A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951). George Stevens does a sensational job directing this adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel, An American Tragedy. In the film, George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) is a distant relative of a town’s dominant family of wealth. George secures an entry-level job at the family’s factory and strikes up a romance with a co-worker named Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters), even as he secretly pines for the beautiful socialite Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor). As George’s status in the company rises, he is drawn into the community’s high society and gets the chance to canoodle with his dream girl. He lacks the spine to break off his other engagement, which leads to mounting anguish and more questionable means of extricating himself from his dilemma. There are a few spots when the screenplay — credited to Michael Wilson and Harry Brown — strains credibility by making logical leaps that are a big too long, but its thematic swipes at the toxicity of capitalism and associated lustful pursuit of upper mobility. Stevens is especially strong at building tension, and Clift is makes his character’s writhing discomfort as his circumstances practically palpable. A Place in the Sun has a sweaty power.

Party Girl (Daisy von Scherler Mayer, 1995). It’s easy to understand why Party Girl locked in Parker Posey as the nineteen-nineties indie queen. Posey plays Mary, an aimless twenty-something living in New York City. Mary’s time flitting from nightclubs to house parties is disrupted by a late-night arrest that necessitates her asking for help from her godmother, Judy (Sasha von Scherler). As repayment, Mary reluctantly agrees to work as a clerk at the library branch Judy runs. Even as she remains prone to the slips in judgment that are emblematic of long transition from impetuous youth to settled adulthood, Mary gradually learns to take pride in her growing talent job and, in conjunction with that, tiptoes towards rewarding maturity. I think most of the film’s subplots don’t work (the roommate’s quest to be a club DJ, the recovering alcoholic who’s convinced Mary character is an addict too), but everything centered on the main story line is downright magical, mostly due to Posey’s ludicrously charismatic and clever performance. Daisy von Scherler Mayer directs with the sort of messy enthusiasm that filled arthouse screens all through that decade.

Slacker (Richard Linklater, 1990). Although it’s technically Richard Linklater’s second feature, Slacker was such a resounding breakthrough that it feels like the Texas filmmaker’s debut. It bears all his hallmarks: flinty philosophizing, sly comedy, endearingly lo-fi visuals, and performances that find odd emotional truths in off-kilter line readings. It also bears a giddily inventive structure, staying with a character for a few minutes as they experience some atilt plane of Austin when it was defiantly kept weird. Then they pass the camera’s focus like a stoner moving the pipe along a long line rather than a circle. Every one of the figures who moves through the film is memorable, and it’s a nice touch that Linklater himself has the first speaking role, as a taxi passenger who hilariously expounds on alternate realities on a ride from the bus station. This time, I was especially fond of the cheery J.F.K. assassination conspiracy theorist and the television collector. To this day, I think my favorite way a character has ever been identified in a film’s closing credits is “S-T-E-V-E with a Van.”