Most people who think of the late 1960s Arthur Penn movie will immediately picture Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in their iconic movie-poster-ready, murder-spree, doomed-lovers poses. But if you watch the movie again (and you should), the performance that seals the deal most of all is Gene Hackman as Clyde's older brother, Buck Barrow, who joins the duo for their journey into self-delusional mythos and violent consequence. This is the movie that gave Hackman his A-list calling card, leading him to major-player success within a few years.

Bonnie and Clyde is considered the movie that jump-started the "new wave" of American filmmaking -- the era when filmmakers were taking cues from the exciting new styles of French, Italian, Swedish, and other innovative filmmakers. America's new wave of auteur directors came to include Robert Altman, Mike Nichols, Sam Peckinpah, Hal Ashby, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and many others. Bonnie and Clyde's story had been told before, but its style and approach built off of European works such as Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless.

If you really want to dive in to how different the film was for its time, read this exhaustive review by critic Pauline Kael.

Standout scene: The movie still packs a punch in the way it draws you into the playful, joyride-like whimsy of their on-the-run romance and then whacks you (and them) over the head with stark reality, and the first crushing moment comes when Gene Hackman's character is mortally wounded and stumbles around like an animal at the gate of death. The movie is haunting.

Standout scene (bonus): Hackman tells Beatty a joke about spiked cow's milk.

Directed by William Friedkin, The French Connection was a major step forward in early-1970s-style gritty realism, deployed for a crimefighting story based on true events. The movie was a box-office hit, and Hackman gave a star turn as the round-hatted "Popeye" Doyle, who fast-walked, fast-talked, and then fiercely sprinted his way through nearly every scene. Hackman played a New York narcotics agent who, along with his partner (played by Roy Scheider), targeted a major incoming shipment of heroin from a supplier in the French Riviera.

Hackman reprised his role a few years later with The French Connection II, which includes a segment in which he is kidnapped, forcibly addicted to heroin, and suffers through recovery.

Standout scene: The movie includes what is still considered one of the most riveting car chases in movie history, in part because it (along with the rest of the film) was shot entirely on location -- particularly a stretch underneath the elevated train line in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

Standout scene (bonus): Any time Popeye Doyle says "Are you still picking your feet in Poughkeepsie?"

Or as Mad Magazine called it, The Poopside-Down Adventure. This Irwin Allen disaster flick put its ensemble cast through the paces by making them find their way out of an ocean liner that has been tumbled upside-down. I saw it on TV as a kid, and it was the first time I'd ever seen Gene Hackman in anything, but his intensity and anger (heroic anger) left an impression on me. I didn't know anything about acting, but I knew that his performance affected me, and felt raw and driven.

Standout scene: Playing a reverend who is none too happy with what God is putting him through, Hackman singlehandedly -- actually doublehandedly -- saves the survivors who are trying to flee the inverted wreckage before it all sinks. Hackman leaps across a chasm to unscrew a wheel valve that is emitting scorching hot steam. As he sweatily dangles and turns the wheel, Hackman defiantly curses at his maker, then lets himself plunge into the burning oil like a fallen angel. Just because you're making a heroic sacrifice doesn't mean you have to be happy about it!

It's one of the standout moments in an otherwise rather silly disaster movie (the other standout was seeing Shelley Winters swim around underwater like a cute turtle).

The Conversation is a high achievement in character study, done early in Hackman's career in a way that practically made everything else he did seem like bonus work. Working from director Francis Ford Coppola's inspired script, Hackman creates one of the most multi-layered, moving, and interesting portraits of paranoia, alienation, and quiet despair ever filmed -- embodied in a character, Harry Caul, whose technical skills remain admirable and intriguing.

Hackman's character denies himself emotional intimacy due to deep-seated trust issues; ironically, he spies on private conversations and yet can't connect with anybody. He is often seen in a transparent raincoat, symbolizing the vulnerability he doesn't realize is apparent from outside.

The plot is driven by Caul's elaborate work recording a couple's extended conversation at Alta Plaza Park in San Francisco. He's perplexed by their oblique statements, and can't properly interpret what they're saying until it's too late.

Standout scene: After his delusions and misinterpretations have been laid bare, Hackman's character desperately rips out the interior of his apartment and, symbolically, himself -- until he has nothing left to do but play a lonely solo on a saxophone. (Steven Spielberg paid homage to this scene, of a hunter distressed at becoming the hunted, in his 2005 film Munich.)

Hackman reprised his surveillance-expert role in 1998's Enemy of the State, alongside Will Smith.

It's wild to think that in the same year he was in The Conversation, Hackman was also appearing in Mel Brooks's comedy classic Young Frankenstein. Hackman plays a blind man who invites in Peter Boyle's monster and offers him a cigar -- and, alas, a light.

Young Frankenstein also marked Hackman's second time appearing in a movie alongside Teri Garr (also in The Conversation), though in this case he only had a bit part and (if memory serves) did not interact with Garr, who plays Inga here. They did reteam, though, for 1988's Full Moon in Blue Water.

Standout scene: This one, but speaking of "standouts," the actress Cloris Leachman (who plays Frau Blücher in Young Frankenstein) spoke especially highly of Hackman in her memoir. She writes fondly of a dinner meetup she had with Hackman that turned into an "epic" all-night, uh, escapade.

Hackman was the first Lex Luthor on screen in a big movie way, and he's still the best -- wearing a tacky wig for most of the movie before his bald-mastermind appearance is revealed when Superman bests him.

You almost have to laugh at Kevin Spacey's and Jesse Eisenberg's attempts to approach the character with a fraction of Hackman's charisma and smug, nearly self-bored malevolence (though we have high hopes for Nicholas Hoult's upcoming take on Lex Luthor).

Hackman's take on Luthor is fine-tuned between comedy and malevolence, and while the movie's origin story unfolds, we get scraps of information about Luthor's team robbing a kryptonite-enjeweled meteorite that fell near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Eventually he outsmarts Superman to the point where the Man of Steel's only option is to turn back time.

Even though Luthor is utterly ahead-of-the-game (in his groovy New York Subway adjacent underground lair), he's blind to the backlash from his cruelty. This was a recurring theme for many of Hackman's darker roles. Luthor eventually loses to Superman due to his own nastiness toward his other minion, the kittenishly sexy Valerie Perrine. When Perrine, as Eve Teschmacher, frets over losing her grandmother to one of Luthor's nuclear blasts, she sadly mutters "My grandmother lives in Hackensack," and Hackman deadpans, "Not anymore." That single act of heartlessness inspires Miss Teschmacher (or as Hackman shouts it, "Miss TESCHMACHERRR!") to save the kryptonite-laden Superman from drowning.

Hackman doesn't just play Luthor as a used-car-salesman with Hannibal Lecter-like sociopathic genius, he also does a vaudevillian comedy-duo shtick alongside Ned Beatty, verbally and physically abusing his toady, who responds repeatedly with "Right away, mister Luthor!"

Hackman appeared as Lex Luthor in two out of three sequels, which had diminishing returns in spite of his contribution.

Standout scene: When Ned Beatty's Otis fails to get a secret code right due to writing the numbers on his arm and running out of space, Hackman threatens him with, "Do you want to see a really long arm?" and you're left to imagine him doing some sort of Stretch Armstrong move on poor Ned.

This intense suspense-thriller is multiple things at once: A tale of political scandal, Cold War espionage, and innocent-man-wrongly-accused screw-tightening as the protagonist (Kevin Costner) races time before a death is falsely pinned on him. No Way Out is often listed among films with the most surprising final-act twists (no, nobody sees dead people or has a sled named Rosebud).

Playing a conniving Secretary of Defense with a sexy mistress and a jealous streak, Gene Hackman is a terrific part of an ensemble that includes Costner, Sean Young, Will Patten, and several fine character actors. (Costner, right out of the gate early in his career, had the good fortune to play opposite Hackman in this, and opposite Sean Connery in The Untouchables.)

Hackman's role as a methodical, playing-the-angles political player goes hand-in-hand with his unraveling when it comes toself-preservation. Every scene he's in, he plays brilliantly, and as his right-hand man and effetely Machiavellian consigliere, Will Patten is fantastically good too.

Standout scene: When Hackman interrogates Sean Young's character about her other lover, he slaps her, calms himself, apologizes for slapping her, then lunges at her in quick succession. He's very effective as a man for whom composure and self-control are the highest disciplines, but who keeps failing due to jealousy and rage. A later scene, betraying a close confidant, is also a standout.

In this 1988, Alan Parker-directed film, Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe play FBI agents assigned to find three young activists who have disappeared in the Deep South while helping black people register to vote. The film is set in 1964 during the upheavals of the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., and it is based on a real case.

The film is fictionalized and dramatized for suspense, though, and Hackman and Dafoe embody two different approaches to law enforcement -- by-the-book (Dafoe) and by-kicking-ass (Hackman). It's a classic good cop/bad cop pairing, and Gene Hackman is juicy as the bad cop. The contrast between Dafoe's bookish-looking, idealistic agent and Hackman's pragmatic, experienced character seems to be the template that was later used with Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe for 1997's L.A. Confidential.

Hackman's character isn't one-note, though: In an early scene he relates a story about his own father's racism, and how as a boy he saw the ways white impoverishment and ignorance can lead to the shameful mistake of blaming other, different groups for one's own failings and disappointments. His insight into the psychology of racism also helps him uncover key witness testimony from several locals, including a disheartened housewife played by Frances McDormand (in one of her earliest non-Coen-Brothers roles).

Mississippi Burning is sometimes knocked for being part of a trend of "white savior" movies (hilariously parodied here), in which issues of racial injustice are Hollywoodized in a fashion that makes white people the center of black progress. Though it's a valid criticism in many cases, it is often used simplistically and without giving movies their due credit. Though very much a work for audiences in 1988, Mississippi Burning takes pains to show black people taking charge of their circumstances, highlighting black smaller characters in pivotal developments of the plot. Nonetheless, it's Hackman's character who is the film's biggest badass.

Standout scene: The film is worth seeing just to see Hackman beat the shaving cream out of a craven racist and wife beater (played by Brad Dourif)  in a barber shop.

At the time of its release, I was inclined to avoid taking this John Grisham story seriously, due in large part to the Tom Cruise factor. Cruise has always had too much of the "This guy is great at everything he does!" element to his characters, and in The Firm there are some goofy scenes where he does gymnastic tumbling (using a quick edit to an extra), which sets up Cruise's dramatic escape from villains later. (I also couldn't fully wrap my mind around character-actor Wilford Brimley as an evil henchman after seeing him in so many Quaker Oats commercials.)

In retrospect, it wasn't that bad; I was just a very picky viewer who had a hard time forgiving a few over-the-top moments.

Revisiting it recently, I decided The Firm has held up well -- thanks to the strong premise and, in large part, due to Gene Hackman's ruefully corrupt performance. It also sports seriously fun performances by the likes of Gary Busey and Holly Hunter.

Hackman's character isn't just a blackmailing lawyer and boss, he is somebody whose personal ethical compromise has slowly eaten away at himself his whole life. By the end he has thoroughly let his guard down in an act of subtle self-sabotage.

Jeanne Tripplehorn, who at the time was a new-on-the-scene actress, holds her own opposite Hackman -- whose character falls sadly in love with her, and eventually becomes deeply moved by her decency.

Standout scene:  When Hackman's character realizes he's been had, and is glad because it means that somebody has done the right thing instead of following in his ashamed footsteps.

Sam Raimi, best known at the time for the Evil Dead films, directed this surrealistically action-packed Western (based entirely on a gunfight contest) as if he'd taken the title to heart and slowing down would kill him. Every sequence spills over with visual punchlines, obnoxiously funny zoom-in shots and ferocious one-liners.

It's almost too much movie for itself, and protagonist Sharon Stone can't anchor the picture the way it needs; her Clint Eastwood-style sullenness lacks substance.

But the gallery of supporting actors, which includes Lance Henriksen, Leonard DiCaprio, Gene Hackman (doing a twisted take on his corrupt sheriff role from Unforgiven), fill the movie with so much wanton charisma that Stone's performance as the "straight man" actually starts working after a while. It's a weird picture where A-movie and B-movie qualities are blended at such a high velocity that you start to lose track of which is which.

Standout scene:  Hackman has numerous juicy scenes, including a face-to-face showdown at a saloon table opposite Sharon Stone with guns hidden under the table. He also has a shaded, ambivalent turn as the father of Leonardo DiCaprio's young character, a cocky kid who is trying to impress his illegitimate father by confronting him in the gunfight competition.

Hackman's final scene, with a piercing bit of light shining through the hole in his soul, marks Sam Raimi's ability to embrace both schlocky comic-book style and real cinematic potency. Not to overstate the case, but....that image and that moment transcend the Western genre and become almost supernatural.

Standout scene (bonus): Hackman's defiant "This is my town!" speech.

By the time Wes Anderson's far-too-"twee" movie was released, Hackman was at the take-it-or-leave-it stage of his career, and you get the sense he signed on just for the sheer fun of scenery chewing alongside a cast and director who were doing everything differently.

Wes Anderson's status as a stylistic auteur got a major boost from Hackman's buoyant patriarch, showing what the director could do beyond the partnerships of the Wilson brothers, unhinged Bill Murray, and a Coppola nephews. The film's ensemble of Anjelica Huston, Danny Glover, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, and several others -- along with a shrewdly selected soundtrack -- was an incisive statement of indie-films style. To date The Royal Tenenbaums remains on most fans' #1 spots for the love-him-or-hate-him director.

Standout scene: I'm going to have to go back and watch the film again to pick one scene out, but Hackman seems to be having a blast for much of the movie, and "having a blast" is the way he deserves to be remembered.

Runaway Jury was Hackman's second time playing a morally and ethically compromised lawyer in a film based on a John Grisham legal thriller. For this 2003 film, the Hackman character is also an expert in jury selection, and his attempts to manipulate jurors behind the scene come up against a juror (John Cusack) who has machinations of his own. The movie's outstanding cast also includes Rachel Weisz and dozens of others, and the storyline about a civil suit against gun manufacturers seems as relevant today as it ever was (unfortunately).

Standout scene:  Hackman's legal team is fighting against plaintiffs led by Dustin Hoffman's character, and eventually Hackman and Hoffman have a verbal showdown in the courthouse bathroom. Their exchange doesn't make or break the case, but it explicates the differences in their approach to justice and ethics. Once again, Hackman's character is the more pragmatic, cynical one; but this time he may have underestimated his opponents.

Runaway Jury isn't an all-time great film, and the premise is stretched legal-brief-thin (unless New Orleans standards for juror confidentiality are astonishingly low). But seeing Hackman and Hoffman in a scene together is almost as cool as watching DeNiro and Pacino facing off in Heat; these are two giants of the New Hollywood era, finally throwing sparks on film. It's even cooler when you factor in that Hackman and Hoffman had worked together as struggling actors at the Pasadena Playhouse in the 1960s, and shared an apartment together (along with Robert Duvall) when they were pounding the pavement to get acting gigs in New York City. If you really want to throw in extra subtext, you could interpret Hackman's animosity toward Hoffman's character as a wee bit o' resentment at the latter beating out the former for an Oscar a few years later when Rain Man went up against Mississippi Burning. (Though, realistically, he was surely thrilled over his friend's win.)

Many sports fans and sports-film fans swear by Hoosiers, a tale of a Midwest small-town basketball team who make it to the championship. Hackman plays the coach, whose inspiring, down-to-earth leadership and speeches hold the group together. (He apparently gave a similarly beloved performance in the football-based film The Replacements.)

I haven't seen the film (yet) but feel like it would be a major omission not to include it. (Though I've omitted many other acclaimed films, such as Hackman's performance in 1973's Scarecrow alongside Al Pacino.)

This is another film I  haven't seen (yet) but I'd feel remiss in not mentioning Hackman's turn as a moral-majority type who ends up dressing in drag.

As Roger Ebert writes in his three-out-of four-star review, "Most of the biggest laughs, for me, came from Gene Hackman and Dianne Wiest, as the senator and his wife. Hackman’s senator is weathering a crisis (his closest colleague has just died in bed with an underage prostitute), and thinks maybe meeting his new in-laws will appease his right-wing constituents by promoting family values."