This restored, animated valentine to the Beatles offers viewers the rare chance to see a work that's been substantially improved by its technical facelift, not just supersized with extra footage. Recognizing that its song-studded soundtrack alone makes Yellow Submarine a video annuity, United Artists has lavished a frame-by-frame refurbishment of the original feature, while replacing its ...

Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Starring: Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, The Beatles
Directed By: George Dunning

By any rational measure, Alan Parker's cinematic interpretation of Pink Floyd: The Wall is a glorious failure. Glorious because its imagery is hypnotically striking, frequently resonant, and superbly photographed by the gifted cinematographer Peter Biziou. And a failure because the entire exercise is hopelessly dour, loyal to the bleak themes and psychological torment of Roger Waters's ...

Manufacturer: Sony
Starring: Bob Geldof, Christine Hargreaves, James Laurenson, Eleanor David, Kevin McKeon
Directed By: Alan Parker

Cheech & Chong's first cannabis comedy is also their best, a souvenir from the more carefree days before "Just Say No," when people did not feel so defensive about inhaling. In 1978, the prevailing spirit was more like "Just Say Blow." Even New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael liked it (the movie, that is), adding that it was "an exploitation slapstick comedy, rather than a family picture, ...

Manufacturer: Paramount
Starring: Edie Adams, Marian Beeler, Pam Bille, Michael Caldwell (III), Tommy Chong
Directed By: Tommy Chong, Lou Adler

If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director--oh, and a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus--this is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. However, Brazil was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam sure captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial ...

Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Starring: Jim Broadbent, Ray Cooper (II), Robert De Niro, John Flanagan, Kim Greist

You are now entering Interzone, William S. Burroughs's phantasmagorical land of junk, paranoia, and crawly things. Best travel advice: "Exterminate all rational thought." In David Cronenberg's superbly shot, unnerving warp on the Burroughs novel, the novelist himself becomes a main character (played in an implacable monotone by Peter Weller), with elements from Burroughs' life--including the ...

Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox
Starring: Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands, Roy Scheider
Directed By: David Cronenberg

This 1983 science fiction oddity, set in the subterranean world of heroin addicts, performance artists, and androgynous models in New York's East Village, became a staple of the midnight movie circuit and college campus film societies. A tiny UFO lands on the roof of a grungy penthouse apartment inhabited by androgynous model Anne Carlisle and her drug-dealing lover Paula E. Sheppard (the former ...

Manufacturer: Mti Home Video
Starring: Anne Carlisle, Paula E. Sheppard, Susan Doukas, Otto von Wernherr, Bob Brady
Directed By: Slava Tsukerman

Manufacturer: MGM (Warner)
Starring: Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, Paul Fix, G.D. Spradlin, Bill Garaway
Directed By: Michelangelo Antonioni

A bewigged Sean Connery is Zed, a savage "exterminator" commanded by the mysterious god Zardoz to eliminate Brutals, survivors of an unspecified worldwide catastrophe. Zed stows away inside Zardoz's enormous idol (a flying stone head) and is taken to the pastoral land of the Eternals, a matriarchal, quasi-medieval society that has achieved psychic abilities as well as immortality. Zed finds as ...

Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox
Starring: John Alderton, Daisy Boorman, Katrine Boorman, Telsche Boorman, Niall Buggy

Manufacturer: Rhino / Wea
Starring: William Bagdad, Timothy Carey, Carol Doda, Micky Dolenz, June Fairchild
Directed By: Bob Rafelson

This 1968 oddity is probably a film only a total Beatlemaniac could love, but it carries both musical and historical resonance. It also gives intimations of what would happen in the next 30 years as artists gained more and more power over how they were presented. The roots of virtually any rock star's vanity project (including Prince's Under the Cherry Moon) can be traced to this ...

Manufacturer: Mpi Home Video
Starring: Alexis (XI), Jan Carson, George Claydon, Ivor Cutler, Mal Evans
Directed By: George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr