Leaving January 1

Directed by John Carpenter | 91 mins | 1976
As lean and brooding as its skeletal synth theme music, possessed from the first frame with an inimitable sense of ambient menace, Carpenter’s second feature is a marvel of action filmmaking economy. Its siege-on-an-LA-police-station plotline is inspired by Howard Hawks’s 1959 "Rio Bravo" but the film belongs unmistakably to a new and nastier generation of action filmmaking, clear from the moment an infamous ice cream truck visits early in the film. Whether for the first or tenth viewing, it just does not get any better than this.