Even if you’ve never seen it, it’s hard to separate the legend of The Shining from the film itself. Its key moments have become part of our cultural lexicon. “Heeeere’s Johnny!” “Redrum” “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” It has been parodied by The Simpsons and Key & Peele. It inspired a long-awaited sequel, Doctor Sleep, in 2019. It’s certainly not the first film to be overshadowed by its influence, but The Shining is a frustrating case because it feels designed to make us sit around and wait for those indelible moments. It’s a slow-chill horror with long stretches of anticipation and a few bursts of intensity. It must have been dazzling upon its initial release, but it lacks the same bite today.

Based on the 1977 novel by Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining tells the tale of Jack (Jack Nicholson), a seemingly average husband and father, who, stuck inside an empty isolated hotel with his family for a long winter, loses his sanity and tries to kill them. The cause of his breakdown is never precisely defined. It could be the fact that the Overlook was built on an Indigenous burial ground; as the hotel manager notes early on, tribal members rebelled against its construction and perhaps they still are. It could be the stress of a long winter inside (those of us who survived the first year of COVID with our families can relate). Or it could be the writer’s block. Jack fancies himself an author, although he has never written a word, and his madness escalates with each day that his typewriter fails to produce a masterpiece. His well-meaning wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), puts on a happy face for as long as she can, while his troubled son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), starts seeing ghosts.

The Shining, released in 1980, has inspired a wide array of theories as to its meaning. A 2012 documentary, Room 237, let four conspiracy theorists run wild with their interpretations, with one of them arguing that Kubrick used imagery in the film to confess to his role in faking the 1969 moon landing. The irony is that The Shining’s power lies in the simplicity of its narrative. The script hones in on a common form of marital discord—a husband prioritizing his work over his family—and takes it to its most absurd and ludicrous extreme. Other films have explored this dynamic; Phantom Thread comes to mind, as does this year’s Trap. What makes The Shining stand out is its craft: Kubrick’s patience in delaying the bloodshed; the thoughtful cinematography and production design that paints the Overlook as a mausoleum in waiting; and, of course, the gonzo performance by Nicholson, whose overacting feels a bit antiquated today—Nicolas Cage aside—but surely stunned audiences at the time. As Jack, Nicholson builds an entire character around the concept of mugging.

The film really has only one original idea, and it’s a good one. Peeling back the layers of the typical American male, it finds not just rage and resentment but utter and total failure. As the film starts, Jack is unemployed; after losing his job as a teacher, he’s resorted to a series of menial jobs to pay the rent. He drinks to excess. He hit his child at least once. He has decided he’s a writer now, but he has no skills or work ethic. He even fails at murdering his family. Once his sanity departs, he chases after them clumsily. He comes off like a true psychopath, but his waifish, wide-eyed wife gets the better of him at every turn. It’s a special talent of Nicholson’s; the actor is so charismatic that we often don’t recognize at first what losers his characters are. Jack isn’t charismatic per se, but the character’s outsize portrayal of male fury is impossible to ignore

But is it relevant? Nicholson burnished his legend by playing angry young men in an era of profound political disillusionment. The Shining came at the end of a decade that produced Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, all masterpieces built around iconic Nicholson performances. The next decade found him leaning—successfully, I should add—in to self-parody in The Witches of Eastwick and Batman. Male rage was out, and it has never really come back in as a topic worth exploring. Especially now, in the wake of #MeToo and Donald Trump, watching Nicholson verbally and physically abuse his wife isn’t shocking or edgy. We’ve already looked under the surface of the mediocre American male and found little worth seeking. The Shining knows that. It’s just not a revelation anymore.

The Shining screens at 7 p.m. on Oct. 16 at both Alamo Drafthouse locations. drafthouse.com;

And again, at 11:55 p.m. on Oct. 25 and 26 at Landmark’s E Street Cinema. landmarktheatres.com.

And again at 5:45 p.m. on Oct. 27; 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 29; and 8:45 p.m. on Oct. 30 at AFI Silver. silver.afi.com.

“Be careful,” Randy says near the end of Scream. “They always come back for one last scare.” 

He might have been talking about the genre itself. Horror has existed nearly since the beginning of cinema, but in 1996 it was on its last breath due to a series of declining sequels to slasher classics such as Friday the 13th, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. When young writer Kevin Williamson teamed up with old master Wes Craven for a film that took its cues from seminal modern horror film Halloween but added a postmodern twist that made it resonate with a younger, hipper audience, the genre got a breath of new life. But here’s where the metaphor falls apart: Scream wasn’t a last scare. It inspired six sequels and set the stage for the horror movie’s return to prominence. In 2024, it might be cinema’s most reliable genre. The prestige and popcorn horror movies of today all owe their lives to Scream.

The film hit different back then. Every generation gets their high school movie, and Scream is mine. I was 16 when it landed in theaters, and although my friends and I were never terrorized by a psycho killer in a mask modeled after an Edvard Munch painting, the world of the film reflected our own upper middle-class existence. Like the smart-ass teenagers of Scream, we were bored. We had no cause to fight against. We weren’t oppressed at school. The stock market was high, the country was at peace, and the houses in the suburbs were getting bigger.  The only excitement came when someone’s parents went out of town so that we could invade one of those unreasonably large houses, drink cheap beer, and watch movies. 

The high school kids in Scream are so bored in fact that when two of their classmates die—in a riveting 10-minute opening sequence where the hottest talk show host of 2024 bites it—it’s treated as a novelty rather than a threat. The kids run around in Ghostface masks, and they cheer when an attempted murder at the school inspires an early dismissal. The only one who takes it seriously, of course, is Sidney (Neve Campbell), whose mother was brutally murdered a year prior. Conveniently, her father is out of town for the weekend, so she decides to spend her time with her idiot friends, including her seriously horny boyfriend, Billy (Skeet Ulrich), rather than sit at home and wait for the phone to ring.

Williamson’s script spreads its focus beyond the kids to an ambitious reporter (Courteney Cox) and a boyish police officer (David Arquette), who provide light romance to play against the gruesome kills. At various points, you might suspect either one of them of being the killer, as one of Scream’s key innovations is how it blends the slasher flick with the whodunit. Instead of simply waiting for the next scare, we monitor the comings and goings of each character like a detective. There’s no real hope that the police will solve the murder, so it’s incumbent on the viewer to suss out Ghosface’s identity ourselves. Getting to play Poirot while watching intricately staged kills added, at the time, a fresh layer of tension.

If anyone could have solved the case, it should have been the aforementioned Randy (Jamie Kennedy), the dorky cinephile who essentially recognizes that he’s in a slasher movie and uses his knowledge of the movies to stay alive. One of the film’s great jokes is that he’s too dumb and horny to really take charge of the situation. Still, it’s easy to see him as a stand-in for Williamson, since it’s the writer’s fondness for the genre that animates the screenplay. References to movies as diverse as Prom Night, The Exorcist, and Psycho pepper the dialogue, forging a postmodernism that culminates in a climax where the characters actually watch Halloween at the party while oblivious to the real-life killing spree happening in other areas of the house (including one perfectly meta scene in which Randy yells at the film: “Behind you, Jamie,” to Jamie Lee Curtis’ character in the film, when Scream’s audience is yelling the same thing at him). If you squint, you can see a pointed critique on the dehumanization of a generation raised on media violence, although Williamson is more interested in making a great movie than curing society’s ills.

Scream puts Williamson in the same class as Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, a generation of young filmmakers who gorged on VHS tapes, watching and rewatching their favorite classics until those films were stitched onto their souls. In retrospect, it was the only way to reboot a genre that was on the verge of bleeding out. Scream bridged generations through Craven’s craft and Williamson’s wit, turning a surprise hit into new life for a genre that simply refuses to die. Scream all you want, the killer will win in the end.

Scream (also a Fall Arts Guide pick from WCP Arts Editor Sarah Marloff) screens Oct. 11 at 9:30 p.m.; Oct. 12 at 10:25 p.m.; Oct. 13 (TBA); and Oct. 16 (TBA) at Alamo Drafthouse DC. drafthouse.com.

“The franchising rights alone will make us rich beyond our wildest dreams,” Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) tells his colleague Ray (Dan Aykroyd) as they discuss their startup business of busting ghosts. More prophetic words have never been spoken. The second-highest-grossing film of 1984, Ghostbusters inspired a sequel, a re-imagining, and a reboot, which had its own sequel. There was also an animated TV series, a toy line, and a cereal with, of course, marshmallows. Its legacy is one of controversy: The 2016 all-women remake with Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy was targeted by online misogynists who tanked its ratings on sites like IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. The more recent reboot, 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, directed by Jason Reitman (son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the original film), and its subsequent 2024 sequel both made money, but they are often cited by critics as bitter examples of the industry’s creative bankruptcy that turns original properties into craven fan service.

Forty years on, the original Ghostbusters remains a hoot, but it’s also easy to see it as the author of all our pain. It’s a wildly funny supernatural comedy built on both an innovative idea and the individual personalities of its stars, but as the film goes on, it largely drops the humor and devolves into set pieces. The spectacle is deeply imaginative—even on the ninth rewatch, it’s still thrilling to see the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man appear in glimpses between skyscrapers—but the favoring of grandiosity over small, character-driven comedy would, over the next several decades, be taken to its most awful and logical conclusion. The Marvel movies owe much of their schtick to Ghostbusters, although instead of carefully building to a big, shiny action sequence, they drop one in every 20 minutes, ruining the pace and dulling the senses.

Ghostbusters wouldn’t be made today, and not because of the incessant smoking, the spectral fellatio, or Venkman’s aggressive stalking of Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver). No, Ghostbusters would be laughed out of studio boardrooms today simply because films this original don’t get made with this large a budget ($30 million, which would be close to $100 million today). There is no cinematic antecedent here. No genre conventions to follow. Sure, the comic chemistry between Venkman, Ray, and Egon (Harold Ramis) has its roots in classic comedy teams like the Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello, but the overall tone, story, and core idea feel conjured from nothingness. Somehow, the three principal actors plus the director created something that felt like it had always existed and was just waiting to be birthed. From the classic Ghostbusters logo and the uniforms to the hit theme song by Ray Parker Jr., Ghostbusters arrived fully formed and fully confident in its own existence.

The idea was first hatched by Aykroyd, who has always harbored a fascination with the supernatural. His enthusiasm drives the story, both on screen and off. Ray’s wild-eyed zeal blends seamlessly with Egon’s hardened rationality. It’s easy to see how they linked up with Venkman, who knows how to work a room (or at least, he thinks he does), and handles all the public-facing duties of their little research team with aplomb. Aykroyd and Ramis provide able support, but Murray is the clear star. His trademark blend of sarcasm and vulnerability plays well in a sci-fi comic blockbuster, where he’s needed to hold down a love story, while undercutting the scientific grandeur with bemused quips.

But if Ghostbusters has no past and speaks to the future, how is it also so profoundly of its time? Made during Ronald Reagan’s first term, the film evokes a deep conservatism that encompasses much of the era’s right-wing rhetoric. Reagan spoke often of America’s crumbling cities, demonized the very federal government that he led, and fearmongering about rising crime rates. It’s all there in the Ghostbusters, who could be seen as a privatized response to urban crime. Sure, the ghosts are not criminals, but the terror they provoke in city residents feels like a manifestation of how conservatives framed city life. Of course, it’s a problem that the government itself is ill-equipped to solve. After the trio gets fired from their federally funded research gig at the film’s start, Ray bemoans their predicament: “You don’t know what it’s like out there,” he tells Venkman. “I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.” 

It’s a good joke that also provided a loud dog whistle to conservative viewers who grinned along with Reagan when he spoke of the nine scariest words in the English language: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Just to be clear about the government’s inability to protect the public, the film fashions an antagonist of Walter Peck (William Atherton), a sniveling Environmental Protection Agency representative who, understandably, wants to regulate the Ghostbusters’ facilities. For a moment at least, it’s easy to understand Peck’s point. The government does have a right to make sure this new technology doesn’t pose any risks to the public. Yet as he is played by Atherton (essentially reprising his role as a snotty journalist, another enemy of the right, in Die Hard), the character is impossible to sympathize with, especially when he shuts down the storage facility out of spite and unleashes hell on the city. Yes, the federal government nearly brought about the end of the world because they didn’t trust a working man to take care of his own business.

Does this rampant conservatism make Ghostbusters hard to watch for good progressives? It shouldn’t. When you parse their politics, most blockbusters are conservative because reinforcing the status quo is more enjoyable than challenging it. Films that present a coherent worldview should be appreciated even if that worldview clashes with yours. It gives us an opportunity to think critically about how art invariably reflects the culture from which it is made, turning us into more savvy viewers. Ghostbusters, for all its wonderful silliness, is an artifact that helps us understand its time, as well as ours. 

Ghostbusters (PG, 105 minutes) screens on Aug. 30 at 2:45 p.m.; Aug. 31 at 7 p.m.; Sept. 1 at 11 a.m.; Sept. 2 at 8:20 p.m.; and Sept. 3 at 7 p.m at AFI Silver. silver.afi.com.

If an alien came down from outer space and asked you to explain why American cinema from the 1970s is so revered, you could do worse than simply showing them The Last Detail. Hal Ashby’s 1973 classic captures the desperate and irreverent spirit of its times. It’s a shaggy road trip movie with a naturalistic aesthetic and a magnetic performance from an actor who turned disillusionment and rage into star power.

Jack Nicholson plays Signalman Billy Buddusky, who refers to himself as “Badass.” Beware the man who gives himself a nickname. A lifer in the Navy, Buddusky and fellow sailor Mulhall (Otis Young) are assigned to accompany young seaman Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) to prison, where he can begin an eight-year sentence for stealing $40. The steep punishment is due entirely to military politics; Meadows stole the money from a charity donation box that was run by the base commander’s wife. A naive teenager played with aching vulnerability by Quaid, Meadows is a victim of the establishment who is being made an example of simply to soothe feelings of a higher-up.

The assignment doesn’t sit too well with Buddusky and Mulhall, who, when we meet them, are already disillusioned with the Navy. The film doesn’t explicate their complaints; we just assume this isn’t the first time they’ve been stymied by internal politics. And their views don’t evolve much over the course of the film. As Buddusky and Mulhall try to show Meadows a good time before his incarceration—taking him to bars and brothels up and down the Eastern seaboard—they feel torn between their duty to the Navy and the injustice of their task, but they never think seriously about disobeying orders and letting Meadows go. They’re trapped in the system and in themselves. 

It doesn’t mean they can’t have fun. On the page, The Last Detail is probably a bleak work, full of dark nights and desperate dawns, but Ashby and his star work together to bring some levity to the proceedings. Nicholson is cooking here, bringing every ounce of his sharp-edged charisma to his portrayal of a man revolting against the encroachments of middle age (Nicholson was 36 at the time of shooting) who fears he’s wasted his youth. Most famous is his outburst at the bartender who won’t serve Meadows and threatens to the call the shore patrol (“I am the motherfucking shore patrol!”), but more telling is his sad come-on to a young woman at a party: “There’s nothing like being on the sea,” he blandly extols. “Doing a man’s job.”

The script by Robert Towne (best known for 1974’s Chinatown) and Darryl Ponicsan, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, captures the sadness of life in the system, but Nicholson imbues it with his pied-piper charm, ensuring viewers don’t get dragged into the dark and making the plot more believable. Buddusky is the kind of man other men follow because they think he holds some secret to life, or at least to getting girls. Turns out he’s not very good at either. The playful score by Johnny Mandel, which sounds like military reverie played through an organ grinder, matches the movie inside Buddusky’s head, where he and his new friends have the world on a string, if only for a few days. But Ashby, a master of tone in Harold & Maude and Shampoo, never lets the wine get too bubbly. To that end, there’s Michael Chapman’s grim cinematography, which features diegetic lighting, creating a scuzzy mise-en-scene that shades the exuberance of his characters. Even when they’re having a great time, something feels pathetic about their exploits.

Although they eventually stop in New York (to start a fight with some Marines in a Penn Station bathroom) and Boston (to grill hot dogs on the Boston Common), some of the film’s best scenes are set right here in the District. The crew first gets off the train at Union Station, and they wander around the area looking for a restaurant. There are no shots of the U.S. Capitol or the White House. The pre-renovation Union Station looks like a slab of concrete. It’s a revision of the way Washington had previously been depicted in film—as a shining city upon a hill—that instead paints D.C. as just another prison for Buddusky and his friends to break out of. It’s the essence of New Hollywood filmmaking, which broke down our myths and revealed in their place a world of everyday losers who looked so much like ourselves that we couldn’t turn away.

The Last Detail (R, 104 minutes, 1973) screens at 11:45 a.m. and 9:10 p.m. on Aug. 14; and 9:30 p.m. on Aug. 15 at AFI Silver. silver.afi.com.

Who would want to spend two hours with a pair of unkempt degenerate gamblers? If we’re being honest, a lot of us would. That’s why movies like Rounders, Uncut Gems, The Sting, and The Hustler exist. The euphoric highs and bracing lows of a gambling addiction aren’t much fun in real life, but it’s an ideal subject matter for film, which can offer us the thrill of a winning streak while sparing us the real-life consequences. 

No film has done it better than 1974’s California Split, a prototype for both the modern gambling movie and the modern bromance. It’s about a casual gambler, Bill (George Segal), who meets a professional gambler, Charlie (Elliott Gould), and decides to go all in on the lifestyle. Actually, calling Charlie professional is misleading. He’s not looking to earn a living. His goal is to keep gambling and, ultimately, to keep having fun. The two suffer some mishaps over the course of their glorious week together: Charlie gets beat up multiple times, they lose a lot of money. But Charlie never lets it get him down, so it never gets us down either. California Split is a party that refuses to end.

The deftness of tone can be credited mostly to the performances by Segal and Gould, who feel like brothers who were separated at birth and have just fallen back into each other’s arms. Gould’s Charlie is a motormouth who believes—rightly—that he can talk his way out of any situation. (Vince Vaughn, another fast-talking beanstalk with curly brown hair, was surely taking notes.) In a great scene, Charlie is held up at gunpoint but somehow convinces the mugger to only take half his winnings. He sleeps all day, makes spontaneous trips to Mexico to gamble on dog races, and sort of manages two women who are both sex workers. Is Charlie a pimp? I guess so, but the relationship between the three is never defined. Nevertheless, we’re drawn to characters like Charlie, who live with a freedom most of us dream of but don’t have the audacity to pull off.

Bill is mostly along for the ride, a good role for Segal and his easygoing, aw-shucks, slightly sleazy charm. Even when he blows up at Charlie, it’s hard to take him seriously—that grin is never gone for long. The two Jewish actors are a perfect pair, rising simultaneously in Hollywood during the first era in history in which their stardom was even possible, and seemingly enjoying every minute of it. There’s a cultural specificity in their performances—they get by on their cleverness not their might—but also a universality. From Bud Abbott and Lou Costello to Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, film comedy has been built on these kinds of friendships between two people who exasperate and delight each other in equal measure.

It’s probably indefensible to have gotten this far into a review without mentioning director Robert Altman, one of cinema’s great masters, who deserves credit not just for conjuring the film’s pleasingly rambling tone but for shaping the chemistry of his two leads. In the early days of shooting, Segal was trying to match Gould’s frenetic tone, but Altman wisely encouraged him to simply play the straight man.

California Split also pioneered Altman’s use of an 8-track sound recording system, which allowed him to institute overlapping dialogue, the aesthetic for which he is best known. In his casinos, tracks, and poker rooms, Altman’s naturalistic soundtrack allows us to feel as if we’re merely listening in on the exploits of Bill and Charlie, heightening the reality, while also providing us the emotional distance not to take their problems too seriously.

Like all great parties, the darkness begins to creep in around the edges. A life lived on the margins has its drawbacks, and Altman sees this, but chooses to neither moralize nor redeem. The trauma of the sex work is hinted at, particularly by Susan (Gwen Welles), a younger woman that Charlie and his girlfriend have taken on. She has tears in her eyes after a bad “date,” although we’re never told exactly why. This is a movie of feelings, not plot. When the duo gets robbed by a fellow degenerate, we can feel the blood on Bill’s face and the bruises on Charlie’s ribs. None of this is worth lingering on because the film follows the lead of its characters. It keeps the party going, always searching for the next score, whether it’s money, girls, or simply a temporary escape from the drudgery of a normal life, until it comes to its soft ending. Every winning streak has to end, but California Split has a helluva run.

California Split screens Aug. 3 at 9:25 p.m.; Aug. 5 at 7 p.m.; Aug. 7 at 12:45 p.m.; and Aug. 8 at 7 p.m. at AFI Silver. silver.afi.com. 

The first time I encountered Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice was at the video store. I noticed the cover of the VHS tape right away: four adults laying next to each other in bed. How racy! How tantalizing! How adult! Of course, I wasn’t permitted to rent a film about swinging couples when I was a child, so I didn’t see Paul Mazursky’s 1969 free love comedy until I was much older. That’s a good thing, as I would have been sorely disappointed. The film doesn’t live up to that cover.

It’s actually much better. I wasn’t looking at the cover correctly. The four figures in that bed—Elliott Gould, Natalie Wood, Robert Culp, and Dyan Cannon—don’t look as if they’re about to engage in a spirited bout of communal extramarital lovemaking. They look happy and nervous and uncertain all at once. In actuality, the image perfectly conveys the inquisitive, empathetic spirit of the film, which grapples honestly with the realities of free love, or what is better known these days as ethical non-monogamy.

The film’s delicate tone is established in the opening scenes, when Bob (Culp) and Carol (Wood) attend a retreat at an establishment much like the Esalen Institute, which was the epicenter of a ’60s therapeutic movement to increase “human potential.” Bob is a documentary filmmaker looking for a story; Carol is there because she goes everywhere Bob does, but the two get caught up in the experience and return to their lives committed to emotional honesty. Mazursky both mocks and admires their earnest, desperate attempts at happiness, especially evident in their first dinner back in Los Angeles. When the waiter tells them he hopes their meal was satisfactory, Carol stops him and asks, “Is that how you really feel?” The poor man is befuddled by the question.

Their straitlaced best friends, Ted (Gould) and Alice (Cannon), are amused, but a crack opens in their marriage that gets wider when they learn that their friend Bob has slept with another woman. It’s not the affair that disturbs Ted and Alice. It’s that Carol, who is now committed to a marriage without a sense of ownership, doesn’t seem to mind. In bed that night, Ted makes the mistake of arguing that Bob’s real mistake was confessing the affair to Carol. Most of the film plays out like theater, with long scenes between characters that allow room for them to uncover layers of emotional reality. The actors are committed to the dance, edging closer and pulling away in equal measure, vacillating between love and anger as the moment requires. Gould and Cannon, who both received Oscar nominations for their roles in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, do much of the heavy lifting, wrestling their own emotions into submission over the course of several long scenes.

The sixth-highest grossing film of 1969, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice surely spoke to its moment, when normies everywhere were wondering how they could partake in the pleasures of the counterculture, but Mazursky had his eye on something more universal. The film doesn’t end with its promised orgy, and “Age of Aquarius” doesn’t play on the soundtrack. It ends unironically with Dionne Warwick’s sweet “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” We don’t get any sex scenes; we get their aftermath, when the characters now have to rationalize their most basic urges. It’s painful and hilarious and cringeworthy, as any honest movie about sex and relationships must be. At every turn, Mazursky forgoes the chance to titillate the audience and instead keeps the film’s gaze squarely on the tender, open hearts of its characters. It shapes Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice into a lasting work that will resonate with anyone who fears their heart is hardening with age. 

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice screens at 7 p.m. on July 19, 9:15 p.m. on July 22, and 5:30 p.m. on July 23 at AFI Silver. silver.afi.com. $13.

Blow Out is here to trick you. It pretends it has something deep and profound to say about America. Set on the weekend of the fictional Liberty Day Parade in Philadelphia, Blow Out revolves around a political assassination and cover-up, and concludes with a murder committed under fireworks and in front of an enormous American Flag. It’s the story of Jack Terry (John Travolta), a soundman for cheap B-movies, who accidentally records audio of a car crash that kills a presidential candidate and becomes determined to prove a conspiracy. There are echoes of the JFK assassination and Chappaquiddick, and Jack’s paranoid mind reflects the collective suspicions of an entire generation still processing the failures and tragedies of the ’60s nearly two decades later.

But director Brian De Palma is not a political artist, and that’s for the best. He’s a filmmaker who is most fascinated with the art of cinema—or you could say, the act of looking. Blow Out might not be about conspiracies at all. Maybe it’s about getting off. It opens on a point-of-view shot of a serial killer peeping into various windows of a sorority, where he sees buxom young women in various states of undress. He then enters the building and begins slashing away. De Palma expressed similar ideas in Body Double, Dressed to Kill, and most of his other films, aligning us with killers and perverts. He turns our need to watch—a prerequisite to buying a ticket for a movie—into a vulnerability, turning the lens on his audience and making us question just how much we’re willing to watch.

It turns out the sorority killings are a scene in a movie. Jack is instructed by his director to get some fresh nature sounds for the scene, so he heads to a park late at night, where he witnesses a car drive off the road and into a reservoir. He saves Sally (Nancy Allen) from the passenger seat; the man behind the wheel, whom he later learns was a politician, is dead. But it’s later, while listening to his recording after the fact that Jack becomes convinced he’s heard a gunshot, and that the car’s tires were intentionally shot out. The police brush off his theory, so he sets about proving it on his own, befriending Sally and scrutinizing his recording, second by second, to suss out the truth.

If there’s an animating force behind Blow Out, it’s De Palma’s love of filmmaking. His fondness for split diopter shots—when two objects at disparate distances are seen in focus at once—serves him well here, making the viewer’s eyes dart back and forth to grasp the juxtaposition, replicating the inner workings of Jack’s mind. De Palma’s use of pink and red lighting lends the proceedings a lurid overtone, while the pounding score by Pino Donaggio accentuates the filmmaker’s maximalist style. 

More importantly, De Palma is mostly here to watch Jack piece together the mystery by using the building blocks of filmmaking. The newspaper obtains video of the accident, and Jack cuts out the photos, putting together a crude flipbook. It’s almost as if he is creating cinema all over again. De Palma lingers on these scenes, his camera seduced by Travolta’s dexterous fingers and his famously determined chin. This sequence—and the film as a whole—is a loose remake of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blow-Up about a fashion photographer who scrutinizes his own photographs to solve the mystery of a missing woman. But De Palma is more upfront about his voyeuristic tendencies. We can feel his yearning in the painstaking detail with which he shoots these scenes, but his passion extends beyond mere affection. The scenes of Travolta mastering the editing equipment, splicing together sound and film, are as sensual as any of the director’s famous sex scenes.

Blow Out is a strange, perverse film, and unsurprisingly, it wasn’t a hit when it was released in 1981. Made for $18 million (a lot at the time), Blow Out flopped upon its initial release and was only reclaimed by the next generation of cinephiles. Quentin Tarantino praises it to the heavens, and it’s easy to see how De Palma’s brash, lurid style was a clear influence on the young director, who, somewhat less elegantly, also challenges viewers with their voyeurism and implicates them in his on-screen violence. In that way, Blow Out does have something to say about the country that produced it, a place where we consistently pretend to care about the victims but we really can’t tear our eyes away from the screen.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone.

Brian De Palma’s 1981 cult classic Blow Out screens at 7:15 p.m. on July 3 at Alamo Drafthouse in D.C. and at 7:30 p.m. at the Drafthouse’s Crystal City location. drafthouse.com. $11.

Sergio Leone had already made an indelible contribution to the western genre by the time he got around to co-writing and directing 1968’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Earlier in the decade, he’d introduced the world to Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, and made two superior sequels, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He popularized the “spaghetti western,” so named for its Italian origins, though its popularity in the U.S. reflected a broader change in American culture. With its thin line between heroism and villainy, a more ambiguous view of western expansion, and way more blood, the spaghetti western showed that public appetite for the rosy myths of America’s founding had waned. They were ready for the darker truth.

Still, Once Upon a Time in the West isn’t realism. It is, in fact, more grandly cinematic than perhaps any western made to that date. The iconic score by Ennio Morricone—intermittently playful, tense, and mournful, and sometimes all of those at once—sees to that. But its story of a ruthless land grab by a robber baron, and a group of outlaws caught up in his scheme, resonated at a time when violence had made its way past the guardrails of the media and into the lives of the American public. The war in Vietnam, the Kent State shootings, and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. had brought bloodshed into our homes, and Hollywood mirrored that shift. Once Upon a Time in the West opens on a typical western sequence, in which a stranger known only as Harmonica (Charles Bronson) is met at the train station by three outlaws—and promptly guns them all down but proceeds to a more startling scene of bloodshed perpetrated by gun-for-fire Frank (Henry Fonda), who murders an entire family. Turning one of cinema’s greatest good guys—indeed, a man who once played Abraham Lincoln—into a child-killing outlaw is one of the best casting decisions in history.

There’s also a damsel in distress: Jill McBain (Claudia Cardinale), a young woman who has come to Arizona to be with her new husband and her children-in-law—but instead finds them murdered, gunned down by Frank and his henchmen. The townspeople expect her to leave, but she stays to live on her dead husband’s ranch, land with immense value that is seemingly known only to those who will kill for it. There’s also Cheyenne (Jason Robards), an outlaw of the slightly kinder variety. There’s a chance he and Jill might end up together. Then again, this feels like a world that would deny happy endings just to be consistent.

Under Leone’s masterful guardianship, Once Upon a Time in the West proceeds deliberately, setting its own pace, bending you to its rhythms. Each scene is a masterpiece in and of itself, with a mysterious beginning, exciting middle, and elegiac end. Often, there is bloodshed, but Leone is more interested in the rituals of the Old West, the way two men with guns size each other up to determine who has the power, and the way each of them treats Jill, stereotypically the most helpless character in the film. Once Upon a Time in the West casts no moral judgment, and there are no heroes here, but the actions of each character expertly reveal their courage or cowardice, while casting a broad judgment on the desperate world they inhabit.

It’s a film of such powerful vision and brilliant technique that the plot itself becomes incidental. We can try, though: Harmonica has a mysterious grudge against Frank, who has been hired by the rich guy to get the lucrative piece of land out from under Jill. Cheyenne has been framed for murder by Frank, but falls in love with Jill and ends up teaming up with Harmonica to keep Frank away from Jill’s land. Does that cover it? I think so, but every time I watch it, I forget about the plot altogether and get lost in these faces. Leone loves the desert, but he’s more interested in human landscapes. His extreme close-ups filter out the plot, themes, and the setting. Instead, he locates meaning in the mysterious wrinkles of Bronson’s boyish face and the knowing glances of Robards, which emerge from behind his beard like a portal to another, slightly better world. Even more beautiful are the ice-blue irises of Henry Fonda, which stand out from his black attire and tanned face like a dash of blue sky in a storm. This is cinema, folks. Every bleak, bloody, and beautiful frame of it.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, PG-13, 166 minutes) screens at 2 and 7 p.m. on June 7;  7 p.m. on June 8; 7:20 p.m. on June 9; and 3:45 p.m. on June 13 at AFI Silver. silver.afi.com.

It used to be how Hollywood did business. The studio would pair an established star with a rising ingenue to see if they have chemistry. If it worked, they’d make more films together. When the young star got older, they’d pair them with a younger star, and the cycle would continue. They did it with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as well as Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. They also did it in 1991’s Point Break with Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves. Swayze had already shown what he could do physically in Dirty Dancing and Road House. At the time, Reeves had only played burnouts in movies like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Parenthood, and had never been a proper leading man. In the Hollywood of old, they’d put those stars together, and we’d spend two hours waiting for them to kiss. In Point Break, sadly, they never do.

Reeves plays Johnny Utah, a former college football player who joins the FBI and begins stalking a group of wild-eyed surfers he believes might be California’s prolific bank robbers. Their leader, Bodhi (Swayze), is the philosophical type. He speaks of living for “the ride” and liberating himself from societal expectations. He’s probably just an adrenaline junkie with delusions of grandeur, but once Johnny catches his first wave, he starts to buy into the mythology. He falls hard for the ocean and Bodhi. On the page, maybe they’re just supposed to be kindred spirits or even good buddies, but with each actor possessing an inherent softness, their connection feels more like a romance. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the way the moonlight glances off the ocean.

The romantic undertones of Point Break weren’t noticed at the time, despite the fact that Swayze tells Reeves at one point, “You want me so bad you can taste it.” It’s not subtle, but Johnny does have a girlfriend (Lori Petty) who he claims to love, so maybe that confused audiences in 1991. He has a partner, too, a wise old war vet named Pappas who is played by a pre-meltdown Gary Busey. Johnny is coupled up three times over in Point Break, but it’s Bodhi who owns him. Johnny may be an arm of the law, but Bodhi sees the crazy in his eyes and cultivates it, taking him surfing, skydiving, and eventually bank robbing. Is it a strategy to implicate Johnny in his crimes and keep the law off his back? Or does he simply want Johnny to be his best and most liberated self? Yes. Point Break is a film of dualities (“Utah, get me two!”). Its irreconcilable nature is the essence of its charm.

It would, however, be entirely defensible if you were in it for the thrills. Bodhi takes Johnny to the edge, and we join them. Director Kathryn Bigelow, who would go on to win Oscars for 2009’s The Hurt Locker, stages every kind of sequence you’d expect from a ’90s action movie, but each has the flair of the original. An FBI raid turned shoot-out features a naked woman beating the crap out of our hero, and Anthony Kiedis (of Red Hot Chili Peppers) getting his foot blown apart in gruesome fashion. A foot pursuit through the houses and alleys of Los Angeles culminates in Bodhi picking up a snarling dog and throwing him at Johnny. Then there are the skydiving scenes, which have no cinematic antecedent and fully immerse the viewer in the thrill. It’s the ultimate bonding experience for the characters, but it bonds us to them, too, grateful as we are to be taken along for such a transcendent ride.

But mostly the thrill is between Swayze and Reeves, two actors whose talents were dismissed at the time and for too long afterward. Hollywood tried to fit Reeves into the leading man box, and his ill-fated attempts at playing normal humans set his reputation back a ways. Finally, he figured out he fits best into the dream worlds of The Matrix and John Wick. Swayze’s physical approach to acting was largely dismissed by the critical elite, but Dirty Dancing and Road House, which have both been mined for a sequel and a remake, remain indelible. Each brings a touch of zen, and no small amount of femininity, to their portrayals of alpha males. It was genius of Bigelow to let them revel in each other’s presence. Whether on a board, in the air, or on land with their bodies coiled somewhere between anger and lust, they create a rare chemistry in Point Break. The only shame is they never got to do it again.

Point Break (R, 122 minutes) screens at 7 p.m. on May 24 and 9:15 p.m. on May 25 at AFI Silver. silver.afi.com. $13. 

For as long as humans have had the ability to take photographs, images of protests have been among our most enduring. Tiananmen Square. Thích Quảng Đức. A Birmingham police officer unleashing an attack dog on 15-year-old protestor Walter Gadsden. Filmmakers have also made powerful use of this imagery. From The Battle of Algiers and Medium Cool to the more recent Civil War, scenes of citizens rising up against their government reflect a righteous anger in our spirit. These images titillate and terrify us at once, offering a path toward revolt that we may not have previously seen so clearly.

That’s part of what makes the events of January 6, 2021, so confusing. The insurrectionists who broke into the U.S. Capitol that day believed they were on the right side of history, but most Americans saw only a criminally violent attempt to subvert our democracy. The confusion was traumatizing to our nation, but psychiatrists will tell you the best way to process a traumatic event is to reexperience it in a safe environment. Like a shrink’s office. Or maybe a movie theater. 

The Sixth, a gripping documentary about the events of that tragic day, gives viewers that safe space. It shows us thrilling, often gruesome images of a violent insurrection. It makes room for those who were directly affected by it to share their stories and continue the healing process. It lays out the causes and effects of this tragedy as clear as day. In this era, no images are incontrovertible, but those in The Sixth comes as close as any can.

Eschewing the news clips through which we originally experienced the event, filmmakers Andrea Nix and Sean Fine, the couple behind the D.C.-based production company Change Content that coproduced The Sixth with A24, instead weave together police body camera footage, videos and photos from a citizen journalist, and after-the-fact interviews with a diverse corps of traumatized individuals who were present on the day. Among them are Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who buried his son a day earlier, and brought his daughter and son-in-law to the Capitol to watch the certification of the presidential vote; Mel D. Cole, a freelance photographer who embedded himself with the mob of insurrectionists; and Erica Loewe, a Congressional staffer who started the day filled with hope for the future and ended it barricaded into her boss’ office fearing for her life. These interviews show the human cost of the insurrection and the long tail of trauma. Two years later, each subject is still grappling with what they saw and experienced, either fighting back tears or trapped within themselves.

In cinematic terms, The Sixth is a Paul Greengrass-esque movie, such as United 93 or Captain Phillips, that immerses us in an escalating crisis and never lets us go. Much of the footage in the film is taken from within the mob. Or maybe it’s found footage horror with a touch of Lynchian surrealism. There’s the midwestern woman who, while sporting an ear-to-ear grin, tells us that she is happy to die for her country as if she’s rooting for her favorite football team. We see a man dressed in a suit made of American flags and wearing a full bald eagle head over his own. This is the stuff of nightmares. Even more horrifying is how the crowd co-opts the language of the Civil Rights movement. “Whose streets? Our streets!” they chant as they make their way to the Capitol. “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” they shout, echoing the final words of Eric Garner. The shameless, unexamined hypocrisy would be too absurd to believe if we didn’t have a movie to prove it.

For some, the movie never ends. Perhaps most affecting is the interview with Capitol Police officer Daniel Hodges, who was seen, in footage widely circulated in the days after the attack, trapped in a doorway and screaming out for help. Hodges calmly retraces his movements on that day, offering a boots-on-the-ground view of every terrifying step toward tragedy. On the surface, he seems fine, but his voice seems constantly on the verge of breaking and his timbre is suspiciously flat. Juxtaposing his cries for help, which the film replays for us, with his measured recollection makes for a powerful collision that emblemizes how we have all buried our emotions emanating from this tragedy in order to forget, process, or simply continue to live our lives.

While The Sixth forces us to confront an awful chapter of U.S. history, it also serves the important function of simply documenting what occurred. We still need that. The primary source footage that makes up so much of The Sixth should lay to rest claims from the idiots among us that the insurrection was simply a peaceful protest that got out of hand. Many Americans have learned to ignore their own eyes, but we mercifully have the footage to make them look like fools or worse. This is the power of the documentary form. Never again must we forget our own nightmares. Especially when they come true.

The Sixth (106 minutes) is now available for purchase on all major streaming platforms; the film will be available to rent on May 10. changecontent.com.