Slaughterhouse-Five

Director: George Roy Hill

1972 / 104min / 35mm

Get unstuck in time with this daring adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s seemingly unadaptable, epoch-hopping classic of counterculture literature, starring Michael Sacks as Billy Pilgrim, existing at one and the same time as a POW surviving the firebombing of Dresden; a prosperous suburbanite in Ilium, New York; and as an attraction in an extraterrestrial zoo on the planet of Tralfamadore, doted over by Valerie Perrine’s hot-to-trot starlet, Montana Wildhack. Dede Allen seemingly effortlessly negotiates the complex chronological leaps of Vonnegut’s novel, rendering what its narrator describes as a mere “collection of moments, strung together in random harmony” into a coherent—and disarmingly moving—whole.