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They say the customer is always right — but not always right away. For instance, sometimes it takes a while for movie audiences to recognize just how special a film really is. When it premieres, there’s a barely audible thud, and very little box office.  The culprit could be poor distribution, half-hearted promotion, a storyline slightly ahead of its time, the ire of some influential critic with digestive trouble, or any combination of the above. A surprising number of now-classic films either just broke even, or actually lost money on initial release. Here are 10 classics from my list that fall into this category. 

It all started with the hardboiled detective fiction which exploded onto the American popular culture way back in the roaring twenties. This new genre portrayed America’s evolving urban landscape as vividly as the Western genre did the rural frontier.

You’ll hear a lot about patriotism this weekend. I already got an email saying it was my patriotic duty to get in on a great car deal. Even beyond the stupendous sales out there, there are the barbecues, parades, fireworks, and at some point, maybe even a warbling of the National Anthem. (Get on your feet, boy. Stand up straight, and put that hand where it belongs- across your chest!)

Film lets us move in with idealized families, the families we would happily join if they were real and would have us. Here, we have gathered our favorites into one warm, harmonious place. We can smell the cookies baking from here…

While the holidays are the ideal time to cozy up to cheery family fare, it’s also a swell idea to take a break from interrelating with relatives to witness the astonishingly bad behavior of families far more dysfunctional than one's own (hopefully).

From the socially unacceptable, to the downright deviant, taboo topics make for dramatic movies. What we can’t, and wouldn’t, do in life, film plays out for us, revealing not only the forbidden acts, but also the hidden motivations behind them.

 One of the major pleasures and sources of eye candy the movies provide are fantasy spaces of which dreams are made. For anyone who lives for their monthly issue of Dwell, or who forwards photo compilations of delicious décor, on-screen interiors offer a form of fun several notches up from catalogue shopping.  Whether these movies were shot on sound stages, or on existing locations dressed up for their close-up, they perform the task of drawing us into the world of the story, and making us forget about the tedious limitations of reality. If you could choose any movie interior to move into, which one would it be? 

Just as the British once showed Americans how to reinvent rock music, so it was with the French and the crime film. Many of the top French directors of the ‘50s and ‘60s turned out memorable, enduring gangster films, and we are all the better for it. Though critics dubbed these young filmmakers as "The French New Wave," they may as well have called them "The French Crime Wave."  A key turning point was when an American director, Jules Dassin, found himself exiled to Europe during the McCarthy era, and directed French actors in the classic "Rififi" (1955). American film noir (ironically, a French term) was on the wane by this point, and France not only picked up the torch, they practically yanked it out of our tired hands. French directors did more than create rehashes of American crime movies. True, they borrowed many techniques and stories that were already familiar from Hollywood films, but they seasoned them with distinctly French flavorings, whether it was Jean Luc Godard's jump-cut editing technique, or the way existentialism seemed to crop up even in plots about car thieves.

How do you make a legendary film in a few weeks’ time, all with a budget that would make even the most miserly studio head giddily twirl his mustache? Ask Sidney Lumet. Unquestionably, “12 Angry Men” (1957) is one of the finest films of the 1950s, with three Oscar nominations to its credit; but even so, the project had a skin-tight budget, (only $350,000 - a paltry sum for a film, even then). This forced first-time feature director Lumet to bob and weave to finish on-time and on-cost. So how did he pull it off? This tense film follows the contentious deliberations of twelve men, packed into a sweltering jury room, as they decide the fate of a youth accused of murdering his father. Lumet made the most of the confining premise by filming 93 of the 96 minutes on the same cramped 16 x 24 foot set. Even this solo venue was a cheap collection of sticks that Henry Fonda (AKA Juror 8) famously complained “looked like shit”, comparing it unfavorably to the lavish Hitchcock soundstages he’d just stepped off of when filming “The Wrong Man.”