One of the strongest of the film noir revivals popular during the 1970s, Night Moves pushes the genre to a bleak point of no return. Gene Hackman is wonderfully cast as a disillusioned Los Angeles detective hired to track down a washed out movie star's daughter while also trying to understand the mystery of his own rapidly disintegrating marriage. Night Move's sinister tale of conspiracy and intrigue powerfully evokes the Watergate era and stands as one of the quintessential American films of the 1970s.

Strangely underrated, Penn's wonderfully offbeat and inventive film is an extraordinary tour de force and one of his most stylish and satisfying works. Warren Beatty gives a brilliant turn as Mickey, a stand-up comedian on the lam who descends, like Orpheus, into a strange back alley underworld that just might be of his own invention. At turns haunting and comic, Mickey One offers a mysterious allegory of fear and redemption that features gorgeous photography by Robert Bresson's favorite cinematographer, Ghislain Cloquet, and an improvised soundtrack by jazz great Stan Getz.

In Penn's cinema the human body is frequently explored as expressive medium, with gesture, posture and movement taking on a new level of meaning and subtlety – often more expressive than even dialogue. Penn's contribution to the eight-part omnibus film of the 1972 Tokyo Olympics is a wonderful study of the body in motion that follows the thrilling trials of the pole vaulting competition.