Roman Polanski‘s devious, fascinating and marvelously entertaining neo-noir is arguably one of the best movies, like, ever, with Jack Nicholson giving one of his greatest and most iconic performances as J.J. ‘Jake’ Gittes, a moderately successful private eye who’s hired by a mysterious femme fatale (Faye Dunaway) to snoop on her husband and ends up uncovering all sorts of dirty business in the Los Angeles waterworks — Jake soon learns, amongst other things, that sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong will get it slashed (by the director himself, making a memorable cameo appearance). Robert Towne turned down a $175,000 paycheck to adapt The Great Gatsby and instead asked for $25,000 to write his own story, a seemingly impossibly complicated mystery yarn that, like a great Raymond Chandler novel, ends up making perfect sense when it all comes together. Jerry Goldsmith’s score is aces, too, with David Lynch citing it as his all-time favorite movie soundtrack. Chinatown was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won for Towne’s screenplay; Nicholson himself directed the 1990 sequel, The Two Jakes, an enjoyable time-waster but little more.