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.