20 great (and 5 not-so-great) sophomore films from famed directors

George Lucas’ polarizing feature debut, THX 1138, steered the future Star Wars creator toward a more commercial (and better told) movie about a subject close to his heart: riding in cars, listening to early ’60s rock ’n roll. Set over the course of one fun and funny, music-filled night in 1962, is unlike any film Lucas has done before or since and that’s a shame. He’s arguably better at telling relatable stories like this than he is those from a galaxy far, far away.

Movie fans still can’t get over Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-winning screenplay for losing the Academy Award for Best Picture to Forrest Gump, and for good reason. Few filmmakers’ sophomore outings came out of the gate and into the lexicon so quickly (and so quotable). The fractured narrative’s timeline and rich tapestry of all-timer performances (especially from Samuel L. Jackson) only gets more rewatchable.

Christopher Nolan barely made a dent with his solid but unremarkable directorial debut, The Following. But with , Nolan firmly established himself with this riveting (and tragic) calling card about a man (Guy Pearce) with a broken short-term memory struggling to get revenge on the John G. who may have killed his wife. Or maybe our hero killed her, or maybe he already killed the real killer? Following the twisted, temporal story threads that Nolan braids together will crinkle your brain in the best of ways.

Steven Spielberg’s second feature film, and the first blockbuster ever made, serves as a template for the summer movie experience. Spielberg grounds his shark-hunting thriller on the backs of very relatable, very likable characters, that way every victory they have or panicked breath they take feels like one of our own. It’s no surprise then that, after 45 years, we’re still afraid to go in the water.

Tim Burton barely had two nickels to rub together while making this kooky 1988 comedy, yet he still managed to craft one of the most visually unique comedies of that decade—thanks to the sleeper success of his live-action feature debut, 1985’s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. is a demented supernatural comedy unlike any other, and it’s one that helped launch Michael Keaton into super-stardom.

Ridley Scott’s is a sharp contrast from The Duelists, his 19th-century-set feature debut about two rival soldiers in France. But the latter establishes Scott’s signature vision and penchant for the slow-burn tension that would fuel the former. A sci-fi horror classic, Alien—like the Facehugger—grabs hold of you and never lets go until it delivers its payload of terrifying thrills and unrelenting suspense as an acid-bleeding xenomorph dispatches a spaceship’s blue-collar crew one at a time.

Writer-director James Cameron, coming off his dismissal from directing B-movie Piranha II, established his bona fides with , a gritty, time-travel actioner that mixes science fiction, action, and certain horror movie elements into one of the best Hollywood films ever made. Cameron’s lean, inspired direction and surprisingly character-driven story about a relentless killing machine from the future (wearing an Arnold Schwarzenegger skin suit) forever changed both the genre and the careers of Cameron and Arnold.

put David Fincher on the map after his feature debut, Alien 3, flopped. On the surface, it’s a typical ’90s crime drama about a brilliant serial killer and the cops (Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman) who must hunt him down. In Fincher’s hands, however, the story is almost entirely about atmosphere—a millennial, apocalyptic gloom where the killer’s Biblical judgment is almost beside the point, since the characters are already living in hell. Se7en remains so chilling, even decades later, that even that tiny spoonful of hope is hard to swallow.

The adventures of Brock Landers, aka Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), through the San Fernando Valley during porn’s 1970s heyday is arguably Paul Thomas Anderson’s best (if not most popular) film, a more audience and awards-friendly effort than his first movie, Hard Eight. Unlike that film (or, Sydney, for PTA superfans), affords PTA with the perfect canvas to paint his vision, which borrows visual colors (and narrative choices) from the pallets of Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese to tell a dense but undeniably rich tale about the rise and fall of one small-town kid with a big, um, talent and all the lost souls that become his found family.

Spike Jonze couldn’t have picked a better, or more quirky, film as his follow-up to the unforgettable Being John Malkovich. Reunion touring with Malkovich scribe Charlie Kaufman once again, Adaptation is an intentionally meta reckoning about the toll creativity takes on those most sensitive to its gifts and pitfalls, centered on a fictional version of Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), his more confident and schlocky twin brother, and how they intersect in the former’s attempt to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief into a film. chronicles the fictional screenwriter’s attempts to adapt the book, based on the real-life writer’s attempts, but put through a dizzying and funny (and, at times, slightly scary) lens with flawless performances by Cage and Meryl Streep as Orlean.

Before Wes Anderson doubled-down on his tweed, almost hermetically sealed, hipster-y aesthetic, he let loose-ish with , a movie that either has you smiling or laughing throughout most of its runtime. Jason Schwartzman and Bill Murray steal the show in this coming-of-age dramedy about Max, a gifted (but overcompensating) private school kid, his crush on his teacher (Olivia Williams) and the middle-aged father figure (Murray) standing in the way of what Max thinks is true love.

Michael Bay’s unique take on violence and explosions was first unleashed on theatrical audiences with Bad Boys, but marks the inception of Bayhem. Armed with a scary-good cast—Nic Cage, Sean Connery, and Ed Harris—and one of the ’90s best movie spec script premises (Die Hard in Alcatraz), Bay and his slick, car-commercial style deliver one of the best summer movies ever.

Pi’s intentionally low-fi, black-and-white aesthetic established Darren Aronofsky’s unique but largely cold and uninviting approach to story. And his Oscar-nominated doubles down on it. Aronofsky’s magnum opus isn’t his best film, but it is his best-acted film—a warts-and-all drama about a group of people who fall victim to the vice grip that is drug addiction. Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans play young heroin addicts and Ellen Burstyn gives an Oscar-nominated performance as Leto’s mother, who succumbs to prescription amphetamines to help her lose weight. Its in-your-face moralizing doesn’t hold up as well as the searing performances or impressive camera work, but it’s a career milestone for Aronofsky.

Edgar Wright’s seminal is such a masterful blending of horror and comedy that, while it’s a bit jarring to watch two unlikely heroes (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) debate which records to lob at a zombie as everything goes to hell, the trajectory of the story isn’t some bait-and-switch tonal shift. Shaun of the Dead is pure comedy and pure horror, at once. Not too many movies can say the same.

Australian filmmaker Andrew Dominik’s second film—and first collaboration with Brad Pitt—is a stunning, slow-burn Western that takes creatively rewarding risks with its mesmerizing adaptation of the 1983 novel of the same name. In , Pitt’s Jesse James is less the “legend” history has made him out to be than he is just a semi-charming guy with a gun—armed with more brains and less envy than the “coward” who killed him, played by Casey Affleck. As portrayed by Affleck, Ford teeters between hero worship and dry rot personified, as the unlikely assassin embarks on a delicate and haunting dance of death with James, all put through Roger Deakins’ landmark cinematography.

, Giuseppe Tornatore’s masterpiece, centers on the heartstring-tugging friendship between a young boy and a veteran projectionist in a small, Sicilian town. The way movies connect them across the gulf of age and experience speaks to how a series of images projected at 24 frames-per-second can temporarily connect a theater full of strangers through an experience that cinema makes last forever.

The less said about M. Night Shyamalan’s first feature film, the clunky and soulless Wide Awake, the better. But its failure both commercially and creatively led the writer-director to make his filmmaking legacy’s defining film: . A brooding, chilling ghost story about life and death, about how hope and love transcend mortal coils long after we have shuffled them off, is a modern classic. It’s a good movie without the iconic (and often parodied) twist ending, but it’s a great film thanks to the exceptional performances of Hayley Joel Osment as young Cole and a never-better Toni Collete as his mother who struggles to make sense of why her son sees dead people.

In this thoroughly off-the-wall comedy, the Coens gave Holly Hunter her first big break as the baby-craving Ed, opposite Nicolas Cage as her tyke-napping husband H.I. Future Coens regular John Goodman joins as a scheming escaped convict who threatens Ed and H.I.’s new nuclear family. Absurd, inventive, and in places, unexpectedly poignant.

Director: Terrence MalickThe elusive auteur Terrence Malick came into his own with 1978’s poignant . As love triangles go, few get as tragic as Heaven’s, which takes place in the 1910s, on a farm where a couple put on a con, posing as siblings, to swindle a very wealthy (and very dying) landowner from his inheritance. Malick’s sparse dialogue gives way to haunting visual storytelling, as Days Of Heaven shows that actions hurt louder than words ever could.

Director: Michael CiminoThe late Michael Cimino assembled one of the best Hollywood ensembles ever—Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, the late John Cazale, and Christopher Walken—for an anti-Vietnam epic that’s just as much about the forever-changed souls of a Pennsylvania steel mill town as it is about the loss of innocence many of them find in the war. The infamous Russian Roulette sequence is ’s most memorable scene, and Walken’s Oscar-winning performance as a broken-not-sprained soldier is its most haunting contribution to cinema.

This movie is all but forgotten, unlike Robert Redford’s Oscar-winning first feature film as director, Ordinary People. Oh to be a fly on the wall of the marketing meetings about how to sell a movie with a title that’s pure anti-box office. Based on co-screenwriter John Nichols’ book of the same name, isn’t terrible, it’s just … there. An inert, charmless film about one stubborn man’s struggle to protect his small beanfield from Big Business and political agendas.

It’s unfortunate that Sam Raimi, who made the nasty and narratively tight The Evil Dead, followed that success with the structurally messy and bizarre . The rough and flawed movie lacks whatever it takes to meet the threshold of guilty pleasure, thanks to execs micro-managing the hell out of it and the Coen brothers’ crime-horror mash-up of a script.

There are worse movies than , Richard Kelly’s virtually impenetrable and garish follow-up to the quirky and dark cult hit, Donnie Darko. I can’t think of any, but they are out there.

Neill Blomkamp had carte blanche in Hollywood following the success of his low-budget sci-fi hit, District 9, a collaboration with Peter Jackson. He chose to follow that immigration allegory with the big-budget, bloated, and narratively shaky . Matt Damon plays a bald guy armed with a violently applied exo suit trying to get to a space station run by Jodie Foster in what is maybe her worst performance ever and … you know what? This movie isn’t even bad enough to warrant talking about how void of good it is.

Even with his Sex, Lies and Videotape follow-up, . He recently reconceived and re-edited the misfire into Mr. Kneff, trying to salvage whatever creative vision that he lost hold of more than three decades ago. The final product is more effective than the original effort, but both fall short of the highs that mostly take up room on Soderbergh’s resume.