The material has been bowdlerized to the point of abstraction, which makes Richard Brooks's sweaty, emphatic direction look a little silly—there just isn't that much to get worked up about. But Burl Ives and Judith Anderson are highly entertaining as the nightmare parents, Big Daddy and Big Mama, and Jack Carson has one of his last good roles as Newman's competitive older brother.

Slightly above average 50s science fiction (1958), enlivened by a nearly literate script by James Clavell (Shogun).

It's easy to drift away from the story and become absorbed in Minnelli's impossibly delicate textures, but there is a little something here for everybody.

A thematic analysis can only scratch the surface of this extraordinarily dense and commanding film, perhaps the most intensely personal movie to emerge from the Hollywood cinema.

The definitive road movie (1958), the well from which all the genre’s subsequent blessings flow.

Peter Cushing carries most of the ho-hum script as Dr. Van Helsing, though the well-lit color photography, central to the Hammer formula, can't compare with the shadowy magnificence of Nosferatu (1922) or Dracula (1931).

This 1958 feature is thin stuff, seriously intended but not involving.

The artificial plotting is all Christie’s, but the film eventually becomes Wilder’s—thanks to a trick ending that dovetails nicely with a characteristic revelation of compassion behind cruelty. His theatrical mise-en-scene—his proscenium framing—serves the material well, as does Charles Laughton’s bombastic portrayal of the defense attorney.

As masterful as Welles's filming is, what makes Touch of Evil a staggering masterpiece is the global quality of his style, which causes every image to echo almost every other in the film.

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.

Based on a minor novel by William Faulkner (Pylon), the film betters the book in every way, from the quality of characterization to the development of the dark, searing imagery. Made in black-and-white CinemaScope, the film doesn’t survive on television; it should be seen in a theater or not at all.

One of the most memorable of Walt Disney's live-action films, perhaps because it stays so close to the traumatic family themes of the cartoon features.

Banned in France for 18 years, this masterpiece still packs a wallop, though nothing in it is as simple as it may first appear; audiences are still arguing about the final sequence, which has been characterized as everything from a sentimental cop-out to the ultimate cynical twist.

For what it is, it ain't bad, though it serves mainly as an illustration of the ancient quandary of revisionist moviemakers: if all you do is systematically invert cliches, you simply end up creating new ones.

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.

Elvis made a few better films (including Peter Tewksbury’s The Trouble With Girls and Don Siegel’s Flaming Star), but none that drew so well on the bad-boy side of his personality.

James Cagney gives it all his drive and speediness, but this plodding, straight-line 1957 biography of Lon Chaney Sr. never comes close to capturing the actor's obsessiveness or offering any insights as to how he made his personal pain and humiliation accessible and meaningful to a mass audience.

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.

Leo McCarey’s 1957 remake of his 1939 masterpiece Love Affair, coscripted with Delmer Daves and shot in color and ‘Scope, is his last great film—a tearjerker with comic interludes and cosmic undertones that fully earns both its tears and its laughs, despite some kitschy notions about art and a couple of truly dreadful sequences.

Not without its cruelties, but not without its beauties as well.

The script, by Budd Schulberg, is pat and badly proportioned, but the picture has a sharp, dirty appeal.

It's a slick, empty spectacle, with antipathetic stars and a director with no basic sympathy for the myths he's treating.

Mechanically written, but within its own middlebrow limitations, it delivers the goods.