John Carpenter has made better movies than this over his long and incredibly varied career, and he’s definitely made worse (cough—Ghosts of Mars—cough cough), but 1981’s Escape From New York could be the most Carpenter of all Carpenter’s films, the one most consistently peppered with the director’s signature touches. If, by some weird happenstance, you haven’t seen one of his films before (that’s crazy), Escape is the best introduction, primarily due to Kurt Russell’s career-defining performance as Snake Plissken. by Bobby Roberts