Elmer Bernstein

[5] Paul Newman stars in this L.A. detective story from director Robert Benton (Kramer vs Kramer), about a down-on-his-luck P.I. who lives with two movie stars (Susan Sarandon and Gene Hackman) who are married to each other. Newman starts to get suspicious, though, when Hackman sends him to deliver money to someone, only to discover a murder has taken place. The murder leads to clues …

[6] Dack Rambo and Rebecca Dianna Smith star as a young couple who playfully escape their wedding party and retreat to a hotel in the Louisiana bayou where they accidentally witness a murder and become the killers’ next targets. After an initial attack in which Smith is raped, the couple find their relationship tested to the breaking point. Rambo decides to hunt down the killers …

[7] Nicolas Cage stars as a third shift New York ambulance paramedic haunted by ghosts and clinging to his sanity in this grim, sometimes darkly comic film from director Martin Scorsese and Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader. Cage’s character gets a natural high from saving people’s lives, but he hasn’t saved one in months — and he needs his fix. A cardiac arrest case leads him …

[7] Producer Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters) wrangled together animation companies from around the world to assemble Heavy Metal, a string of six animated shorts based on the popular adult fantasy magazine. The stories are tied together by a loose framing device involving an ominous green orb that destroys everything it encounters. My personal favorite sequences are “B-17”, which depicts a zombie attack aboard a WWII bomber …

[6] Julie Andrews stars in this 1920s madcap musical as the title character, a woman looking to land a job and a husband in the big city, but ends up embroiled with a nefarious white slave trader! Mary Tyler Moore is underutilized as the woman Millie has to rescue from slavery, but Carol Channing chews the scenery in a bizarre Oscar-nominated performance only she could …

[10] Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is lovingly adapted to film by director Robert Mulligan, screenwriter Horton Foote, and producer Alan J. Pakula. Gregory Peck earned the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch, a lawyer of uncompromising morals who puts the safety of his family on the line to defend Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), a black man accused of raping a white …