This 1935 musical finds Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers at the top of their form.

Zwigoff not only presents a complex human being and the range of his art but also guides us through a profound and unsettling consideration of what it means to be an American artist. Essential viewing.

It's Fellini's last black-and-white picture and conceivably the most gorgeous and inventive thing he ever did—certainly more fun than anything he made after it.

Tarkovsky's eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker's boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances by all the principals.

For many, this 1953 feature represents the height of the American musical.

Yasujiro Ozu’s 1949 film inaugurated his majestic late period: it’s here that he decisively renounces melodrama (and, indeed, most surface action of any kind) and lets his camera settle into the still, long-take contemplation of his gently drawn characters.

It avoids all the maudlin cliches and blind alleys of examining the “meaning of life,” giving us instead a rare portrait of a man experiencing a genuine insight into what his wasted years have been leading to.

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.

he Diving Bell and the Butterfly fuses experimental techniques with a highly accessible and sometimes humorous narrative; it’s deeply personal yet universal in its humanism.

This genuine SF classic says a good deal more about the McCarthyist hysteria of the early 50s than about the danger of invasion from outer space by soul-stealing pods.

A dense and subtle masterpiece.

Most impressive, Cantet tracks the racial and ethnic resentments that simmer beneath the classroom discussions but become harder to quell when the parents get involved.

He makes a good job of it, though the wider aspirations to contemporary relevance seem dubious. Stone seeks large lessons in the experiences of ordinary men in battle, but it isn't clear Vietnam has anything new to offer: war is hell and somebody inevitably gets shafted, but the uniqueness of this conflict lies away from the military arena: in politics, psychology, and history. For all the purported naturalism, the film seems resolutely schematic, and the attitudes shaping the drama are far from open-ended.

A very well-made genre exercise, but I can’t understand why it’s been accorded so much importance, unless it’s because it strokes some ideological impulse.

A bit abstract, though gorgeously shot (by John Alonzo) and cleverly plotted (by Robert Towne), Polanski's film suggests that the rules of the game are written in some strange, untranslatable language, and that everyone's an alien and, ultimately, a victim.

It's a beautiful picture but very quietly so, and definitely not for the ADHD set.

Willis O'Brien did the stop-action animation for this 1933 feature, which is richer in character than most of the human cast.

This is truly a great film, recently celebrated at length in "My Voyage to Italy," Martin Scorsese's documentary about Italian cinema.

The acting is so strong--with Spall a particular standout--that you're carried along as by a tidal wave.

This turned out to be Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate film (1972), though there's no sign of the serenity and settledness that generally mark the end of a career. Frenzy, instead, continues to question and probe, and there is a streak of sheer anger in it that seems shockingly alive.

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

Paul Newman tells 'em where to get off in this slick, popular antiestablishment drama set in a prison camp. Stuart Rosenberg's direction is a horror, but the cast teems with so many familiar faces that this film can't help but entertain.

Though marred by Spielberg's usual carelessness with narrative points, the film alternates sweetness and sarcasm with enough rhetorical sophistication to be fairly irresistible.

Better in certain ways than the original Apocalypse Now, though the flaws are also magnified.

Visually and structurally it's a mess, but many of the situations are genuinely clever, and there are plenty of memorable gags. The perpetual problem is that Allen isn't nearly the thinker he thinks he is.

It's full of scenic splendors with a fine sense of scale, but its narrative thrust seems relatively pro forma, and I was bored by the battle scenes.

The picture gets to you more through its intensity than its craft, but Hooper does have a talent.

Robert Redford's best and richest directorial effort.