.

The pride before the fall: it's a black and white movie that actually entertains.

Twenty years of drug addiction lend credibility and force to this powerful movie about drugs in America today. Spoiler alert: the war on drugs is pretty hopeless.

"Boogie Nights" is a poignant and satiric examination of the pornography industry of the seventies when its actors and directors actually thought they were creating "art": brilliant and strange.

It's a formulaic sappy love story starring Renee Zellweger: that's some very good reasons to deride it in public but see it in private.

Okay, Ryan Phillippe is in it, but it still features some very creative action scenes.

Finally, they've brought James Ellroy to the big screen: sick and twisted, mesmerizing and entertaining.

A television game show creator, bored with his life, decides to become a CIA assassin: now wouldn't the world be much better if the CIA and Hollywood just swapped all personnel?

How wonderful must life be to be young, naive, and inexperienced journalists, and to be handed a story of a lifetime by political opportunists interested in the downfall of an American President?

A romantic movie about the final days of freedom: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid will always go into the sunset with guns ablazing.

Strange people do strange things before they're shot in the head by control freaks who know what they're doing.

Relentless violence spills into lots and lots of blood: has anyone calculated the amount of blood spilled in Tarantino's films?