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.