For Fans of John Landis

Everyone starts with Animal House, but The Blues Brothers is the film that shows you everything Landis can actually do. It has the anarchy and the ensemble warmth, but it also has genuine spectacle: car chases of a scale that would be impossible today, a soul and R&B concert film nested inside a road movie, and a density of cameos that functions as a love letter to an entire era of American popular culture. It is the film where his reverence for music and his gift for comedy work together at full volume. Animal House is a great film about being young and stupid. The Blues Brothers is a great film, full stop.

People treat An American Werewolf in London as a cult curio, a horror-comedy curiosity worth seeing for the transformation scene. It is actually a film of genuine precision: Rick Baker's practical effects work remains the standard against which every subsequent werewolf film is measured, but the sequence earns its reputation because of the emotional context Landis builds around it. The horror here is specific and real, the horror of becoming something you do not recognize, played completely straight while the world around it stays wickedly funny. It is not an underrated film. It is a great one that gets undersold because it is also funny, and people seem to think those two things cannot coexist at the highest level. Landis proved they can.

The Duke brothers in Trading Places are a specific kind of villain: the casual cruelty of inherited wealth, men who regard other human beings as variables in an experiment. Landis understood this precisely. The film is structured as a screwball comedy but its target is exact: the way class and race function as a system of arbitrary permissions, dressed up as merit. Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd play it beautifully, and the film never has to underline its point because the plot already makes it. It holds up not as a period piece but as a film that was right about something and remains right about it.