Just like its hero, the academically impoverished but activities-rich high school kid Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), this 1998 comedy is a come-from-behind winner. Lavishly photographed in anamorphic widescreen, a format more typically used for action films and historical epics, it isn’t just about Max’s frenzied attempts to charm a moneybags businessman (Bill Murray), win the love of a teacher (Olivia Williams) and mount the most spectacular school play ever seen. It’s about recognizing the finality of all things, and learning to ride the cycles of decline/fall/death/rebirth rather than try to impose one’s will on them. Director Wes Anderson and his co-writer Owen set “Rushmore” between September and December of a school year. Much of the action occurs outdoors, and the change in climates both affects and comments upon the film; as the film’s events become more bleak, the leaves turn brown and fall from the trees, and the kids start turning up onscreen in jackets, then winter coats with mittens. (Max even sports a hat with earflaps, a la Holden Caulfield or Charlie Brown.) Especially lovely is the scene where Max returns to the prep school he got kicked out of and is attacked by underclassmen in Halloween costumes, and the November sequence, which is compressed into a single music montage scored to the Rolling Stones’ “I Am Waiting.” (Watch it here, it’s gorgeous.) The film was shot in Anderson’s hometown of Houston, Texas, which cinematographer Bob Yeoman miraculously photographs as if it’s the marshland in “Wuthering Heights.”

Todd Haynes’ 2002 drama is a highbrow pastiche heavily indebted to the three-hanky melodramas of Douglas Sirk, and visually, you know what that means: Technicolor, baby! (Or, to be accurate, as close to Technicolor as the movie’s cinematographer, Ed Lachman, could get, Technicolor having become basically defunct by that point.) The metaphoric possibilities of fall are put to very good use here. From the neurotic white housewife (Julianne Moore) falling in love with her late gardener’s African-American son (Dennis Haysbert) to the wife’s tortured hubby (Dennis Quaid), an alcoholic closet case, the movie is filled with people in delusions that are bound to decay. The movie is set in Connecticut, and man, does Haynes let us know it. Outdoor shots are often accompanied by a low wind that sends the dead leaves skittering about, and as the story goes on, Moore rarely leaves the house without a kerchief.

Did you know that Albert Einstein had a genius niece who fell in love with an auto mechanic, and that Einstein spent much of his time translating his groundbreaking scientific theories into little aphorisms that helped get the two crazy kids together? You didn’t? And what’s that? You say you don’t believe a word of it? Well, neither did I, and to be honest, 16 years after seeing this film in a theater, I can’t remember a damned thing about the plot. But I could probably draw some of the shots from memory, because they’re filled with some of the most eye-poppingly gorgeous fall landscapes (some green, some brown/yellow/orange) that I’ve seen in a movie. Director Fred Schepisi (“Roxanne”) shoots the movie in widescreen, as is his preference, and goes outside whenever he can, often making the characters rather small in the frame so that the panoramas overwhelm them. Some of the more arresting wide shots seem not to have been photographed, but painted in watercolor, probably by some old lady sitting in front of a roaring fire, sipping sherry and snacking on cinnamon-dusted apple slices in between brush strokes.

Shot mostly around Chadds Ford, Pa., within striking distance of director M. Night Shyamalan’s hometown of Philadelphia, “The Village” is either a stripped-down modern parable of anti-modernity or a “Twilight Zone” episode unwisely stretched out to feature length, depending on whether you like it. Shyamalan and his cinematographer Roger Deakins (regular lenser for the Coen brothers) photograph the leafy fall terrain in a series of elaborately choreographed long takes, which adds immeasurably to the film’s already intense atmosphere. The villagers’ yellow cloaks really pop against that foliage, and the skinned animals and horrendous, pagan-looking totems that keep appearing provide a splash of Halloween-like dread — an emotion that only builds as the story works its way toward its mandatory twist ending.

“Autumn Tale” is the final section of Eric Rohmer’s cycle “Tales of the Four Seasons,” and visually, at least, he saved the best for last. B

Starting out as a clever gloss on Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” (1968), about a couple of women whose personalities seem to merge, Woody Allen’s 1988 drama is a great fall movie, and arguably Allen’s loveliest evocation of his favorite city during windbreaker weather. (He throws in a couple of scenes set in the Hamptons, also sumptuous). Gena Rowlands plays the philosophy professor who eavesdrops on the therapist next door to her makeshift office; Mia Farrow is the patient who unexpectedly comes into her life. There’s also a dash of Berman’s “Wild Strawberries,” about an aging professor looking back on his life — an homage that dovetails nicely with the images of changing (dying) landscapes on the brink of aridity, then transformation.

“When Harry Met Sally” is Woody Allen lite, cutesy and pandering, and it steals Allen blind, right down to the racing-through-Manhattan ending of — fer crying out loud! — “Manhattan.” But my goodness, Rob Reiner, you sure did make fall in New York City look fantastic. The movie is a leaf spectacle extraordinaire, with Reiner and his crew taking maximum advantage of the patchwork-quilt landscaping by setting the film outdoors whenever possible — a strategy that adds gravitas to a movie that doesn’t pretend to have any — and costuming its stars in clothes that complement the terrain.

If you’re tired of Hollywood’s East Coast chauvinism about fall, here’s a nice change of pace. Steven Spielberg’s 1982 drama is set in Southern California (the redwood sequences were filmed in a forest near Crescent City). The fall colors aren’t as intense as in the 13 original colonies, but the rugged hills and misty air have a magic of their own. The film contains one of the great trick-or-treat sequences in cinema (as good as the one in Vincente Minnelli’s “Meet Me in St. Louis,” which almost made this list even though its events cover several holidays), and throughout, Spielberg and company evoke a lyrical sense of fall being a fairy tale time of year — a time when both dark and light magic can happen without warning. The moonlit bike ride through the forest, capped by a triumphant flight, is truly elating, like something out of a very good dream.

Yes, absolutely, it’s a great horror movie and arguably the greatest of all stalker movies, and if you made up a list of the great Halloween-themed movies of all time, duh, of course it’d be at the top. But it belongs here, too — not just because it captures the mythic ambience of a particular day, but because of an overwhelming quality of fallness (if that is indeed a word — and if it isn’t, well, take it up with The Shape). It’s pretty amusing to realize that this film, which is set in the fictional small town of Haddonfield, Ill., was actually shot in a neighborhood in Hollywood, Calif., with director John Carpenter and his crew faking the appearance of fall however they could, from making sure the actors wore a light layering of chill-weather attire to hiring greensmen to dump piles of brown leaves on the lawns.

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 film about a troublesome corpse appearing in an ordinarily boring small town isn’t thought of as one of the master’s great works, but it’s mordantly funny, and it happens to be one of the great foliage porn movies ever. Just look at this early scene in which the body is discovered by Captain Albert Wiles (Edmund Glenn), who mistakenly assumes he offed the poor bastard in a hunting accident. The screen is a canvas of yellow, orange and russet gold, impeccably re-created on a soundstage from on-location footage in Vermont, where “Harry” was shot. A comedy of mistaken assumptions that seems to have given the Coen brothers a template for about half of everything they would one day make, Hitchcock’s movie is a series of black comedy set-pieces strung together with funny exposition; every 10 minutes or so, somebody digs the body up and buries it somewhere else. Hitchcock must have know what a spectacle he had here, weather-wise: the poster showcases the fall leaves as if they were one of the movie’s stars.