Chinatown (1974)

Halfway through Roman Polasnki’s perfect crime noir “Chinatown,” the femme fatale played by Faye Dunaway bumps a car horn with her head during a moment of distress. The noise startles her and seat mate PI Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson). It is the coldest punch of foreshadowing I’ve ever seen, and I only noticed it on what may have been my 15^th (?) viewing. The next viewing I noticed a new twist: Gittes’ love of horses. That’s the beauty of Polanski’s tale of 1930s Los Angeles and ex-cop Gittes, who spies on wondering spouses, and wears fine suits. Plot: The wife of LA’s water engineer hires Gittes to bust her cheating husband, except the woman isn’t the engineer’s wife, and when the man turns up dead, Gittes realizes he’s been played. Gittes takes action. Except the cruel joke of “Chinatown” is Gittes is a fool, so lost and clueless the deeper he sinks into ancient familial evil, by film’s end he is left in shock, helpless. Robert Towne gets the screenplay credit, but Polanski wrote the unnerving finale. Polanksi’s direction is as smooth as jazz, with perfect interior car shots. As the villain, John Huston plays a monster for the ages. A+

The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)

This is rare: A remake smarter and cooler than the original. John McTiernan’s takes on 1968’s “The Thomas Crown Affair” starred Steve McQueen and Faye Dunanway and spun on a bank-robber billionaire. Here, Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo -- at the height of their stardom -– are in the spotlight with an art museum theft as the central plot device. Great change up. Brosnan is a Wall Street master who has grown bored with acquisitions and the back-slapping hoopla of taking other people’s money. But he loves oil and canvas, and a thrill. So he takes a Monet from New York’s Met. In broad daylight. During a giddy fun sideshow to a full-on robbery he orchestrated. Russo is the insurance investigator who care shit about art, but only the chase. She knows Crown did the theft, and he knows that she knows. Is the art the thing here? No. It's two bored powerful people who finally found the one who makes them tick. “Crown” is smart, damn sexy, and funny, with an insider streak that plays on the stars’ wattage, New York ego, and the prior film with Dunaway playing a wink-wink role. Brosnan and Russo are perfectly matched. B+

Supergirl (1984)

Red cape and blue tights. A newcomer actor as the hero. A veteran pro as the villain. A godlike actor as the father figure. “Supergirl” – the 1984 attempt to give girls the fantasy series that thrilled boys such as myself with the “Superman” films – breaks little new ground, and it’s terribly cheesy. But it’s a lark, full of unintended laughs. That’s the somewhat positive side. The negative? Precious little of the plot makes sense, the special effects seem cheap even for 1984, and there’s no heart or bravado. “Supergirl” opens in inner-space, a universe inside the Earth that serves as a distant cousin world to Krypton. You know the one, Superman’s home planet. The story: Teenage Kara (Helen Slater) leaves her world for Chicago in an egg ship to find a missing power ball thingy and has to battle a megalomaniac evil woman (Faye Dunaway, the veteran pro) bent on world rule. Whew. Peter O’Toole is the father figure. The real hero is Dunaway (“Network”), who chews scenery and drops one-liners like she could take over Earth. C+

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

What a banner year 1967 was for film, “Cool Hand Luke,” “The Graduate,” and “In the Heat of the Night.” But “Bonnie and Clyde” tops them all. If you’re older than 13, you know the story: Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) rob banks, shoot, kill, and die in a hail of bullets. In this Arthur Penn-directed tale, the couple stumbles into their life of crime, botching their first robberies at a shuttered bank and a grocery, with family (including a frantic sister-in-law played by Estelle Parsons) close by. The first murder is almost accidental, the others come easier. Penn dishes out the dark humor in droves, always with an edge of violence that still shocks with its exploded body parts and proximity. Beatty and Dunaway themselves explode as the original gangster couple with heaps of personal issues, faults and an unending hunger for stability during a financial depression that provides none. I could rave about Gene Hackman as an elder brother Barrow, but it’s Denver Pyle (yes, Uncle Jesse!) who burns brightly as a lawman with a raging psychotic lust for murder, barely masked by his quest for justice. A+

Network (1976)

"Network" is one of my Top Ten films of all time. By God, not a week goes by where I don't quote it. Or think about it. And I have posters of the film on my walls at home and in my office. So, I love it. It is the ultimate cold-hearted, sick satire of the American news media hell-bent hooked on Nielsen ratings (the crazier the news, the more people watch), and capitalism run amok.

William Holden is the (so it seems) stalwart TV newsman, the knight in shining armor, who gets his mettle tainted when his best friend and TV anchor (Peter Finch) has a nervous breakdown on air. He's sucked into a ratings war with the Big Three (remember those days?), office politics and an affair with a much younger woman (Faye Dunaway, never more alive and fierce), who would burn a child alive for a Nielson point.

Written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, the 1976 film is still deadly on target, striking a blow against an American public bored with itself and the corporate drones who feed that hunger. Ned Beatty's monologue as a CEO is historic, and ought to be required viewing in every college classroom across the nation.

"Network" also is one of best-acted movies ever: Beatrice Straight mesmerizes as an angry wife and Robert Duvall throttles off the screen as a soulless corporate demigod. But it's Finch who rules the film. His "I'm as mad as hell!" rant is among the greatest scenes in film, and still startles me after more than a dozen viewings.

I haven't even started on the sexual and racial politics that Chayefsky rips apart for all to view. A must see. Unless you're a conservative who thinks corporations and churches have your best interest in mind. In which case, Ha! A+