It may be “all for one and one for all,” but it took director Richard Lester two films to contain the sweeping spectacle of Alexandre Dumas’s swashbuckling adventure. This sequel—shot simultaneously with The Three Musketeers, since they were originally conceived as a single film—dials down the comic high jinks that distinguished the first installment in favor of a more somber tone, as our heroes are drawn into a deadly revenge plot orchestrated by the seductive Milady de Winter (a deliciously…

Richard Lester’s spirited adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s timeless novel immediately distinguished itself from previous film versions with its irresistible lightheartedness. It follows the brash, young wannabe musketeer d’Artagnan (Michael York) as he travels from the French countryside to Paris and befriends Athos (Oliver Reed), Porthos (Frank Finlay), and Aramis (Richard Chamberlain), famed swordsmen whom he must help to stop the conniving Cardinal Richelieu (Charlton Heston) and his plot to undermine the king. The Three Musketeers sweeps viewers away with its…

The ultimate cult British comedy, Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical cinematic bender is a feast of delectably florid dialogue delivered with deadpan relish by stars Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann as, respectively, Withnail and “I,” a pair of perpetually soused, unemployed actors in 1960s London who, desperate to escape their nightmarishly grimy flat, embark on a hilariously misbegotten country getaway beset by menacing locals, bare cupboards, and a randy uncle—all of which they may be able to withstand as long as…

Writer-director Bruce Robinson and star Richard E. Grant, the cracked comic geniuses behind the cult favorite Withnail and I, reteamed for this diabolically dark satire of runaway capitalism in Margaret Thatcher–era England. Grant gives a virtuosically crazed performance as an ambitious advertising exec whose latest assignment—devising a campaign for a pimple cream—has him on the edge of a nervous breakdown. When he sprouts an enormous boil on his shoulder—one that not only talks but has evil ambitions of its own—a…