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.