The movie stands apart from the French New Wave in that it is very much the story of a woman, not about a woman.

Playfulness is the defining characteristic of Jules and Jim, even if what it largely entails is a tragic gender gap of fatal proportions.

There’s a cheerful honesty to Elvis Presley’s Chad Gates in Blue Hawaii that’s irresistible.

Splendor in the Grass may seem quaint, even silly. But anyone who’s thrown – or endured – a teenager’s temper tantrum will recognize the anger and confusion on the screen as genuine. In that sense, Splendor will never be out of touch.

The widescreen Tohoscope compositions offer ample opportunities for dramatically staged standoffs, yet Kurosawa also employs them for laughs.

Like Pulp Fiction, Breathless runs on pure movie love, even as its heedless editing and bursts of jazz were redefining the art form. If the picture feels slight for a masterpiece, that’s because Breathless is primarily about itself.

An original script from Arthur Miller, The Misfits turns on the playwright’s usual concern: that of the individual trying to maintain his identity in a changing world.

Swiss Family Robinson’s sole saving grace is the tree house the family builds, an inventive piece of production design that manages to capture the sort of imaginative delight the rest of the movie is striving for.

With its epic setting and visual grace, The Hidden Fortress also is a precursor to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Watching the movie, though, you’ll be struck less by its influence than by an awesome artistry that’s all its own.

Plan 9 from Outer Space may not be pure bliss to watch, but you certainly can feel the bliss that writer-director Edward D. Wood Jr. must have experienced while making it.

The bitter has not yet overpowered the sweet in this early film from writer-director Ingmar Bergman.

Directed by Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo has its fair share of gunfights and saloon showdowns (including a bravura opening confrontation that unfolds with barely any words). Yet the film resembles other Westerns less than it does Hawks’ snappy romances, such as Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and To Have and Have Not.

Deep, dark forests; thorny thickets; spiraling castle stairs – every detail seems to envelop us. And then there is Maleficent, voiced by Eleanor Audley and undoubtedly one of the great Disney villainesses. Her transformation into a roaring dragon in the finale is so triumphant you almost want her to win.

If Some Came Running survives its dated gender politics, that’s all due to MacLaine. Her Ginnie—overly made up and yet disheveled, with hamburger bun crumbs on her sparkly cocktail dress—is the only one to lend the movie an authentic sense of dignity.

Mon Oncle zeroes on in the way we often use our homes as status symbols first, and places of care and comfort second.

The performances are sweltering...This isn’t a good thing. Yes, it’s fitting for the setting – a humid, suffocating Louisiana mansion where the family of an ailing tycoon (Burl Ives) connives to inherit his fortune – but the overall result is like watching a melodrama in a sauna. It’s just too much.

What begins as a sympathetic, almost neorealist portrayal of a mentally and physically challenged newspaper peddler named Qinawi (played by Chahine) eventually warps its way into a slasher film, complete with sex-as-death overtones.

Hardly a flattering portrait of the military machine, Paths of Glory suggests a soldier’s best hope often is to survive the chaos that his or her own army causes.

Lean stages the events with an expert sense of suspense, then leaves us wondering what to make of the mythologizing that came before. Was all that whistling really the sound of legendary British resolve, or were those soldiers only whistling past their own graveyard?

Joanne Woodward won an Oscar for her title performance in The Three Faces of Eve, but what she’s doing here feels like an exercise you’d see at theater camp.

Suspense mechanics and psychological horror don’t meld quite as seamlessly here as they do in the best Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, but The Wrong Man has more than its share of masterful moments.

Lust for Life features exhilarating scenes of Van Gogh at work, often set in the locations of some of his most famous paintings and punctuated with close-ups of the original artwork. Like the 2017 animated experiment Loving Vincent, the movie functions not only as a biopic, but as an exercise in aesthetic reinterpretation.

If anything identifies The Killing as a Kubrick picture, it is the movie’s overall sense of fatalism – even as we watch how carefully things are planned, there is a sense of impending doom.

Decades before an apologist Western such as Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, The Searchers bluntly addressed this country’s racism toward Native Americans by putting one of Hollywood’s most famous faces on it.

The genius of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru is the way this deeply sentimental film continually deflates sentimentality.

Director Otto Preminger emphasizes the lurid whenever he can – the neon signs, the smoky interiors, the insinuating bass on the soundtrack – so that the movie plays like a blurry, bleary night-on-its-way-to-morning. Only Sinatra’s talent is clear.

A curious comedy that neither looks back at Rear Window nor ahead to Vertigo, but rather exists in some goofy space all its own. It’s as if Hitchcock went on vacation, but kept working.

A model for breezy, bantering filmmaking of the criminal kind, To Catch a Thief has the feel of being made while on a getaway vacation.

The Night of the Hunter is nearly as demented as its lead villain, and I mean that as a compliment.

Sansho the Bailiff stands as a humanist landmark alongside something like Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, which would come out a year later.

Garland and Mason don’t exactly generate sparks as a couple, and her histrionics in the dialogue scenes eventually overwhelm the picture. But early on, this has a a lot of Technicolor/CinemaScope magic.

Though nowhere near as ambitious an undertaking as his 1967 Playtime, this Monsieur Hulot outing is till a delightful example of the gentle satire of silent clown Jacques Tati.

In so many monster movies, the pieces show. This creature is seamless.

Like An American in Paris, which Vincente Minnelli directed two years earlier, The Band Wagon will either strike you as ebullient and exhilarating or aggressive and overwhelming—in both technique and theme.

All of these sequences have an unshowy effortlessness that represents the pinnacle of Hollywood glamour.

For all its opulence, it never creates a distinct sense of space like, say, Black Narcissus, where an ethereal version of a Himalayan convent was created on an English soundstage. Yet The Tales of Hoffman is never less than dazzling, given the elaborate, multi-dimensional sets, fanciful costumes, and opulent makeup design.

Rashomon is a movie of ideas first and foremost. There is little room for subtext here. Matters of truth and human nature are debated in an anguished, grandiose acting style that can be jarring to contemporary, Western eyes.

From Gene Kelly’s forced grins to its boldly monochrome sets to the horn-heavy George Gershwin music that is the genesis for the picture, An American in Paris is an all-out assault on the senses. If Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain, which would come a year later, revels in movie-musical joy, this effort’s defining trait is insistence.

Ophuls’ technique is often on the nose, but it’s still exhilarating.

A landmark in terms of science-fiction style and influence, The Day the Earth Stood Still boasts a wavering, theremin score (by Hitchcock regular Bernard Herrmann), a shiny, disc-shaped spacecraft and even a robot named Gort. Yet it deals in these sci-fi cliches with an amazing artistry.

A Streetcar Named Desire works itself up into a hurricane of emotional chaos, yet ironically, as these final scenes give in to hysteria, Brando starts dialing down. Depending on your reading, that makes Stanley either remorseful or sinister. Either way, he’s riveting. If Brando is calm at the end of Streetcar, that’s because he’s the center of the storm.

It’s less impressionistic than Great Expectations and more starkly insistent—fitting for a work that doubles as a social tract about the mistreatment of children in England in the early 1800s. John Howard Davies, as Oliver, has a heartbreakingly fresh face, one that’s increasingly bewildered by the cruelty continually visited upon him.

No film since Sunset Boulevard has better captured the spotlight’s cruel, heartless glare.

There may have been better made movies starring Crawford (she’s working with director Vincent Sherman here, not Otto Preminger, Michael Curtiz, or George Cukor), but I don’t know if she ever had a richer opportunity to click on all of her intimate, melodramatic, and camp cylinders.

Still ahead of its time.

Gun Crazy is a burst of movie id all its own, a confluence of sex, sexism and violence.

For all its silliness, the musical also taps into something existential, thanks to its ticking-clock structure. As the hours slip away and impending separation looms over every note, On the Town becomes a bittersweet reminder that all our days are numbered.

White Heat is smart enough to give nearly every audience member whatever they could possibly want.

Key Largo belongs to its villain, through and through.

Disorientingly glorious and thrilling, it’s a beguiling mixture of believability and artifice, of the sort that only the movies can manage.

A mixture of hard-boiled intrigue and mental instability, this dark passage takes us from the film noirs of its time to the psychological thrillers that Alfred Hitchcock would make in the 1950s. Altogether, it’s a wild, harrowing journey.

As an adaptation of Great Expectations, this is scattershot and unsatisfying, but as a fever dream you might have after reading it, the movie mesmerizes.

The central romance of I Know Where I’m Going! may be a bit of a drip, but swirling around it are filmmaking flourishes of the sort that the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger would lavish on the cinema throughout the 1940s, under the name of The Archers.

Shockingly modern in sensibility, construction, and execution, Brief Encounter is very different from what one thinks of as a David Lean movie, whose historical epics have come to define posh, mid-century, cinematic excellence.

This has little of the insinuating nature of the best film noir, as Lana Turner and John Garfield go from 0 to 60 in their first scene together.

It’s all wild, but too intentionally amped up to be any fun.

I could watch Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck whisper while staring deeply into each other’s eyes for ages, yet Spellbound still registers as a talky exploration of psychoanalysis, something director Alfred Hitchcock would later examine with more insinuating subtext in his masterpieces of the 1950s and ’60s.

Mildred Pierce is a somewhat reckless mixture of film noir and soap opera. It opens with a murder and then proceeds to run on revelations and betrayals and wild swings of fortune. Yet the high-wire act works, largely because Mildred Pierce has the right trapeze artist dangling in the air.

There are clear reasons why some might consider The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp their definitive film: its very Britishness, its doomed romanticism, its cheeky bits of humor, and moments like the crane shot during Candy and Kretschmar-Schuldorff’s duel.

As the parents of a busy family in an early 20th-century English hamlet, Donald Crisp and Anne Revere save this treacly family drama from choking on its own sentimentality.

The picture’s reason for being is Bacall, whose Marie “Slim” Browning slinks onto the screen asking Harry for matches and walks away with the entire movie.

A paean to the nuclear family and the fertile soil where it ostensibly grows best—the American Midwest—Meet Me in St. Louis would feel a bit claustrophobic, if not cultish, if it weren’t for Vincente Minnelli’s elegant camerawork and Judy Garland’s spiky performance.

It’s a thrill to watch Stanwyck go to work and assert her dominance.

It’s often asked why battered women don’t “just leave.” Gaslight evokes the sort of psychological intimidation and cruel mind games that make it so much more complicated than that.

This is one of [Hitchcock's] significant works, accented by wickedly effective insert shots and a handful of strong performances.

Cat People is a lot talkier and less evocative than its reputation would suggest, yet it’s still a startling, psychosexual horror picture – especially for its time.

Now, Voyager may not have the fine balance of some of Davis’ best films—Jezebel is probably the place to go for that—but it’s still, in its stronger moments, a fine showcase for an iconic actress.

It’s beautiful, powerful stuff. The Disney animators evoke a naturalism of such depth and detail that you feel shrouded by the forest. Then, just when it seems as if you’re watching a nature documentary, bursts of artistry arrive in the form of choreographed raindrops or a wildly impressionistic forest fire.

The bold cinematic techniques Welles employed in Citizen Kane are put to even more sophisticated use here.

Under the direction of Wyler, who is working from a novel by Jan Struther and won a Best Director Oscar for his efforts, this ultimately becomes a portrait of a community.

Dumbo ends happily enough...but all that comes in a rushed finale; the movie is more interested in capturing the shadings and sounds of sadness (so many scenes take place in the blue night).

How Green Was My Valley thrums with an indomitable confidence in a better day, one that’s rooted in the memory that life in this valley – before the mine hollowed things out – was once very good.

There is hardly a shot in Orson Welles’ towering achivement that doesn’t employ some sort of ingenious trick involving the camera, editing, sound, staging or production design. Kane didn’t invent all of its techniques, but it’s one of the few pictures I can think of that uses almost every one in the movie playbook. The film is like a dictionary of the cinematic language.

Cukor does stage a crackerjack sleigh chase in the climax (the movies need more of those), while overall managing to capture Crawford at what feels like a crucial juncture of her career, just as the gloves were really coming off.

Yes, Meet John Doe is “talky” (if politically astute). That—along with a fairly inert romance between Stanwyck and Cooper—counts against it. But the cast commits with full hearts, especially Cooper, who creates a character both silly (there’s some great physical comedy in his reactions to being put up in a posh hotel room) and sincere.

This might be one of Bette Davis’ least sympathetic parts, which is saying something.

A bit ham-fisted in its call to arms, Foreign Correspondent also fails in trying to force a romance between McCrea and Day. But there are plenty of signature Hitchcock sequences to recommend it.

The original Scared Straight!

Given a hurtling pace by director Howard Hawks, His Girl Friday might just offer the highest laugh-to-minute ratio in film, considering there are jokes in the dialogue, delivery and actors' expressions coming at you all at once.

The Wizard of Oz is frantic, enchanting and spookily surreal.

If joy and liberation bursts from the best Astaire-Rogers films, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle is defined by restriction.

Jezebel is populated almost entirely by unsavory characters, foremost among them the woman of the title.

With After the Thin Man, the best thing about the series remains the playful, boozy, flirtatious repartee between Powell and Loy (even if Nick seems a bit bossier this time around).

If Swing Time isn’t the pinnacle film in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers partnership, it surely has their pinnacle production number: Never Gonna Dance, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Dorothy Fields.

Directed by Michael Curtiz, Captain Blood is much more than a showcase for one of Hollywood’s legends. The action sequences at sea crackle with excitement (and surprisingly intricate special effects), while the well-navigated narrative, based on a book by adventure novelist Rafael Sabatini, has the fatalistic scope of Charles Dickens.

It never really mattered what loopy plot was devised to get Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers together in their musicals – once they started dancing in each other’s arms, all contrivances fall to the wayside and you clearly see they were made for each other.

Director Alfred Hitchcock, who would remake the movie in 1956 with James Stewart, invests each scene with a blithe sense of fun.

There is pleasure in Astaire and Rogers floating, a foot apart, to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” as well as the elaborate, heavily furred gowns that the fashion setting allows.

By far the highlight is Astaire and Rogers’ impossibly fluid routine to Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” in which even that formidable song knows its place and quiets down for a portion of their dance. The two are so elegantly in sync that the ill-fitting conventions of The Gay Divorcee simply melt away.

The whodunit plot is a bit laborious and uninvolving, but William Powell and Myrna Loy are so delightful together—slurrily sexy in the manner of the 1930s, when words and glances had to do all of the work—that it hardly matters.

Even for a 1933 movie musical, Flying Down to Rio is a vaudeville show shamelessly trying to pass for a feature film. Thank goodness, then, that it can get by on sheer showmanship.

Directed by James Whale, The Invisible Man is missing the gothic poeticism of his Frankenstein films, but offers its own sense of unease, especially when the invisible Griffin smashes another cop’s head with a bench. The effects in these trick shots are incredibly sophisticated for the era, as are the moments when Griffin unravels his bandages to reveal … nothing.

This may be the definitive Busby Berkeley-choreographed musical simply because the entire movie revels in the sort of things that Berkeley’s elaborate dance numbers revel in: innuendo, flirtations and flesh.

How thoroughly does Joan Crawford own Grand Hotel? She makes Greta Garbo superfluous. A star parade (and Best Picture winner), Grand Hotel unfairly encourages such comparisons.

A piercing dignity defines this infamous Tod Browning picture, in which a community of circus sideshow performers exact revenge on the trapeze beauty who exploits one of their own.

Marlene Dietrich is in full plume in Shanghai Express, literally and figuratively.

Most of the picture takes place on a luxury cruise liner – on which Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo are stowaways – and the setting makes for a wonderful comic playground. Racing up and down decks and in and out of cabins, the brothers exhibit a more sophisticated sense of staging and interplay than they did in something like Animal Crackers.

Crime may not pay, but The Public Enemy was one of the first pictures to recognize that it sure can be exciting to watch.