Thanks to Anthony Mann's splendid eye for landscape, composition, and spectacle—in particular his striking use of the edges of the 'Scope frame, a facet (among others) that is totally lost on TV and video—this is a rousing and often stirring show.

A good movie for kids and armchair Freudians (1944), with 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor training her pet horse for the Grand National.

This is so ravishing to look at (the colors all seem newly minted) and pleasurable to follow (the enigmas are usually more teasing than worrying) that you're likely to excuse the metaphysical pretensions—which become prevalent only at the very end—and go with the 60s flow, just as the original audiences did.

A pretty watchable and always interesting period film, well photographed by English cinematographer Freddie Francis.

One could have plenty of quarrels with this as an adaptation of the Herman Melville novel, but it’s still one of the better John Huston films of the 50s.

Though a bit slow to start and overlong (GBS added 18 minutes to the screenplay), this is still an enthusiastic and intelligent rendering of the wonderful Shavian wit and sense of the ridiculous.

More action oriented than the other Dietrich-Sternberg films, this 1932 production is nevertheless one of the most elegantly styled.

John Huston's 1972 restatement of his theme of perpetual loss is intelligently understated, though the recessive camera compositions put an unnecessary distance between the viewer and the characters.

It's highly inventive, self-conscious camp, made in 1965, well before the genre wore itself out in superciliousness.

The movie takes a while to hit its stride, and its conclusion is fairly slapdash, but somewhere in between are some of the funniest bits of low slapstick Brooks has ever come up with, and an overall uncloying sweetness helps to save much of the rest.

Joffe may remain as variable a filmmaker as ever, but this time, at least, he gives one something really solid to think about.

Russ Meyer's 1968 skin-flick is a hilarious, stylistically adroit compendium of middle-American preoccupations: breasts, fishing, anticommunism.

The gaudy Freudianism of this 1945 Hitchcock film, backed by a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí and an overexcited score by Miklós Rósza, can make it hard to take, but beneath the facile trappings there is an intriguing Hitchcockian study of role reversal, with doctors and patients, men and women, mothers and sons inverting their assigned relationships with compelling, subversive results.

The line between romance and sex is blurred in this enthralling feature by Guy Maddin, whose overwhelming stylization unexpectedly produces an emotional and psychological authenticity.

Max Ophuls’s witty version (1950) of Arthur Schnitzler’s play showing love as a bitterly comic merry-go-round.

The archetypal Joan Crawford movie.

Where Nabokov was witty, Kubrick is sometimes merely snide, but fine performances (particularly from Peter Sellers, as the ominous Clare Quilty) cover most of the rough spots.

A shrewd and powerful mix of commercial ingredients and ideological intent.

Baumbach's best trait as a filmmaker remains his handling of actors.

The funniest thing about this 1971 Ken Russell camp epic is probably the juxtaposition of its first-class production values (a good cast, great set design, marvelous photography) with Russell's no-class sexual fantasies—it's like a David Lean remake of Pink Flamingos.

Visually stunning, with ravishing uses of color and beautifully modulated lap dissolves, Ju Dou may not be the most formally striking Chinese film I’ve seen...but it certainly is the most effective and dramatic in terms of commercial moviemaking, both as spectacle and as story telling.

I wouldn’t call it an overlooked masterpiece, but it’s eccentric studio filmmaking of a tall order (not to mention hilarious in spots). It certainly looks like nothing else coming out of Hollywood at present.

The pacing never flags and the story—let’s face it—is well-nigh unbeatable.

Veteran director Delmer Daves hit his stride with a series of tense, modestly budgeted westerns in the 50s... Despite an abundance of jabber, this 1957 film is often considered his best.

An eminently watchable antique, this was the Marx Brothers' first film — a literal recording of their Broadway smash hit.

At the same time that Boorman seduces us with such enchantments, he also deceives us with a crafty little googly of his own--persuading us that he is embarking on a fresh adventure while aiming straight for the heart of old-fashioned English cinema.

Often grim, sometimes nasty, but awfully interesting.

John Boorman's 1972 film of the James Dickey novel has a beautiful visual style that balances the film's machismo message.

This 1966 film was eclipsed in many people's minds by The Wild Bunch three years later, but it's a good, solid job, and with Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, and Woody Strode, how could you miss?

Victim, for all its compromises, offers a rich mosaic of minor characters, none of them particularly complex but each articulating some British attitude toward homosexuality and the law surrounding it.

The main focus is on everyday household chores and sensual discoveries, all made mesmerizing by elaborately choreographed camera movements that link interiors and exteriors in the same fluid itineraries.

A very adroit and entertaining social comedy.

One of the first big caper films, this 1950 feature contributed much to the essence of the genre in its meticulous observation of planning and execution.

Reportedly (and understandably) Youssef Chahine’s most popular film among Egyptians, this gritty and relatively early (1958) black-and-white masterpiece also features his most impressive acting turn, as a crippled news vendor working at the title railroad station.

Probably the most visually sophisticated of Alfred Hitchcock’s silent pictures and certainly one of the best, this 1927 release sets up an edgy romantic triangle in a traveling carnival that involves two boxers (Carl Brisson and Ian Hunter) and a snake charmer (Lillian Hall-Davies).

Made piecemeal over a number of years and first released in 1983, this 90-minute comic fantasy has lost little of its radical edge—in contrast to Borden’s subsequent Working Girls, which accommodated itself to a wider audience.

In some ways it’s a loose remake of Yang’s previous feature, A Confucian Confusion, but it succeeds even more in capturing the tenor of our times.

Here the director is more self-conscious about his didactic aims, which limits him in some respects, but there's an engaging roughness about his visual approach that keeps this movie footloose and inventive.

The movie is affecting as a social portrait as well as a psychological drama.

It's still the best film in which a zombie and a shark have an underwater fight. Throw in the director's nightmarish style and experimental narrative structure and you have one delightfully weird and genuinely chilling film.

It's an intimate psychological story laced with references to Hollywood movies.

The film brims over with various eccentrics (the barber's ufologist neighbor and a former prison mate who harasses the hero and delivers drunken tirades), and Imamura views them all with mixed amusement and curiosity; he also does striking things with dream sequences and visual and aural flashbacks.

Madonna’s aim throughout appears to be to straddle the barrier that separates the merely show-offy from the outrageous without falling squarely on either side–which may help to explain why she and her gay dancers gleefully chant that they want this to be an X-rated movie.

It was the most assured film Coppola had made in a decade, full of casual wit and visual invention. And even though the split narrative doesn't quite cohere, Coppola wins an amazingly high proportion of his risky bets, including a finale that takes off into total abstraction.

There are many fleeting poetic moments in The Neon Bible--moments so ecstatic that you may feel yourself rising off your seat. And if much of the rest of the movie tends to be clunky as narrative, that's a small price to pay for pieces of enlightenment you can happily carry around inside your head for months.

The second film version (1964) of Ernest Hemingway's short story, directed by Don Siegel with far more energy than Robert Siodmak could muster for his overrated 1946 effort.

This 1958 film by Yasujiro Ozu (his first in color) is gentle, spare, and ultimately elusive, in a quietly satisfying way. [07 May 2009, p.28]

The director, Hal Ashby, has affected a restrained, understated style to match the subtlety and precision of Sellers's performance. No one seems to know what to do with the allegorical undertone of Jerzy Kosinski's script, but as a whole this 1979 film maintains a fine level of wit, sophistication, and insight.

Perhaps this movie isn't as wise or as profound as Simon wants it to be, but it is certainly a cut above sitcom complacency, and packed with wit and charm.

There's nothing in the aesthetic and neo-Freudian delirium within hailing distance of Vertigo, and the plot's often more complicated than complex, but Herrmann's overpowering score and De Palma's endlessly circling camera movements do manage to cast a spell.

Wilder's strategy is to play a bubbly romantic comedy in a mise-en-scene of destruction and despair. As usual, it's more clever than meaningful, but this 1948 film is one of his most satisfactory in wit and pace.

Stripping these characters to their essences, Hill identifies a shared culture of hatred that unites a range of Americans.

Funny and stirring, in quite unpredictable ways, with the usual Powellian flair for drawing the universal out of the screamingly eccentric.

This is deeply felt, poetic filmmaking, though the unrelentingly dour tone isn't for everyone. [18 Oct 2012, p.41]

Critics turned up their noses at this tear-jerking ‘Scope blockbuster of 1957, based on Grace Metalious’s lurid best-selling novel. But people came out in droves for it, and it’s not at all hard to see why—it’s corn in the grand style, much of it delivered with sweep and conviction, and the intrigues come thick and fast.

Norman Jewison's literal-mindedness actually helps squeeze some of the goo from the material.

With its American, English, and French characters representing the three cultures Polanski has known since he left Poland, it's also quite possibly his most personal film—and certainly his most self-critical.

Whale added an element of playful sexuality to this version, casting the proceedings in a bizarre visual framework that makes this film a good deal more surreal than the original.

The sinister mise-en-scene is compromised only by a few overripe lines from screenwriter Steve Shagan, and Reynolds reveals himself as an actor of depth and complexity.

What ties all this material together is the force and humor of Moretti’s eclectic personality.

Bob Hoskins gives a growly, charismatic performance as the kingpin brought low by phantom forces over the course of an Easter weekend, and there’s a political theme that asserts itself with nicely rising force.

Better-than-average sitcom stuff, enhanced by the lively performances, Doyle's own adaptation, and the able direction of Stephen Frears.

It lacks a certain grace in execution, but this SF/romantic comedy-thriller, directed by Nicholas Meyer from his own novel, is clever and well calculated.

A profoundly sexist and eminently hummable 1954 CinemaScope musical—supposedly set in the great outdoors, but mainly filmed on soundstages—with some terrific athletic Michael Kidd choreography and some better-than-average direction by Stanley Donen.

George Roy Hill's very professional, very entertaining 1972 adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's time-traveling novel, with the pseudoprofundities nicely tucked into place as peppy one-liners and narrative tricks.

The final shoot-out remains a classic study in mise-en-scene, as Mann transforms a jagged landscape into a highly charged psychological battleground.

The dialogue is spare, the scenery the real star. Satisfying and impressive.

Anne Dorval gives an extraordinary performance as the mother, who lashes out at the boy but can't disguise her own suffering when he lands an emotional punch; their scenes together reminded me of Paul Schrader's Affliction for their sense of familial love gone hopelessly sour.

One of many clear advantages this funny and scary 1989 fantasy-adventure has over most Disney products is its live-action visual bravado, evident in both the stylization of the witches and the profusion of mouse-point-of-view shots.

Curtis Hanson (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle) directed this 1994 thriller effectively from a fairly routine script by Denis O'Neill; what really makes this movie worth seeing are the stunning Oregon and Montana locations (filmed in 'Scope), as well as Streep's sexy pluck in playing the most capable and resourceful character around.

Mann understands that mood is more important than plausibility in a thriller, and you could cut the mood here with a knife.

Poised somewhere between a movie-familiar (i.e., semiscurrilous) look at inner-city life as trench warfare and a farfetched Hollywood revenge fantasy, this is kept alive largely through its first-rate performances, beginning with Sean Nelson's as the boy; Giancarlo Esposito is also a standout.

The movie illuminates how the moral, economic, and spiritual concerns of its characters converge in situations that defy ethical platitudes. In less capable hands the brasher metaphors might have come across as trite, but director F. Gary Gray (Friday) generally manages to ensure that the line where technique meets meaning is marvelously blurred.

Tati hasn’t quite solved the structural problem he posed for himself, but if the film isn’t wholly satisfying, it’s still a very witty and suggestive work from the modern cinema’s only answer to Chaplin and Keaton.

A better-than-average Bette Davis vehicle (1940), well constructed by that shrewd old hack, William Wyler, from a Somerset Maugham play.

Critics seemed to like this less than audiences; personally I had a ball.

Made in 1937 by a relatively young and innocent Alfred Hitchcock, this British feature tends to be overshadowed by The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes, but actually it’s only the uncharismatic casting that holds it back from being one of the most entertaining of Hitchcock’s English films.

Seen in the context of Roman Polanski's career it becomes something rich and strange, shaded into terror by the naturalistic absurdism that is the basis of Polanski's style.

Based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich and a play on Aesop’s “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” fable, its premise is straightforward but nevertheless incredibly anxiety inducing—less is more when the stakes are this high.

The picture is amazingly compact (70 minutes), and the swift pacing helps temper the goo. The film is no classic, but it's a good example of its type.

For all its overfamiliarity, this is a good play, easily Simon's best, and Matthau and Lemmon inhabit it with grace and style.

Edwards's attention to detail pays off; while this isn't his best film, it is far superior to most problem dramas of the early 60s.

The last act is rushed and soapy, but this is still a singular observation of American life.

As a children's movie with a fine sense of magic (without fantasy) and a great deal of feeling (without sentimentality), this beats the usual Disney junk hands down, and adults will find it an expert piece of storytelling.

MGM’s opulent version of ancient Rome circa 1951, with Peter Ustinov at his most whimsical doing honors as the mad Nero...Directed with some pizzazz by Mervyn LeRoy.

Some of it is disturbing, some of it is embarrassingly flat, but all of it shows a degree of technical accomplishment far beyond anything else on the midnight-show circuit.

Alfred Hitchcock's fluffy 1955 exercise in light comedy, minimal mystery, and good-natured eroticism (the fireworks scene is a classic).

Howard Hawks's 1941 version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a delight.

Michael Curtiz, the most polished of Warner's studio technicians, starts Flynn off royally.

Something large and abstract is stirring here, though the film's ultimate implications are chilling

Roundly condemned as a glorification of drug dealing, it's actually an acrid film noir on a classic theme—the hood who must make one last score before he quits the business.

After all the free advertising Ray Bradbury had given Walt Disney over the years, the Disney studio finally returned the compliment in 1983 by letting him write his own adaptation of his fantasy novel and giving his script a polished, respectful treatment, including tasteful direction by Jack Clayton.

The film is surprisingly mature in its depiction of community dynamics and its sobering conclusion, which addresses the real-life costs of environmental devastation. The visual design veers from fantasy to naturalism, depending on the tone of the story: the tanuki appear sometimes as Disneyesque cuddlies and other times as realistic-looking rodents.

This is a uniquely plausible portrait of life in England, yet its appeal isn't limited to social realism—it also has a twist of buoyant fantasy and romance.

What I like about these camera movements, combined with the exotic, erotic ambience of Mychael Danna's score, is that they simultaneously implicate us in the characters' fantasies and place us at some distance from them. We literally view the action from shifting perspectives, but the rhythm and direction of our drifting gaze seem to place us directly inside the obsessions of the characters.

This 1927 silent feature won the first Academy Award for best picture, establishing a tradition of silliness that hasn’t been broken to this day, but there is some thrilling flying footage and impressively expensive spectacle.

Alec Guinness as the master pickpocket Fagin is the high point of David Lean's 1948 version of the Dickens classic.

Andre de Toth’s 1954 noir is gritty, powerful, and economically told.