Dark Star (1974)

Dark Star (1974)
Rating: ★★★★
Jun 9, 2000Space Mission Gone Wrong Comedy
John Carpenter's first film, made as a student project in collaboration with an also unknown Dan O'Bannon. A send-up of the boldly going space exploration of Star Trek, this features a ship where the crew are going stir crazy. The results are hilarious

Escape from New York (1981)

Escape from New York (1981)
Rating: ★★★★
Jul 5, 2002Action/New York as a Future Prison
One of the key films from John Carpenter with Kurt Russell giving his best ever performance, a slick exciting action film that imagines a future Manhattan Island having been transformed into a lawless prison

Starman (1984)

Starman (1984)
Rating: ★★★
May 5, 2000Alien Visitor
John Carpenter abandons horror to make one of the better E.T.-inspired cute and cuddly alien visitor films. The film’s grasp of science is sometimes shaky but the film gains an enormous amount from Jeff Bridges’ performance as the alien trying to adjust to being in a human body

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
Rating: ★★★
May 7, 2003Chinese Supernatural/Martial Arts Fantasy
John Carpenter film that was marketed as a Raiders of the Lost Ark copy but is more Carpenter trying to emulate Hong Kong’s Wu Xia cinema, which was largely unknown in the West at the time. All with highly enjoyable conic results.

Escape from L.A. (1996)

Escape from L.A. (1996)
Rating: ★★★
Sep 11, 2003Action/Los Angeles as a Future Prison
John Carpenter’s sequel to Escape from New York falls too much in the shadow of its predecessor, nevertheless has some effective moments of its own, with Carpenter in particular creating a satiric fundamentalist future

The Ward (2010)

The Ward (2010)
Rating: ★★
Jun 16, 2011Haunted Asylum
John Carpenter returned to the director's chair after more than a decade but failed to light the world on fire. Carpenter makes what you could call a ghost story version of Girl, Interrupted. The scares are tame and the film is hamstrung by an improbable M. Night Shyamalan twist ending