Movies are often compared to comfort food and for good reason – the right movie at the right time can be a healing experience, just as the wrong movie at the wrong time can make a bad thing even worse. The first and only time I saw the 1983 drama Brainwash (aka Circle of Power) with Yvette Mimeux was when I was sick with the flu; the movie, about an EST-style retreat for corporate executives that puts these Alpha males through the ringer, was so oppressive and claustrophobic to my weakened condition that I have avoided it ever since. So I'm talking about the opposite effect here.

Working from home, I keep the TV on for some background noise but it has to be a movie, not reality TV or a game show or news… something with dialogue and music, something I can hear and not hear at the same time, pay attention to or tune out. Occasionally a movie comes on that stops me in my tracks and I am compelled, as if by Mesmerism, to watch the thing through to the end. I call these movies again and again movies because you will watch them five, eight, ten times or more. Quality isn't the issue and most of the movies on my list would probably best be classified as guilty pleasures. These films don't have to be good to capture my complete attention… they just have to be on.

In no particular order…

The Towering Inferno (1974, top). Irwin Allen's follow-up to The Poseidon Adventure (1972) is another all-star affair, this time set within a downtown Los Angeles too-high rise constructed with sub-par materials. When sparks fly, it's up to architect Paul Newman, fire & rescue captain Steve McQueen and security guard O. J. Simpson to save the day. Disaster flicks are natural again and again movies, being broken up into vignettes of amazing rescues and tragic endings. I don't know what it is about The Towering Inferno that does it for me, that makes me watch it, and I don't feel this same passion for The Poseidon Adventure (which has a far more ingenious set-up) or Earthquake (1974). I think it's watching the professionalism and heroics of the firefighters… and all that gear! Love the gear.

Brubaker (1980). As with The Towering Inferno, I saw the fact-based Brubaker in the theater and enjoy catching up with it after almost thirty years via TV broadcasts. Director Stuart Rosenberg certainly made better movies (Cool Hand Luke comes immediately to mind), as has star Robert Redford, but the supporting cast here is a big part of the lure: Yaphett Kotto, Jane Alexander (looking so beautiful), Morgan Freeman ("R-E-S-P-E-C-T!"), Matt Clark, Albert Salmi, Murray Hamilton, Everett McGill, Val Avery, M. Emmet Walsh, Wilford Brimley, Joe Spinell, Linda Haynes (whose career in film was too short) and the always watchable Tim McIntire. When was the last time you watched a new movie with a dozen solid veteran characters onboard? And I'm leaving people out!

El Dorado (1967). This Howard Hawks western is inferior to his classic Rio Bravo (1959) yet I'm drawn to it again and again because it was a family favorite when I was growing up. Leigh Brackett's script is witty and John Wayne and Robert Mitchum are a good pair. The supporting cast is pretty choice, too: Ed Asner, The Immortal's Christopher George, the immortal Arthur Hunnicutt, the equally immortal R. G. Armstrong, Paul Fix and Johnny Crawford (as a tenderfoot who makes the grave mistake of firing on The Duke) from The Rifleman, John Mitchum, The Losers' Adam Roarke and a young James Caan, who rocks a cool-ass leather shirt (with a knife hidden under the collar), a jaunty top hat and a sawed off shotgun.  Puh-pow!

Five Came Back (1939). John Farrow directed both this savage jungle drama and its inferior (but still interesting) 1956 remake Back from Eternity. You won't find showings of this anywhere but on Turner Classic Movies and they are infrequent to be sure but when I see Five Came Back has turned up again on the schedule, I'm Johnny on the Spot. Somewhat related to the disaster film, this one belongs to the action/adventure subcategory of survival-in-an-exotic-locale film. Sure, the jungle is strictly backlot and the airplane is a miniature, but that cast… Lucille Ball is gorgeous, Chester Morris appropriately jut-jawed, Patrick Knowles (in real life an avid amateur pilot) is appropriately pathetic in the Richard Chamberlain/useless husband role, John Carradine characteristically over-the-freaking-top and Allen Jenkins is, well, Allen Jenkins. And that fade-out… oof!

Death Wish II (1982). Somehow late in life I've become a closet fan of the Death Wish series starring Charles Bronson as an architect who loses his whole family (biological and adopted) over the course of several feature films and takes out his anger on various villains in various cities. This first sequel is set in Los Angeles and Laurence Fishburne (warming up for his even more hateful turn as Jimmy Jump in Abel Ferrara's King of New York) is among the thugs brought down by Chuck's deadly aim. It's pure, unfiltered exploitative crap of the first water but I love the Hollywood locations and, once again, the supporting cast (Vincent Gardenia, Robert F. Lyons, J. D. Cannon and Anthony Franciosa) is to die for.

Yes, the same guy who thrills to vigilante violence writ large in Death Wish II will find himself dabbing away tears for the entirety of Love Story (1970), which everybody in the world seems to hate… but me. I love (that word again!) the Boston/New York setting and the winter scenes and the manipulative soundtrack and the snapshot of life in 1970. I also find the, you know, love story tender and tragic and John Marley breaks my heart. I can't even claim coolness points by saying I like Love Story because Tommy Lee Jones appears in an early role. I like it because it appeals to the big sobbing girl in me, so there.

Shattered Glass (2003) kind of snuck up on me… but I guess that's how again and again movies work. I caught the film, directed by Billy Ray and based on the journalism footnote of cub reporter Stephen Glass's fraudulent stories for The New Republic, on The Independent Film Channel. I thought once would be enough until repeat viewings (caught completely by chance) drew me back – you guessed it – again and again. The stars of the piece are Hayden Christensen and Peter Sarsgaard (pictured above), and both are excellent, but the supporting cast benefits from lived-in performances by Chloe Sevigny, Steve Zahn, a bespectacled Rosario Dawson, Mark Blum and a rare dramatic turn by The Simpsons' Hank Azaria. The dialogue (some of it drawn from life) crackles and Hayden Christensen is a pluperfect weasel ("I didn't do anything wrong!").

I am ending this list with William Castle's cult favorite The House on Haunted Hill (1959), starring Vincent Price, Elisha Cook Jr. and the bewitching Carol Ohmart (pictured in recoil mode at right). This is the only again and again movie on this list that I own on DVD and its inclusion is somewhat representative. There are certain movies that, even though I may already own a complete, uncut copy, I will watch again and again when they're shown on television because there's something about the act of them being broadcast, with or without commercial interruptions, that takes me back to the days of my youth, when I ate these movies as if they were food. Fried food. With gravy. Even at their cynical and spooky worst/best, old black-and-white horror movies are a comfort to me, they return me to myself when the struggle to make a living breaks me up into too many pieces, and they remind me, again and again, of who I really am.

Okay, now that I've shown you mine… you show me yours! Show me! Again and again!