Jaws

Director: Steven Spielberg, Steven Spielberg, Steven Spielberg, Steven Spielberg, Steven Spielberg

1975 / 123min / 35mm

The massive popular success of Jaws may have ushered in the era of the “summer blockbuster” as we know it now, but Spielberg’s adaptation of Peter Benchley’s bestseller about a man-eating great white shark menacing the beaches of a New England resort town exemplifies qualities—craftsmanship, narrative economy, finely detailed characterization— that’ve all but disappeared from the modern tentpole. The prop shark is appropriately terrifying when it finally surfaces, but it’s the indelible performances of Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss as unlikely shipmates that guaranteed the film pop culture immortality, not special-effects spectacle.