Rushmore

Rushmore is the film that invented Wes Anderson. His second feature — about Max Fischer, a hyperactive prep school student who falls in love with a first-grade teacher and wages war against his millionaire mentor for her affections — established every signature that would define his career: the symmetrical compositions, the British Invasion soundtrack, the precocious characters, the melancholy beneath the whimsy.

Jason Schwartzman's Max Fischer is the most complete teenage character in 90s comedy — a kid who directs plays, leads every extracurricular activity, and fails every class. His ambition is limitless and his self-awareness is zero. Bill Murray's Herman Blume — a depressed industrialist who envies Max's passion — is the performance that reinvented Murray's career. After decades of comedies, Murray discovered that his deadpan could convey sadness as powerfully as humor.

The love triangle between Max, Blume, and Olivia Williams' Miss Cross is played with total sincerity, which is why it is funny. Max does not know he is a kid in an adult situation. Blume does not know he is an adult in a kid's situation. And Miss Cross cannot believe either of them. The Vietnam play climax — a full-scale theatrical production with pyrotechnics — is Anderson's mission statement: excess in service of feeling. Rushmore made everything that followed possible.