Marjorie Baumgarten

Frenzy is one of the great latter-day Hitchcocks; great technique, great suspense, and very black humor drive this tale of an innocent man hunted by Scotland Yard for a series of sex murders.

Household Saints restores one's faith in miracles while teaching us how to invent them ourselves. That, and also teaching us not to worry about getting stigmata on the carpet when Jesus comes to visit.

One of Disney’s best and most popular live-action movies, this one is a favorite among those who grew up in the Seventies

Not only is it a film about a poet, Paterson transcends its story to become a work of poetry itself.

Winter's Bone never hits a false note.

Repulsion's depiction of a young woman's dissolution into madness is one of the most harrowing mental descents ever depicted onscreen. (Reviewed 11/24/97)

This modern cult classic is a triumphantly dark comedy directed by one of the film world's truly original visionaries, Terry Gilliam. "Imagination" is this futuristic film’s middle name.

Tennessee Williams’ study of a crumbling Southern patriarchy is riveting stuff. Although the word homosexuality is never uttered, this Hollywood reworking brings a certain understanding of the son’s latent “immaturity” and his wife’s childlessness. Bolstered by extraordinary performances, this tale’s a summer sizzler.

A movie that amply delivers on the epic promise of its title, entertaining, enlightening, and emboldening viewers with its deceptively simple premise and execution.

I can think of no other movie that has dared to analyze grief and its aftermath with such naked honesty and precision.

Taylor, Burton, and Harrison are sublime in this sweeping epic of love and nations.

The story is one of those great mad scientist tales in which the potion invented with the best intentions for its enhancement of human life becomes instead an evil force bent on its destruction. The visual effects here are pretty great - and at first comedic - as the Invisible Man smokes and brawls and rocks in a chair. Oh, but then the horror happens.

There is no better way to while away a Sunday afternoon than with this sprawling saga about the growth of Texas and the families that matured along with the state. If Texas had a state movie, then Giant would be it.

For my money, this Freudian tale about a beautiful kleptomaniac and liar is one of Hitchcock's best accomplishments, certainly one of his most perverse.

More lethal than a nuclear waste dump, Kubrick's komedy at least kills us with laughter... It's one of the greatest - and undoubtably the most hilarious - antiwar statements ever put to film.

Teen tales don’t get much better than this.

This is an amazing allegorical study of the life and death of a donkey named Balthazar, whose nasty, brutish life as a slave parallels that of a young farm girl.

One of the cinema’s very best car-chase sequences – set amid the hilly, windy San Francisco streets – caps this quintessential Steve McQueen policier.

Just about as great as a movie's ever gonna be... As for the storytellng, The Godfather is an intricately constructed gem that simultaneously kicks ass.

An additional treat is seeing Hollywood good guy Henry Fonda playing one of the nastiest curs in the West. Once Upon a Time in the West is one of the great films in cinema history. (8/30/2000 Review)

Talk about your baby boys – Cagney takes the cake here as a psychopathic gangster with a seriously perverse mother complex. A gangster classic.

Bergman and Grant sizzle in this espionage tale written by Ben Hecht.

One of the all-time great action movies, The Great Escape also features an all-star international cast. The first half of the movie sets up all the various characters who have to drop their prickly differences and unite to outwit their German captors. Steve McQueen as the Cooler King is a genuine classic.

In this enduringly transcendent love story, Truffaut traces the relationships between three lovers and friends over the years. Moreau dominates every fragment of the movie with her magisterial eroticism. The film works in ways that touch the heart more than the mind.

This sentimental perennial is a holiday chestnut.

Michèle is a daring, complicated character – one that Isabelle Huppert brilliantly creates in concert with the director, Paul Verhoeven.

One of the sharpest prison dramas ever, although it's graced with some very humorous portions as well.

Based on a Cornell Woolrich short story, this is one of Hitchcock's finest moments, full of subtle humor and nasty black turns, not to mention a wonderful score by Franz Waxman and gorgeous cinematography from longtime Hitchcock director of photography Robert Burks.