Stepping away from the narrative vastness of his previous Nashville and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, Altman’s mystifying film focuses on three social outsiders—Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule— who form an unusual bond around a Palm Springs health spa for the elderly. An NYFF15 selection.

This wet and wild third installment in Universal’s mega-budget disaster series traps an all-star cast in a luxury airliner below the ocean.

Dennis Hopper is the sociopathic charmer Tom Ripley, transformed by Wenders into an urban cowboy peddler of forged paintings who ensnares Bruno Ganz’s gravely ill Swiss-born art framer into a plot to assassinate a Mafioso. This brooding, dreamlike thriller conjures a world ruled by chaos.

A mysterious, driverless coupe terrorizes a small desert town in this unnerving, Jaws-on-wheels joyride.

The godfather of Senegalese cinema, Ousmane Sembène, crafts a powerful ode to resistance in this sui generis blend of ritual, folklore, and fantasy.

Based on a bestseller by Jaws author Peter Benchley, this aquatic nerve-shredder stars Jacqueline Bisset and Nick Nolte as vacationing scuba divers who discover trouble in the Bermuda waters.

Perhaps Bresson’s most explicitly political film, this searing send-up of post-’68 France is among the most chilling cinematic portraits of a historical moment.

Having a supercomputer control every aspect of your existence is all fine and dandy, until it turns on you—as Julie Christie learns in this unhinged, future-shock thriller.

After a successful decade in commercial advertising, Ridley Scott made his feature directing debut with this rapturously beautiful, profoundly ironic adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novella The Duel. Winner of a special prize for best first film at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival.

Lynch’s scrappy debut feature, five years in the making, is a nonlinear odyssey in which the hapless Henry (Jack Nance) navigates an inhospitable nocturnal landscape and struggles with the anxiety of fatherhood. A literal head movie that remains one of the definitive midnight movies of all time.

Try to spot all the references in master parodist Mel Brooks’s gag-a-minute homage to/send up of the Master of Suspense, which features spot-on spoofs of Psycho, The Birds, Vertigo, and more.

Caked in low-budget grime, Wes Craven’s ultra-perverse, grindhouse scuzz-shocker pits an all-American family against a band of mutant cannibals.

Seven schoolgirls. One bloodthirsty house. This inexplicably bonkers, avant-pop head-spinner is part supernatural spine-tingler, part Saturday morning cartoon.

Oh Britain, up yours! A murderous girl gang runs wild in a fascistic, post-apocalyptic England in Derek Jarman’s decadent, defiantly bad taste punk fantasia.

Completed in ’77 but difficult to see for nearly thirty years due to soundtrack licensing issues, Charles Burnett’s landmark UCLA thesis film is a haunting, almost documentary-like chronicle of 1970s black life in Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood laden with indelible, magic images.

An ancient—and very wet—doomsday prophecy comes to pass in Australian New Waver Peter Weir’s hallucinatory murder mystery-cum-apocalyptic chiller.

In Richard Brooks’s controversial adaptation of Judith Rossner’s notorious best-seller, Diane Keaton—a world away from the same year’s Annie Hall—plays a bar-hopping schoolteacher; this dark story became a pop-cultural touchstone amidst a changing climate in sexual mores.

An inveterate womanizer recounts his myriad affairs in Truffaut’s tender, bittersweet ode to love in its many forms. An NYFF15 selection.

Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro are 1940s jazz performers falling in and out of love in Scorsese’s emotionally turbocharged homage to and deconstruction of the classic Hollywood musical.

This sci-fi epic about the emergence of a new human civilization on the moon was the most ambitious and difficult project of Andrzej Żuławski’s career: the largest Polish production of all time when shooting began in 1976, it was halted in the fall of ’77 by the Ministry of Culture, before finally being reconstituted and released over a decade later.

In one of her finest performances, Gena Rowlands plays an aging stage star in the midst of preparing for a new role whose sense of self begins to crumble after she witnesses the car-accident death of an obsessive fan in Cassavetes’s masterful psychodrama.

The film that introduced the world to Arnold Schwarzenegger, this colorful look at competitive bodybuilding follows the leading contenders as they prepare to flex at the 1975 Mr. Olympia contest.

Cronenberg’s sophomore feature stars former adult film star Marilyn Chambers (in her first mainstream leading role) as Rose, a car accident victim left mangled and comatose before she becomes the bloodthirsty host of an unknown epidemic.

John Travolta’s hip-thrusting star power and a parade of Bee Gees hits light up this quintessential disco-fever time capsule.

Paul Newman is a hilariously foul-mouthed hockey coach in this raucous, unrepentantly rude satire of the brawling, trash-talking, ultra-macho culture of sports.

Cool cars, Coors beer, and CB radio: Burt Reynolds cemented his status as a Clark Gable for the 1970s playing a rascally, pedal-to-the-metal bootlegger outrunning the law through the Deep South.

William Friedkin takes Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel Le salaire de la peur and transforms it into a blood-and-guts opera of existential delirium as four desperate men transport truckloads of nitroglycerin through the South American jungle.

Werner Herzog’s crackpot poetry graces this devastating portrait of a Berlin street musician searching for the American dream.

Dario Argento’s witchy freak-out is one of cinema’s most potent hallucinogens: a sustained spectacle of outrageously stylized violence and eye-popping art direction set to Goblin’s iconic prog-occult score.

Buñuel was 77 when he made this masterful swan song: an anarchic send off to his career-long obsessions that stars go-to Fernando Rey as Mathieu, a French bon vivant who spends a train ride flashing back to his doomed love with a mercurial flamenco dancer named Conchita (played by Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina). An NYFF15 closing night selection.

Gonzo auteur Robert Aldrich channels post-Vietnam disillusionment into a subversive, anti-establishment political thriller starring Burt Lancaster as a rogue ex-general holding the government hostage.

Richard Pryor x 3: the inimitable comedian takes on multiple memorably hilarious roles in this irreverent, socially conscious satire.

Boundary-pushing adult animator Ralph Bakshi’s foray into fantasy is a dark, strange, psychedelic wonder about the battle between good and evil in a postapocalyptic universe.