In "Performance," Roeg's first feature film as director, Mick Jagger plays a reclusive rock star who, amid a hedonistic tangle of sex and drugs, insinuates his identity into that of a small-time gangster taking refuge in his home. Making use of his skills as a cinematographer, Roeg splices in images

Avant-garde film, Fantastic, Perceptual, Perverse, Pioneering, Psychological

Jane Campion's lush study of repression, "The Piano," contains an enduring image: high cliffs tower over a deserted beach, waves crashing and rolling upon the cold sand. Deposited in the tide is a black piano, a misplaced presence seemingly dropped from heaven. It is a solitary signifier of humanity

Dissonant, Enigmatic, Erotic, Film down under, Intense, Tribal

David Letterman influenced the comic sensibility of an entire generation (according to the presenter of his 1992 Peabody Award) by taking "one of TV's most conventional and least inventive forms -- the talk show -- and infusing it with freshness and imagination." Letterman always dreamed of hosti

Clever, Funny, Ironic, Wise assy, Witty

TV screens may have gone color in the '60s, but TV actors didn't -- the small screen remained a white, white world. It remained white-washed in terms of subject matter, as well: no controversy, no politics, and no racial prejudice (because, of course, there were no people of color). That all changed

Charming, Funny, Pioneering, Political