"13"

In Hollywood, August is rather indelicately known as a “dump month”— a time when studios traditionally litter theaters with films that have low box-office expectations and pack all the heft of a half-eaten Twizzler (à la this year’s “Let’s Be Cops” and “The Expendables 3”).  However, now and then over the years, the scheduling gods have managed to include a real gem with all the other celluloid junk. Here’s a look at some of the films that—from the 1950s to the 2010s—have defied their dog-day August release dates and become timeless works of art.   

This year, what do you say we switch things up and not dread the whole back-to-school business? No prodding the kids to plow through the summer-reading-list books they haven’t yet cracked. No bracing yourself for the logistical nightmare of getting your brood up, fed, dressed and off to their classrooms.

Man versus Nature. It’s a struggle as old as the movies—even as old as man himself. (Man, that’s old.) Many movies have thrilled us by pitting their leading characters against the elements. Floods, blizzards, tornados, tsunamis and other cases of severe and, at times, catastrophic weather conditions are the stuff film drama is made of.  It seems that hardly a calendar year goes by without stormy weather whipping around audiences. Earlier his year, Russell Crowe’s “Noah” encountered a flood of Biblical proportions. And just when we thought the memory of Hurricane Sandy was starting to fade, “Into the Storm” arrives in theaters shortly, bringing destructive cyclones and tornadoes with it.

It boggles the mind that only a couple of generations back, women were sometimes referred to as “the weaker sex.” That’s not only sexist, but misleading.  Plenty of tough, cunning, even deadly female characters have graced the screen over the past six decades that prove this idiotic saying wrong.   Here are an even dozen.

It’s nearly impossible to discuss a truly great movie without mentioning its musical score. Can you  honestly ponder the Spielberg classic “Jaws” (1975) without hearing those relentless, alternating two notes (played on a tuba!) that announce the killer shark’s arrival? Or think of “Rocky” (1976) without remembering how Bill Conti’s soaring trumpet theme made your heart race? 

Please don’t let a super-sized screen, nor that Best Picture Oscar (over “Pulp Fiction,” for crying out loud!), nor that $600 million-plus box office take convince you that “Gump" is anything but a treacly mediocrity. While it has moments of sweetness and charm, it is absurdly overrated.

Going crazy in real life is about as glamorous as sleeping in a bowling alley, but going crazy on-screen? Plan your Oscar outfit early. There is scenery to be chewed, fits to be pitched on an epic scale, fantasies to spin, and a kind of canny brilliance to the crazy character’s lunacy.       Maybe we are drawn to movie crazies as a kind of proxy nervous breakdown, the one we’d like to have, if only we could spare the time. In the more extreme cases, such as director Alfred Hitchcock’s criminally insane killers in “Psycho” (1960) and “Frenzy” (1972), we are watching a bomb blast from a safe distance, marveling at the potential for distortion within the human mind. And then there are characters that are driven crazy, like Ophelia (Jean Simmons) in “Hamlet” (1948), or Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), the shattered widow of an unscrupulous New York financier, in “Blue Jasmine” (2013).

Part of the thrill of film is the costumes that dress up the screen. But there's a clear distinction between standard costume pictures where clothes simply help evoke a period, and those indelible outings in which great clothes not only draw our eye to their design, but also inform character.  It is, in fact, more accurate to say “wardrobe” than costumes, and, as with our own wardrobes, there are standouts that we return to again and again. These are pieces that are stars in their own right: Edith Head’s dresses for Grace Kelly in “Rear Window”; Cecil Beaton’s black and white dress for Audrey Hepburn, worn to Ascot in “My Fair Lady”; Lauren Bacall’s check suit in “The Big Sleep”; and countless bias-cut crepe gowns, Technicolor satins, wide hats, snug corsets, and acres of rhinestones, beads, and feathers. When paired with crackling dialogue, powerful stories, and flattering cinematography, these signature looks create the models for our own evolution in style.  Why not slip into our own look at some of the movies’ most memorable fashion moments...

Who are you calling “Diva?”   In real life, wrangling with a diva is a blood-boiling lesson in the perils of the high-maintenance personality. On film, though, there is an undeniable deliciousness to watching the diva — at a safe distance.   Divas are so cutting, so presumptuous, so brash, brassy, demanding, withering, larger than life, full of themselves, and they chew through scenery with cast iron teeth. And, in what might just be a law of nature, it often takes a diva to play a diva.