Though “X-rated” means something different than it did in 1969, it’s still a badge of honor that Midnight Cowboy is the only film with that “for adults only” label to have won the Best Picture Oscar (Last Tango in Paris being the other great “X-rated” flick of the era). Midnight Cowboy is less shocking today; sexually, it’s not the graphic images that provide the punch it’s the intellectually complicated nature of the characters’ sexuality that still can move an audience. As a follow up to The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman proved he was more than a one-hit wonder and instead that he had a long and vital career ahead of him. It also deservedly made a star out of a little known pretty-boy actor named Jon Voight. And it also put British director John Schlesinger on the American A-list, a guy whose deep sensitivity and open homosexuality put him ahead of his time. The film’s theme song, “Everybody’s Talkin’” performed by Harry Nilsson, has become the iconic standard bearer for images of a lonely guy walking the streets of New York. Midnight Cowboy also is a fascinating peek at an era both for representation for how an artist works at a time when the movie studios were willing to take a chance on a grubby flick about a would-be male prostitute and his new BFF while also revealing a dark side to the Big Apple during what has sometimes been considered a golden age of self-expression.

Deliverance is a wholly original American film, directed by a Brit, an action survival thriller in the Straw Dogs mode. Ahead of its time in ’72 it precluded a number of genres that would emerge over the decades from “hillbillyxploitation” of the '70s to “torture porn” of more recent years. Films from Southern Comfort to The Descent have been explained and pitched as “Deliverance with…” No film since has been able to combine the stunning filmmaking and the shock, but not just for shock's sake. This isn’t an exploitation film, beneath the horror there is great and powerful purpose, when man takes on wild nature, he also finds out what is buried in his own nature.

Heat is a self-proclaimed “Los Angeles crime saga” about a master crew of thieves and the dedicated police officers who try to keep them in check.

Based on a real criminal and inspired by his own TV movie, L.A. Takedown, Michael Mann directs one of the all-time great cop and robber films with Heat. He takes a highly established genre and digs in deeper—finding the truth and parallels between those who enforce the law and those who break it. Heat explores the sacrifices both sides have to make in order to do the job—mainly causing dysfunction at home. You can see years of preproduction that goes into Mann’s vision—building from earlier works as director of Thief (1981) and producer of TV’s Miami Vice.

"Bobby Cooper" (Penn) is a wandering gambler whose car breaks down in some lost Southwestern town where he’s pulled into a web of lies, deceit, and murder.

Oliver Stone (W) directs one of his most re-watchable and entertaining films in a long and ambitious career. He creates a sinisterly fun Neo-Noir within the confines of a funky cowpoke town. The film maintains a strong mood throughout, with special attention paid to the details, and at a pace that never lets up.

Robert Richardson continued his visual exploration with Stone following Natural Born Killers. Although the shooting style is more reserved than the serial murder tale, U-Turn has a wonderful aesthetic, with a stunning color palette and good use of exaggerated angles.

Composing legend Ennio Morricone’s score is delightfully quirky and almost cartoonish—really adding to the dark humor of the piece.

Based on the 1962 John Frankenheimer Cold-War classic, The Manchurian Candidate is the story of a group of soldiers who, upon returning home from war, suffer painful flashbacks of torture and brainwashing. “Major Ben Marco” (Washington) grips to reality trying to get at the truth before a possible corporate-designed “sleeper” (Schreiber) is elected to the White House.

Oscar winner Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), helms one of the better remakes of classic cinema. The director is really able to illustrate the paranoia, warped sense of memory and the spiraling down into madness -- using the main character (Washington) as a mental road map.

The screenplay by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgari, (based on the novel by Richard Condon and the original screenplay by George Axelrod) manages to contemporize the communist tale, moving the action into the Middle East of the first Gulf War. They retain the core elements of the story, while giving it a modern feel more accessible to today’s audiences.