Before directing 2013’s Nebraska and 2011’s The Descendants (set, respectively, in a black-and-white heartland and a deceptively sunny Hawaii), Alexander Payne directed and co-wrote this 2004 twisted road tour of the California wine country. Paul Giamatti was in peak form as a depressed man who accompanies a buddy (Thomas Haden Church) about to be married on a last-adventure trip to some local wineries, and Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh are equally credible, touching, and unpredictable as the women they encounter along the way. Sideways feels more like a Seventies movie than a modern one – and I mean that as the highest sort of compliment.