In terms of guilty pleasures, John Frankenheimer’s 1996 kinda/sorta adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novel The Island of Dr. Moreau may elicit the most guilt but certainly a lot of pleasure. By most standards the film is a complete mess with a legendarily ugly story of getting to the screen. It’s utterly indulgent and over the top, but it also has a giddy grotesqueness that makes it completely entertaining. Like its characters it reeks of madness, in one of those “what were they thinking” kinds of ways. Much more interesting than the ‘70s Burt Lancaster version, this later edition plays like a long, drug-fueled trip you wish would end but that the next day you think back and decide maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

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.

True Romance is the story of a young down-on-their-luck couple who comes across a suitcase full of cocaine and makes their way across America to sell it in Hollywood. As they do so a colorful group of cops and criminals hunt them down.

Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill) wrote the film with un-credited voiceover by his Pulp Fiction co-author, Roger Avery (Killing Zoe). As with all of Tarantino’s scripts, the story is filled with unique characters, explosive action, and very memorable dialogue.

Tony Scott (Spy Game) directs this cross-country-crime-romance with such flavor and style that there are beautiful moments throughout. The film has a kinetic energy that is infectius and undeniably entertaining. From the first moments of young love blossoming on streets of Detroit, all the way to the blaze of glory Mexican standoff at a Beverly Hills hotel, Scott directs with a confident vision that never lets up on its momentum.