The Fugitive Kind

Dustin Hoffman ages a century in Arthur Penn's epic picaresque anti-western, the tall tale of 121-year-old Jack Crabb, a white man rescued and raised by the Cheyenne, a one-time snake-oil salesman, gunslinger, and mule skinner under General George Custer.

Men behaving badly: reeling from the death of a friend, three middle-aged buddies go on an epic drinking binge. It's not enough. They roll home, collect their passports, and take off for a weekend of gambling, women and booze in London.

With 26 actors getting more-or-less equal screen time and half of them singing their own tunes, Robert Altman's state-of-the-nation satire on bicentennial USA is a movie that repays multiple views.

A bittersweet, touching buddy movie with Gene Hackman as a volatile tramp, Max, and Al Pacino as "Lion", a drifter now set on returning to the wife and kid he abandoned years ago. Hackman's favourite of his own movies.

A family saga in more senses than one, Francis Coppola's enthralling gangster opus aims to chronicle the American experience through the twentieth century. It is both a success story and a study of moral corruption.

This exuberant, wild and wooly western from Arthur Penn features a brazenly transgressive performance from Marlon Brando, while Jack Nicholson underplays masterfully as the cattle rustler he's been hired to eliminate.

In the throes of a near-fatal drug problem Martin Scorsese made what he believed could be his last movie. Its subject: the Bronx Bull, Jake La Motta, a graceless but indomitable boxer who never quits beating himself up. De Niro has never dug deeper.