"Sunset Blvd." (directed by Billy Wilder, 1950) Where did a director as lightweight as Billy Wilder (there, I said it) find the dark spirit of this grotesque Hollywood masterpiece, which prefigures a perverse moral-fable tradition in American movies that includes "Chinatown," "Blue Velvet" and "American Beauty"? I'll never understand it.

"Taxi Driver" (directed by Martin Scorsese, 1976) You talkin' to me? The only movie, as far as I know, to inspire an attempted presidential assassin. Many critics feel that Scorsese's "Raging Bull" is actually a better movie, and they might be right. But "Taxi Driver" distilled the mad mood of creeping urban anomie better than any other film of the '70s, and almost immediately became more a trope or a signifier than a movie. It also simultaneously launched the careers of Scorsese, Robert De Niro and screenwriter Paul Schrader.

"2001: A Space Odyssey" (directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1968) There may be no explaining or understanding this picture, which seems just as strange now as the day it was released, and is basically a near-abstract art film disguised as a major Hollywood release. It changed the way people thought of movies, and not entirely in a good way. (And yes, for many viewers psychoactive chemicals were involved.) But here's the thing: Those images! That soundtrack, from the "Blue Danube" to "Also sprach Zarathustra"! That creepazoid computer! That psychedelic light show! Sheesh.

"Vertigo" (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) OK, so I'm famous (well, famous among my friends) for not liking Hitchcock and especially not liking "Vertigo." Let me clarify: Its message, as far as I can tell, is that love is an unhealthy obsession and art is a mean-spirited trick. It's also a beautiful, magnificently crafted film, and without serious doubt the most influential Hollywood thriller of all. And it was made by a sick bastard.

Films You Might Never See (Without My Benevolent Guidance)

"Andrei Rublev" (directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1969) Many cinéastes regard Tarkovsky's leisurely, impressionistic epic portrait of the great medieval icon painter as the best film about artistic creation ever made. It's a work of extraordinary cinema that drags you almost bodily back to the timeless brutality of the Middle Ages and -- at 205 minutes in the full-length DVD version! -- virtually makes you live through them. I'll never forget the first time I saw it, mostly because I got so bored I thought I was going to die. Then came the fabled bell-making scene and I realized, oh, you stick with this, you get bored out of your skull, you come out on the other side of boredom into some kind of timeless state of marvel and you're never quite the same person afterward. These days we flee in terror from boredom. We believe that art is supposed to be clever and pretty and quip-laden and always entertaining. But in fact the ability to use stillness, silence and nothingness to pull an audience out of history and mortality into the infinite space of God -- or the soul or the connectedness of all life or whatever you want to call it -- is one of the artist's most important functions. "Andrei Rublev" is the greatest work of the 20th century's most intractable major film artist; it isn't chocolate and it isn't trying to be.

The Apu Trilogy: "Pather Panchali," "Aparajito" and"The World of Apu" (directed by Satyajit Ray, 1955-59) This unforgettable tragicomic trilogy following a boy from a poor Bengali village into manhood is one of the great achievements of world cinema. Not merely because it dignifies an obscure peasant family by making it the subject of epic drama, but because in doing so Ray always insists on the wanton, irrepressible individuality of young Apu and everyone else in the story. The trilogy was a minor art-house hit in the U.S. on its initial release, but its effect on aspiring filmmakers and artists all over the developing world was incalculable. (Although a VHS box set of the trilogy can still be found, it isn't available on DVD.)

"Badlands" (written and directed by Terrence Malick, 1973) The ultimate American road movie, this makes "True Romance" and "Natural Born Killers" look like the cheap and snarky imitations they are. I love Malick's movies (he's the other, weirder Stanley Kubrick), including "Days of Heaven" and even the overwrought "Thin Red Line," which was buried amid the recent onslaught of World War II flicks. But this one, with Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as killers on the lam, has a purity and clarity unique in American crime movies.

"The Bicycle Thief" (directed by Vittorio De Sica, 1948) The heartrending classic of Italian neorealism and the film -- along with Roberto Rossellini's "Open City" and "Germany Year Zero" -- that pretty much launched the European film vogue in the U.S. Certainly should be part of that freshman-year film class, but you never know; they probably showed you "Kiss Me Deadly" or something instead. Used in Michael Tolkin's "The Player" as the movie even the most disgusting Hollywood vermin watch to prove they still have souls.

"Breathless" (U.S. title of "À bout de souffle," directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) There are plenty of Godard movies I might rank above this one in terms of pure enjoyment -- "Band of Outsiders," "Alphaville," "Pierrot le fou" -- and in truth I find the whole rebellion-romance thing in "Breathless" a bit juvenile. But this is the movie that made Godard a celebrity filmmaker overnight, and Jean-Paul Belmondo as a dreamboat, Marlboro-smokin' thug, alongside Jean Seberg's Yank-tomboy-in-Paris routine, really created something here. And I don't have to admire it entirely to see that it has echoed through generations of youth culture to this very day.

"Bride of Frankenstein" (directed by James Whale, 1935) This hallucinatory, tragic, witty masterpiece is many things: a tripped-out Gothic comedy, a heartbreaking homoerotic romance, a series of jaw-droppingly beautiful black-and-white compositions. It isn't, however, a horror movie. (Although I guess Elsa Lanchester's bride, with that streaked Susan Sontag do, is pretty scary.) Don't miss Whale's original "Frankenstein" or his 1936 "Show Boat," but his tragic genius -- a tremendously influential force in a way no one could have foreseen at the moment of his greatest fame -- found its fullest expression here. (A great DVD edition is available.) If you haven't seen "Gods and Monsters," starring Ian McKellen as Whale, don't miss that either.

Recent Stories