The Four Seasons (Alan Alda, 1981). Alan Alda’s first film as a director — and second as a screenwriter, following The Seduction of Joe Tynan, released two years earlier — examines marriage and friendship in middle age using the conceit of a group of couples that manage to convene for vacation weekends four times per year. As a director, Alda had dozens of M*A*S*H episodes and an Emmy win to his credit by this point, and he’s completely assured navigating the film’s shifts between comedy and drama, tonal changes that could have easily felled another first-timer. The script is solid if a little blindered in its attentiveness to WASPy preoccupations at the dawn of the nineteen-eighties. The gimmick is also undone a bit by how seamlessly conflicts from one season carry over into the next. The narrative adheres so rigidly to itself that it feels like everyone on screen practically goes into stasis in the interim between group adventures. The Four Seasons is an entertaining collection of character studies, though, and every actor in the main cast gets at least one scene to really crackle. In an ensemble full of skilled performers, Carol Burnett gives the strongest performance across the entire film, drawing skillfully on the role’s prickly intelligence to developed a full, recognizable person.

Try and Get Me! (Cy Endfield, 1950). Originally released under the title The Sound of Fury, this drama swings back and forth between nasty little film noir and didactic assault on crassly opportunistic journalistic practices, and somehow the whole thing works. Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) struggles to find work. Just as the needs of his family start to press in on him, Howard encounters Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges), a confident smooth-talker who offers to the opportunity for some quick cash. That money-making venture puts Howard on the wrong side of the law, and the cohorts’ exploits soon escalate to murderous ends. Cy Endfield directs the film with a sweaty urgency and a keen attention to the story’s squalid details. That’s especially true when the film reaches its bleak ending that was inspired by an ugly instance of massed citizenry performing a vigilante execution of two confessed criminals, in the nineteen-thirties. Try and Get Me! is admirable tough-minded to this point, but the ending gives the whole film a brute power that’s almost startling. Bridges is sensational as the snappy crook. He laces his menace with just enough charisma to make the plot’s leaps work.

Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1989). This justly venerated black comedy holds up as twisty and daring, far darker and funnier than its legion of descendants. Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) has misgivings about her place within the clique of mean girls who cruelly rule over Westerburg High School, conflicted feelings that only add to the appeal of a the rebel-without-a-cause new kid, J.D. (Christian Slater). Heathers steers into the skid of satire as J.D.’s brand of juvenile delinquency evolves into murdering the school bullies and staging the crimes to look like suicides, effectively creating a cause for the community to rally around and distracting the authorities from growing suspicious about the body count. Daniel Waters’s flows like a roiled river of acid. It’s defined by its barbed perspectives and imaginatively architected slang, and it’s thrillingly relentless. I do feel obligated to note that the pervasive homophobic language in thefilm sometimes feels less like a satire of regressive societal views and more like the filmmakers trafficking in the same sort of mean-spirited punchlines they’re ostensibly mocking. Ryder is immensely appealing in the lead role, catching the way adolescents grasp for identity and shakily ride the torrents of their shifting being. It’s still a little weird that Slater launched an entire career with a middling Jack Nicholson impression. Because J.D. is so intently adopting the guise of a fearless cool guy, the approach admittedly works for this role, but how did anyone see that persona, which he hung onto for a while, as something that would translate outside of the giddy, unreal haze of this movie?