Raiders of the Lost Ark

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

1981 / 115min / 35mm

Spielberg’s pulse-pounding invocation of the spirit of the Saturday matinee serial introduces Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones: academic, archaeologist, adventurer, all-American puncher of Nazis, and victim of crippling ophidiophobia. (That’s fear of snakes, folks.) Follow Indy on a globe-trotting itinerary from the jungles of Peru to frozen Nepal to dusty Cairo to a stony Aegean isle, along the way avoiding rolling boulders, bad dates, and facial peels. You’re humming the theme already, aren’t you?