This immensely likable look at one woman’s attempt to break through the glass ceiling features a near-unimprovable cast topped by Melanie Griffith as a secretary with big ideas, Sigourney Weaver as the boss who steals them and Harrison Ford as the man both have eyes for. A Cinderella story for the 1980s (complete with the decade’s focus on big business and even bigger hair), Nichols’ sure-handed romantic comedy picked up six Oscar nominations, including a win for Carly Simon’s original song “Let the River Run.”

Gene Hackman plays an ex-football-star-turned-private eye whose life unravels when he finds his wife (Susan Clark) has been unfaithful. Adding to Hackman’s midlife crisis, his job finding a missing teenager (a young Melanie Griffith) goes abruptly sour in a nightmarish labyrinth of betrayals and sudden death, crafted by screenwriter Alan Sharp. With Jennifer Warren.

Melanie Griffith plays a female variation on Mad Max in this post-apocalyptic story of a hired killer who takes on psychotic criminals in a robot warehouse. John Ford stalwarts Ben Johnson and Harry Carey Jr. costar, giving this futuristic Western added street cred.