Chinatown (1974)

  Chinatown is one of those movies you watch one time because it's a classic and you need to see it to be a well-rounded cinephile and then you never watch again because it's soul-crushing, blackly cynical, and directed by a rapist.

Unless you need to show it to someone else to further their cinematic education.  Guess which one is more fun.

Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is an L.A. private investigator hired to catch a milquetoast water engineer (Darrell Zwerling) cheating on his wife.  Except the woman who hired him turns out to not be his wife and the real Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) is not pleased that Gittes has basically run a smear campaign against her husband.  Especially when the dude ends up dead in a reservoir and the cops are leaning towards suicide.  Gittes is not pleased at being used so he and the widow Mulwray team up to determine who would want her husband dead and what's going on with the water rights of Los Angeles county.

This is a true noir for all it's filmed in sunny streets and well-lit country clubs.  It's thematically dark, extremely depressing, and there's no justice to be found.  It's a damn near perfect movie and it fucking kills me to say that because Roman Polanski is a cockroach of a person and I hate praising him.  Worse still, the concept that powerful men will always be self-serving assholes no matter how much money they have and how much destruction they cause has only gotten more timely and relevant.

This movie will fuck you up.  That is a guarantee.  Unless you are a sociopath, in which case it's more like a how-to.  It is streaming on Tubi with like 10 ad breaks or you can rent it on Amazon for $3.99.