James Dean's ultimate movie, Rebel Without a Cause is both a great teen picture--full of front-seat romance, fast-car thrills, adolescent alienation, nightmare suspense and all the nervy grace director Nicholas Ray could muster--and a perfect memento of the edgier side of the '50s. The sublime supporting cast includes Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, Dennis Hopper and Jim Backus; together, they create one memorable scene and incandescent moment after another. [03 Jun 2005, p.C8]

This 1955 Todd-AO blockbuster, made from the landmark American stage musical, faithfully preserves the play's robust spirit and extroverted charm, while resetting it among vast golden and green outdoor vistas. [15 Nov 2005, p.C3]

The third and least of the three great Kelly-Donen MGM musicals--but that's no knock, considering the others were "On the Town" and "Singin' in the Rain." [27 Jan 2006, p.C7]

Few Alfred Hitchcock movies are more fun to watch than To Catch a Thief. [15 Jun 2007, p.C7]

One of the great movie horror tales, with one of the greatest of all movie villains, appeared to relatively little fanfare in 1955 when actor Charles Laughton released his sole movie directorial effort: a startlingly Gothic visualization of Davis Grubb's Southern nightmare novel The Night of the Hunter.[23 Nov 2001, p.C5]

Despite script collaboration by his friend William Faulkner, this is Hawks' hokiest movie, a stilted Egyptian period piece about pyramid-building and sexual intrigue with Jack Hawkins as the Pharaoh and Joan Collins a conniving temptress with a jeweled navel. Yet the director gives it real spectacle; it looks great. [13 Feb 1998, p.N]

The quintessential American love story --the one between the spoiled heiress and the spontaneous, fun-loving guy from the wrong side of the tracks--has seldom been more elegantly and entertainingly told.

Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the script, has captured the human element deftly. Here are human beings as they really are, refreshingly life-like, piteously real, and often hilariously funny. [16 May 1955, p.15]

The movie can still make temperatures rise -- though for musical rather than political reasons.

Chirpy, bland, slightly maudlin Christmas musical comedy. [21 Dec 2001, p.C5]

Mankiewicz's classic Hollywood backstage tale of a tragic sex goddess/superstar (Ava Gardner), her gloomy, intellectual director (Humphrey Bogart) and the retinue of glamorous and/or exploitive movie types around them. [05 Nov 2004, p.C6]

With its lilting Lerner-Loewe score and great Kelly dance numbers, this is almost a Hollywood musical masterpiece. But it's sabotaged by the airless "outdoor" studio sets mandated by MGM. [13 Mar 1998, p.L]

Loony, but spellbinding. [28 Apr 2006, p.C9]

Director Edward Dmytryk, working from a top-notch script adapted from Herman Wouk's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, makes Bogie's gradual breakdown under relentless cross-examination from defense lawyer Jose Ferrer a superb example of screen melodrama. [21 Nov 1986, p.92]

They are all more capable performers than are usually found in horror films, and the script is not as stiffly self-conscious as the average, either, with the result that this does of devastation is a bit easier to take than some of its predecessors. [22 Jun 1954, p.27]

Tati's fabulous comedy about a bumbling French vacationer in Brittany -- the first appearance of his hilarious pipe-smoking alter-ego Hulot -- is almost a silent movie done in sound, with spare dialogue, affectionate characterizations, sunny beach scenes and complex sight gags that recall the genius of Chaplin and Keaton. [19 Dec 1997, p.T]

It remains the best movie ever photographed in 3-D, although the film, adapted from Frederick Knott's stage play, seems less than ideal for the 3-D process, given its tight interiors and extended dialogue scenes. [19 May 2000]

A recently resurfaced noir classic, in which an ex-con (Gene Nelson) is trapped between his criminal ex-buddies (Charles Bronson, Ted De Corsia and Timothy Carey), pulling him back into the underworld and the tough, toothpick-chewing L.A. cop (Sterling Hayden) who wants to make him a stoolie. Harsh, rough, sharp as a knife. [24 Oct 1997, p.L]

This Universal sci-fi saga has little of the style or atmosphere of the studio's '30s horror classics; its stars are amiable Richard Carlson and Julia Adams. But it does have a unique monster: the Amazonian gill man, a lovelorn amphibian who spots Adams underwater and doesn't stop swimming after her until the very last minute. [30 Oct 1998, p.I]

The desert isn't necessarily a desolate place, and this film makes it come alive. [15 May 1987, p.65C]

Robust safari movie, partly remade from "Red Dust," co-starring Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly. [23 Jun 2006, p.C2]

James Cagney had his crack at a Huey Long-like character in this overlooked 1953 feature directed by Raoul Walsh; the film suffers from a near-complete lack of originality but Cagney and Walsh, here as always ("The Roaring Twenties," "White Heat"), strike some sparks together. [01 Nov 1992, p.15C]

This cast could hardly be bettered and it's a great story as well: a taut, engrossing, highly perceptive scan of the fears, desires, repressions and ugliness boiling under the deceptively quiet surface of pre-war years. Our movies rarely get an American story this rich, evocative and true, and rarely realize it as well. If "Eternity" has dated at all, it's only in a good way; we can only wish our own movies were half as good or reflected American reality half as well. [5 Dec 2003, p.C8]

The definitive alien invasion movie, often imitated, never surpassed. [04 Sep 1987, p.54C]

It's a shame the dippy TV knockoff Hogan's Heroes has supplanted memories of this great dark WWII POW comedy. Seeing it makes you understand why Schindler's List was a long-time Wilder project. [17 Oct 1995, p.3C]

A cautionary tale of paranoia and prejudice. [25 Jul 2003, p.C1]

A stylish remake of Michael Curtiz' shocker "Mystery of the Wax Museum"--about a museum-art gallery filled with wax-dipped murder victims, run by the fiendish Vincent Price. [25 Jul 2003, p.C1]

Shane is one of those movies that I revisit at least once a year, just to remind myself how stirring a Western can be when the mix of myth and method is just right. [21 June 2002, p.C8]