Film School 101

A love story in the city of dreams . . . Blonde Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) has only just arrived in Hollywood to become a movie star when she meets an enigmatic brunette with amnesia (Laura Harring). Meanwhile, as the two set off to solve the second woman’s identity, filmmaker Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) runs into ominous trouble while casting his latest project. David Lynch’s seductive and scary vision of Los Angeles’s dream factory is one of the true masterpieces of the new millennium, a tale of love, jealousy, and revenge like no other.

In Darren Aronofsky's darkly psychological thriller, a committed dancer (Natalie Portman) struggles to maintain her sanity after winning the lead role in a production of Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake".

A popular though critically ignored Western at the time of its release, John Ford's The Searchers was canonized a decade later by auteur critics as the American masterpiece par excellence exerting its influence as a cinematic touchstone and "cult film" among such directors of the New Hollywood as Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Representing Ford's most emotionally complex and generically sophisticated work, The Searchers manages to be both a rousing adventure movie and a melancholy film poem exploring the American values at the heart of the Western genre.

At the center of the film is Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), a bitter, ruthless and frustrated crusader engaged in a five-year quest to retrieve a niece kidnapped by the Comanches. Edwards is perhaps Wayne's most accomplished characterization, isolated by the violent individualism which defines his heroic status.

One of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai) tells the story of a sixteenth-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits. This three-hour ride from Akira Kurosawa—featuring legendary actors Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura—seamlessly weaves philosophy and entertainment, delicate human emotions and relentless action, into a rich, evocative, and unforgettable tale of courage and hope.

Stanley Kubrick took science fiction cinema in a grandly intelligent new direction with in this enigmatic adaptation of a short story by revered sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke. When Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and other astronauts are sent on a mysterious mission, their ship's computer system, HAL, begins to display increasingly strange behavior, leading to a tense showdown between man and machine that results in a mind-bending trek through space and time. 2001: A Space Odyssey stands alone in its scientifically accurate depiction of space flight, pioneering special effects, and ambiguous imagery.

In a time of conflict and rebellion, a group of unlikely heroes led by Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) band together on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star, the Empire's ultimate weapon of destruction. Directed by Gareth Edwards, Rogue One draws deep on Star Wars mythology while breaking new narrative and aesthetic ground for the franchise.

During the height of the Vietnam War, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) journeys upriver on a perilous and increasingly surreal odyssey to assassinate the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a once-promising officer now operating with godlike impunity in the jungles of Cambodia. Francis Ford Coppola's haunting, hallucinatory epic is cinema at its most audacious and visionary.

The conclusion to Peter Jackson's epic trilogy based on the timeless J.R.R. Tolkien classic and the culmination of nearly 10 years' work, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King presents the final confrontation for control of Middle-earth. Hobbits Frodo and Sam reach Mordor in their quest to destroy the 'one ring', while Aragorn leads the forces of good against Sauron's evil army at the stone city of Minas Tirith.

A former San Francisco police detective (James Stewart) wrestles with his personal demons while becoming obsessed with the hauntingly beautiful woman (Kim Novak) he has been hired to trail. Alfred Hitchcock’s surrealist thriller delivers delirious, slow-burn modernism that, almost half a century later, led it to unseat Citizen Kane as the Greatest Film of All Time in Sight and Sound's authoritative 2012 poll.

In the most dazzling debut feature in cinema history, twenty-five-year-old writer-producer-director-star Orson Welles synthesized the possibilities of sound-era filmmaking into what could be called the first truly modern movie. In telling the story of the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of a William Randolph Hearst–like newspaper magnate named Charles Foster Kane, Welles not only created the definitive portrait of American megalomania, he also unleashed a torrent of stylistic innovations—from the jigsaw-puzzle narrative structure to the stunning deep-focus camera work of Gregg Toland—that have ensured that Citizen Kane remains fresh and galvanizing for every new generation of moviegoers to encounter it.