Paula Kelly

The first in a trio of very broad comedies from director Sidney Poitier features Poitier and Bill Cosby as two small-time hustlers always looking for an angle. During a robbery at a swanky nightclub, they are relieved of their wallets, only to find later that one of them had a lottery ticket that came up a winner. The chase is on as they scour the city to find their prize, along the way running up against Harry Belafonte as a sly and suave mob kingpin (with a nod to Don Corleone) with his eye on the ticket as well.

Soylent Green is landmark screen science-fiction, a riveting entertainment anda cautionary tale that holds a mirror to a tomorrow rife with ecological disaster. Working well again in the futuristic genre following Planet Of the Apes and The Omega Man, action titan Charlton Heston portrays Thorn, a detective prowling the dark streets of a polluted, overpopulated Big Apple gone rotten in 2022. He's trailing a murderer-and the trail leads to a stunning discovery.

The best-selling novel by Michael Crichton was faithfully adapted for this taut 1971 thriller, about a team of scientists racing against time to destroy a deadly alien virus that threatens to wipe out life on Earth. As usual with any Crichton-based movie, the emphasis is on an exciting clash between nature and science, beginning when virologists discover the outer-space virus in a tiny town full of corpses.