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.

With 8 1/2, Fellini cast aside all vestiges of the naturalism that informed his early work. From here, he stepped off into the dazzling fantasyland of Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, and Roma, but for many, this remains the quintessential Federico.

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

Supremely goofy in tone, the film pits Wayne (in his last Ford film) and Marvin as drunken pals who careen from one friendly brawl to the next. A Pacific island paradise becomes their silly playpen.

Angela Lansbury's frighteningly in-check performance is alone worth the trip.

Just look at the cast and try to resist the testosterone pull of this movie.

Nabokov’s satire is sensationally cast, with Winters and Sellers delivering some of their best work ever.

When you see a great Peckinpah film like his second feature, Ride the High Country (1962), you feel that the director has found a way to tell a story that lays his own soul across the screen. This movie celebrates a hero of self-control. But each frame is energized with a sense of what that self-control has cost the man in love, friendship, and glory.

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.

Arguably, the best John Ford film ever, certainly one the very best, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an American classic. Ford addresses the complexity of heroism in a poetic manner.

Despite wonderful performances from all the actors, Wyler’s attempt to retell the story in a more forthright manner still seems to pussyfoot timidly around the issues.

A surprisingly effective adventure, El Cid begins well enough but if you stick with the story 'til the end, in CinemaScope, it becomes breathtaking.

Hepburn brings Truman Capote's Holly Golightly to vivid life. [Review of re-release]

Dingy atmosphere and great performances make this a standout.

A superlative cast vividly captures the turbulence of this classic drama about the constrictions caused by race in postwar Chicago.

Considering how lame the bulk of teen movies made in the late Fifties and early Sixties look in retrospect, Where the Boys Are stands up respectably well.

When Liz is good, she's very, very good, but when she's bad, she gives it all she's got. Director Daniel Mann definitely had a way with leading ladies.

The basic outline was adapted from Kurosawa's classic Seven Samurai and made into an American Western by one of the great innovators of the genre, John Sturges. The film led the way for other all-star cast outings.

Kubrick’s gladiator film is the pinnacle of sword-and-sandal epics, and who isn’t a sucker for stories about rebellious slaves? This is the kind of movie the Paramount’s screen was made for.

Mainly remembered for its rather soggy haunted-house plot and the Master Showman's latest gimmick, the "Illusion-O" Ghost Viewer (a strip of colored plastic not unlike 3-D glasses which enabled audiences to see the ghosts on screen, or "remove" them when cowardice got the better of them).

Corman's legendary parsimony has rarely been so inobvious; House of Usher has the look and feel of a film made for far more than its tiny $200K budget (and on a tight, 15-day shooting schedule). Its authentically creepy dream-sequence – all grasping hands and hazy blue-gelled fog swirls –­ is a minor surrealist masterpiece by its own right.

This essential Billy Wilder film smoothly combines trenchant social observation with hilarious comedy.

The battles between the imperious Hepburn and the presumed-mad Taylor are pure theatricality, while sensitive shrink Clift observes it all and emotes.

One of Hitchcock's very best comic thrillers, North by Northwest features scene after unforgettable scene.

Arguably the best cross-dressing comedy of all time, it's also one of director Billy Wilder's most fluid, vibrant, laugh-out-loud accomplishments, rife with zippy one-liners delivered in Lemmon's impeccable style, and a rakishly outrageous Cary Grant impersonation from Curtis. Monroe is at her gooey, blonde best here as the pouty, hard-drinking Sugar.

The film is a biting critique of American race relations in the Fifties and a complex study in contrasts and paradoxes.

The hypocrisy, sexual repression, and backwater snobbery here is enough to make Peyton Place look like Vatican City.

Nearly a decade before the supper-table racial detente of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Kramer mined the subject matter of racial divisiveness in the groundbreaking The Defiant Ones, which paired Curtis and Poitier as hunky prison escapees unhappily bonded to each other by means of metal chains and the mutual need to survive.

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.

Vertigo stands as one of the thrill master's most psychologically dense and twisted works in which obsession, commitment, and dual identities all merge to create a voluptuous tale of thwarted love. [Restored version]

This film no doubt planted the seeds for more good ol' boy action pics (White Lightning, Smokey and the Bandit), but while many of those vehicles relied solely on high-speed hijinks, Mitchum's story and charismatic screen presence make Thunder Road a ride to remember.

The great director's masterpiece of bad juju. [Director's Cut]

Kubrick’s film vividly depicts the harsh realities of war and remains a great anti-war drama.

Elvis' third movie is surely his best. He plays a guy vaguely like himself, who hits it big after learning to play music while in prison. Not only does this film have some of the best tunes in an Elvis movie, the choreography is great too.

This oil-family story is way, way east of Eden. Were I asked to choose, Written on the Wind would blow in as my favorite Sirk film.

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.

As good as the story and direction are, though, the true strength of The Killing lies in the characters and characterizations.

A meditation on survival, The Searchers is about the loss of faith and the death of heroes.

Ageism, sexism, classism, and unabashed snobbery rear their ugly heads in a provocatively told story by probably the greatest film melodrama stylist who ever lived.

It's been 40 years since James Dean essayed his quintessential role in as a troubled American teen and, along with co-stars Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo, established an iconography of adolescence whose potency extends into the present.

Hitchcock's comedic charms shine in this delightful story about a corpse that just won't stay buried.

Preminger strips the musical of all excess and frills. He creates an austere, depoeticized, anti-lyrical world in which nothing obstructs his camera's detached recording of the action. The great themes of Preminger's oeuvre are obsession and the conflict between freedom and repression, themes which are central to Carmen Jones.

White Christmas endures – despite not being a very good movie.

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.

This Stanley Kramer-produced film is the original biker movie.

Minnelli's direction has seldom attained such a perfect fusion of form and content. The Band Wagon is quite simply a masterpiece.

Clift's performance is moody, the kind of slow, psychological approach rarely witnessed in Hitchcock's films.

Kurosawa's international breakthrough is a masterstroke in unreliable narration.

The camera tracks, cranes, and dollies through the dance space, anticipating with the boldness of the greatest director working at MGM in 1951, that the New Wave is, indeed, not so very far away. Finally, like all of Minnelli's collaborations with Lerner (Brigadoon, Gigi, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever), An American in Paris is a paradox - a musical that embraces solitude and romantic despair. It is a resplendent motion picture.

Streetcar is always a wonderful screen drama and now, also, a study in film archeology. [Director's Cut]

Celebrate Father's Day in grand movie style.

So thick and rich you'll be tempted to eat it with a fork - but use a spoon to get every drop.

Billy Wilder’s cynical edge is finely honed in this darkly amusing satire, which won three Academy Awards. It’s a film that is perennially ready for its close-up.

It has a classic Hitchcock scenario in which a man is mistaken for a murderer, but the film lacks humor and suspense. Even the great cast is unable to make much headway with this torpid thriller.

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

It's a giddy blend of horror and comedy.

This sentimental perennial is a holiday chestnut.

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

With a plot hinging on twists and turns that might not have worked as well with less electricity than Turner and Garfield generate, Postman sizzles and flares with crackling tension.

This is the master of subversion's most subversive work.

The Magnificent Ambersons retains a haunted, elegant feel that takes the viewer inside an era Hollywood has largely sidestepped.

One of the strangest riffs on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ever. Stanwyck is hot!

The performances are first-rate, and Anderson as the obsessively attached maid Mrs. Danvers is a perverse gem.

In its way, Remember the Night is as full of the improbabilities of any of the more familiar Christmas movies that we ritually rewatch in this season every year. But it's also no less lacking in the affirmation it makes of the power of love, its ability to melt even the coldest of hearts, to transform our feelings for our fellow man and woman. If that's a feeling you treasure in your holiday viewing, remember the film.

The real surprise is in how earnestly the director of some of the finest, spikiest romantic comedies ever made is willing to step off the gas and let heartfelt romance win the day. And it so very winning.

This is witty romantic comedy with barbed social commentary.

Hands down, this is the best Astaire-Rogers musical ever. Nothing more needs to be said.

Nick and Nora Charles are one of the screen's great couples.

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.

This is entertaining fare that's still potent today in all its pre-censorship seediness.

This criminal tale excited audiences and landed the kinetic Cagney on the movie map. Now a classic, this is the movie in which Cagney famously crams a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face.

The film stars “It Girl” Clara Bow and a very young Gary Cooper in a WWI love triangle, but the film’s real highlight is its spectacular aerial photography.

To this day one of the most riveting, horrific, and empathetically turbocharged pieces of motion picture history ever recorded, Eisenstein's mind-bogglingly complex composition – utilizing a seeming cast of thousands of extras in addition to the unnamed, iconic main figures – is a gory ballet of marching Cossacks, frantic Odessites, trampled innocence, and doomed dissent.