A box office failure at the time, John Boorman's 1974 cult science fiction film Zardoz is an entrancing if overly ambitious project that offers pointed commentary on class structure and religion inside its complex plot and head-movie visuals. Its healthy doses of sex and violence will involve viewers even if the story machinations escape them. Beautifully photographed near Boorman's home in Ireland's Wicklow Mountains by Geoffrey Unsworth (2001), its production design is courtesy of longtime Boorman associate Anthony Pratt, who creates a believable society within the film's million-dollar budget.
A bewigged Sean Connery is Zed, a savage "exterminator" commanded by the mysterious god Zardoz to eliminate Brutals, survivors of an unspecified worldwide catastrophe. Zed stows away inside Zardoz's enormous idol (a flying stone head) and is taken to the pastoral land of the Eternals, a matriarchal, quasi-medieval society that has achieved psychic abilities as well as immortality. Zed finds as much hope as disgust with the Eternals; their advancements have also robbed them of physical passion, turning their existence into a living death. Zed becomes the Eternals' unlikely messiah, but in order to save them–and himself–he must confront the truth behind Zardoz and his own identity inside the Tabernacle, the Eternals' omnipresent master computer.

–Paul Gaita

Some survivors of a drowning ship are rescued by Captain Nemo and his submarine crew. They are taken to an underwater city, where they may be trapped for the rest of their lives.

Choreographer-turned-director Bob Fosse (Cabaret, Lenny) turns the camera on himself in this nervy, sometimes unnerving 1979 feature, a nakedly autobiographical piece that veers from gritty drama to razzle-dazzle musical, allegory to satire. It's an indication of his bravura, and possibly his self-absorption, that Fosse (who also cowrote the script) literally opens alter ego Joe Gideon's heart in a key scene–an unflinching glimpse of cardiac surgery, shot during an actual open-heart procedure.
Roy Scheider makes a brave and largely successful leap out of his usual romantic lead roles to step into Gideon's dancing pumps, and supplies a plausible sketch of an extravagant, self-destructive, self-loathing creative dynamo, while Jessica Lange serves as a largely allegorical Muse, one of the various women that the philandering Gideon pursues (and usually abandons). Gideon's other romantic partners include Fosse's own protégé (and a major keeper of his choreographic style since his death), Ann Reinking, whose leggy grace is seductive both "onstage" and off.
Fosse/Gideon's collision course with mortality, as well as his priapic obsession with the opposite sex, may offer clues into the libidinal core of the choreographer's dynamic, sexualized style of dance, but musical aficionados will be forgiven for fast-forwarding to cut out the self-analysis and focus on the music, period. At its best–as in the knockout opening, scored to George Benson's strutting version of "On Broadway," which fuses music, dance, and dazzling camera work into a paean to Fosse's hoofer nation–All That Jazz offers a sequence of classic Fosse numbers, hard-edged, caustic, and joyously physical.

–Sam Sutherland

As JFK-conspiracy movies go, Executive Action is distinguished by being one of the earliest and one of the best. This speculative drama draws together some of the theories floating around in 1973 and lay them out in dry, unadorned fashion. At the center of the conspiracy is a group of right-wing muckymucks who quietly plan the assassination of the president (thanks to their fears about Vietnam, civil rights, and whatever else might be handy). Burt Lancaster is the most prominent name in the cast, although the film gets much of its gravity from the weathered presence of Robert Ryan, the superb character actor who died not long after completing the project. Will Geer and John Anderson are also in on the plot. Scripted by Hollywood pro (and former blacklistee) Dalton Trumbo, the film is unrelentingly grim, but there's something about its very flatness that makes it that much eerier. Oliver Stone would take the opposite approach in his pinwheeling JFK, but this simple accounting is just as creepy.