Ford's admirers have rightly tended to play this down in favor of his later and more personal westerns, but there's much to admire here in Gregg Toland's sun-beaten photography and Henry Fonda's meticulous performance as Steinbeck's dashboard saint, Tom Joad.

Along with Dumbo, which immediately followed it, this 1940 classic, the second of the Disney animated features, is probably the best in terms of visual detail and overall imagination as well as narrative sweep.

The loose, graceful script is by Preston Sturges (one of his last before he turned to directing), and it partakes of a softness and nostalgia that seldom surfaced in his own films. Mitchell Leisen, the director, serves the material very well with his slightly distanced, glowing style.

Hawks’s great insight—taking the Hecht-MacArthur Front Page and making the Hildy Johnson character a woman—has been justly celebrated; it deepens the comedy in remarkable ways.

A critic-proof movie if there ever was one: it isn't all that good, but somehow it's great.

Interwoven with subplots centered on the other members of the shop's little family, the romance proceeds through Lubitsch's brilliant deployment of point of view, allowing the audience to enter the perceptions of each individual character at exactly the right moment to develop maximum sympathy and suspense.

The material makes no demands on the talents of James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, but they enter gamely into the farcical tone set by director George Marshall.

This 1939 release is still watchable, though the spirit is now sitcom.

This is classic Capracorn, with the greatest girl cynic of the 30s, Jean Arthur.

By common consent, this is 1939 drama is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s poorest and least personal works, though it has some compensations.

I don't find the film light or joyful in the least—an air of primal menace hangs about it, which may be why I love it.

Funny and forgettable.

Certainly it's the weakest of Ford's major westerns, burdened with a schematic and pretentious Dudley Nichols script (the "cross section of society" on board the stagecoach), but its virtues remain intact.

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.

This is vintage Hitchcock, with the pacing and superb editing that marked not only his 30s style but eventually every film that had any aspirations whatever to achieving suspense and rhythm.

Time has revealed its brilliance, as well as the apparent impossibility of its like ever being seen again.

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.

Though the film isn't as psychologically penetrating as some of Disney's later work, it retains the Freudian ferocity of the Grimm brothers fairy tale, as well as a fair measure of the scatological humor of the Disney shorts. David Hand was the supervising director, but Uncle Walt passed on every frame.

The definitive Ben Hecht screenplay.

The issues deepen in a subtle, natural way: the film begins as a trifle and ends as something beautiful and affirmative. A classic.

It’s pretty much all genre and no nuance, though Michael Curtiz’s direction is surprisingly soft and light.

Freely adapted from Conrad's The Secret Agent, this 1936 study of murderous intimacy is ripe for reevaluation as the masterpiece of Alfred Hitchcock's British period.

The most elegant title for a sequel in film history belongs, happily, to one of the most elegant sequels.

Gregory La Cava's improvisational style received its highest critical acclaim for this 1936 film, a marginally Marxist exercise in class confusion during the Depression.

Arlene Croce has called it a movie about the myth of Astaire and Rogers and the world they lived in, and that's about as good a description as any.

James Whale’s brilliant and surprisingly delicate 1936 rendition of the Kern and Hammerstein musical, which was based on an Edna Ferber novel, is infinitely superior to the dull 1951 MGM Technicolor remake and, interestingly enough, less racist.

It’s amazingly dull, even with William Powell in the lead and guest appearances by the likes of Ray Bolger and Fanny Brice, so of course it won the Best Picture Oscar for 1936.

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