7. Angels Live In My Town (Boogie Nights)
No one could accuse Paul Thomas Anderson of encouraging bad acting. Unless, that is, you include the films of Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), in which Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) and Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly) play Brock Landers and Chest Rockwell, two cops who have a habit of losing their shirts. Angels Live In My Town is hardly Horner's finest hour. The slap bass soundtrack, the fight sequences, the part where Landers slips on a roof and pretends nothing happened; it's a pastiche perfectly realised. Documenting Diggler's, erm, rise and fall in Seventies skin flicks, Anderson turns the camera onto a decade, a dream and an industry built on excess.