The Graduate (1967)

Benjamin Braddock’s big romantic quest in the second half of The Graduate is, by today’s standards, a guy following a girl to college and refusing to leave. Watch it now and you kind of want to call somebody. Everything around it, though, is sharp. Dustin Hoffman plays Benjamin as a nervous wreck in a sports car, a guy so lost after school that floating on a raft in his parents’ pool counts as a plan. Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson has her own ideas about how Benjamin should spend the summer, and she plays her cool, bored and a little sad, the best performance in the movie. Mike Nichols frames Benjamin behind fish tanks, inside a scuba mask, and lost in a crowd of grown-ups shouting advice, including one word about plastics. The Simon and Garfunkel songs do half the emotional work. An 8.6 because it’s funny, lonely and gorgeous, with a hero who gets harder to root for every year. $62.78 says the next time a grown-up asks about your future, you just say plastics and walk away.

What works: Anne Bancroft is magnetic, Dustin Hoffman’s awkwardness is perfectly pitched, and Mike Nichols makes every shot show how stuck Benjamin feels.

What doesn’t: Benjamin’s pursuit of Elaine in the second half plays more like pestering than romance, and it’s hard to cheer for now.

Who it’s for: Anyone who has finished school and felt completely lost about what comes next.