After years of straight-to-DVD dreck, Jean-Claude Van Damme made a movie that cast an unsparing eye at the wreck he’d made of his life.

After a lifetime of playing good guys, Ronald Reagan ended his acting career with a villainous turn in Don Siegel’s The Killers. Was the performance revelatory, or an aberration?

Warren Beatty’s 1998 film Bulworth attempted to give a charge to Clinton-era liberal frustration by pairing it with a frankness inspired by hip-hop. The result was stranger than expected, but also truer to Beatty’s past than it seemed.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s canny casting of the 1970s icon in a film set during his heyday gave Reynolds the best reviews of his career. But it ended up being an outlier in a filmography dominated by popcorn and junk.

Robert Altman didn’t seem like a logical directorial choice for a big-budget, family-friendly musical adaptation of Popeye, but the film still fits snugly into his career.

Michael Mann’s debut, Thief, helped set a tone for a career marked by stylish grit. But with this sophomore effort—filled with Nazi villains and an evil, imprisoned entity—he attempted work on a bigger scale.

When filmmakers from abroad visit America, they tend to find angles on the country that native directors would never consider. Michelangelo Antonioni’s sole film made on American soil is no exception.

The Marx brothers’ future looked dim after the cooly received Duck Soup. Enter Irving Thalberg’s MGM and an attempt to class up the act. Exit much of the mirthful anarchy.

Nothing in Barry Levinson’s filmography suggested he would direct a found-footage horror film. And yet The Bay exists.

For his first and only English-language film, Truffaut took on Ray Bradbury’s science-fiction classic. Hated in its day, it’s the perfect example of why even the maligned films of a great director deserve investigation.

With 1978’s Interiors, the director made a sharp detour into territory first explored by Ingmar Bergman. Remarkably, he was able to claim some of it as his own.

What was Walter Hill doing directing a comedy with Richard Pryor and John Candy? The answer isn’t in Brewster’s Millions.

A period adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel found Martin Scorsese turning his attention to a different type of gang—one just as ferocious and status-obsessed as the Mafia of Goodfellas and Casino.