William Friedkin is back and I’m here to ask the 70’s auteur to please stay. Just keep going. Though his image has been tarnished through the decades  with critically mixed pictures like "Jade," "Blue Chips," "Rules of Engagement" and "The Hunted" (pictures that remain interesting, especially "The Hunted"), 20-odd years ago he was one of Hollywood's most courted directors. Creating two bona-fide American classics, "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist" and some misunderstood masterpieces, "Cruising" and "Sorcerer," Friedkin’s work can be fearlessly visceral and cinematically ingenious (his use of sound is often brilliant, and his collaboration with wizard Jack Nitzsche is especially virtuoso). When Friedkin is on his game, he’s under-your-skin profound.

 

Provocative ideas have always been central to Friedkin's vision, and he's jumped genres to find them. Among other films (including Sonny and Cher's "Good Times"), he's adapted stage plays, such as Harold Pinter's "The Birthday Party" (1968), about a lodger harassed by two strangers, and "The Boys in the Band" (1970), a biting, soul-searching night in the life of gay friends and the police thriller "To Live and Die in L.A." (1985), which exposed both sides of the law's moral ambiguity even further than "The French Connection."

 

His newest study of insanity and horror, "Bug" (starring Ashley Judd) finds Friedkin venturing into a smaller though no less explosive milieu, adapting Trecy Letts off-Broadway play for a claustrophobic, paranoid thriller. With this, I'm looking at the best of Friedkin's work— work that helped shape a period of darker, more challenging and often more shocking movies. Here are five of Friedkin’s greatest—superior studies of flawed humanity, tension, fear and, of course, some wicked cool car chase sequences.

 

"The French Connection" (1971)

 

A tour de force of stylistic, kinetic editing, sweeping hand-held camerawork, savage realism and natural, anti-heroic leads, "The French Connection" won that rare honor in Hollywood, Academy Awards for best picture and best director and for an “action” picture. Within this complex police story exists wonderful hard boiled acting, ingenious cinematography, one of the best dirty cops in filmdom (Popeye Doyle, played by Gene Hackman at his porkpie hat hottest) and one of the grittiest, most exhilarating chase scenes ever filmed. To top it all off, a beautifully subtle yet tough Roy Scheider is Hackman’s partner, and Roy Scheider is great in just about everything.

 

Read the rest of the list here.