It's largely Kazan's authentic feeling for the locale, aided by Boris Kaufman's superb black-and-white cinematography, that makes this movie so special, combined with a first-rate ensemble.

Much of it is awful, but it's almost impossible not to be taken in by the narrative sprawl: like many big, bad movies, Giant is an enveloping experience, with a crazy life and logic of its own.

Proof that you can buy an Academy Award, with David Niven, Cantinflas, and 44 stars in cameo roles spending a lot of Michael Todd’s money as they tour the world in Jules Verne’s balloon.

In a compositional sense, the film has a realistic feel, but Minnelli’s graphic mise-en-scene and poetic transitions give the impression of moving paintings, and when the film is at its most dazzling, there’s a sense that the director is reshaping the very nature of existence.

Overlong, stiff, and about as suspenseful as a detergent commercial, The Bad Seed has one small asset, Patty McCormack as the child, but that's about it.

While Walters is no Cukor, he's not without his pleasures. His simple but polished shooting style, once a routine satisfaction of the cinema, carries the aura of a long-lost classical grace.

A typically overproduced 1956 Fox film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit, with Yul Brynner as the king and Deborah Kerr as the British schoolteacher who comes to Siam to educate Brynner's army of children. Too long at 133 minutes, but the score is swell.

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.

Siegel manages to keep the action wound pretty tight, though he doesn’t seem to sympathize much with Rose’s bleeding-heart liberalism.

Orson Welles was so taken with this film that after seeing it he declared Kubrick could do no wrong; not to be missed.

The film is uncharacteristically rigid and pious for Hitchcock; it feels more like a work of duty than conviction.

The Searchers gathers the deepest concerns of American literature, distilling 200 years of tradition in a way available only to popular art, and with a beauty available only to a supreme visual poet like Ford.

Even as the SF cliches fall fast and heavy, this is great to look at, thanks to the sumptuous MGM sets and the fine animation and matte work by Walt Disney Studios.

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.

Laurence Olivier's classic rendition (1956) of Shakespeare's total villain contains one of his most engaging performances and reveals some of his best spatial manipulation of action.

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.

Kon Ichikawa’s 1956 antiwar film was widely hailed at the time of its release for its power and commitment, though by today’s standards it’s likely to appear uncomfortably didactic.

Douglas Sirk is best known for his highly stylized Technicolor melodramas, but he also did superlative work in restrained black and white. There’s Always Tomorrow (1955) is a virtuoso study in tones, ranging from the blinding sunlight of a desert resort to the expressionist shadows of the suburban home where Fred MacMurray lives in unhappy union with Joan Bennett.

Conceivably the best picture Sam Goldwyn ever produced.

The tension is intriguing and expressive (perhaps this is what Beineix had in mind for The Moon in the Gutter), though the unstable mixture is clearly limited as a sustainable style. 

Bunuel remained true to his surrealist origins throughout his Mexican period, but the full command of his earliest and latest films, as well as such intermediate masterpieces as Los olvidados and The Exterminating Angel, resulted in stronger fare than this.

Dean's alienation is perfectly expressed through Ray's vertiginous mise-en-scene: the suburban LA setting becomes a land of decaying Formica and gothic split-levels. An unmissable film, made with a delirious compassion.

The film heaves and sputters from one indifferently rendered number to the next.

The film is one of Donen’s most formally perfect works—innovative, involving, and, in case there’s any doubt, finally optimistic.

Alfred Hitchcock's fluffy 1955 exercise in light comedy, minimal mystery, and good-natured eroticism (the fireworks scene is a classic).

The film is still hilarious, though time has dimmed the luster of Lemmon's hamming in favor of James Cagney's superbly psychotic commanding officer.

An enduring masterpiece--dark, deep, beautiful, aglow.

Howard Hawks’s only attempt at a wide-screen blockbuster (1955), much disparaged afterward by Hawks and many others, is actually fairly awesome if you can get beyond the clunky dialogue (some of it written by William Faulkner, as well as Harry Kurnitz) and the campy evilness of the Joan Collins character.