Sorcerer

Four men, each fleeing something in another country, are stranded in a South American town. They agree to drive unstable dynamite over a mountain road in worn-out trucks; there is nothing else left for them. The film draws its tension entirely from the road. The crossing of a rotting rope bridge counts among the hardest sequences ever staged, the result of months of shooting in rain and mud with real trucks. William Friedkin took up the same story as an earlier French film. It opened the same week as Star Wars and found no audience; it was restored and reconsidered decades later. Who it's for: those who like slow, filthy, hopeless suspense. Who it's not for: viewers who want someone to root for; the film makes no one likeable.