movie reviews for the outsiders

The Outsiders

It’s unfortunate that Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Outsiders” opens on the same day as “Bad Boys.” That makes the contrast all the more dramatic between the high-energy realism of “Bad Boys” and Coppola’s stylized, over-careful, deadening approach to somewhat similar material.

Both movies are about tough teenagers. The kids in “Bad Boys” are hardened 1980s street criminals, while the kids in “The Outsiders” are 1950s Nebraska greasers, living in a time when even their toughness belongs to a more romantic tradition. But even so, those are real kids in “Bad Boys,” while Coppola’s teenagers seem trapped inside too many layers of storytelling.

“The Outsiders” is based on a well known novel for teenagers by S. E. Hinton. It’s about class warfare between rich kids (the “soches”) and poor kids (the greasers). The greasers try to pick up a soche’s girlfriend at the drive-in, there’s a fight later that night, and a rich kid gets killed. The two greasers who did it run immediately to Dallas Winston ( Matt Dillon ), who is the town’s ranking adolescent hood. He gives them money and tells them to hop a train out of town.

Although the two scared kids ( Ralph Macchio and C. Thomas Howell) are convincing enough, the story isn’t — and neither is the way Coppola sees it. He seems to be struggling with some sort of fixation on the contrived Hollywood sound stage look of the 1950s; there are scenes in which he poses his two heroes against a lurid sunset and bathes them in backlights so improbably reddish-orange that the kids look like Gordon MacRae in “Oklahoma!”

The problem with seeing characters in a highly stylized visual way is that it’s hard for them to breathe and move and get us involved in their stories. That’s what happens here. The thin narrative material for “The Outsiders” only adds up to a movie of 90 minutes, and even then there are scenes that seem to be killing time. Nothing that happens in the movie seems necessary; it’s all arbitrary.

This is Matt Dillon’s second outing in material by S. E. Hinton. In “ Tex ” he played a three-dimensional character, complicated and convincing. In “The Outsiders,” he’s required to do little more than standard “ Rebel Without a Cause ” behavior.

The problem, I’m afraid, is with Coppola’s direction. He seems so hung up with his notions of a particular movie “look,” with his perfectionistic lighting and framing and composition, that the characters wind up like pictures, framed and hanging on the screen.

There’s not much life in this movie, or spontaneity. It’s a stylistic exercise. The man who made the “Godfather” pictures and “ Apocalypse Now ” is a great director. He ought to reserve these exercises for the rehearsal halls of his fancy and get back to making movies.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

• Matt Dillon as Dallas Winston
• Ralph Macchio as Johnny Cade
• C. Thomas Howell as Ponyboy Curtis
• Diane Lane as Cherry Valance
• Leif Garrett as Bob Sheldon
• Darren Dalton as Randy Anderson
• Carmine Coppola

Directed by

• Francis Ford Coppola

Produced by

• Gray Frederickson

Screenplay by

• Kathleen Knutsen Rowell

Based on the novel by

• S. E. Hinton

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The Outsiders Reviews

The Outsiders - The Complete Novel becomes a stronger film because of Coppola's decision to restore deleted scenes and give the film a new score and soundtrack.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 26, 2023

This overwrought, stylized teen melodrama might only hold your interest if you were young enough to be impressed by it in 1983.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Aug 30, 2022

The movie has aged well, and today impresses on all counts. The story and characterisation are intelligent and play-like, the camerawork is interesting, and the acting is sensitive and involving.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 23, 2022

The deep, honest emotion undercutting the performative toxic masculinity of these young men is beyond charming and vitally essential, but the melodramatic randomness of the plot ultimately lost me.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 22, 2021

What particularly sells this pensive if occasionally overwrought melodrama is the amazing collection of then-rising stars.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 21, 2021

This begins as a great film but, unfortunately, slowly gives way to ever weaker melodrama across its second half. Well worth it, though, to see the beginnings of so many notable careers and for Stephen H. Burum's cinematography.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 29, 2021

It's beautifully shot, written and paced, but the cast, really, is the thing.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 15, 2021

The movie is sincerely anguished, sensitive to class. It can also wobble alarmingly.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 14, 2021

It is a movie with the heartfelt old-fashioned urgency of a Hollywood film from much further back, with the Brat Pack in this film the equivalent of the Dead End Kids who made Angels With Dirty Faces in the 1930s.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 14, 2021

[A] surprisingly sweet, earnest and vulnerable in a way that from some angles could be considered cloying, but ultimately succeeds in capturing the overwhelming and all-encompassing emotions of adolescence.

Full Review | Apr 27, 2021

Because of his sentimentality, Coppola misses the opportunity to reflect more vigorously on the life of these teenagers. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Feb 5, 2020

Watching it again recently I found all of Coppola's cornball flourishes to be rather endearing, even generous.

Full Review | Jul 31, 2018

In The Outsiders, the director's class is consistently present, but it may be a case of the wrong man for the job, since overall film plays unevenly, with a cliche and detached ambiance that robs the plotline of what passion it might've whipped up.

Full Review | Mar 27, 2018

One of the most overtly aesthetic, art-for-art's-sake films in Hollywood's history, a faux-naf Pre-Raphaelite mural in which angels with dirty faces but immaculately pure hearts burn with a hard, gemlike flame before being snuffed out in their prime.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2015

A satisfying example of the artist-as-talented-hack.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Oct 25, 2014

Ultimately, "The Outsiders" feels like two movies awkwardly thrown together - one a tough-acting antiseptic to the sanitized-suburbia Spielberg fantasies that ruled the era's box office, the other a besotted valentine to widescreen epics of old.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 5, 2013

Francis Ford Coppola's cheesy, overblown adaptation of S.E. Hinton's wonderful novel captures none of the book's gritty magic.

Full Review | Original Score: 30/100 | Jul 12, 2011

Coppola's take on S.E. Hinton's classic. Teens+.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 1, 2011

As a movie, it's mediocre. As a clue to Coppola's thinking, it shows he still has things to learn about the relation between technology and expression.

Full Review | Dec 11, 2007

Because it falls in with the undulating rhythm of the life of its heroes, for whom a fatal fight and a quiet night have almost equal importance, the picture never manages to reach the peaks of satisfying Hollywood melodrama.

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The outsiders.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 37 Reviews
• Kids Say 158 Reviews

Parents Say

Based on 37 parent reviews

Parent Reviews

Messages aren't worth the costs.

This title has:

• Too much violence
• Too much drinking/drugs/smoking

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Are you ready to rumble.

• Great messages
• Great role models

Stay Gold, Ponyboy. Stay Gold.

Everything I loved and still love is this movie and the cast and EVERYONE! I LOVE THEM SO MUCH! Really recommend it if your child can stand it! And they might as well fall in love with one of the actors or more REALLY RECOMMEND! YOUR CHILD WILL LOVE IT! And warning there is lots of smoking so yeah

This book should not be read to 7th graders

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The Outsiders: Film Review

• Harry Solomons
• October 12, 2021

Uniquely and stunningly overdramatic, The Outsiders is turned by Francis Ford Coppola and his cast, against all odds, into an incredibly engrossing picture.

When The Outsiders opens, it is the early 1960’s (or so we can assume from advertisements for The Hustler plastered across cinema marquees) in an unnamed southern US city, and the teen gangs of the Greasers and the Socs are at war. Greaser Ponyboy Curtis (a 15-year-old C. Thomas Howell), threatened at knifepoint by a group of Socs on his walk home, finds himself at the centre of increasingly violent disputes, reaching a head when a Soc is murdered in self-defence by shy Greaser Johnny Cade ( The Karate Kid ’s Ralph Macchio in his debut film appearance). Ponyboy and Johnny must escape to the nearby countryside and lie low until it is safe enough to return, while back in the city, the war between the gangs has grown ever more deadly.

This may sound a little clichéd, and with good reason – S.E. Hinton’s original novel is often claimed as the originator of young adult fiction , and thus can be seen to contain all the genre’s myriad advantages and flaws: it revels in the pure, visceral melodrama of teenage conflict, while not necessarily exploring themes and motifs with a particularly light touch. How do Johnny and Ponyboy prove that even gangsters are good guys after all? Why, they save a group of children from a burning building, of course. How do they demonstrate an emotional depth you don’t expect from kids in double denim? They watch sunsets and quote Robert Frost and Gone with the Wind at each other. If there is a word to describe The Outsiders’ storyline, it is unashamedly ‘teenage’, with all the self-determined severity that comes with it.

With this story as its source material, and with director Francis Ford Coppola charting a tight course to its plot, it would be easy for The Outsiders to have fallen apart in a self-indulgent mess. It is a wonderful surprise, then, that Coppola is more than able to exert his influence in a movie that quickly becomes an immersive, engrossing experience, an experience only heightened in its new 4K restoration. By focusing less on the violence present in the story, instead reducing it to a steady background hum with occasional, surprising eruptions, Coppola treats the work as an exercise in escapism , with a wild tonal inconsistency that only works as a product of the film’s internal environment. The abundant music cues, while often heavy-handedly 60s focused with Dick Dale-esque guitar licks at every turn, help build the steady foundation of environment upon which the story can unfold itself. The result is more American Graffiti than anything else, with its melodrama woven into its details rather than sitting uncomfortably alongside them.

It is a credit to the acting, too, that the drama imparts an emotional heft far closer to the resonance of the novel than may be expected. Howell is excellent as Ponyboy, the grounded emotional heart of the picture, and shows a sensitivity in his wannabe-tough-guy persona unbecoming of a 15-year-old actor. Macchio , likewise, is phenomenal: as characters veer from emotional extreme to extreme, Macchio’s willingness to demonstrate elation and despair as two sides of the same coin imparts a sincere tenderness. Matt Dillon also excels as Dallas, the fresh-out-of-jail bad influence on the younger members of the group. Dillon brings the required sense of assumed maturity, an aspirational charm to a character that becomes increasingly erratic and terrifying to an audience more removed from the idolatry that consumes Ponyboy and Johnny.

It shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise that a Coppola film is so well-cast, considering the reputation the director has for top-to-bottom all-star rosters. What is so surprising is the sheer number of brat pack stars for whom The Outsiders was star-making – Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez to name a non-exhaustive number – in fact, this film is often described as one of the cornerstones of the group’s identity. There is a mind-boggling amount of talent devoted to this picture both in front of and behind camera, a testament to the director’s reputation and the enduring legacy of S.E. Hinton’s novel, and discovering the stars hidden throughout the picture is a joyous undertaking: Tom Waits’ one-line cameo at a house party, or Nicolas Cage and Flea as uncredited extras in a major fight scene.

For a movie that, at the time, only received lukewarm critical response, to now receive a 4K restoration almost four decades on speaks highly of the legacy that the movie imparts beyond its runtime. It is worth analysing The Outsiders simply on the grounds of how it inexorably bound together and gave an identity to one of the most distinctive groups of collaborators in 1980s cinema, becoming an artifact of undeniable weight in Coppola’s own magnificently influential repertoire. Although The Outsiders may tell a story that many others have told, often with a little more deftness of touch than we see here, it does so with a panache and confidence that, against all odds, marks a film of undeniable legacy on the landscape of the cinematic decade (and beyond) to come.

A 4K restoration release of The Outsiders: The Complete Novel will be released in cinemas in the U.K. on 15 October, and on Blu-Ray, DVD and Digital Platforms from 8 November, 2021.

• TAGS: genre: coming of age , restoration
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Classic Review: The Outsiders (1983)

Overall Score

Rating summary.

In the early 60’s, Ponyboy Curtis (Howell), the youngest of three orphans, get into the The Greasers, a gang of boys from the “wrong side”of the tracks. Ponyboy’s relationship with his older brother Darrel (Patrick Swayze) is falling apart after Darrel became responsible for him and for Sodapop (Rob Lowe), the middle brother who dropped out of school to work full time at the gas station. Pobyboy’s best friend is Johnny Cade (Macchio), who ends up killing a boy from the Socs, a rival gang. The two run away with the help of Dallas (Dillon), until both come back in town and The Greasers need to face the Socs.

The Outsiders was a strange element in director Francis Ford Coppola’s career. After a very ambitious decade in the 70’s with Godfather, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, and an even more ambitious start of the 80’s with One From the Heart (which was a colossal failure), Coppola seemed to take a step back and reassess. He received a letter from both a librarian and a class of 13-year old students, signed by all of them, asking him to consider adapting S.E. Hinton’s book, The Outsiders, into the big screen. Coppola fell in love with the book and said yes to such an innocent request. He would end up making an understated masterpiece.

The Outsiders definitely took inspiration from with Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One. These kids are heirs to James Dean and Marlon Brando, and their conflicts are simple and seem so small, but the beauty of the film is exactly in not turning them into major things. It’s just these boys hanging around and looking for trouble, while days goes by pretty much all the same. The big turning point of the film is when Johnny kills the rival kid. In a way, it is the moment that Johnny and Ponyboy let childhood behind forever and step into (young) adulthood. But their entrance into adulthood is not without its problems. The truth is they are still not ready to be adults, and they are constantly struggling between their innocence and the weight of what they have done, turning Johnny’s sacrifice in a very very sad moment in the film.

This is one of the most interesting aspects of the film: how it balances very well the joys and the melancholy of being a teenager. These kids love each other to death, and they want nothing more than to keep having fun with each other forever, without having to really care about consequences. But life is constantly signaling them that it can’t go on forever; adulthood is around the corner, and with it, its problems and responsibilities. In a way, The Outsiders perfectly encapsulates that exact moment in our lives when we are beginning to understand the broader and more complicated world around us while still having one foot firmly placed in childhood innocence.

The film was released in 1983 with a running time of 90 minutes. In 2005, Coppola and Warner Bros. released a new version of the film, entitled The Complete Novel. With 22 extra minutes, this version shed a new light on the story. The best moments of the new cut are the scenes between the three brothers, little moments that turn their relationship into a more tri-dimensional one and show off the actor’s individual strengths. Darrel tries to be an “adult”influence to his younger brothers, and Swayze does a great job in showing us the insecurities and fears behind the strong character he needs to put up for his brothers.

The fear of separation is palpable in the household; they know social services can take them all away from each other. Howell is fantastic as Ponyboy, turning his character into a compelling and relatable lead. But the best moments from the new cut come from Lowe, whose character was severely cut in the theatrical release and now shows so much vulnerability it is heartbreaking to watch. His conversation with Ponyboy in the bed is beautiful, but his breakdown in the park is so touching and so understated.

The whole cast works just fine, even Tom Cruise in a very small role. Coppola let the actors improvise and the cast had a long period of rehearsal before shooting started. That helped turning these kids, all still very new to acting, into a strong and united group. Besides the ones already mentioned, Dillon, who was probably the biggest name of the cast at the time, turned Dallas into the perfect example of teenage revelry. Dallas is cool and dangerous, all at the same time. Diane Lane, almost the only actress in the cast, was very young at the time, but she manages to turn in a very commanding performance, standing up to Dallas in the toughest of ways but also embracing Ponyboy with a lot of warmth.

Of course, having Coppola on the helm only made the technical parts of the movie stand out. The photography is outstanding; Coppola was experimenting at the time (again, One From the Heart is a perfect example of that) and the golden tones give the film a magical atmosphere sometimes. Editing and the camera work are great, and the film start and ends with the perfect Stevie Wonder ballad.

The Outsiders is just a small movie in Francis Ford Coppola’s career. But when you watch it, you’ll see there’s nothing little about it.

*still courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.*

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The Outsiders Reviews

• 45   Metascore
• 1 hr 31 mins
• Watchlist Where to Watch

Francis Coppola's adaptation of SE Hinton's story of rival gangs in 1960s Oklahoma.

In the early 1980s, after his "Godfather" films (1972, 1974) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), works of epic scale, Francis Ford Coppola began choosing smaller projects like THE OUTSIDERS, based on a popular teenage novel by S.E. Hinton, a teenager herself when it was first published (who makes a cameo appearance as a nurse). Set in Oklahoma of the 1960s, the story hinges on a conflict between the "greasers"--leather-clad poor kids with Elvis-style pompadours--and their affluent high school classmates, the "Socs" (pronounced "soshes"). Hinton's novel was brought to Coppola's attention by a letter from a Fresno, Calif., high school class, asking that he film their favorite novel. More than 20 years (and many letters from young readers bemoaning the absence of their favorite scenes) later, Coppola recut THE OUTSIDERS. He restored footage trimmed from the original theatrical release and replaced much of the lush symphonic score composed by his father, Carmine Coppola, with period-appropriate rock music. This new version was titled THE OUTSIDERS: THE COMPLETE NOVEL, both to differentiate it from the original theatrical release version and to stress its fidelity to Hinton's book. Dallas Winston (Matt Dillon) leads his rebellious buddies on a succession of typical teenage adventures, from committing petty crimes to flirting with Cherry (Diane Lane), the trophy girlfriend of a hot-tempered soc. But when fellow gang members Johnny Cade (Ralph Macchio) and Ponyboy Curtis (C. Thomas Howell) have a run-in with their moneyed rivals, the stakes are raised. Johnny kills a boy and goes on the run with Ponyboy, hiding out in an abandoned church where they kill time by playing cards and reading Gone With the Wind. Johnny, Ponyboy and Dallas later rescue several school children from the burning building (Johnny's careless smoking started the blaze) and are hailed as heroes, but Johnny is critically injured. Meanwhile, Ponyboy's brothers Darry (Patrick Swayze) — the eldest, who put his own dreams aside to care for his younger brothers after their parents were killed in a car accident— and Sodapop (Rob Lowe), are frantic; the orphaned brothers are at constant risk of being seperated by child welfare authorities. The charismatic Dillon is a believable delinquent and gets solid support from a cast that went on to populate some of the better youth pictures in years to come. Coppola tries to evoke REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, and while his film lacks the emotional conviction and psychological insight of Nicholas Ray's classic work, his grandiose vision pays off in some stunning camerawork. Among the changes to the 2005 director's version of the film are the inclusion of a long opening sequence that introduces the Curtis brothers as Dally and Sodapop come to Ponyboy's aid as he's attacked by a car-load of Socs, and a sequence in which Sodapop and Ponyboy talk together in bed, which was cut because test audiences were made uncomfortable by what they perceived as homoerotic implications. A trial scene cut to the rhythm of a ticking clock was also restored; it anticipates the percussive rhythms of RUMBLE FISH, Coppola's "art movie for teens;" based on another Hinton novel, it began production two weeks after THE OUTSIDERS wrapped and shared several cast members, notably Dillon. Several of Lowe's scenes were put back as well, including one in which he breaks down after being forced to intercede one time too many in his brothers' squabbling. The new version of the film runs 113 minutes.

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The Outsiders (1983)

Hollywood century, 1983: in which the new hollywood kids, reeling from the unexpected arrival of the 1980s, pay for their alleged sins, connect with us.

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Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema, and the filmmaker’s own biography. For April, we revisit both the game-changing hits and low point misses of Francis Ford Coppola. Read the rest of our coverage  here .

Francis Ford Coppola ’s 1983 coming-of-age drama The Outsiders , adapted from S.E. Hinton’s classic novel by the same name , is a dreamy, soft endeavor. Despite the gritty world in which the film’s protagonist Ponyboy Curtis ( C. Thomas Howell ) exists, the film is a surprisingly sweet, earnest and vulnerable in a way that from some angles could be considered cloying, but ultimately succeeds in capturing the overwhelming and all-encompassing emotions of adolescence. 

Howell’s Ponyboy is a tender-hearted and kind teenager born into a family of Greasers — a working class gang on the wrong side of town in 1960s Tulsa, with two older brothers. He’s proud of where he comes from, and willing to stand up to the Socs (pronounced Soshes, short for “social”), a rival gang of affluent bullies. Ponyboy’s life is changed forever one night when his friend Johnny ( Ralph Macchio ), also a gentle soul, inadvertently kills a drunk Soc who’s trying to drown Ponyboy, and they must flee town to avoid arrest.  

Coppola was inspired to make the film in 1980 during the troubled time following the financial disaster of One From the Heart . He received a letter from Jo Ellen Misakian, a librarian at the Lone Star School in Fresno, California and parent to a teenage son, who had decided that The Outsiders would make an excellent film and collected hundreds of signatures from young people who supported the idea.

As recounted in a 1983 article in the New York Times following the release of the film, Misakian contacted Coppola by looking up his address in the reference section of the library. In the letter, she described the school and its students and included a copy of the paperback “because [she] knew he wouldn’t go out and buy it.” 

Normally, a letter like this would not have reached someone at Coppola’s level, nor would it have been something that could ever have been seriously considered. Luckily, Misakian caught Coppola at the perfect moment and sent it to his New York address instead of his Hollywood address, which helped it stand out. Fred Roos, Coppola’s producer, read the book and agreed that Misakian and the kids were onto something. “It was signed by like 110 little signatures,” recalled Coppola about the letter in a 2005 interview with Today . “Who can ignore that?” 

The filmmaking process was cathartic for Coppola, who considered the opportunity a chance to escape from his financial problems and allowed him to “be a camp counselor” again, with a young cast and crew. And it was indeed a fun set — in a 2018 oral history of the making of the film , the members of the cast recall the legendary pranks that took place on set, of which there were many. 

The opening credits of The Outsiders contains a seemingly endless list of future stars, including Patrick Swayze , Matt Dillon , Rob Lowe , Tom Cruise , Emilio Estevez , and Macchio, the so called “Brat Pack”, as they would later be dubbed by New York Magazine in 1985 . But in 1983, the Brat Pack was not yet a term that existed, and similar to a film that would come decades later – Short Term 12 , which launched the careers of Brie Larson, Kaitlyn Dever, Rami Malek, Lakeith Stanfield, and Stephanie Beatriz, The Outsiders functions as a fascinating time capsule of the nascent phase of these actors, especially a captivating young Diane Lane , who plays Sherri “Cherry” Valance, a preppy student whose Soc boyfriend is the one who gets killed by Johnny. 

After Ponyboy and Johnny flee Tulsa, they hide in an abandoned church for several days, where they try to disguise themselves — Ponyboy by bleaching his hair blond, Johnny by cutting his hair shorter  — and afterwards, stare, displeased at their altered reflections. “It’s like being in a Halloween costume you can’t get out of,” Ponyboy complains, and the fact that this, of all things, is what he chooses to fixate on, reveals the depth of his naivete, and the pathos of the narrative. 

The Outsiders…ultimately succeeds in capturing the overwhelming and all-encompassing emotions of adolescence. 

Realistic the film is not; with heightened dialogue and cinematography that uses a Hollywood vernacular that “went out of fashion at least 20 years before the picture was even made” to evoke the turbulent emotions of youth onto a “giant canvas”, as Sean Burns mentions in his 35th anniversary retrospective on the film , The Outsiders has the oversized heart of a stage play with the visuals of a painting. “You two are too sweet to scare anyone,” Sherri says to Ponyboy and Johnny, and truly, it’s hard to believe that two young men who have grown up in such rough circumstances could actually be so soft. 

But the tenderness between young men who don’t know where their lives are going but who trust in each other is the thread that runs throughout the film, not just for Ponyboy and Johnny, but also for Patrick Swayze’s Darrel “Darry” Curtis, an older brother struggling to fill the shoes of absent parents, and Matt Dillon’s Dallas “Dally” Winston, a juvenile delinquent with rough edges who really only cares about one person — Johnny — and is unable to cope when Johnny succumbs to burn injuries after saving children from a fire at the abandoned church. 

Ultimately, the heartfelt performances from all the young actors is what allows the film to hold up, despite the melodramatic sensibilities of the cinematography; particularly in the scene when Johnny and Ponyboy watch a beautiful sunset. “The mist is what’s pretty, all gold and silver. Too bad it can’t stay like that all the time,” observes Johnny, and in response, Ponyboy quotes the Robert Frost poem “ Nothing Gold Can Stay .” It’s a scene that could have easily come across as insincere, but thanks to Howell and Macchio’s genuine, vulnerable performances, Johnny’s dying wish is for Ponyboy to “Stay gold,” at the end of the film feels heartbreakingly authentic. 

Described in his own words as “ a Gone With the Wind for 14-year-old girls ”, Coppola’s adaptation of The Outsiders is soft but not subtle, but that’s what makes it work. Ponyboy’s story isn’t high art; but it isn’t trying to be — and in the end, it finds poignancy in big feelings and the honest vulnerability of youth. 

The Outsiders Trailer:

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The outsiders: 15 big differences between the movie & the book.

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• The Outsiders: The Complete Novel 4K remaster includes scenes that were cut from the original movie, providing a more faithful adaptation of the book.
• The movie focuses more on Dally's character and his relationship with Johnny and Ponyboy, giving Matt Dillon a bigger role.
• While the movie captures the core themes of the book, the omission of certain scenes and details from the novel affected character development and depth in the adaptation.

The differences between The Outsiders book and movie are crucial to how the Brat Pack coming-of-age film subgenre developed in the '80s. After establishing himself as an icon in the New Hollywood era, director Francis Ford Coppola worked with author S. E. Hinton to adapt Hinton's 1967 novel of the same name into the screenplay for The Outsiders. Coppola's epic cinematography and visual storytelling proved to be the perfect match for Hinton's harsh but gripping deep dive into teenage gang culture in the '60s. Thanks to the performances of The Outsiders cast members like Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Ralph Macchio, C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, and Rob Lowe, Hinton's characters have become cult cinema icons.

To celebrate the beloved 80s movies and the book that inspired it, Coppola released a 4K remaster of the movie in 2017 in time for the 50th anniversary of S. E. Hinton's novel. Apart from its improved resolution, The Outsiders: The Complete Novel features scenes that Coppola had to cut for time, with the DVD format allowing for a much more faithful adaptation of the novel - in stunning 4K. There are some notable differences between The Outsiders book and the movie's original cut, along with whether they've been included in the 4K remaster or not.

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15 Ponyboy's Introduction Scene

Ponyboy's first scene was getting jumped by socs.

Among the many differences in the adaptation and source material, the most glaring omission from the novel is Ponyboy's book introduction. The novel begins with Ponyboy getting jumped by the Socs alone until the Greasers show up to save him. However, in the movie, Ponyboy (C. Thomas Howell) is with Dally (Matt Dillon) and Johnny (Ralph Macchio) and doesn't really interact with the Socs at all . The introduction of Ponyboy in the book and in the movie are completely different, which seems like a strange decision. However, with The Outsiders: The Complete Novel now including this introductory scene from the book, it seems that it was shot but then cut for running time.

14 The Curtis Boys' Parents

The deceased parents were mentioned a lot more in the novel.

Throughout S. E. Hinton's book, Ponyboy heavily discusses his parents, who died in a car crash and left the three siblings to fend for themselves. Ponyboy constantly thinks and talks about them and tends to compare himself and his two brothers to their mother and father. The film doesn't really mention their parents and instead focuses on where the boys are now, without much mention of their past when their parents were alive. This may seem like a small detail and not needed as much of the movie is about the relationship between the brothers, but it would've given much more context to the circumstances and decisions of these characters.

13 Darry's Role Is Smaller

The movie presents the older brother as more distant.

Darry (Patrick Swayze) is Ponyboy's eldest brother, who has acted as a surrogate father to him and Sodapop (Rob Lowe) after their parents died. Darry is a stern but constant presence in Ponyboy's life, and he talks about him and their rocky relationship frequently throughout the book. Unlike in the movie, the book lays out their difficult relationship and how Ponyboy truly thinks that Darry hates him. What truly makes this a notable change is that it makes the reunion between Darry and his brother at the hospital a much more emotional affair in the book than in the film.

12 Greaser Side Vs Soc Side

The book highlights the class difference between the rival gangs.

The main fighting and hatred between the Greasers and the Socs is just as strong in the movie as it is in the book, but the details about the locations of the groups are changed for the movie. The book describes the Greasers as controlling the poorer East side of town while the Socs control the wealthier West side . Meanwhile, the movie says the Greasers are on the North side of town and the Socs are on the South side of town. While it is another small difference between The Outsiders book and movie, the source material seems to further highlight the economic divide between these gangs.

11 Sandy And Soda's Relationship

Soda's girlfriend doesn't appear in the movie.

One of the main recurring side plots in the novel is Sodapop's relationship with Sandy, who doesn't even appear in the movie. Sodapop was sure he and Sandy would get married, but when Sandy becomes pregnant , she's sent to live with her grandmother, and they never reunite. It's a catalyst for a lot of Sodapop's issues, including his frustration about being stuck between Darry and Ponyboy's constant fighting, as he no longer has a person outside the family to turn to when he needs to vent. It's one of the more unfortunate omissions from the movie as it would've led to a more explosive start for Rob Lowe's movie career.

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10 Darry Fighting For Custody

The movie downplays the threat of the brothers being broken up.

Despite their differences, The Outsiders book and movie are, at their core, about brotherly love. However, in the novel, a main concern of the eldest Curtis brother is being able to keep custody of his two younger brothers, and this plot line is hardly mentioned in the movie. There are a few scenes where Darry voices his concerns about being unable to provide for Soda and Pony, along with worries about Child Protective Services taking them away. However, the movie never fully shows this struggle, though it was crucial to Darry's arc in the book . It's a pity, as it would've only made Patrick Swayze's performance better.

9 Ponyboy's School Project

The narrative device is not mentioned in the movie.

The book makes it clear that Ponyboy is writing his story for a school project, but the movie never specifies why Ponyboy is telling the audience his story. The book even emphasizes the fact that Ponyboy's a great writer and student , which includes a storyline dedicated to a teacher reaching out to Ponyboy to support him and make sure he's able to finish his assignment after the fire. The movie ignores all this, and it's one of the more contested changes. On one hand, the film format somewhat negates the need for the assignment premise. On the other hand, it would've given C. Thomas Howell's Ponyboy some more character development.

8 The Courtroom Scene Finale

The movie chooses a different ending.

The book ends in the courtroom , where Ponyboy takes the stand regarding Johnny killing Bob the Soc, and about his home life with Darry and Sodapop. The film mentions that, after the killing in self-defense and the fire, the only thing that the authorities really cared about was making sure that Ponyboy had a stable home life living with his brothers. However, it doesn't show any of the ending courtroom scenes where Ponyboy explains he's happiest with his brothers. This is decidedly one of the biggest differences between The Outsiders book and movie and takes away from the more emotional conclusion.

7 Blonde Hair Vs Black Hair

The movie creates a visual distinction between greasers and socs.

The book describes the Greasers as having all types of hair colors. Some even have blonde hair, including Dally whose hair is described as almost white . However, the movie chooses to give more distinction between the Greasers and the Socs by giving the Greasers dark black hair and the Socs lighter hair colors. It's not a significant difference to the plot and visually on the screen, and it makes sense as a further representation of the rivalry between the two groups, but it's still odd reading Dally's description and comparing Matt Dillon's movie look to Dally in the book. Nonetheless, it's one difference between The Outsiders book and movie that's easily forgiven.

6 Sodapop's Significance To Ponyboy

Deleted scenes add more moments of their closeness.

The film focuses more on Ponyboy and Johnny's relationship than focusing on Ponyboy's relationship with his older brothers. Notably, Ponyboy has a strained relationship with Darry but is incredibly close to Sodapop. This is clear in the movie, but not like in the book, much of which is dedicated to Ponyboy writing about his love and admiration for his brother . The Outsiders: The Complete Novel actually remedied this by including the full scene of Sodapop cuddling his baby brother in bed and Ponyboy asking him big life questions. It's just one of the deleted Sodapop scenes returned in the 4K remaster, which somewhat makes up for this huge change.

5 Clearly Explaining Johnny's Past

Johnny's rough home life is a bigger part of the novel.

The book spends a long time discussing Johnny Cade's (Ralph Macchio) life and past events, particularly being jumped by a group of Socs in a blue Mustang, one of them being the same Soc he stabs to protect Ponyboy . Understandably, this has turned Johnny into a nervous wreck. The film alludes to this event, and to his abusive home life that leads to his nervous demeanor, but it's not as clear as it is in the book. In fact, the little clues in the film might be missed if the viewer isn't familiar with his backstory. It is another small example of removing something that simply adds a little more character development.

4 Dally's Role Is Bigger

Matt dillon's star power made for a bigger role.

The Outsiders movie version focuses more on Dally (Matt Dillon) and his relation to Johnny and Ponyboy as he helps them go on the run after Johnny kills Bob the Soc. All the events that happen when the two go to Dally for help happen in the book as well, but since the film doesn't focus on Ponyboy's brothers Darry and Sodapop as much, Dally gets a much brighter spotlight than in the novel. This is actually one of the changes that works the best as it only gave Matt Dillon more opportunities to flesh out one of the coolest characters from the '80s.

3 No Rodeos

The movie ommitted the small yet emotional subplot.

The book mentions local rodeos multiple times and talks about how Sodapop wanted to own a horse called Mickey Mouse , and how he was crushed when the horse was sold to another farm. The stories work to contextualize the Oklahoma setting of the story, but the rodeos are never mentioned in the film. Although it's a small detail, it did provide characterization for Sodapop and provided a strong sense of location. On the other hand, out of the many differences between The Outsiders book and movie, this one is part of what makes the movie more universally relatable than the book.

2 Ponyboy Shutting Down After The Fire

The effects of johnny and dally's deaths have a bigger impact in the novel.

In the book, after learning that not only did Johnny die from his injuries during the fire, but also that Dally was killed by the police, Ponyboy shuts down and becomes sick both physically and mentally . Ponyboy becomes distraught, sleeps for days, and continually claims that he was the one who killed Bob, not Johnny. However, the film hurries things along by showing Ponyboy physically hurting from his injuries, but then quickly fighting through it, so he can go to the rumble with the Socs. It is a change that arguably hurt Ponyboy's complexity as a character.

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1 Ponyboy's Narration And Missing Moments

Little moments helped to make the novel a more fulfilling story.

The Outsiders movie does provide a lot of narration from Ponyboy, but it misses some insightful moments that the book covers through Ponyboy's inner thoughts. It's part of why the film struggles to use Ponyboy as the narrator at times . Moreover, small but compelling moments from the novel are left out of the film, like Ponyboy breaking a glass bottle to threaten a Soc, but then picking up the glass after so no one gets a flat tire. Whether they were cut for time, budget concerns, or Coppola's creative preferences, these omissions from the book kept the adaptation from achieving so much more.

To be fair, The Outsiders remains iconic and faithful to the core themes of S. E. Hinton's story even without these book scenes. However, considering the novel's depth, it's clear that The Outsiders should've stayed closer to Hinton's words. For those who've read the book and may want a deeper, more faithful adaptation of the novel, Francis Ford Coppola did a good job of filling in many of the missing book elements in The Outsiders: The Complete Novel.

The Outsiders

The outsiders review.

By Chris Barsanti

Facts and Figures

Year : 1983

Run time : 91 mins

In Theaters : Friday 25th March 1983

Box Office Worldwide : $25.7M

Budget : $10M

Distributed by : Warner Bros. Pictures

Production compaines : Warner Bros., American Zoetrope

Contactmusic.com : 3 / 5

Rotten Tomatoes : 66% Fresh: 23 Rotten: 12

IMDB : 7.2 / 10

Cast & Crew

Director : Francis Ford Coppola

Producer : Gray Frederickson , Fred Roos

Screenwriter : Kathleen Rowell

Starring : Matt Dillon as Dallas 'Dally' Winston, Ralph Macchio as Johnny Cade, C. Thomas Howell as Ponyboy Curtis, Patrick Swayze as Darrel 'Darry' Curtis, Rob Lowe as Sodapop Curtis, Emilio Estevez as Keith 'Two-Bit' Mathews, Tom Cruise as Steve Randle, Glenn Withrow as Tim Shepard, Diane Lane as Sherri 'Cherry' Valance, Leif Garrett as Bob Sheldon, Darren Dalton as Randy Anderson, Michelle Meyrink as Marcia, Gailard Sartain as Jerry Wood, Tom Waits as Buck Merrill, Sofia Coppola as Little Girl (as Domino), William Smith as Store Clerk

Also starring : Gray Frederickson , Fred Roos , Kathleen Rowell

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The Outsiders

• In a small Oklahoma town in 1964, the rivalry between two gangs, the poor Greasers and the rich Socs, heats up when one gang member accidentally kills a member of the other.
• It is 1961, and Tulsa, Oklahoma is divided in two along social lines. The youths of each side form gangs in line with these two camps: the working class Greasers and the wealthier South Side gang, the Socs. The two sides use any opportunity to niggle each other and whenever they meet, there is friction. Then one night, a gang of Socs attack two Greasers with a knife. This sets off a chain of events. — grantss
• Under everyone's noses, war is brewing in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma. On the one hand, the Greasers--tough, working-class rebels from the other side of the tracks--dream of a better world. On the other hand, the Socials, or Socs--privileged, bored-to-death college boys--have got it all figured out. And then, as tempers flare and a sinister undercurrent of simmering enmity invites violence, someone knifes a cocky Soc. As a result, two Greasers go on the lam. Now, the already tenuous truce is at stake; only a once-and-for-all, winner-take-all rumble between the two teen gangs can sort out the men from the boys. But when you're sixteen, there are so many things you haven't seen or done yet. What difference will it make if either of them wins? — Nick Riganas
• The year is 1964. There are 2 gangs divided the social class. One gang is the Greasers and the other is the Socs. Both hate each other and jump each other every now and then. One night though, things go too far and Ponyboy and Johnny are jumped. The results of the jumping cause a chain of events. — Ethangamer579
• The film opens with Ponyboy Curtis (C. Thomas Howell) sitting at his desk in his room, writing. He talks about walking home from the movies one night. As he is bouncing and messing with a ball, he recites parts of the movie that he's just seen when a group of guys pull up in a red Corvair. They start to call him a greaser because he has greasy hair, and he tries to evade them. They're the Socials, clean-cut teens dressed in Varsity letter jackets and chinos, also known as the rich kids or the South Side Socs. The Socs stop, get out, and attack Pony, knocking him to the ground as he struggles. The soc on top of Pony puts his knees on Pony's elbows, asking, "How would you like that haircut to begin just below the neck?" Ponyboy struggles but is unable to unpin himself. As the socs try and shut him up, the knife accidentally slips and cuts his head slightly. Hearing his screams, Pony's older brothers, Darrel (Patrick Swayze) and Sodapop (Rob Lowe) and the rest of their gang, Johnny Cade (Ralph Macchio), Dallas Winston (Matt Dillion), Steve Randall (Tom Cruise), and Two-Bit Matthews (Emilio Estevez) come to his rescue, chasing off the Socs. Darrel, Sodapop, and Ponyboy lost their parents in a car crash. Darrel, a high school grad with a job, acts as the father figure. Soda is a dropout who works at a gas station. The three are allowed to live together without parental supervision as long as they stay out of trouble. Pony is still in high school at Darry's insistence and is actually a good student, earning good grades. However, Pony is often absent-minded, getting into trouble when he doesn't let his older brothers know where he is after dark and other small slips. Darry is very protective of his two younger brothers, more so with Pony, since they are all still reeling from the trauma of losing their parents. Dallas, Johnny, and Ponyboy go to a drive-in movie and sit in the bleachers. Cherry (Diane Lane) quarrels with her Soc date and leaves his car, going to sit in front of the greasers with her friend . Dallas tries to chat her up but Cherry seems to connect more with Ponyboy and Johnny. Dallas finally says something offensive and Cherry, unafraid of his tough-guy attitude, tells him to shut his mouth. When Dallas reaches for her, Johnny stops him, being the only member of the group able to do so. Spurned, Dallas stalks off. Pony goes with Cherry to the concession stand. While waiting in line, they talk about their respective friends. Pony's view is that he and his friends are persecuted by the Socs because they're poor, dress differently and are often considered delinquents. Cherry counters, saying that her group has their own problems, ones that the greasers couldn't even imagine. Back at their seats, Two-Bit joins the group and after the movie ends, the three boys and two girls walk together chatting. Cherry's boyfriend, Bob, stops in his car nearby. He's drunk and harshly admonishes her for hanging out with the greasers. Two-Bit immediately pulls out the butterfly knife he carries and smashes the end off a bottle to use as a weapon. To avoid a violent fight, Cherry reluctantly goes with Bob. While they walk past Johnny's house, they hear Johnny's parents having a violent fight. Johnny decides he's going to sleep out in the vacant lot near his house until his parents stop fighting. When he arrives home, Ponyboy is harshly reprimanded by Darry for staying out so late. When his brother tries to stop the argument, Darry pushes Pony a bit too hard, spilling him to the floor. Pony runs out of the house despite Darry's attempts to apologize and he finds Johnny in the vacant lot. Still very much upset, Pony gets Johnny to walk to the local park with him. Not long after, the Socs find Ponyboy and Johnny in the park, still angry about the greasers trying to pick up Cherry and her friend. They mock both Pony and Johnny for having long, greasy hair and Pony throws an insult back. The Socs are further provoked when Pony spits at them and tries to run, making it as far as the park's fountain. The Socs knock Johnny to the ground and dunk Ponyboy's head in the water, nearly drowning him. Johnny pulls out a switchblade to stop them. Bob is left dead and everyone flees. Johnny, unusually calm only a few minutes after he kills Bob, decides that he and Pony should find Dallas, who will be able to help them in their predicament. They go to a house where Dallas had been partying with an old friend (a cameo by singer Tom Waits) and talk to him about hiding out. Dallas gives them instructions to board a train to a small village called Windrixville where they can hide out in an abandoned church. Johnny and Ponyboy hop a freight train and make their way, break into the church, and fall asleep. The next morning Johnny comes back with bologna and bread, cigarettes, a paperback copy of "Gone With the Wind" and, oddly, a bottle of peroxide. Pony is puzzled by the last item until Johnny tells him that they should cut their hair and dye Pony's blonde so they can't fit the descriptions the police will have for them. Johnny also mentions that if they have to appear before a judge, that the judge will order them to get their hair cut anyway. They cut their hair with Johnny's switchblade and Ponyboy dyes his blond. The two hide out in the church for several days, waiting for word from Dallas. The two spend several days playing cards, betting with cigarettes, Pony reads "Gone With the Wind" to Johnny, and they try to trap a rabbit. One morning, Pony wakes up early and sees the valley below the church in the sunrise, admiring its beauty. He recites a Robert Frost poem, "Nothing Gold Can Stay" that Johnny takes to heart. A few days later Dallas arrives and takes them out to eat. He tells Ponyboy about how the police are looking for Bob's killer, even hauling Dallas himself in for questioning. Soda and Darry are both worried about Pony's disappearance but Dallas has assured them that the two are safe. Johnny wants to turn himself in as it sounds like they can claim self-defense, but Dallas tries to discourage him, warning him of what can happen if Johnny gets jail time. On returning to the church, they find it burning and a group of young kids milling about with two adults and a school bus. The woman exclaims some kids are trapped inside. Johnny and Ponyboy feel responsible, thinking that one of them must've dropped a lit cigarette that sparked the fire. Over Dallas' harsh objection, they enter to rescue the kids, Dallas reluctantly following. They find the kids in a back room and carry them to safety, Dallas helping out. Suddenly the roof collapses and Johnny is badly burnt and his back is broken. Dallas pulls both of them to safety. EMS finally arrives and takes them back to their hometown and the hospital. The boys are all hailed as heroes, and Ponyboy is tearfully reunited with Darrel and Sodapop. The Socs and Greasers plan a big rumble to settle things after the death of Bob, and Cherry acts as the go-between: No knives or other weapons; fighting will only be hand-to-hand. Two-Bit and Pony go to the hospital to visit Dallas and Johnny. Johnny is suffering from horrible burns and is in traction, laying on his chest, seemingly paralyzed. The visit is very emotional and Johnny becomes very upset when a nurse tells him that his mother has come to visit. He doesn't want to see her, as he feels she doesn't care about him. He orders the nurse (a cameo by the novel's author, SE Hinton) to send her away, and faints. Pony and Two-Bit leave, shaken by the encounter. When they visit Dallas, he is arguing with a nurse. Dallas asks about Johnny and they tell him the outcome doesn't look promising. Dallas is desperate to join the big rumble and asks Two-Bit for his knife, talking about revenge for Johnny's sake. On the night of the rumble, despite signs of exhaustion, Ponyboy wants to go. Darrell reluctantly lets him participate, telling him and Soda to run if cops arrive. The Socs arrive and the big rumble gets underway in a heavy rainstorm as the groups pair off and start slugging. Both sides get their licks in but after a while the Socs retreat, the Greasers whooping with delight at their victory. Just before the first punch is thrown, Dallas arrives, having left the hospital. When the fight ends, Dallas grabs Pony and they drive to the hospital to see Johnny, who is weaker than ever. On the way, Dallas tells Pony to stay tough and nothing will ever faze him. When they arrive, Dallas tells Johnny that the Socs have been driven out of their territory for good. Johnny seems not to care and tells Pony to "stay gold". Johnny dies and Dallas becomes incredibly upset, dry-firing a pistol at a doctor and babbling madly before he runs off. Pony heads home to find Darrell and the rest of the gang nursing their wounds. He tells them that Johnny died and Dallas tore off in a fury. While Pony worries that Dallas will do something crazy, Dallas holds up a convenience store and is shot and wounded. He calls Pony's house, asking for a place to hide from the police. The cops chase him and shoot him when he waves the unloaded gun at them. The police open fire and his friends arrive just as he dies; his last word is "Pony". Pony faints from exhaustion. At the trial Cherry gives her testimony and Ponyboy is declared not guilty. Back at school Ponyboy is now neatly dressed and coiffed; Cherry ignores him and a teacher gives him an extension to finish his writing assignment. At home Darrel rides Ponyboy as Sodapop runs off into the night. The three brothers reunite and Sodapop tells Darrel to stop being so hard on Ponyboy, the three only have each other and they all need to get along. They have a group hug and return home. At home at his desk, Ponyboy opens the paperback copy of Gone With the Wind that they'd bought for Johnny and finds a note from his friend. Johnny tells him he thinks the Robert Frost poem Pony had recited while they watched the sunrise was telling them both to enjoy their youth. Pony opens his composition class notebook and begins to write his story, starting with the moment he left the movie theater: "When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I only had two things on my mind: Paul Newman, and a ride home", the first line from Hinton's novel.

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The Brutalist Review: Brady Corbet Creates A Dark Vision Of The New American Epic [Venice 2024]

• One of the best performances of Adrien Brody's career
• Devastating take on the American dream
• Some audiences may be turned off by the long run time

There's nothing that says "swing for the fences" like a three hour and 35 minute period drama about the American dream. But this one pays off for Brady Corbet, a director who has long been on the rise with films that caught on with niche audiences but haven't quite broken through to the mainstream. "The Brutalist" should change all that, at least among movie-going circles, with its unflinching take on the American epic and how the values that seemingly inform the myth of the American dream are perverted by the insidious fear of the Other. Adrien Brody puts in arguably the most compelling performance of his career, captivating the audience with a commanding screen presence. A movie of this length might not be an easy sell to casual audiences, but we have a feeling that "The Brutalist" is destined to become a classic .

"The Brutalist" begins in the aftermath of World War II , as the esteemed Brutalist architect László Toth (Brody) starts a new life in the United States, biding his time until his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and their niece Zsofia (Raffey Cassidy) are able to emigrate from Hungary as well. He bounces around for a while, first staying with a Hungarian cousin who moved to the U.S. before the war, before eventually landing a commission from an eccentric millionaire (a career-best Guy Pearce) to design and build a community center in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. After the chaos of the war and the horrors of the Holocaust, it seems as though László is finally able to move forward with his life. But opportunities that are given through the kindness of strangers are delicate things, easily taken back on a whim. Especially when, in spite of his attempts to contribute to an American community, he and his family are still seen as outsiders, the first to be blamed or suspected when things go wrong.

The dark side of the American dream

The elephant in the room is that "The Brutalist" is a good hour longer than what most people would consider an already relatively lengthy film. Bold choices are made, that's for sure. Yes, it's long, but it's paced well and never drags. It certainly helps that Brady Corbet includes an intermission, something that more directors should consider for longer films, because it really acts as a palate cleanser and gives the audience a nice burst of energy. "The Brutalist" is also divided cleverly. The first part is full of hope and optimism for the future, a sense that László is slowly but surely building something of value in his new country, while the second part sees it all turn to ash in László's mouth. Everyone is so eager to help him and his family, but only on their terms, for as long as it interests them, and never without strings attached. American beneficence is abundant, but remarkably fickle. Newsreel footage about the promise of the country is interspersed throughout the film, juxtaposing the pervasive rot perceived by László and Erzsébet. Europe may be the site of their trauma, but America is where their illusions died.

Aside from these narrative choices that make "The Brutalist" suitably epic in tone, Corbet takes the film in an interesting stylistic direction. He's always been a filmmaker eager to take risks — some of which have paid off, and some of which haven't, as evinced by the mixed reception of some of his previous films — but it seems like the sheer scale of "The Brutalist" focused his creative instincts in a way that makes this by far his most successful. It's clear that he had a very specific vision for this film, and he builds his own twisted version of Americana as seen through a scary funhouse mirror. When we get our first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, beacon of hope and freedom herself, even she's upside down.

Adrien Brody's best performance to date

But all of this would be for nothing were it not for the utter conviction that Adrien Brody brings to the challenging central role of László. A man who has seen his life's work reduced to metaphorical rubble but remains committed to starting anew, his noble intentions belie an incredibly complex figure. He can be alternately charming and obstinate, ambitious and apathetic, humble and arrogant. His desire to create is at the center of his character, but it is perpetually tinged by his own self-destructive tendencies born out of trauma. László is not always a likable character, a good husband, or a considerate friend, but he's always an engaging figure, and that's thanks to how much Brody pours into this role. Felicity Jones serves as a perfect counterpart as Erzsébet — although she's physically weakened as a result of severe malnutrition during the war, she is the intellectual, emotional, and moral strength of their relationship.

"The Brutalist" is not for the faint of heart — it's a challenging but ultimately incredibly rewarding watch . With the bold direction of Brady Corbet and the intensity of Brody's lead performance, it takes a look at the dark side of 1950s America, a time of immense prosperity and optimism wallpapering over fears and anxieties that would leave a stain on the entire era. This is an exciting new vision of the American epic film, which will no doubt cast a long shadow over cinema for years to come.

"The Brutalist" premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 1, and is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

‘Harvest’ Review: Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Brawny, Brutal, Beautiful Fable of a Torn-Up Farming Community

Adapting a Jim Crace novel for her first English-language feature, the Greek director immersively plunges audiences into the mud, sweat and tears of pre-industrial agriculture.

By Guy Lodge

Film Critic

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Uneasy with this vindictive turn of events is the village’s lone-wolf misfit, Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones, sporting a creditable semi-Scots burr) — a former townsman who came to farming through a spirited love of nature, and who was raised and educated alongside Kent, his mother having been employed as the young lord’s nursemaid. That class-straddling background makes Thirsk something of a go-between in the community, though it leaves him swiftly without allies once hostilities surface between factions.

Which they do, spiraling rapidly, when two further outsiders enter this hitherto placid spot of green. One is Earle (Arinzé Kene), a worldly cartographer hired by Kent to make the first map of the region, in the process giving titles and labels to landmarks and flora that were previously unnamed. The other is Jordan (Frank Dillane of TV’s “Fear the Walking Dead”), Kent’s cousin by marriage and the estate’s official heir, who turns up with brisk, decidedly non-communal ideas for turning the land into a profitable livestock farm. With his chilly hauteur and unflattering Prince Valiant hairdo, Jordan is a plain villain amid characters who otherwise collectively lurch between sympathetic victimhood and viciously cruel mob mentality. Thirsk may be the closest thing to a protagonist here, but he’s a teasingly passive one, loyal to the land above all else, with no evident desires or ambitions beyond that fidelity.

Though this isn’t an all-male collective — “Blue Jean” star Rosy McEwen makes an impression as one of the most reactionary villagers, with Teixeira tersely defiant as the first target of her ire — “Harvest” locates the imperiously masculine dynamics of ownership and competition on which this transitional era of history (and many before and since) pivoted, with personal wealth prioritized over the greater good of the people, to say nothing of the environment. The non-specific setting underlines the point that this is a narrative we’re still living through, not least in the age of climate change: Tsangari tellingly closes the film with a dedication to her own grandparents in Greece, “whose farmland is now a highway.”

Yet while “Harvest” is dense in construction and mulchy in atmosphere, it’s not a dour moral parable. There’s a mordant humor to its examination of class conflict and certain arcane traditions that probably should give way to modernity — a droll running joke involves the custom of instructively slamming children’s heads on the local boundary-marking stone — and the storytelling is so busy and fevered that the film, heavy in some respects, never feels stiff. If anything, it’s a bit antsy. The villagers are compelling as a mass but never fully articulated as individuals, despite fine, flavorful ensemble work across the board. Tsangari and Joslyn Barnes’ script outlines racial discrimination against the characters of Earle and Mistress Beldam, but doesn’t really get around to the subject.

Reviewed at Soho Screening Rooms, London, Aug. 22, 2024. In Venice Film Festival — Competition. Running time: 133 MIN.

• Production: (U.K.-Germany-France-Greece-U.S.) A Harvest Film Limited production in co-production with Sixteen Films Ltd, The Match Factory, Haos Film, Louverture Films, Why Not Prods. in association with Meraki Films, Roag Films. (World sales: The Match Factory, Cologne.) Producers: Rebecca O’Brien, Joslyn Barnes, Michael Weber, Viola Fügen, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Marie-Elena Dyche.
• Crew: Director: Athina Rachel Tsangari. Screenplay: Tsangari, Joslyn Barnes. Camera: Sean Price Williams. Editors: Matt Johnson, Nico Leunen. Music: Nicolas Becker, Ian Hassett, Caleb Landry Jones, Lexx.
• With: Caleb Landry Jones, Harry Melling, Rosy McEwen, Arinzé Kene, Thalissa Teixeira, Frank Dillane, Neil Leiper, Antonia Quirke. (English dialogue)

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The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time

By Alan Sepinwall

Alan Sepinwall

The thing that has always distinguished TV storytelling from its big-screen counterpart is the existence of individual episodes. We consume our series — even the ones that we binge — in distinct chunks, and the medium is at its best when it embraces this. The joy of watching an ongoing series comes as much from the separate steps on the journey as it does from the destination, if not more. Few pop-culture experiences are more satisfying than when your favorite show knocks it out of the park with a single chapter, whether it’s an episode that wildly deviates from the series’ norm, or just an incredibly well-executed version of the familiar formula.  

Still, that episodic nature makes TV fundamentally inconsistent. The greatest drama ever made , The Sopranos , was occasionally capable of duds like the Columbus Day episode. And even mediocre shows can churn out a single episode at the level of much stronger overall series.   For this Rolling Stone list of the 100 greatest episodes of all time, we looked at both the peak installments of classic series, as well as examples of lesser shows that managed to briefly punch way above their weight class. We have episodes from the Fifties all the way through this year. We stuck with narrative dramas and comedies only — so, no news, no reality TV, no sketch comedy, talk shows, etc. In a few cases, there are two-part episodes, but we mostly picked solo entries. And while it’s largely made up of American shows (as watched by our American staff), a handful of international entries made the final cut.

Fargo, “Bisquik” (Season 5, Episode 10)

Our list of classic episodes starts with its most recent entry, from a January 2024 installment of the great FX anthology drama inspired by the work of the Coen brothers. Fargo Season Five dealt with the growing sense of polarization in America, and the debts — both literal and figurative — that everyone feels they’re owed from everyone else. It all culminates in a long, surprising, utterly gorgeous scene where our firecracker of a heroine, Dot Lyon (Juno Temple) finds herself face-to-face with immortal sin-eater Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), who has come for a rematch of their clash in the season premiere. With her husband and daughter in the house with her, Dot declines to fight this terrifying man, and instead explains, patiently and with palpable kindness, that perhaps Ole Munch might prefer a world focused less on resentment and more on love. — Alan Sepinwall

The Cosby Show, “Theo’s Holiday” (Season 2, Episode 22)

There’s a temptation with these lists to immediately disqualify anything associated with the true monsters like Bill Cosby. But his crimes shouldn’t erase from the history books the wonderful work of everyone else involved in “Theo’s Holiday,” in which the Huxtables get together for an elaborate role-playing exercise to teach Theo (Malcolm Jamal-Warner) a lesson about the economics of life in, as he puts it, “the real world.” All the actors throws themselves into these larger-than-life characters, like Clair (Phylicia Rashad) as a cheery restaurant owner as well as a fast-talking furniture saleslady, or little Rudy (Keshia Knight Pulliam) as a powerful businesswoman. The idea of the whole clan teaming up to both mock Theo and help him out is so intoxicating that even his best friend Cockroach (Carl Anthony Payne II) admits, “I wish they did this kind of stuff at my house!” — A.S.  

South Park, “Scott Tenorman Must Die” (Season 5, Episode 4)

A show that features an anthropomorphized turd in a Christmas hat and at least one projectile vomit scene per episode, South Park has never been known as highbrow. Yet there are elements of “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” a Season Five episode focused on Cartman’s elaborate revenge plot against a high schooler who scammed him by selling his pubes, that are nothing less than virtuosic. There’s the plot itself, a retelling of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which culminates (spoiler alert, I guess) with the protagonist forcing a woman to unwittingly eat her own children. There’s the exquisite cameo appearance by Radiohead, the culmination of Scott Tenorman’s debasement. And there’s Cartman’s classic taunt, “Charade you are, Scott Tenorman,” a reference to an obscure track of Pink Floyd’s Animals. Co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have often referred to “Scott Tenorman Must Die” as the apex of Cartman’s villainy, marking the character’s transition from obnoxious troll to next-level sociopath. But really, the episode marks another transition entirely: that of Stone and Parker from poop joke purveyors to dark-comedy masters. — Ej Dickson

You’re the Worst, “There Is Not Currently a Problem” (Season 2, Episode 7)

Here’s an odd but welcome trend: FX not only has an excellent track record with extremely niche half-hour comedies (some of which you’ll find higher on this list), but many of them manage to weave thoughtful, even dramatic, material about mental health issues into their usual humor. The hip-hop comedy Dave did it with a terrific episode where we learn that Lil Dicky’s hype man GaTa struggles with bipolar disorder. The final Reservation Dogs season revolved around a character who’d spent much of his life institutionalized. And You’re the Worst — a romantic comedy about two selfish, immature people who would be horrified to learn they were the main characters in a romantic comedy — found a new level with an episode revealing that Gretchen (Aya Cash) suffers from clinical depression. Much of “There Is Not Currently a Problem” is fairly comedic: a bottle episode where the gang is stuck together with Gretchen and Jimmy (Chris Geere) because a local marathon has caused a traffic jam in their neighborhood. But this forced closeness comes while Gretchen is trapped in her latest depressive episode, with no choice but to finally reveal her condition to Jimmy — and to admit that she’s less worried that he’ll reject her for it than that he’ll become the latest man convinced he can “fix” her. Cash conveys every bit of the pain and fear Gretchen is experiencing, in a way that enriches the laughter rather than undercutting it. — A.S.  

In Treatment, “Alex: Week Eight” (Season 1, Episode 37)

Most episodes of this drama were presented as real-time therapy sessions between Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) and one of his patients, or Paul visiting his own shrink. Occasionally, though, outsiders found their way into Paul’s office, like Alex Prince, Sr. (Glynn Turman), the father of one of Paul’s patients, seeking answers as to why his son committed suicide. Alex Jr. had spent most of his sessions to that point painting his dad as such a monster, it should have been impossible for any actor to both live up to those stories and not seem like a cartoon. Turman, in one of the best dramatic performances you will ever see on television, somehow did it, channeling both the bogeyman and the grieving father, in a riveting two-hander with Byrne. — A.S.   

Bob’s Burgers, “Tina-rannosaurus Wrecks” (Season 3, Episode 7)

Bob’s Burgers loves puns, but “Tina-rannosaurus Wrecks” is a groaner of a title even for them. No matter, because the episode so expertly combines many of the series’ hallmarks into one tight, funny, awkward package. Once again, a well-meaning parenting gesture by Bob (H. Jon Benjamin) goes awry, when he lets Tina (Dan Mintz) drive the family station wagon in a nearly empty parking lot, and she somehow crashes into the only other car there. Once again, the Belchers find themselves on the verge of financial calamity, when the other car turns out to belong to Bob’s ruthless rival, Jimmy Pesto (Jay Johnston). Once again, the family gets mixed up in the plans of a lunatic, when insurance adjuster Chase (Bob Odenkirk) forces them to aid him in an insurance fraud scheme in order to get out of the mess with Jimmy. And, once again, Bob’s lovable but terrible children somehow prove surprisingly useful, when Tina uses her brother’s Casio keyboard to get incriminating evidence that frees them from Chase’s clutches. All’s well that ends… not necessarily well, but at least not substantially worse than usual. — A.S.

Enlightened, “Consider Helen” (Season 1, Episode 9)

Today, it seems almost obligatory for cable and streaming shows to devote one or two episodes a season to presenting the POV of a minor character. When future White Lotus creator Mike White did it with his first HBO series, Enlightened , it was still relatively rare. And in this case, the shifts in perspective came as a welcome, even necessary, relief from all the time spent in the head of the show’s fascinating but maddening main character, Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), a toxically narcissistic former executive trying to rebuild her life after a nervous breakdown. With “Consider Helen,” White moved the focus to Amy’s mother Helen (played by Dern’s real-life mom, the great Diane Ladd), to present a day in her life, to show what a chore it is to have to deal with such a pathologically needy child, and to make clear that Enlightened itself understood exactly how its audience would respond to Amy. — A.S.

Maude, “Maude’s Dilemma” (Season 1, Episodes 9 & 10)

This two-parter, in which Maude (Bea Arthur) is shocked to discover that she’s pregnant again at 47, and has to decide whether she wants to get an abortion, was so ahead of its time, even the original Supreme Court verdict on Roe v. Wade was two months away. Well after Maude decided to end her pregnancy, the rest of television shied away from the subject, often having pregnant characters suffer conveniently-timed miscarriages before they could make up their minds and potentially alienate viewers and sponsors. But “Maude’s Dilemma,” with a teleplay by future Golden Girls creator Susan Harris, ran toward the thorny subject, and handled it with both humor and grace. — A.S.

Scrubs, “My Screw Up” (Season 3, Episode 14)

There are plenty of shows we call dramedies, even though they’re really just half-hour dramas, as well as lots of alleged comedies that aren’t particularly interested in making the audience laugh. The hospital show Scrubs , though, was remarkably comfortable at balancing silliness and sadness throughout its run, especially in “My Screw Up.” Brendan Fraser reprises his role as Ben, wisecracking brother-in-law to John C. McGinley’s bitterly sarcastic Dr. Cox. Ben’s leukemia appeared to be in remission when last we saw him, so there’s room for him to relentlessly tease J.D. (Zach Braff) about having made out with both of Ben’s sisters, as well as a lighthearted subplot where Turk (Donald Faison) tries to convince Carla (Judy Reyes) to take his name when they’re married, in exchange for having a mole she hates removed. But things also get plausibly serious, even before we get to the Sixth Sense -style twist: Ben was the patient whose death earlier in the episode caused a rift between Cox and J.D., and Cox has been in denial about it ever since. Even the revelation that Cox has been imagining conversations with his dead friend is reflective of the show’s juggling of comedy and drama — it’s the dark mirror of how Scrubs generates so much humor from taking us inside the highly-distractible mind of J.D. — A.S.    

Watchmen, “This Extraordinary Being” (Episode 6)

Even for a series as sophisticated and layered as Watchmen , this episode is an acrobatic feat. In the most dramatic departure from the show’s source material, the 1980s comic of the same name, “This Extraordinary Being” tells the origin story of one of this world’s seminal vigilante superheroes, Hooded Justice (a man lionized in a modern-day TV show-within-the-show that kicks off the episode). Told almost entirely in black and white, it sees our current-day heroine Angela Abar (Regina King) — herself a vigilante who goes by Sister Night, when she’s not working her day job as a cop — sucked into the memories of her grandfather, Will Reeves, after swallowing a bottle of his “nostalgia pills.” Transported to 1930s New York, we watch Will (played as a young man by Jovan Adepo), and sometimes Angela-as-Will, join the NYPD, where he encounters racism so virulent, his fellow cops stage a near-lynching, covering him with a hood and briefly hanging him from a tree as a warning to stand down. The message he takes away, though, is that there is plenty of evil to fight in the world, even in his own precinct. He just has to do it undercover — appropriating for his costume the very hood and noose that had been used to terrorize him. With balletic camerawork, a period soundtrack of big band standards, and visceral performances from King and Adepo, the episode is a sweeping achievement that inverts a fundamental truth of the series’ world — this revered hero that everyone assumed was white is Black — and underscores one about ours: Justice often comes at a steep price. — Maria Fontoura

The Golden Girls, “Mrs. George Devereaux” (Season 6, Episode 9)

The Golden Girls experienced so many adventures together, as Dorothy (Bea Arthur), Rose (Betty White), Blanche (Rue McClanahan), and Sophia (Estelle Getty) lived together as pals and confidantes. But “Mrs. George Devereaux” is a truly touching treatment of grief and loss. Blanche, the most frivolous of the Girls (and the funniest), opens the door and beholds a strange sight: her late husband George, telling her that he faked his death and now wants her back. The episode explores how all the characters live with their different kinds of grief — and how that grief is what brought them here together in the first place. It has the most emotional resonance of any Golden Girls episode, but it’s also the funniest in terms of pure farcical comedy, as Dorothy gets swept up in a bizarre love triangle with two 1970s heartthrobs, guest stars Sonny Bono and Lyle Waggoner. As usual, Blanche gets the best line, when she confronts Cher’s ex-husband with the command, “Sonny Bono, get off my lanai!” — Rob Sheffield

SpongeBob SquarePants, “Pizza Delivery” (Season 1, Episode 5)

The absurdist humor that made SpongeBob SquarePants beloved across multiple generations is already at full strength in this early episode. At the end of another shift at the Krusty Krab, a customer calls in to order a pizza to be delivered to his home. Never mind that the restaurant doesn’t make pizzas: Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown) sees a few bucks to be earned, and somehow turns a Krabby Patty burger into a pizza, complete with box, then orders SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) and Squidward (Rodger Bumpass) to take it to its destination. Instead, SpongeBob’s usual difficulty with driving strands the odd couple far from Bikini Bottom, trying various bizarre methods to get home — all of them borrowed from the “pioneers,” like the idea of riding on giant rocks. In the end, we get one last, great punchline: The customer lives right next door to the Krusty Krab, and they could have just walked the pizza over to him. — A.S.

Roseanne, “War and Peace” (Season 5, Episode 14)

Both in its Nineties heyday and its modern reinvention as The Conners , Roseanne had a real knack for blending domestic comedy with candid material about poverty, addiction, sexuality, and more. In this terrific conclusion of a two-part story, Dan (John Goodman) gets hauled off to jail after beating up Fisher, the abusive boyfriend of Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), while Roseanne tends to her sister, and Darlene (Sara Gilbert) gets to briefly relish the sight of her disciplinarian father behind bars. “War and Peace” doesn’t hide from the horror of Jackie’s experience, but even its dark moments are flavored with sass, like when Roseanne warns Fisher, “If you ever come near her again, you’re gonna have to deal with me, and I am way more dangerous than Dan. I got a loose-meat restaurant. I know what to do with the body!”  — A.S.

The Dick Van Dyke Show, “Never Bathe on Saturday” (Season 4, Episode 27)

Somehow, the best showcase for Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore as one of TV’s all-time couples is in an episode where Moore is frequently off-camera. A romantic getaway for Rob and Laura goes horribly awry when Laura’s big toe gets stuck in a hotel bathtub faucet, the bathroom door gets locked, and Rob makes the ill-timed decision to draw a fake mustache on his upper lip that he can’t wipe off — leading every hotel worker who arrives to help assuming he’s up to no good. Written by Dick Van Dyke Show creator Carl Reiner, this installment keeps finding new and amusing ways to escalate the sticky situation, and to push the outer edge of the envelope of censorship circa 1965, with a story about the risk of other people seeing Laura naked. By this point in the series’ run, Reiner knew exactly how to use his leading man’s fluency with physical comedy, and how his leading lady’s voice on the other side of that locked door was all that was needed to sell Laura’s dismay at being trapped in such an embarrassing position. — A.S.

Black Mirror, “San Junipero” (Season 3, Episode 4)

What would your ideal afterlife look like? Black Mirror — the British dystopian anthology series with a nihilistic approach to rapidly-developing technology — is known for being a show that doesn’t only answer questions about the future but depicts the worst possible alternative you’ve never even considered. Maybe that’s why, when fans were introduced to the couple at the heart of “San Junipero,” and found the answer of the ideal afterlife to be an Eighties beach town party that never ends, they responded so fondly. Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) and Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) meet on a night out and quickly fall into a romantic entanglement. But what begins as a love story about two lesbians finding each other in a heaven on earth is quickly revealed to be a virtual reality — one where the elderly and those who have died can be uploaded and then live on forever as their younger selves. The two — both dying in real life — must deal with whether or not the love they’ve found in pixels is enough for both of their forevers. It’s a touching love story that embodies Black Mirror at its very best. — CT Jones

Sex and the City, “My Motherboard, My Self” (Season 4, Episode 8)

Family is, arguably, everywhere in Sex and the City — from those the core four start with their partners to the ones they marry into (have there ever been more terrifying mothers-in-law than Frances Sternhagen or Anne Meara?) and the one they build just among themselves. But when it comes to the blood relations of Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the show is surprisingly thin, which is what makes “My Motherboard, My Self” stand out so much. It’s not that the other subplots aren’t memorable — the endless physical comedy of Samantha losing her orgasm; Carrie’s Macintosh meltdown and trip to Manhattan 1990s mainstay Tekserve (R.I.P.), where technician Dmitri (a brilliantly dry Aasif Mandvi) rags on her for not “backing up” — but Miranda’s turn here feels different. As she attends her mother’s funeral in Philadelphia (where she is, apparently, from, and where she has, apparently, multiple siblings), we see a more human side of a character who until this point has largely maintained her station as “the analytical one.” (Though it’s notable that the most intimate moment she has in the City of Brotherly Love isn’t with a direct relation, but the fitting room attendant trying to sell her a bra.) While the show has been criticized for celebrating solipsistic behavior, this episode is a prime example of the four women grappling with their ability to be vulnerable. — Elisabeth Garber-Paul

Broad City, “Knockoffs” (Season 2, Episode 4)

Both stories in the stoner comedy’s most laugh-out-loud installment involve imitation products. In one, Ilana (Ilana Glazer) and her mother Bobbi (Susie Essman) travel into the sewers of Manhattan to obtain counterfeit designer purses. In the other, Abbi (Abbi Jacobson) is shocked when her boyfriend Jeremy (Stephen Schneider) asks her to peg him with a strap-on — a development that so thrills Ilana, she does an upside-down twerk on her friend’s behalf — then has to scramble to find a reasonable facsimile after her dishwasher melts Jeremy’s custom-made dildo. In the end, the replacements prove shoddier than the real thing, but “Knockoffs” is so perfectly constructed, and so memorable, that when the friends met Hillary Clinton in a later episode later, among the first things a flustered Abbi can think to tell her is, “I pegged!” — A.S.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Excuse” (Season 4, Episode 24)

When The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air went on the air in 1990, Will Smith was such an inexperienced actor that he literally mouthed the lines of his co-stars while they spoke. But it didn’t take long for Smith to learn his craft and land roles in dramatic movies like Six Degrees of Separation . That’s why the creative team behind this series knew he was ready for a Season Four episode where Will reunites with his father (played by Ben Vereen) 14 years after he walked out on the family, only to see him leave once again after they reconciled. “I’ll be a better father than he ever was, and I sure as hell don’t need him for that, ’cause ain’t a damn thing he could ever teach me about how to love my kids!” Smith roars, before breaking down in the arms of Uncle Phil. “How come he don’t want me, man?” For anyone who grew up without a father, the moment cut deep. “I shed a tear til this day every time I see this episode,” LeBron James wrote on Instagram in 2015. “This hit home for me growing up and I couldn’t hold my tears in. Til this day they still coming out when this episode come on.” — Andy Greene

Doctor Who, “Blink” (Season 3, Episode 10)

The scariest, cleverest episode of the British sci-fi institution Doctor Who features monsters who are elegant in their simplicity: the Weeping Angels, predatory aliens who resemble stone statues of angels, and who can only move when you’re not looking at them. Writer Steven Moffat places these disturbing creatures in service of a story that barely features the Doctor (David Tennant) and his then-companion Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), instead focusing on a young Carey Mulligan as Sally Sparrow, a woman who keeps running afoul of the Weeping Angels. Her only hope of surviving the ordeal comes in the form of a DVD Easter Egg that creates the illusion of the Doctor having a conversation with her, and even the Time Lord himself struggles to adequately explain all the seeming paradoxes contained within Moffat’s tale. “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,” he tells Sally, “but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.” Yet it all makes exciting sense by the end. — A.S.

Alias, “Truth Be Told” (Season 1, Episode 1)

Throughout his career, J.J. Abrams has struggled with endings, as anyone who sat through The Rise of Skywalker can tell you. Few, though, are better at beginnings, and the pilot episode of his spy drama Alias is so fantastic that it bought years of goodwill from viewers, no matter how nonsensical the plots grew as the show went along. While undercover agent Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) is in Taiwan being interrogated by a torture expert, we flash back through the events that led her here, starting with her double life as a grad student by day, CIA agent by night. This turns out to be a triple life when Sydney discovers that she’s been tricked into working for a terrorist organization called SD-6, and that her father, Jack (Victor Garber), is secretly her co-worker. Oh, and Sydney’s fiancé gets murdered on the order of SD-6 boss Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin), plus a half-dozen other characters have to be introduced, Sydney has to try on multiple hair colors and accents, and more. Between the fractured timeline and the multiple lies Sydney has to live at once, “Truth Be Told” should be absolute gibberish. But Abrams, in one of his earliest efforts as director as well as writer, keeps everything coherent and thrilling in an episode that made him into a star just as much as it did Jennifer Garner. — A.S.  

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “Mac Bangs Dennis’ Mom” (Season 2, Episode 4)

Most of the time, the Paddy’s Pub gang aim to screw over other people but really just end up screwing themselves, and that’s just what happens in this crude, tangled adventure. When Frank (Danny DeVito) promotes Charlie (Charlie Day) from a sleazy janitor to manager of the bar, he sets in motion a dizzying sequence of events that puts each character’s Achilles’ heels on full display: Mac’s (Rob McElhenny) sensitivity, Frank’s lost youth, Dennis’ (Glenn Howerton) pride, Charlie’s unrequited love, and Dee’s (Kaitlin Olson) conniving impulses. In order to get out of the grunt work Charlie left behind, Dennis goes on a mission to sleep with the unnamed character the Waitress (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), but ends up setting his sights on Mac’s mom (and later Charlie’s) when he finds out Mac banged his mom (and Frank’s ex-wife). Meanwhile, Charlie draws up a plan to finally bang the Waitress; Dennis’ sister Dee isn’t looking for sex, just power, as she plays the henchman to Charlie’s mastermind; and Frank just wants to bang any “young broad” who will give him the time of day. “That doesn’t make any sense,” Mac says to Charlie after encouraging Mac to sleep with Dennis’ mom. Charlie’s response pretty much sums up the entire FX sitcom: “It doesn’t have to.” — Maya Georgi

Grey’s Anatomy, “It’s the End of the World/As We Know It” (Season 2, Episodes 16 & 17)

Hearing main character Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) refuse to get out of bed for fear that she’ll die at work should have been a clue that it wouldn’t be a good week. But viewers were still terrified when the series seemingly tried its hardest to make every main character (plus guest stars Christina Ricci and Kyle Chandler) have near-death experiences in this two-parter, which began airing after Super Bowl XL. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) is in labor at the hospital waiting for her husband, who won’t answer his phone. Derek (Patrick Dempsey) can’t concentrate on saving his patient’s life while the man’s cell keeps going off (put two and two together here). And when a newbie paramedic shoves her hands into the chest cavity of a patient who’s bleeding out, it’s Meredith who learns that what’s currently killing him is unexploded ammunition that could go off at any minute, taking her and the entire O.R. with it. The bomb squad evacuates the floor, but if Derek leaves, Bailey’s husband dies. Meredith steps in for the paramedic, who’s had a panic attack, so now, if Meredith moves, she and Derek and Bailey’s husband die. Richard (James Pickens, Jr.) has a heart attack from the stress of the evacuation. Izzy (Katherine Heigl) and Alex (Justin Chambers) are off hooking up in a closet, which is also life-threatening if you consider Alex’s numerous confirmed STDs. And if Bailey, who is refusing to push without her husband being present, doesn’t give birth, she and the baby will die. It’s an all-in, melodramatic pivot for a series that has since become known for putting its main characters in life-threatening situations. And yet, in the midst of these increasingly heightened stakes, the standout scene remains George’s (T.J. Knight) gentle cajoling that finally convinces Bailey to push — and to name her son after him. “You’re Doctor Bailey,” he says, in a scene that remains one of the most tender of the entire series. “You don’t hide from a fight.”  — CTJ

Girls, “American Bitch” (Season 6, Episode 3)

If ever Hannah Horvath was a voice of a generation, this was it. Airing just a few months before the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017, this quiet cri de coeur — in which famous author Chuck Palmer (Matthew Rhys, nimble as ever) confronts Hannah (Lena Dunham) about a blog post she wrote slamming his alleged misconduct with several college girls — taps into every conversation we’re still having about power and consent. Chuck summons Hannah to his stately apartment, where she attempts to explain why taking advantage of his literary stature to hook up with young women is predatory, while he hurls every trick in the Bad Men Handbook at her: flattery (“You’re very bright”); faux honesty (“I’m a horny motherfucker with the impulse control of a toddler”); defensiveness (“These girls throw themselves at me!”); casual intimacy (“You’re more to me than just a pretty face”). With astonishing precision and economy, Dunham turns the tables such that by the end of the episode — that is, by the time Chuck and Hannah are lying clothed atop his bed, and he takes out his dick and flops it onto her thigh — Hannah has fallen prey to the very manipulations she was calling out. A hallmark moment in a show that will only age better with time. — M.F.

Everybody Loves Raymond, “Baggage” (Season 7, Episode 22)

Like Carl Reiner once did with The Dick Van Dyke Show , Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal liked to come up with stories by asking his writers what they’d been up to with their families lately. More often than not, there was a conflict that mapped pretty easily onto the Barone family, like an argument that writer Tucker Cawley had with his wife about who would put away the last suitcase left over from a recent vacation. The fictionalized version of it becomes a cold war of sorts between Ray (Ray Romano) and Debra (Patricia Heaton), even as Marie (Doris Roberts) compares the stalemate to a fight that once almost wrecked her marriage to Frank (Peter Boyle). (This leads to one of the great sitcom lines that makes zero sense out of context and seems absolutely logical in context: “Don’t let a suitcase filled with cheese be your big fork and spoon.”) The whole thing culminates in a slapstick battle between the spouses, demonstrating the impressive physical-comedy chops that Romano and Heaton developed over the series’ run. — A.S.  

King of the Hill, “Bobby Goes Nuts” (Season 6, Episode 1)

Some episodes made this list because they do innovative things with episodic structure, or because they have something deep to say about the human condition. This one’s here because Bobby Hill (Pamela Adlon) kicks a bunch of guys in the groin. Well, no. This one’s here because he learns to do this from taking a women’s self-defense class at the Y — at the unwitting urging of Hank (Mike Judge), who just wants his son to learn how to stand up to bullies — and incorporates not only the crotch attacks, but a high-pitched screech of, “THAT’S MY PURSE! I DON’T KNOW YOU!” every time he does it, just like he and his middle-aged, female classmates were taught. Sometimes, you just have to cherish the little things, you know? — A.S.  

Insecure, “High-Like” (Season 3, Episode 5)

The struggling women of Insecure can’t even catch a break when they head to Coachella to see Beyoncé headline. Newly unemployed Issa (Rae) needs everything to go perfectly for the group’s last hurrah before Tiffany (Amanda Seales) gives birth, while Molly (Yvonne Orji) is preoccupied with work, and Keli (Natasha Rothwell) just wants to have a good time. The girls (minus Tiffany, or so we thought…) take edibles and pop so much MDMA they are forced to miss Bey, instead finding themselves in a drug-fueled frenzy that makes the chaos and humor feel like they’re seeping through the screen. Keli takes “Beyoncé or bust” too far and pisses herself after getting Tasered by festival security. Tiffany cries in a closet and tells her husband, “It’s our weed, baby” after admitting to “one bite” of a pot brownie. Molly bugs out and types nonsense on her work laptop, while Issa insists the mess of the night is all her fault. For an episode that starts with a silly Thug Yoda appearance and ends with the abrupt, emotionally-charged return of Issa’s ex-boyfriend, Lawrence (Jay Ellis), it packs in one hell of a trip. — M.G.

Game of Thrones, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”  (Season 8, Episode 2)

Because Game of Thrones presented spectacle on a scale never before seen on television, it’s easy to forget that the series first became beloved when its budget was much smaller and it couldn’t afford to depict massive battles, dragon attacks, or ice zombie hordes. That stuff, when it came with frequency, was icing on the cake that was the deep roster of memorable characters George R.R. Martin had created, who the GoT writers brought to such vivid life. Even in its later, more epic seasons, the show was still most potent when it placed people first and carnage second. “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” takes place the evening before a coalition of heroes from across Westeros will face the Night King and his undead army. It’s almost all talking, as the characters have the kinds of conversations you’d expect when they don’t believe they’ll survive the next day. The most powerful of these is the moment that provides the episode with its title, as Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) realizes that, by the laws of Westeros, he can fulfill the dreams of his old friend Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) and grant her the knighthood she spent her whole life believing her gender disqualified her from achieving. The actual battle with the Night King winds up being the most visually underwhelming episode of the series, but writer Bryan Cogman’s love letter to these characters still resonates years later.  — A.S.

The Good Place, “Michael’s Gambit” (Season 1, Episode 13)

TV has a mixed track record with twist endings. For every Twilight Zone , it seems there are a half-dozen disasters like the Dexter season where Edward James Olmos was a ghost, or the Westworld season where Ed Harris and Jimmi Simpson were playing the same character — both ideas that fans sniffed out long before those series’ producers expected them to. But then there is the marvelous conclusion to the first season of the metaphysical comedy The Good Place . For the previous 12 episodes, Eleanor (Kristen Bell) and her friends had struggled to figure out why the seemingly perfect afterlife in which they found themselves had so many obvious flaws. In the end, it’s dum-dum Eleanor who’s the only one smart enough to see through the genial exterior of their host, Michael (Ted Danson), and recognize that, for all their worry of ending up in the Bad Place, “ This is the Bad Place!” In hindsight, the idea was clearly seeded; some viewers did guess it in advance, but not so many that it ruined the surprise for everyone else. Rather than undercut everything that happened before, the twist is in keeping with the show’s basic premise about heaven being not all it’s cracked up to be. And it set the series off in new, increasingly wild directions, rather than repeating the same jokes about fro-yo for years on end. — A.S.

Star Trek, “City on the Edge of Forever” (Season 1, Episode 28)

This episode, written by author Harlan Ellison, offers one time-travel tragedy to rule them all. When a deliriously ill Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) staggers through a time portal on a mysterious planet, he somehow alters history enough that the Enterprise is no longer in orbit above the away team. It’s up to Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) to follow their friend, winding up in Depression-era New York, where interplanetary lothario Jim Kirk finds himself falling hard for do-gooder Edith Keeler (Joan Collins). Unfortunately, Spock figures out that Edith is a pivot point for the future of humanity, where her life will ironically lead to centuries of pain and misery, while her death will lead to the timeline our heroes know well. Torn between his duty to the galaxy and the desires of his own heart, Kirk allows Edith to be fatally struck by a car, in a tearjerker ending that wound up echoing throughout the future of TV science fiction. — A.S.

My So-Called Life, ”Pilot” (Episode 1)

Meet Angela Chase, a high school sophomore who offers us a look into her life in a mundane suburb of Pittsburgh. She has a major crush on Jordan Catalano (“I just like how he’s always leaning. Against stuff. He leans great”) and is quite possibly the only person in history to be jealous of Anne Frank (“She was stuck in an attic for three years with this guy she really liked”). My So-Called Life premiered 30 years ago, giving teens a much more realistic portrayal of what it’s like to endure the “battlefield” that is high school over primetime soap operas like 90210. And the pilot lays that groundwork perfectly, with Angela (Claire Danes) narrating as she navigates her strained relationship with her mom, outgrows her best friend and abandons her for two cool, kindred spirits, and, yes, watches Jordan (Jared Leto) excel at leaning. A battlefield indeed. — Angie Martoccio

Master of None, “Thanksgiving” (Season 2, Episode 8)

Though Aziz Ansari was star, frequent writer, and occasional director of his series about an actor named Dev trying to find meaning in his life, he periodically turned over episodes from the first two seasons to other characters, demonstrating that their stories had just as much richness as Dev’s, if not more. “Thanksgiving” tracks many years of the holiday, as Dev’s best friend Denise (Lena Waithe, who co-wrote the episode with Ansari) gradually comes out to her family, slowly but surely wearing down the resistance of her mother (Angela Bassett), aunt (Kym Whitley), and grandmother (Venida Evans). Partly inspired by Waithe’s own coming-out story, the warm and knowing episode was such a creative success that when the series finally returned for a third season four years later, it was built entirely around Denise’s marriage, with Dev now a minor figure in what was once his own show. — A.S.

For All Mankind, “The Grey” (Season 2, Episode 10)

The second season of this sci-fi drama, set in an alternate timeline where the Soviets beat America to the moon, triggering a never-ending space race, is the platonic ideal of the intensely serialized, “10-hour Movie” approach so much of dramatic television has taken in the years since The Wire , and that so few shows actually do well. Everything that happens throughout Season Two, even the parts that seem slow and pointless when you first watch them, have thrilling payoffs in the finale , where Earth seems on the verge of nuclear Armageddon, while American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts wage war on and around the moon. All the earlier subplots matter, like Gordo (Michael Dorman) putting his new devotion to jogging to good use when he and ex-wife Tracy (Sarah Jones) have to run across the lunar surface, clad only in spacesuits jury-rigged out of duct tape, to prevent a nuclear meltdown. — A.S.

St. Elsewhere, “Time Heals” (Season 4, Episodes 17 & 18)  

This innovative hospital drama pushed the boundaries of its format throughout its run. One episode was set largely in the afterlife. Another told a quartet of stories about the stages of life from birth through death. The most audacious, and satisfying, of these, is the two-part “Time Heals,” which aired over consecutive nights. As St. Eligius prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary, we get glimpses of the hospital across the decades, and see how Dr. Westphall (Ed Flanders), Dr. Craig (William Daniels), and the other senior members of the staff each came to work there. Beyond all the backstory — including a great guest turn by Edward Hermann as Father McCabe, the priest who founded the hospital and helped raise the orphaned Westphall — “Time Heals” impresses because each vignette from the past is presented in the style of movies (or, in some cases, television) of that period: Scenes in the 1930s are in black and white, ones in the Sixties are much more brightly lit, and so on. — A.S.

Larry Sanders, “Flip” (Season 6, Episode 12)

“You could sense there would never be another show like that again,” The Larry Sanders  Show actress Ileana Douglas said of the show’s final scene. “And there hasn’t been.” As Rip Torn, Jeffrey Tambor, and show creator Garry Shandling group-hug in an empty studio, a poignant sadness infuses the acerbic wit that Shandling’s revolutionary series displayed for six seasons. Set around Larry’s final show, the Peabody Award-winning episode features gags that remain timeless: Jim Carrey serenading Larry on-air while excoriating him off-air, Tom Petty telling Clint Black to “quiet down, cowpoke” before getting into a fistfight with Greg Kinnear, and Carol Burnett and Ellen DeGeneres catching Larry in a lie that destroys both the show-within-the-show itself and Larry’s glass-fragile ego. It’s a brilliant ending that balances pathos (“I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do without you,” Larry says to his audience before choking up. “God bless you. You may now flip”) with the series’ trademark send-up of Hollywood phoniness (Torn instinctively telling a bumped Bruno Kirby on the last show that “we’ll have you on another time.”) The show that invented the modern sitcom and stuck the landing perfectly. — Jason Newman

Orange Is the New Black, “Toast Can’t Never Be Bread Again” (Season 4, Episode 13) 

The Netflix prison series is the only show in Emmy history to be reclassified from the comedy categories to the drama ones, in part because its tone was so elusive, even to the people making it. But when Orange wanted to get totally serious, it was incredible, like in this episode set in the aftermath of the shocking death of beloved inmate Poussey at the hands of a guard. As Taystee (Danielle Brooks) and the other women grieve the loss of Poussey, then fume at the realization that the guard will go unpunished while most of them are stuck behind bars for much lesser crimes, their pain and rage boils over into a prison riot that will take up the entire following season. — A.S.

The Andy Griffith Show, “Opie the Birdman” (Season 4, Episode 1)

The Andy Griffith Show set the template for broad, light, homespun small-town humor, but the best episode of the long-running 1960s show is as raw as a modern prestige TV feelings-fest. Gifted a slingshot by Don Knots’ iconically bumbling deputy Barney Fife, a young Opie Taylor (played by a nine-year-old Ron Howard) accidentally kills a bird, orphaning its three young offspring. “You gonna give me a whippin’?” Opie asks his father, Sheriff Andy Taylor, played by the show’s star, Andy Griffith. Not this time. Instead, TV’s all-time cool-headed dad simply opens Opie’s window so his boy can listen to the newly motherless baby birds in the tree outside, filling the Mayberry night with their desolate emo chirps. Howard later said the tears he cried in the scene where he kills the bird were real, because he was thinking of his recently deceased dog. The episode doesn’t have any big laughs, a bold move considering it was a season-opener. But by breaking with formula, they made a heartbreaking classic. — Jon Dolan

Good Times, “The I.Q. Test” (Season 2, Episode 7)

As the Seventies sitcom’s iconic gospel theme song noted, there was a lot of scratchin’ and survivin’ to do for the Evans family in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects. And the Maude spinoff was so smart in illustrating the many ways the deck was stacked against Florida (Esther Rolle), James (John Amos), and their kids. In “The I.Q. Test,” everyone is shocked when gifted youngest son Michael (Ralph Carter) flunks a school standardized test, until Michael explains that he refused to finish after recognizing that the test is racially biased, with questions geared towards the experience of reasonably well-off white children. The episode nimbly addresses systemic problems in a way that few shows were even thinking about at the time, much less willing to incorporate into their scripts. And it does it while still having some fun with the situation, through the obliviousness of the white test proctor. — A.S.

Moonlighting, “Atomic Shakespeare” (Season 3, Episode 7)

At the point “Atomic Shakespeare” rolled around in the third season of Moonlighting , the private detective comedy had already established two things: 1) that the onscreen chemistry of co-stars Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd was as scorching as any couple — even an unconsummated one like this — ever put on television; and 2) that the show’s writers didn’t feel in any way bound by the conventions of genre or era, as they had already done a black-and-white film noir tribute, as well as put Willis’ David into a musical number helmed by Singin’ in the Rain director Stanley Donen. So it felt wholly natural to translate the familiar David and Maddie dynamic back to Shakespearean times, with a postmodern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew , with Willis and Shepherd playing David and Maddie-flavored versions of Petrucchio and Kate, and that at various points features ninjas, a horse wearing sunglasses, and wannabe blues singer Willis wailing on the classic rock hit “Good Lovin’.” The episode even gets away with rewriting the Bard: Instead of Kate submitting to Petrucchio’s insistence that the sun is in fact the moon, as a way of humoring her new husband, she instead stands her ground and gets him to admit that, “My wife hath called it: ’Tis the sun, and not the moon at all!” — A.S.

Severance, “The We We Are” (Season 1, Episode 9)

By the time we reach the Season One finale of the satirical workplace thriller Severance , the employees of the macrodata refinement department of Lumon Industries have reached their boiling point. Part of a cohort who volunteered for a surgical procedure that separates their work selves, called “Innies,” from their personal selves, called “Outies,” they all live bifurcated lives, where one half has no clue what the other half does. But now, the Innies, sure they’re getting the short end of the deal, are fed up. With the help of Dylan (Zach Cherry), who hacks into a control room, Helly (Britt Lower), Mark (Adam Scott), and Irving (John Turturro) find a way to inhabit their Outie personas — and, as a result, learn all kinds of things about themselves that they aren’t fully prepared to know. Mark faces his wife’s death in a car accident. Irving tries to reignite his workplace romance with Burt (Christopher Walken), who retired his Innie self. And Helly is shocked to discover she’s descended from the family that championed Lumon’s severance procedure. A master class in building and maintaining tension, the episode reaches a heart-racing crescendo before an abrupt, cliffhanger ending. Premiering two years after the pandemic, as many employees returned to the office with shifted priorities and revamped notions of “work-life balance,” the Dan Erickson-created, Ben Stiller -directed series captures something essential about our modern malaise. But as the mirror maze of this episode shows, completely severing work and home may not be the fix we think it would. — Kalia Richardson

Review With Forrest MacNeil, “Pancakes, Divorce, Pancakes” (Season 1, Episode 3)

In this cult comedy, Andy Daly plays Forrest MacNeil, a pompous fool who has committed himself to the self-destructive task of undergoing and reviewing whatever life experiences his viewers ask him to. Installments prior to this one saw Forrest becoming addicted to cocaine, acting racist, and trying to make a sex tape. But the true folly of the exercise doesn’t hit until the third episode, where two different binge-eating assignments are wrapped around Forrest having to divorce his wife, without even being allowed to explain to her why he’s doing it. It’s a classic case of a joke building and building, until we get a traumatized Forrest declaring to his awful audience, “Perhaps I simply understood, from the darkest corner of my soul, that these pancakes couldn’t kill me, because I was already dead.” — A.S.

Homeland, “Q&A” (Season 2, Episode 5)

When this spy thriller about domestic terrorism ended its first season without brainwashed double agent Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) going through with a planned suicide bombing, it felt like a failure of nerve from the creators of a show that would have been best served as a one-and-done. But the first half of Season Two, featuring an ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Brody and CIA analyst Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), was excellent, and led to the series’ single-best episode, where Brody gets arrested and Carrie is given a limited window to interrogate him in the hopes of turning him into an asset. Danes and Lewis put on a mesmerizing acting duet, so potent it’s easy to ignore a silly subplot about Brody’s daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor) and her boyfriend Finn (a young Timothée Chalamet) getting into a hit-and-run incident. It was largely downhill for Homeland from here, at least until the producers were finally willing to kill off Brody for real, but that takes nothing from “Q&A.” — A.S.

China Beach, “Hello Goodbye” (Season 4, Episode 16)

Long before cable and streaming dramas began to experiment with fractured timelines, there was the final season of this wildly underrated series about the staff of a U.S. Army hospital base during the Vietnam War. Episodes bounced back and forth between events at various points in the war and in the lives of nurse Colleen McMurphy (Dana Delany) and her surviving colleagues throughout the Seventies and Eighties. Much of the series finale takes place in 1988, as recovering alcoholic McMurphy warily attends a China Beach reunion event, then joins her pals in an impromptu (and incredibly poignant) visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. But “Hello Goodbye” also takes us back to China Beach one last time, to show us McMurphy caring for a dying soldier she knows she can’t save, as a closing reminder of the costs of war, whether or not you fight in them. — A.S.  

The Jeffersons, “Sorry, Wrong Meeting” (Season 7, Episode 14)

All in the Family , the parent show of The Jeffersons , had already done a story about the Ku Klux Klan four years prior to the KKK-themed “Sorry, Wrong Meeting.” But the very nature of the spinoff and its leading man made the latter episode feel anything like a rehash. A racist neighbor decides that he can’t tolerate the presence of Black tenants like George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) and hosts a Klan rally to drive this undesirable element out of the building. But he invites the supremely WASPy Tom Willis (Franklin Cover), not realizing that Tom is best friends with George. Tom mistakenly assumes that the meeting will be about a recent spate of break-ins, and later suggests George attend with him. It’s a perfect set-up for both comedy and drama, as an oblivious George enters and cheers on what he thinks is rhetoric aimed solely at low-class criminals, rather than an upstanding businessman like himself, while the meeting’s vile host is shocked by his presence. But then some earlier business about CPR training leads to a great, dramatic climax: This spectacle agitates the Klan leader into a heart attack, and George turns out to be the only one in the room capable of saving the life of someone who thinks of him as less than human. — A.S.

What We Do in the Shadows, “On the Run” (Season 2, Episode 6)

For a show that specializes in absurdist, nonsensical humor, creator Jemaine Clement and company take it next-level with “On the Run.” The episode plucks pompous vampire Laszlo ( Matt Berry , who in July finally got an Emmy nomination for his work on this show) out of Staten Island, where he lives with four roommates — his undead wife Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Prosch), 760-year-old Nandor (Kayvan Novak), and Nandor’s familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) — and relocates him to small-town Pennsylvania, where he’s hoping to escape an old friend (Mark Hamill) who’s come to collect on a nearly two-century-old debt of unpaid rent. A stranger in a strange land, Laszlo goes undercover as a “regular human bartender” named Jackie Daytona and, naturally, becomes an avid supporter of the local girls’ volleyball team. His disguise of dark-wash jeans and a toothpick is enough to fool his pursuer… until a mirror (and the removal of the toothpick from his mouth) exposes his true identity. Fully withdrawn from the show’s usual despondent setting, “On the Run” humorously plays Laszlo’s macabre nature against his desire to help 14-year-old girls make it to their state championship. What more could you want from a small-town, salt-of-the-earth bloodsucker? — CTJ

Friday Night Lights, “Mud Bowl” (Season 1, Episode 20)

When a train derailment near the school forces the relocation of a crucial playoff game, Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler), seeking a neutral battleground, opts for the most retro possible site: a cow pasture that turns into a swampy mess after a downpour starts during the contest. While everyone else thinks the coach has lost his mind by eschewing a modern facility, he sees it as a back-to-basics location that will allow himself, his players, and the Dillon High School fans to reconnect with the pure essence of the sport, rather than all of the usual cynical distractions. In the same way, “Mud Bowl” provides the most concentrated blast of emotions that this most heart-tugging of all dramas ever provided: the joy of seeing the Panthers have fun and play well despite the weather conditions, and the horror of Tyra (Adrianne Palicki) barely fighting off a rapist while skipping the game to study. — A.S.

Better Things, “Batceañera” (Season 4, Episode 9)

Pamela Adlon’s stunning, semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about Sam Fox, a single mom-slash-actress raising three daughters, is packed with installments that feel worthy of being called the best, but “Batceñera” brilliantly captures what makes this underrated gem of a show so special. It opens with a surprise: Frankie (Hannah Alligood), Sam’s headstrong middle daughter, perfectly reenacting a Jerry Lewis bit from Who’s Minding the Store? set to composer Leroy Anderson’s “The Typewriter.” The heart of the episode is the blending of a bat mitzvah and a quinceañera for 15-year-old Frankie and her friend Reinita, respectively. The episode has everything: carnitas and knishes, a replica of Frida Kahlo’s suit, an all-female mariachi band, great needle-drops, poignant mother-daughter exchanges with each girl, Sam’s ex finally feeling a bit of proper shame for not being there for his kids, and much, much more. It’s a batceañera you never want to end. — Lisa Tozzi

The Honeymooners, “The Man From Space” (Episode 14)

For fans of The Honeymooners , it’s impossible to choose an all-time favorite episode, but like Jackie Gleason himself, “The Man From Space” is one of the greats. Originally airing on New Year’s Eve 1955, it pit Gleason’s blustering Ralph Kramden against his dimwitted pal o’ mine Ed Norton (Art Carney) in the Raccoon Lodge costume contest. Norton rents his outfit — a foppish French getup that’s supposed to evoke the engineer who built the sewers of Paris — while Ralph aims to prove he can do better by making a costume out of everyday items: a flashlight, the ice-box door, a kitchen pot as a helmet. His vision is “the man from space,” but neither his long-suffering wife Alice (Audrey Meadows) nor Norton take it that way. When the live audience finally sees Ralph emerge in all his resplendent glory, their reaction is unhinged, even as pieces of his spacesuit unexpectedly fall to the floor, teeing up a classic Gleason ad lib: “Let me have that,” he barks at Alice, “that’s my denaturizer.” The final scene at the costume party, with Norton barging in from his shift in the sewer in a gas mask, is one for the ages. — Joseph Hudak

Six Feet Under, “Everyone’s Waiting” (Season 5, Episode 12)

Alan Ball’s HBO drama usually kicked off its episodes with a grisly and/or highly ironic death. For the series finale, however, the showrunner opted for something a little different: He’d begin the last chapter of the Fisher family and their associates not with a life being snuffed out, but with a birth — and then he’d end the show not with one death, but a dozen. Having spent the bulk of its swan song tying up all of its loose narrative ends, Six Feet Under then shows us how every one of its surviving main characters would eventually shuffle off this mortal coil: Matriarch Ruth Fisher will die of old age with her family around her; Federico has a heart attack on a cruise ship; David’s security-guard husband Keith is murdered during a robbery, etc. Set to the Sia song “Breathe,” this justly praised montage doubles as a full-frontal assault on your tear ducts. It saves Claire’s passing for last, and before she takes her last breath at age 102, we see evidence of friends, loved ones, professional accolades, and personal memories all around her. For a series so devoted to sudden death, it goes out with a tribute to a long life well-lived. — David Fear

Columbo, “Etude in Black” (Season 2, Episode 1)

As rumpled homicide detective Lt. Columbo, Peter Falk was so superhumanly charming that he could have onscreen chemistry with a doorknob. But the iconic mystery series was at its best whenever Falk had a strong foil. This episode, with the dogged cop trying to prove a famous orchestra conductor murdered his mistress, has a home-field advantage in this regard, as the bad guy is played by Falk’s close friend and frequent collaborator John Cassavetes. Beyond the actors’ ease around one another, the dynamic crackles because the Columbo formula depends on the killers being too arrogant to assume this mumbling schnook could possibly outsmart them — and Cassavetes had a gift for playing smug and irritated. — A.S.

Friends, “The One Where Everybody Finds Out” (Season 5, Episode 14)

The best Friends moments come from full-ensemble episodes (Season Three’s “ The One Where No One’s Ready ,” Season Seven’s “ The One With Monica’s Thunder ”) where all six buds join forces and create a killing floor of comedy. The result is always a propulsive 22 minutes that doesn’t have a single dull moment, and “ The One Where Everybody Finds Out ” is this dynamic at its best. Secret’s out: Everyone has found out about Monica and Chandler’s relationship (OK, maybe Ross is a little late), and the gang play a game of chicken, one-upping each other to see who cracks first. Phoebe’s line, “They don’t know that we know they know we know!” embodies everything great about this episode, and the wit and wordplay that make the series a classic. No surprise it was nominated for three Emmys. — A.M.

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‘Harvest’ Review: Athina Rachel Tsangari Sublimates Her Voice in Gorgeous, Overlong Period Fable

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The announcement of a third feature, “Harvest,” world premiering at Venice, nine years on from “Chevalier,” was cause for genuine excitement among Tsangari heads. Forays into a TV miniseries (“Trigonometry” in 2020) and regular producing gigs have been no substitute for a feature film brewed in her singular mind palace. So, how does “Harvest” stack up? Related Stories The 17 Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in September, from ‘Fair Play’ to ‘Emily the Criminal’ Jenna Ortega Says Female ‘Spinoff’ Twists on Male Franchises Isn’t Progress: ‘I Don’t Want to See’ a ‘Jamie Bond’ Movie

At first glance, it seems like Tsangari has totally switched things up. Her first literary adaptation (both previous films were her original ideas) plunges us into the world dreamed up by novelist Jim Crace. In an unspecified village in the wilds of Scotland on the cusp of industrial change, Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry-Jones) is in love with land. He forages bugs from trees, then skinny-dips in a deserted lake. On returning to his village, he finds it is on fire.

As with many of the dramatic events in “Harvest” the medium is the message with imagery that further burnishes the reputation of rising DP star Sean Price Williams. Having first captured the serenity of this place through Walter’s solo revelry, now he captures its ashy filth and danger. This is a film with a comprehensive visual grammar that does not settle for one viewpoint of its absorbing setting. A sense of the charming creativity of living so close to the land is felt when a young girl paints her face using the yellow of a buttercup — she is vying to be crowned “Gleaning Queen.” 

In this remote place, Walter is an outsider among outsiders. He is distrusted by most of the villagers, save lover Kitty (Rosy McEwen) because of his friendship with Master Kent (Harry Melling), another soft man but the closest thing to an authority figure here. Walter’s mother was Master Kent’s milk nurse and they shared childhoods. Adulthood has united them in another way, for they are now both widowers and grief clings to the edges of their respective solitudes. 

They are both out-of-step with the herd when three strangers are found by the lake and the villagers descend — locking the two men in the pillory and shaving the head of the woman. Master Kent does not know how to use the pillory key and hesitates, nervously. Melling oozes the quiet desperation of a boy in over his head, complicating and enriching his character’s objective position of power. 

Head shaved, Beldam is let go. With her friends in the pillory, she does not go far. Walter often spots her running hither and thither, seeming free in contrast with the increasingly preoccupied villagers for a harbinger of change has arrived in the form of the map-maker Quill (Arinzé Kene).

The plot is very much not the point of “Harvest,” and a deliberate vagueness surrounds key events. Later, a man dies, and who’s to say whether it was from murder, suicide or exposure to the elements. We see through Walter’s eyes, who is rarely around when key things happen and frequently unsure of how he can intervene for the better. “Some hero you are, Walter Thirsk,” bellows the man with the leg wound, with contempt. His point stands, although the film treats Walter’s relative ineffectiveness softly, as it does Master Kent’s. There is a sweetness to Tsangari’s depiction of men who technically have power but are too hesitant to make it count. 

Despite its intentionality, the vagueness of the plot stretched across 130 minutes becomes testing. There is an underwritten aspect to the way that racial tensions are presented, alternately ignored and hinted at without a cohesive perspective. Although made up of many mesmerizing moving parts, “Harvest” ends up as feeling less than the sum of these. There are sparks of what makes an Athina Rachel Tsangari film great within this impressionistic period fable, even if — unlike the fires that bookend the film — it never fully takes the blaze.

“Harvest” world premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival . It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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Vicious Reviews Don't Stop Dennis Quaid from Picking New Movie as His Career Favorite

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For the longest time, Dennis Quaid , whose film career spans nearly 50 years, has considered one film experience as his favorite. In a recent MovieWeb interview, the star of the upcoming Reagan biopic said that his role as astronaut Gordon Cooper in 1983’s The Right Stuff always took the No. 1 spot in his heart. Until now.

Quaid plays President Ronald Reagan in his new biopic, which is mostly set in the 1980s. He said playing Reagan made him ponder his experience in 1983’s The Right Stuff, which initially gave him a different measure for ranking his movies. “The experience I had making [films] is very big for me, because I’d watch a movie and I remember what I was doing on that day. [It’s] been The Right Stuff for most of my career, because astronauts were big with me when I was a kid.” He added:

“ I wound up playing my hero, Gordon Cooper, and I got a pilot’s license from that movie , and [co-star] Chuck Yeager was on the set every day and we shot at Edwards Air Force Base. But I have to say, that after 40 years, there's a new movie at the top and that's Reagan , just because of the personal impact on me. Like I said, I have a different perspective than a lot of the other people who watch the movies, because it's personal. And this one has got to take the No. 1 spot now.”

From dusty small-town roots, to the glitter of Hollywood and then on to commanding the world stage, Reagan is a cinematic journey of overcoming the odds. Told through the voice of Viktor Petrovich, a former KGB agent whose life becomes inextricably linked with Ronald Reagan's when Reagan first caught the Soviets’ attention as an actor in Hollywood, this film offers a perspective as unique as it is captivating. Dennis Quaid brings to life a story that transcends the boundaries of a traditional biopic, offering a profound exploration of the enduring impact of the power of one man who overcame the odds, sustained by the love of a woman who supported him in his journey.

Reagan Features an All-Star Cast

As the Reagan trailer reveals, Quaid seamlessly morphs into the 40th President of the United States , a dynamic force in history known for generating short-term economic growth and significant Soviet pushback. The film tracks Reagan’s life, from childhood to his time in the Oval Office. Expect many scenes that were shot exclusively at the famous Reagan Ranch just north of Los Angeles, California.

Best Dennis Quaid Performances, Ranked

Dennis Quaid has had an acting career that spans more than one generation. These are the best performances over the course of his stellar career.

Directed by Sean McNamara ( Shadrach ) and written by Howard Klausner ( The Secret Handshake ), the film also stars Penelope Ann Miller as Nancy Reagan. “It’s something special,” Quaid noted of his costar’s performance. Also featured in the film are: Mena Suvari as Reagan’s ex-wife Jane Wyman, Jon Voight as Viktor Petrovich, Kevin Dillon ( Entourage ) as movie titan Jack Warner and C. Thomas Howell , who played Ponyboy Curtis in The Outsiders .

In addition to The Right Stuff, Quaid’s long list of standout roles include Breaking Away (1979), Great Balls of Fire (1989) , Far From Heaven (2002) , The Rookie (2002), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and a fine turn in the recent miniseries Lawmen: Bass Reeves. No doubt Reagan will charm audiences as much as it did Quaid while he was filming it. Reagan hit theaters August 30. Watch our full interview with Quaid below:

• Dennis Quaid