Tinsel-thin seasonal folly (1945) about a newslady who has a GI hero over for Christmas dinner. Frolicsome in an artificially hearty sort of way, though it made its studio (Warners) a nice holiday bundle.

George Sidney directed, a long way from the slam-bang vulgarity of his most entertaining work.

It stands as very possibly the finest film ever made in Britain.

This 1944 Hepburn-Tracy pairing is so undistinguished that it's nearly dropped out of the history books.

It's bad, all right, but also weirdly compelling, thanks to some mind-boggling special effects work (check out the celestial chorus in the first reel) and some extremely speedy direction by Raoul Walsh, who seems to have decided that if the jokes weren't good, the least he could do was get through them fast.

With Hurd Hatfield memorably playing the title part, the 1945 film also includes juicy performances by George Sanders, Angela Lansbury, and Donna Reed. Deeper and creepier (that is to say, better) than anything turned out by Merchant-Ivory, this is both very Hollywood and very serious in a manner calculated to confound the “Hey, it’s only a movie!” crowd.

One of the forgotten masterworks of Disney animation...No other Disney feature achieved this level of exuberant abstraction, or displayed the same sheer pleasure in the magic of the animator's art.

The film is long (142 minutes), claustrophobic, and intense, yet it works with elegance and rigor, like a philosophical problem stated and solved.

Robert Wise’s direction is no more accomplished here than in The Sound of Music or any of his later big-budget projects, but Boris Karloff in the title role is surprisingly subtle—at times.

A good movie for kids and armchair Freudians (1944), with 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor training her pet horse for the Grand National.

In many ways the ultimate Hawks film: clear, direct, and thoroughly brilliant.

Vincente Minnelli created one of his masterpieces with this loosely plotted but tightly structured 1944 story of a middle-class family waiting through spring, summer, and fall for the opening of the Saint Louis World's Fair of 1904.

Wilder trades Cain's sun-rot imagery for conventional film noir stylings, but the atmosphere of sexual entrapment survives.

George Cukor carefully avoids the obvious effects in telling this story of a husband (Charles Boyer) attempting to drive his wife (Ingrid Bergman) insane; instead, this 1944 film is one of the few psychological thrillers that is genuinely psychological, depending on subtle clues—a gesture, an intonation—to thought and character.

Caustic and chaotic in the arch Sturges manner, it's probably his funniest and most smilingly malicious film.

The drama is developed without recourse to flashbacks or cutaways, and it is done cleverly and stylishly, though it lacks Hitchcock's usual depth. At times, the film seems on the verge of rising above its frankly propagandistic intentions, but it never really confronts the Darwinian themes built into the material.

Classic 1943 canine weepie.

Sam Wood's direction is limited to forced perspective compositions and hollow, incantatory line readings, but the craggy landscape shines under Ray Rennahan's Technicolor cinematography.

Better than you might imagine, though it still has its silly aspects.

Part of what makes this wartime Hollywood drama (1942) about love and political commitment so fondly remembered is its evocation of a time when the sentiment of this country about certain things appeared to be unified.

Hitchcock's discovery of darkness within the heart of small-town America remains one of his most harrowing films, a peek behind the facade of security that reveals loneliness, despair, and death.

More a film about unreasoning fear than the supernatural, this work demonstrates what a filmmaker can accomplish when he substitutes taste and intelligence for special effects.

It has a kind of deranged sincerity and integrity on its own terms.

In spite of the creative team—Hepburn, Tracy, and director George Cukor—this curiously flat 1943 melodrama redeems itself only from moment to moment.

Not great filmmaking, but indispensable to students of 40s pop culture.

The Wilder ironies and favorite themes—sexual deception, innuendo, the power of words to slice up and serve a character—are all present in abundance.

Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire costar in this 1942 musical—which is closer to a revue, without much plot but with loads of Irving Berlin tunes.

The adroit mixture of pantheism and sentimentality continues to be sufficiently timeless to allow Disney's heirs to recycle this picture endlessly.