Engaging and lively.

A fine, freewheeling musical.

The film is a classic, and deservedly so: the conjunction of Tracy's sly listlessness and Hepburn's stridency defines "chemistry" in the movies.

A key film noir of the 40s, this was Nicholas Ray's first film as a director, and the freshness of his expressionist-documentary style is still apparent and gripping.

In Ford’s superbly creative hands, it becomes perhaps the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition.

Shot in astonishingly elaborate long takes, this is the kind of film that finds the most brilliant poetry in the slightest movement of the camera—a paradigm of cinematic expression.

It isn't easy when you're up against the likes of Reed, writer Graham Greene, and producer David O. Selznick, but Welles still manages to dominate this 1949 film, both as an actor and as a stylistic influence. What's missing is the Welles content.

Raoul Walsh’s heroes had a knack for going too far, but none went further than James Cagney in this roaring 1949 gangster piece.

This is almost as close to neorealism as to noir—the details of working-class city life are especially fine.

The plot is typical fluff—Kelly and Sinatra join Esther Williams's baseball team at the turn of the century—but the production values are, as always, worth the price of admission.

A poetic, terse, beautifully exact, and highly personal re-creation of the American underworld, with an unpunctuated Joycean screenplay by Polonsky that is perhaps unique in the American cinema. This is film noir at its best.

Strange and wonderful.

This grim drama packs a punch.

Laurence Olivier's famous 1948 interpretation of Shakespeare's play suffers slightly from his pop-Freud approach to the character and from some excessively flashy, wrongheaded camera work—including the notorious moment when Hamlet begins the soliloquy and the camera begins to track back.

Hitchcock liked to pretend that the film was an empty technical exercise, but it introduces the principal themes and motifs of the major period that would begin with Rear Window.

John Wayne and Montgomery Clift star in Howard Hawks’s epic 1948 western—one of the few such projects in which the human element takes its rightful precedence over spectacle.

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.

A little windy and rhetorical for my taste, but still one of John Huston’s best efforts (1948), a melodrama of ethics that soundly represses the Maxwell Anderson play it was based on (the ending is actually a lift from To Have and Have Not).

Ultimately unsuccessful, the film is nevertheless a fascinating first draft for Vertigo.

This 1948 effort is probably the last of their watchable films, though it’s a long way from their best.

A first-rate police thriller (1948) directed by Jules Dassin when he was still in his prime and before he was blacklisted, shot memorably in New York locations.

There must be some excuse for this but I can't imagine what it is.

John Huston was rarely in better form than he was directing this 1948 study of gold fever and worse obsessions among an unlikely trio of prospectors... Bogart is outstanding as the pathetic bully Fred C. Dobbs.

Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour on an average journey, enlivened by the strange antics of a forgotten vaudeville team called the Wiere Brothers, who do acrobatic stunts and shout “You’re in the groove, Jackson!” on cue.

Films on this subject are generally solemn and naive, but director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger bring wit and intelligence to it.

The most delicate and nuanced of film noirs, graced with a reflective lyricism that almost lifts it out of the genre.

A fascinating anomaly.

An odd, atmospheric 1947 thriller with a San Francisco setting, adapted by writer-director Delmer Daves from a David Goodis novel and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

Grant seems stymied in this claustrophobic, essentially misogynistic material, and director Irving Reis isn’t the man to pull him out.

Nick and Nora investigate a jazz-club killing in this final entry (1947) in the series, which gets by—just barely—on the charm of stars William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Jules Dassin wasn't a bad director before he went to Europe and caught a bad case of Art (He Who Must Die), and this 1947 prison picture, done in the gritty late-40s documentary style, is one of his best efforts.

It's a highly professional piece of Hollywood sentimentalism.

The graveyard scene is still a shocker, the details are still astonishingly well assembled, and the performances are wonderful.

This may be Reed’s most pretentious film, but it also happens to be one of his very best, beautifully capturing the poetry of a city at night (with black-and-white cinematography by Robert Krasker that’s within hailing distance of Gregg Toland and Stanley Cortez’s work with Orson Welles).

Walsh’s directness gives the film an understated quality that may seem anachronistic today but has real cinematic integrity.

John Cromwell, an excellent filmmaker in other circumstances (The Fountain, Since You Went Away), doesn’t have the taste for extremes that film noir requires; he softens the emotions and dims the motivations.

The best American movie about returning soldiers I've ever seen—the most moving and the most deeply felt. It bears witness to its times and contemporaries like few other Hollywood features, and Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography is one of the best things he ever did.

The stories are pretty good folk, though a little too coyly calculated. But the plantation stuff is beneath contempt. Better save this for nostalgia only—kids won't be missing anything if they never encounter this relic.

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

The virtuoso sequences—the long kiss, the crane shot into the door key—are justly famous, yet the film's real brilliance is in its subtle and detailed portrayal of infinitely perverse relationships.

A very good movie (1946), and by far the best Raymond Chandler adaptation, but it isn’t one of Howard Hawks’s most refined efforts—it lacks his clarity of line, his balance, his sense of a free spirit at play within a carefully set structure.

Survives more as a social document than a genuinely compelling drama.

Orson Welles's 1946 film reproduces his personal themes of self-scrutiny and self-destruction only in outline, though it is an inventive, highly enjoyable thriller.

This 1946 film is a key work of the postwar period, dripping with demented romanticism and the venom of disillusionment. Tay Garnett directed, finding the pull of obsession in every tracking shot.

It's one of the most consistently funny films in the “Road” series, though by this late point (1945) the manic unpredictability of the early films has settled slightly into formula.

A fine example of the genre, but not for jaded tastes.

Brilliantly intertwined intensely personal stories with magnificently epic narrative.

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 archetypal Joan Crawford movie.

This 1945 picture is much more felicitous than Christmas Holiday, the bizarre film noir that followed, though not nearly as memorable.

Tinsel-thin seasonal folly (1945) about a newslady who has a GI hero over for Christmas dinner. Frolicsome in an artificially hearty sort of way, though it made its studio (Warners) a nice holiday bundle.

George Sidney directed, a long way from the slam-bang vulgarity of his most entertaining work.

It stands as very possibly the finest film ever made in Britain.

This 1944 Hepburn-Tracy pairing is so undistinguished that it's nearly dropped out of the history books.

It's bad, all right, but also weirdly compelling, thanks to some mind-boggling special effects work (check out the celestial chorus in the first reel) and some extremely speedy direction by Raoul Walsh, who seems to have decided that if the jokes weren't good, the least he could do was get through them fast.

With Hurd Hatfield memorably playing the title part, the 1945 film also includes juicy performances by George Sanders, Angela Lansbury, and Donna Reed. Deeper and creepier (that is to say, better) than anything turned out by Merchant-Ivory, this is both very Hollywood and very serious in a manner calculated to confound the “Hey, it’s only a movie!” crowd.

One of the forgotten masterworks of Disney animation...No other Disney feature achieved this level of exuberant abstraction, or displayed the same sheer pleasure in the magic of the animator's art.

The film is long (142 minutes), claustrophobic, and intense, yet it works with elegance and rigor, like a philosophical problem stated and solved.

Robert Wise’s direction is no more accomplished here than in The Sound of Music or any of his later big-budget projects, but Boris Karloff in the title role is surprisingly subtle—at times.

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

In many ways the ultimate Hawks film: clear, direct, and thoroughly brilliant.

Vincente Minnelli created one of his masterpieces with this loosely plotted but tightly structured 1944 story of a middle-class family waiting through spring, summer, and fall for the opening of the Saint Louis World's Fair of 1904.

Wilder trades Cain's sun-rot imagery for conventional film noir stylings, but the atmosphere of sexual entrapment survives.

George Cukor carefully avoids the obvious effects in telling this story of a husband (Charles Boyer) attempting to drive his wife (Ingrid Bergman) insane; instead, this 1944 film is one of the few psychological thrillers that is genuinely psychological, depending on subtle clues—a gesture, an intonation—to thought and character.

Caustic and chaotic in the arch Sturges manner, it's probably his funniest and most smilingly malicious film.

The drama is developed without recourse to flashbacks or cutaways, and it is done cleverly and stylishly, though it lacks Hitchcock's usual depth. At times, the film seems on the verge of rising above its frankly propagandistic intentions, but it never really confronts the Darwinian themes built into the material.

Classic 1943 canine weepie.

Sam Wood's direction is limited to forced perspective compositions and hollow, incantatory line readings, but the craggy landscape shines under Ray Rennahan's Technicolor cinematography.

Better than you might imagine, though it still has its silly aspects.

Part of what makes this wartime Hollywood drama (1942) about love and political commitment so fondly remembered is its evocation of a time when the sentiment of this country about certain things appeared to be unified.

Hitchcock's discovery of darkness within the heart of small-town America remains one of his most harrowing films, a peek behind the facade of security that reveals loneliness, despair, and death.

More a film about unreasoning fear than the supernatural, this work demonstrates what a filmmaker can accomplish when he substitutes taste and intelligence for special effects.

It has a kind of deranged sincerity and integrity on its own terms.

In spite of the creative team—Hepburn, Tracy, and director George Cukor—this curiously flat 1943 melodrama redeems itself only from moment to moment.

Not great filmmaking, but indispensable to students of 40s pop culture.

The Wilder ironies and favorite themes—sexual deception, innuendo, the power of words to slice up and serve a character—are all present in abundance.

Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire costar in this 1942 musical—which is closer to a revue, without much plot but with loads of Irving Berlin tunes.

The adroit mixture of pantheism and sentimentality continues to be sufficiently timeless to allow Disney's heirs to recycle this picture endlessly.

A masterpiece in every way.

If you can push past the flag-waving, this Warner Brothers effort from 1942 is a superior entry in a dubious genre, the musical biography. Michael Curtiz's direction is supple and intelligent, but what makes the movie is James Cagney's manic blur of a performance.

The film (and Garson’s stiff-backed, Academy Award-winning performance in particular) has dated very badly; it’s difficult now to see the qualities that wartime audiences found so assuring.

One of the better Bob Hope vehicles.

It could be [Lubitsch's] finest achievement, and it's certainly one of the most profound, emotionally complex comedies ever made, covering a range of tones from satire to slapstick to shocking black humor.

A dubious proposition, but in Sturges’s hands a charming one, filled out by his unparalleled sense of eccentric character.

George Stevens’s plodding, straitlaced direction takes much of the edge off this 1941 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle.

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

It may be questionable history (though the film is anything but jingoistic), but it is superb filmmaking, personal and vigorous.

A stodgy Universal thriller from 1941, redeemed by a name-heavy cast.

Everyone concedes that this 1941 Hitchcock film is a failure, yet it displays so much artistic seriousness that I find its failure utterly mysterious—especially since the often criticized ending (imposed on Hitchcock by the studio) makes perfect sense to me.

Not entirely a pale shadow, but definitely fading. [12 Jan 2012, p.36]

Though it was made during a bitter artists' strike in 1941, it's one of Disney's most charming and perfectly proportioned films, uninflated by the cultural pretensions Uncle Walt was fond of slipping in.

As in all the best Fordian cinema, though everything changes and most things die or disappear, what remains in memory and in spirit triumphs—and what on the surface is a tender and sad film becomes instead joyous and robust.

The Maltese Falcon is really a triumph of casting and wonderfully suggestive character detail; the visual style, with its exaggerated vertical compositions, is striking but not particularly expressive, and its thematics are limited to intimations of absurdism (which, when they exploded in Beat the Devil, turned out to be fairly punk). But who can argue with Bogart's glower or Mary Astor in her ratty fur?

Mitchell Leisen's polished direction serves this 1941 melodrama written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.

What can you say about the movie that taught you what movies were?...Kane is no longer my favorite Orson Welles film (I'd take "Ambersons," "Falstaff," or "Touch of Evil"), but it is still the best place I know of to start thinking about Welles - or for that matter about movies in general.

This 1941 film, which Warren Beatty remade as Heaven Can Wait, is nothing special in itself—a fairly routine romantic comedy from the 40s, with Robert Montgomery having a hard time acting like a lowlife.

The film is more strange than good, yet its self-conscious treatment of the politics of beauty seems eerily prescient.

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.