Denzel Washington is a mighty actor, in possession of a gravitas most can only dream of, more than able to lend his talent to the works of Shakespeare or portraying major historical figures like Malcolm X. Yet for decades now he’s also seemed to relish working on material that should be well beneath someone of his stature, enjoying the task of pulling ropey scripts and concepts up to his level. Early reviews have widely deemed him the best part of Ridley Scott’s uneven Gladiator II; his history of elevating the source material is long-standing.

Though he came to fame in the eighties, going from a lead on TV medical drama St. Elsewhere to an Oscar winner for Glory in just seven short years, the nineties were when Washington truly became a megastar. The decade gave us his towering turns in Malcolm X, Crimson Tide, Philadelphia, and The Hurricane – big, muscular movies, often centered around his commanding presence. Scattered among those, however, were a handful that were just…silly. But those movies, as much as the ones that won him all his deserved acclaim, show why his star has remained ascendant for so many years.

In the first, 1991’s Ricochet, Washington is a cop – Nick Styles – who puts psychopathic killer Earl Talbot Blake (John Lithgow) in jail. Eight years later, Blake manages to bust out. He heads straight for Styles – now an Assistant District Attorney –  with revenge on his mind Ricochet’s premise is conventional, but the violence is intense – at one point, a man gets a circular saw straight through the belly. In true 1990s style, almost every bloody act is accompanied by a gleeful, profane witticism; it’s the kind of movie where an impalement is met with “You got the point now, don’t you?”

In his entire filmography, it’s hard to pick out a scene that more encapsulates Washington’s charismatic resplendence than when he first arrests Lithgow’s villain at a nighttime carnival. Styles gets a gun on Blake, but when an unaware woman steps out of a nearby port-a-potty, Blake takes her hostage. To persuade him to release her, Styles makes a show of disarming himself, even stripping down to his boxers to prove he has no hidden weapon or armour, all the while trying to calm the terrified woman. Blake then pushes her aside and launches himself at Styles – who somehow has managed to hide a gun, and manages to subdue the criminal.

Ricochet is a ludicrous movie, yet it makes Washington’s charm textual in a way that would set the scene for many a future film of his. And four years later, things got sillier still for him in Virtuosity.

Here Washington plays Parker Barnes: a former cop convicted for killing the man who murdered his wife and daughter. Barnes and other convicts have been part of testing for a virtual reality training programme meant to pit police against SID 6.7 (Russell Crowe), an AI programmed on the personalities of 200 serial killers – including the one who killed Barnes’ family. When a renegade technician brings SID 6.7 into the real world, Barnes is the only one who can stop him.

Russell Crowe has by far the flashiest role in Virtuosity, and he sure does enjoy it, oozing merry malevolence, and making a three-course meal out of each of his cruel taunts (12 years later the two actors would face off again in American Gangster, where Washington got the showier villain part). Between Crowe’s hammy psychopathy and the movie’s fascination with VR – the effects now look endearingly dated but were at the time considered cutting edge – it’s just Washington’s steady performances as the grieving, furious hero that gives Virtuosity any kind of emotional weight. His willingness to put the charisma on a low boil, to cede the humour and spectacle to Crowe while he deals with the heavy stuff, is almost solely responsible for keeping the whole thing from bursting apart at the seams.

Washington played a police officer once again in the final film of his nineties trilogy of nonsense – 1998’s Fallen. Though his character, John Hobbes, watches serial killer Edgar Reese (Elias Koteas) put to death, somehow that doesn’t stop the string of murders carried out to Reese’s macabre modus operandi. At first Hobbes and his fellow cops assume there’s a copycat on the loose. Before long, he learns the real culprit lies in a different realm entirely.

The full absurdity of Fallen takes a while to make itself known. Directed by Gregory Hoblit, straight after his hugely successful Primal Fear, and co-starring Donald Sutherland, John Goodman, and James Gandolfini, it looks comparatively classy next to the twin lunacies of Ricochet and Virtuosity…until it’s revealed that it’s Reese’s demonic spirit continuing his murder spree, using unwitting bodies (mainly human, sometimes feline!) as his vessels, and passing between them via touch. For the remainder of the movie, Washington effectively finds himself playing tag with a demon.

Even after Fallen has unveiled the heights of its silliness, Washington remains commanding. In the scene where he’s told what’s really going on, he moves from “Oh, come on!” scepticism to whole-hearted belief in a matter of seconds, making his personal change of mind convincing, and (at least temporarily) bringing us along with him. It may be a preposterous movie, but it’s a masterful performance.

Washington’s habit of mixing high and low art expanded well out beyond the nineties, most notably in his frequent collaborations with director Tony Scott. Across five films, from 1995 to 2010, the actor time travelled, stopped runaway trains, and saved the day in countless other ways, elevating schlocky material into the stuff of poetry. After that came The Equalizer movies, where Washington took his ex-CIA agent on a surprisingly moving emotional arc, through a myriad of violent, often outrageous set pieces. Time and again, from the nineties to the present day, he’s made even the most throwaway of movies feel utterly gripping.

In a very real sense, making nonsense films like Ricochet, Virtuosity, and Fallen emotionally credible is every inch as challenging as the trickiest Shakespearian soliloquy. That Washington excels at both is a major part of what makes him such a peerless screen presence and us in the audience so lucky to have him.

Tall and broad, with a mop of curly golden hair and a megawatt grin, Burt Lancaster was an astonishing specimen; that he spent much of his twenties as a circus acrobat just enhanced his formidable figure. Frequently he seemed almost like an alien trying to go undercover as a human: smile a little too wide, movements a little too big, line readings invested with an intensity that could knock the unsuspecting straight off their feet. This was not a man who readily disappeared into a role – whoever he was playing, he was dazzlingly and energetically Burt Lancaster. Within the confines of his star persona, however, he was able to find multitudes, especially as he grew older.

Lancaster’s athletic prowess was exhibited spectacularly and often during his first decade and a half in Hollywood. He made nine films with his old circus friend Nick Cravat, the best among them being the rambunctious pirate movies The Flame and the Arrow (1950) and The Crimson Pirate (1952), which allowed the pair plenty of space to execute their gymnastic feats. Trapeze (1956) utilized Lancaster’s circus skills even more explicitly, positioning him as a trapeze artist caught in a love triangle with fellow performers Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida.

Even when the role didn’t specifically call for acrobatics, Lancaster’s extraordinary physicality and boundless energy lit up his work across various genres. His ebullience made him a natural fit for snake-oil salesmen, such as Bill Starbuck, his grifter in The Rainmaker (1956). A silver-tongued charmer who promises to bring rain to a drought-ravaged Kansan town, Lancaster’s Starbuck is a one man fireworks display, leaping and dazzling and talking a mile a minute, charming Katharine Hepburn’s Lizzy despite the obviousness of his hucksterism. In her reaction to Lancaster, Hepburn becomes our audience surrogate; she’s not really taken in, but she’s entranced by the show. Ultimately, choosing to believe in this extravagant, ridiculous man works wonders for her fragile self-esteem.

Lancaster could be just as effective when he reined in his vigour, crafting characters of coiled-snake stillness. There’s no better example than Sweet Smell of Success (1957), when he played Walter Winchell-esque gossip columnist JJ Hunsecker, who holds the little life of Tony Curtis’ walking ulcer of a press agent in his big, meaty hand. While Curtis bobs and weaves, walking as fast as he talks, Lancaster’s measured movements (Hunsecker deems few people even worth turning his head to look at) tell us all we need to know about his unnerving power. He used his stillness to a similarly destabilising effect as a mutinous army general in Seven Days in May (1964).

You might think an actor whose persona was so linked to their immense physical presence would start fading from view as the years caught up with them, but advancing age bought Lancaster’s work another dimension.

He still had an astonishing build during The Swimmer (1968) – which was shot when he was in his early fifties – but the story of an arrogant man slowly realising his best days are behind him is made more poignant by the fact the audience had watched Lancaster age over the last two decades on screen. That he spends the whole movie only in swimming trunks gives him nowhere to hide, and makes the eventual crumbling of his self-deception feel extra visceral.

Similarly, Lancaster’s fumbling tryst with Deborah Kerr in The Gypsy Moths (1969) is impossible to watch without remembering younger versions of the two rolling around on the beach in From Here to Eternity sixteen years earlier, where they created one of the sexiest love scenes of the studio era. The weight of time lends their later, clumsier affair, with both actors well into middle age, a dramatic potency far beyond what’s on the page.

Over a decade later, in Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980), Lancaster sports a full head of white hair – as many people refer to him as ‘old man’ as they do his character’s real name, Lou. An ex-hood whiling his days away looking after the bedridden widow of an old associate, his grey life is re-invigorated after he meets Susan Sarandon’s much younger Sally, the estranged wife of a petty con, and falls awkwardly back into a life of crime.

Lou is subjected to various humiliations throughout Atlantic City, largely stemming from his still considering himself as much of a player in the boardwalk’s underworld as gangsters half his age, whilst absolutely no-one else does – a late-movie pronouncement “I’m dangerous!” is sodden with desperation. Lancaster plays these delusions of grandeur with the wild look in his eye so familiar from his work in the forties and fifties, but what lends his performance in Malle’s movie its special texture are the piercing moments of clarity that come between these delusions, where Lou realises exactly what he is and how far he has fallen. Lancaster gives these moments both a palpable ache and a wounded dignity, ultimately winning immense grace for a character who could so easily have been nothing but a joke.

In Local Hero, Lancaster again enriched a potentially cartoonish character, delivering a supporting turn full of the off-kilter romanticism that personified both the movie, and his own long career.

As Felix Happer, the Texan Big Oil boss who sends an underling (Peter Riegart) to a remote Scottish coastal village to buy up the land for a pipeline, he should be the villain of the piece – but the film refuses to assign him any malignancy. He’s not even all that interested in making money for his company; it’s the stunning Scottish skies that most fascinate the amateur astrologer. Whereas Riegart’s pragmatic city dweller takes a while to fall under the spell of the natural world, we get the sense that Happer was born with his head in the clouds… far above them, in fact. When he finally arrives in Scotland at the end of the movie, setting down on the beach at dusk, he lands in a helicopter that might as well be an alien spaceship.

Lancaster was almost seventy at the time of filming, with the gymnastic pyrotechnics of his early career many years behind him. Nevertheless, as he waxes lyrical about his love for the stars, the sparkle in his eyes demonstrates with magnetic clarity how the unearthly charisma of his youth never dimmed, only deepened.

In 1967, Bonnie and Clyde lit the fuse for a Hollywood revolution, confounding the critical establishment, attracting droves of wide-eyed audiences who’d never seen anything like it, and altering the course of American cinema forever. The furore around the film was so intense, it more or less wiped director Arthur Penn’s previous film from the public consciousness. But for all the adjectives that could be used to describe 1966’s The Chase, ‘forgettable’ is not one of them.

Bubber Reeves (Robert Redford), a wrongfully imprisoned convict, is tempted into a jail break by a fellow prisoner. After their escape, that prisoner kills a person and drives away in their car, leaving Bubber to take the fall and making him a fugitive twice over. The citizens of his unnamed Texas hometown, with only a few exceptions, are a rowdy, drunken mob who bay for his blood; after hopping the wrong train, Bubber finds himself heading straight for them. His only hope for protection is the long-suffering Sheriff Calder (Marlon Brando), who never believed he was guilty in the first place.

The Chase is a big film, running at more than two hours and boasting a big-hitting cast. Beyond Brando and Redford, it stars Miriam Hopkins as Bubber’s despairing mother, Jane Fonda as his anxious wife (the first of four features Fonda and Redford would star in together over the next 40 years), EG Marshall as the town’s obscenely wealthy overlord, and Robert Duvall as his most obsequious employee.

It was released in the middle of a tumultuous decade, and Lillian Hellman’s screenplay (adapted from Horton Foote’s novel and play of the same name) dives headfirst into a phalanx of hot-button social issues – racism, wealth disparity, the sexual revolution, guns – often using the supporting cast as a kind of Greek chorus.

It’s melodramatic, overblown, sometimes downright hysterical. And yet that hysteria, though mocked in many contemporary reviews, which gives The Chase its queasy power. The townsfolk are portrayed rather like a caricature. Fiendish, almost zombie-like; you can’t reason with them, and they move in a big, homogenous pack. As the film progresses, their soullessness starts to feel nightmarish.

Trapped in this nightmare is Sheriff Calder, who in another actor’s hands could have been a tedious archetype, a grey wall of goodness facing off against a town of hedonistic villains. Brando, however, makes him a captivating presence. He’s never self-righteous. He doesn’t hide his disdain at the citizens under his jurisdiction, or try to show them the error of their ways. He knows they are way beyond that. A palpable sense of exhaustion radiates off of Brando, just as potent as the character’s fundamental decency.

It was Brando who suggested to Penn how to shoot the beating Calder endures at the hands of the townsfolk. The actors’ punches would make contact but be executed slowly, and the film would then be sped up. It’s a deceptively simple idea, but the scene – which unfolds over three agonising minutes – remains frighteningly effective. Indeed, the viscerality of the attack contrasts the cartoonish villainy displayed by the townsfolk earlier in the film. Suddenly, the nightmare feels very real.

It’s this constant tussle between the abstract and the real, between Old and New Hollywood, that makes The Chase noteworthy. The film was shot largely on studio sets, and there’s an artificiality to some of the supporting performances – a mannered quality to the dialogue – that seems to belong to an earlier era. But the violence, both the simmering promise and the brutal realisation of it, foretold where cinema was heading.

Behind the scenes, The Chase was plagued by production issues. Things got so heated between Penn and legendary producer Sam Spiegel that the director was tricked out of the final edit. When it was eventually released the film performed poorly both critically and commercially. Then along came Bonnie and Clyde.

But the passage of time hasn’t dimmed the brilliant power of Brando’s performance, or the film’s seething atmosphere which still manages to burrow under your skin. With the dust from the firestorm started by Bonnie and Clyde having long since settled, The Chase survives today as a fascinating throwback, a time capsule of an industry teetering on the brink of something new.

Nora Ephron was a writer before she was a filmmaker. Her parents, Harry and Phoebe, were a screenwriting team responsible for Hollywood classics like Desk Set and There’s No Business Like Show Business. All three of her sisters were writers; she’d often collaborate with Delia on screenplays. Nora’s first credits in Hollywood were as a screenwriter, and over the seventies and eighties she accrued respect and plaudits for her work on Silkwood, Heartburn, and When Harry Met Sally.

It was the success of the latter film that inspired Dawn Steel, then head of Columbia Pictures – she was the first woman to run a major movie studio – to ask if she wanted to move into directing, suggesting an adaption of Meg Wolitzer’s ‘This is My Life’ would be a good fit for her. Ephron agreed, and after shepherding the project through various stages of development hell (Steel left Columbia soon after their meeting, and was replaced by the notoriously difficult Jon Peters), garnered her first directing credit.

Co-written by Nora and Delia, This is My Life has a real generosity of spirit when it comes to tackling the issues faced by women struggling to balance raising their kids with achieving their career goals. The film follows Dottie Ingels (Julie Kavner), whose rapid transition from cosmetics counter funnywoman to nationally famous stand-up comedian leaves her daughters Erica (Samantha Mathis) and Opal (Gaby Hoffman) feeling abandoned.

With the help of duelling voiceovers from Dottie and Erica, Ephron balances the frustrations of both sides, acknowledging how complicated their situation is; Dottie is never portrayed as callously neglectful for pursuing her dreams, and the girls are never portrayed as monstrous for missing their mum. Ephron doesn’t offer answers, but neither does she assign blame, and her compassionate, honest approach still feels refreshing today.

There’s not a single antagonist in the movie, just a bunch of imperfect humans muddling along, doing the best that they can with what they have. Even the girls’ long absent father isn’t villainised when they (with the help of a private detective) track him down, somehow convinced that he won’t abandon them the way they think their mother has, though he did just that years earlier. He’s severely deficient in his dad duties, yes, and tragicomically terrible at talking to even his own children, but not a villain – Ephron’s humanistic benevolence extends to even the least deserving here.

Despite being a comedy about a comedian, Dottie’s stand-up routines are the least funny parts of an otherwise very funny movie. As both screenwriter and director, Ephron quickly establishes the close, laugh-filled relationship between mother and daughters, nurturing a fun repartee between the three of them through jokes and songs and squabbles.

An endearing, convivial cosiness permeates the film as a whole, which only grows as the Ingels’ social circle does; the murderer’s row of supporting talent – including Carrie Fisher and Dan Aykroyd as Dottie’s agents, Tim Blake Nelson as one of the many babysitter stand-ups that Dottie lines up for Erica and Opal (his speciality is humorous couplets about fish), and Caroline Aaron as the girls’ decidedly un-wicked stepmother – is full of top comedic actors on top form.

This is My Life boasts what still stands today as the sole leading feature film role of Julie Kavner, best known for voicing Marge in The Simpsons (which was still in its infancy in 1992). Kavner is extremely winning as the conflicted, charismatic Dottie: her relationship with her daughters is warm and genuine, she sells her underwhelming stand-up routines with abundant charm, and that iconic gravelly voice of hers imbues every line with extra spirit. Though she was in her early forties when the movie was released – not traditionally the most in-demand age for a Hollywood leading lady, especially 30 years ago – it’s hard not to lament the other starring roles she may have had if the film had performed better.

Alas, while it opened to a decent critical reception, receiving notably enthusiastic reviews from Roger Ebert and Janet Maslin, Ephron’s first feature as director was a resounding commercial flop. The following year, her next project, Sleepless in Seattle, would make almost a hundred times its predecessor’s box office – beginning its reign as one of the most beloved romantic comedies of all time, cementing Ephron the queen of the genre, and condemning the story of Dottie, Erica and Opal to relative obscurity.

While Ephron does have some directorial missteps that are better left forgotten (Mixed Nuts and Bewitched spring to mind), her debut is not one of them; its warm wit and empathetic attitude towards mothers balancing childcare and professional dreams make it far too good a movie to have languished in the dim recesses of our cultural memory for so long.