Cool Hand Luke

When petty criminal Luke Jackson is sentenced to two years in a Florida prison farm, he doesn't play by the rules of either the sadistic warden or the yard's resident heavy, Dragline, who ends up admiring the new guy's unbreakable will. Luke's bravado, even in the face of repeated stints in the prison's dreaded solitary confinement cell, "the box," make him a rebel hero to his fellow convicts and a thorn in the side of the prison officers.

Cool Hand Luke landed as a near-unanimous critical triumph on release and has only grown in stature since, with Newman's performance, Conrad Hall's sun-scorched cinematography, and the ensemble around Newman drawing consistent praise. The one fault critics kept circling back to was the film's final stretch — the monologue, the symbolic close-up of the shattered sunglasses — which several reviewers found overwrought and at odds with the grounded realism that made everything before it so powerful.