Though Hall's stunning vistas and gorgeous exploration of wide-open spaces hearken back to John Ford, Butch Cassidy otherwise radiates the youthful energy, manic pop playfulness, and antic clowning of the French New Wave.

Paint Your Wagon divided audiences and critics. With its central three-way marriage, debauchery, polygamy, Paddy Chayevsky script, and unconventional stars, it was too damn weird and adult for family audiences and too corny, old-fashioned, and bloated for the druggies and stoners.

As a comic heist film, The Italian Job is diverting, though slight. As a feature-length advertisement for the MINI Cooper, however, it's an unqualified triumph.

Aside from the romance between Forster and Bloom—which gets in the way of the volatile Summer Of Love action, and ends in typically nihilistic '60s-youth-pic fashion—Medium Cool still has impact.

Many of the movies made in the wake of Easy Rider were more accomplished, more sophisticated, and more aesthetically mature. But Easy Rider itself still feels vital, because it was made by people who’d spent years learning what couldn’t be done, before deciding to do it anyway.

While the movie may be a Western—one of the best Westerns ever made, in fact—it’s also an action movie, one that was crucial to action movies becoming what they would eventually be.

More than 30 years removed from its theatrical release, Salesman looks less like the story of four traveling salesmen than the story of America itself.

Partly improvised, partly scripted, and partly somewhere between the two, Cassavetes' films have frequently been likened to jazz. Faces bears the stamp of its particular era's jazz; it trades in long stretches of chaos, even ugliness, which produce unexpected passages of grace and beauty. As punishing as that ugliness can be, the graceful bits stick in the memory.

Peter Yates-directed cop thriller that relies on McQueen's chiseled features to hold an audience's attention through what's essentially a 45-minute TV show stretched to two hours. Aside from the famous car chase through the streets of San Francisco, Bullitt is primarily watchable for McQueen's performance as a cop breaking the rules to break a case, as well as all the '68 cinema signifiers: lens flares, soft-focus foregrounds, a jazzy Lalo Schifrin score, and vivid location shooting.

It’s at once smirky and tedious, and a missed opportunity to boot.

I found much to like and dislike about Finian's Rainbow, from forest sets that look unmistakably like an Astroturf showroom to a bloated running time made even longer by a musical prelude and intermission.

The film never jells, but it's the Rosetta Stone for Scorsese's later work.

As Polanski leads the audience step-by-step through Levin’s queasy plot, he pushes them toward a conclusion straight out of a Louvin Brothers gospel song. Oh yes, brethren: Satan is real.

Veteran slapstick fans may get a kick out of the free-form antics, and the party's chaotic ending is suitably memorable, but empathetic viewers are likely to be as uncomfortable with Sellers' improv as the partygoers he leads into havoc.

Its social conscience and deep concern with what it means to be human remains unspoiled.

It's more in the so bad it's almost good mode.

Hepburn's blend of pluckiness and self-pity and Arkin's cool cunning give Wait Until Dark emotional weight, but their final tussle is what most fans of the film remember.

Point Blank smartly joins film-noir elements with techniques from the then-cresting British, French, and Italian new waves.

The playful performances haven't aged, and it still finds all the carefree thrills of being young, dumb, in love with life, and ready for death.

It’s not that Hawks’ style rescues El Dorado; it’s that it integrates all of these problems, producing a movie that feels effortlessly complete and consistent, despite being, frankly, all over the place.

Don't Look Back is a spellbinding portrayal of a gifted artist at the peak of his creative brilliance.

While it doesn’t have the lunatic fervor of The Good, The Bad’s climatic cemetery shootout, For A Few Dollars more feels like its successor’s equal, which is about as great a compliment as I can bestow.

Casino Royale offers plenty for the eyes and ears, but little for the funnybone.

The film's surface is made up of familiar '60s romantic-comedy elements, from Hepburn's haute wardrobe to the Henry Mancini score to the breezy interaction between the stars. They banter, bicker, and make up with witty repartee. It's what movie love is supposed to look like, which makes it all the more heartbreaking to know that it's destined to sour.

The best and most touchingly personal of all Shakespeare adaptations, Chimes At Midnight is pervaded by melancholy and loneliness, even though its characters are almost seen never alone.

Persona doesn’t really benefit from too much thought. It’s a visceral experience that’s best felt, accepted, and left alone to rattle around in your subconscious for years to come. Rest assured that it will.

The visual scheme of Leone’s movie leaves no doubt as to his familiarity with Kurosawa’s movie. Plopping Eastwood’s roving gunman down in the middle of a dusty street with opposing gangs lodged at either end, Fistful replicates Yojimbo’s visual plan to an almost distracting extent. The bigger problem with Fistful is that Leone is still attempting to work with a conventional plot, which never plays to his strengths.

Whenever the cars are running, Grand Prix is one of the best studio efforts of the '60s. The film only stalls when it's off the track, which is where more than half of this three-hour epic takes place.

Blow-Up defies analysis by design, given that it's about an artist who makes messes and cleans them up only in part, leaving behind the splatter that interests him. Antonioni follows a similar methodology, making strict interpretations of Blow-Up pretty pointless, and certainly less enjoyable than soaking up the mod decadence and ennui.

The action that follows doesn't stray too far from formula, nor does it come close to Leone's film, but it's stylishly entertaining enough to serve as a passable time-filler, particularly when its second-rate hero takes to wielding an oversized (and anachronistic) handheld machine gun.

Cul-de-sac functions better as an affectionate goof on Waiting For Godot, enhanced by an unforgettable setting that naturally severs the trio from contact with the outside world.

Projects like this are invariably hit-or-miss, and Tiger Lily misses more often than it hits. Flashes of Allen's wit surface occasionally, particularly during bits in which he appears as himself, but they're few and far between, and generally drowned out by silly voices, a surprising amount of awkward silence, and pacing that makes the film seem much longer than its 80 padded minutes.

Seconds is certainly a flawed film, and it's easy to see why it flopped during its initial release: It's a relentlessly depressing, claustrophobic movie that offers no sense of catharsis whatsoever. Nevertheless, it's strangely touching, and as a portrayal of identity and alienation in suburban America, it's about a hundred times as creepy and sincere as David Lynch's thematically similar Lost Highway.

If one were looking for a perfectly realized film, Au Hasard Balthazar would be as likely a candidate as any. For every convention of film grammar and narrative that this 50-year-old masterpiece utilizes, it uses strictly on its own terms, discarding many more.

Despite some weaknesses, the film remains a bold and challenging work, one that flies in the face of the conventional spy thrillers of its day.

Madness lacks sympathetic characters and a well-structured plot, but its manic energy takes it far.

The Naked Prey has the brute force of great pulp; there's little dialogue, and even much of that is untranslated African dialect. Yet much as Wilde strives to express man's animal nature, he isn't crude or culturally insensitive, so much as sharply attuned to the hideous offenses that put his character in such a bind.

Behind its substantial charm and light touch is a movie that’s more morbid, alienated, and personal than it lets on.

It walks a fascinating line between morbid humor and outright horror, and it consistently defies expectations by resetting them at every possible step.

A moving, funny, formative work that should be of interest to more than just Fellini aficionados.

Roustabout revels delightfully in the arcane details of carny life.

It's a must for those already enthralled by Rear Window, Vertigo, and the like, but a bit of a slog for anyone else.

Though Siegel's The Killers dispatches Hemingway after six unfaithful minutes, its roundabout treatment seems truest to his spirit.

Ozu lets the story of uneasy transitions play out against a Japan that's undergoing changes of its own.

There's a little bit of everything in Bava's best-known film, the three-part anthology Black Sabbath.

Innocence and corruption live together beneath the harmonious, hypocritical surface of an idyllic-seeming American town, and while that situation may seem familiar now, thanks to the films and TV shows Naked Kiss helped inspire—Blue Velvet comes immediately to mind—familiarity has dulled none of the film’s force.

Shooting Dr. Strangelove as if it were Paths Of Glory makes its ridiculous elements at once funnier and more chilling, emphasizing the Cold War’s inherent insanity.

It’s a crude, clunky piece of writing, hampered by variable performances and a leading man whose looks of silent resolve are more compelling than his line-readings. Yet the film has the elemental power of a classic immigrant story, revealing a young man’s single-minded, arduous journey to America through black-and-white images that evoke the country’s promise to the huddled masses.

While not a masterpiece on par with Kurosawa's best work, High And Low is a fine example of his craft, and further proof that it's not a few masterpieces but the overall scope of a career that defines a great director.

There are enough giddy highs that it’s had a strong cult following ever since its release in 1963.

Sound effects, disorienting camera work, expert editing, and Humphrey Searle's discomfiting score all suggest, without showing, a horrible presence waiting in the wings. Though parts of The Haunting are talky, even that works in the film's favor, as Tamblyn's glib dismissals and Johnson's calm professorial tone are unable to clear up the mystery at its core. After all, the specters that can't be seen, classified, or otherwise contained are the scariest of all.

Like Golding's novel, Flies wears its allegorical impulses on its sleeve, but, also like Golding's novel, it rings uncomfortably true.

McQueen speeding across the German countryside and leaping over the first of two barbed-wire fences leading into Switzerland may be the film's most iconic and enduring image. Dubious or not, it's a triumph of sorts that a tale that ends in war crimes could have such a rousing conclusion.

It's a black-and-white shocker, a crazed psycho-melodrama, a pitch-black show-biz satire, a warped meditation on the traumatizing effects of child stardom, and a gothic tale of familial dysfunction as its dysfunctioniest.

The Manchurian Candidate tweaks our collective fear that the enemy looks exactly like us in much the same way that the original Invasion Of The Body Snatchers does, but with a political doomsday scenario foregrounded rather than (as in Siegel’s film) merely implied.

An almost literal slice of life, as its title suggests, Cléo allows Varda to illustrate beautifully the lost world surrounding those too stuck in their own heads—and, more pointedly, too caught up in the role-playing expected of women.

Two of the segments reflect Corman’s admitted weariness with the material, but the middle segment, The Black Cat, turns a hybrid of Poe’s stories The Black Cat and The Cask Of Amontillado into a winking romp through the campy side of Gothic horror.

Where the book peers directly into despair and tragedy, the film looks away and dials up the comedy.

Some of the hallmarks of Peckinpah's style—most notably the moving POV shots, quick cuts, and off-center close-ups—manifest even in the colorful, smooth High Country.

A bittersweet look at the closing of the frontier by focusing on two strikingly different men who help one town choose law and order over the chaos of the open range.

A self-crafted elegy starring Cocteau as himself, an artist at the end of his life wandering through a symbolic landscape filled with his own creations (and guest stars Yul Brynner and Pablo Picasso). In the end, Cocteau takes comfort in the immortality of art, and therefore his own immortality, a sentiment that would seem far less moving and far more egotistical if it weren't true.

A knowing comedy, Good Morning isn't one of Ozu's indisputable masterpieces, but it serves as a fine example of everything he does well.

Although crafting a comedy about such world-altering topics was bound to be difficult, a master like Wilder could pull it off.

A ravishing neo-romantic takedown of Victorian repression, spooky and scathing in equal measure.

It's tough to dismiss a film that succeeds so well at producing spectacle, and it's hard to miss the contemporary parallels in its simple, tortuously protracted story.

Compared to the morose plots of later Elvis movies, Blue Hawaii is a breezy vacation, and Presley looks appealingly relaxed as every Hawaiian's favorite haole.

Like the best sports films, The Hustler makes the game look exciting even to outsiders, but Rossen's film is ultimately about a more universal subject than impossible breaks and the heavy spin of masse shots. Adapting Walter Tevis' novel, Rossen made a morality tale without the moralizing.

Working with a miniscule budget, Baron creates charged compositions out of found locations and makes a virtue out of the film's cheapness.

Aside from a few unfunny comic setpieces, Where The Boys Are is generally entertaining, thanks to vivid location footage and a likable cast.

Still appeals to the lingering adolescent taste for daydreams.

Well-crafted, star-driven entertainment doesn't come much better.

It isn’t Kurosawa’s best picture, by any means, but it’s almost certainly his most fun.

The Bellboy strings together artfully choreographed comic setpieces as it follows a silent Lewis through his rounds at a posh Miami Hotel.

What Castle’s films lack in originality, they make up for in carnival energy and an eagerness to please.

Even though its rough edges (the wildly mismatched acting, the scenes that never take shape) look rougher today than they must have at the time, watching Shadows still feels like witnessing a mold breaking.

It’s the perfect first-date movie: It’s flirty and romantic and a little bit saucy, but it leaves viewers with just a peck on the cheek at the end of the night.

It’s haunting and beautiful at times, surprisingly playful at others, and like all great movies about magic, it has more than a few tricks up its sleeve.

Anatomy Of A Murder respects the audience enough to turn us into the jury, and trusts that we, too, can consider the facts like adults.

Wild Strawberries remains a surprisingly optimistic and affirmative movie about getting old: It’s only natural for people at the end of their lives to reflect on the roads taken or not taken. And there’s peace on the other side.

Rio Bravo features characters who form a familial bond while performing an impossible task in the face of death. It is, in other words, a Howard Hawks movie. It's a great one, too, and if it's not Hawks' best, it's certainly the most Hawksian.

A large part of what makes Some Like It Hot a perennial favorite is that it has the go-for-broke commitment of an early Marx brothers farce, but it's harnessed by a well-structured script that keeps building on itself. It's no fluke that the capper is the most famous closing line in movie history.

Never does [Perkins] project the courage, frailty, or plainspoken depth suggested by Frank’s writing, and the leaden earnestness of George’s direction does Perkins and the film no favors.

The elaborate, gothic-inspired designs look great, and the supporting characters—most notably the three good fairies and the Joan Crawford-like villain Maleficent—liven up the proceedings despite the bland hero and heroine.

There’s a lot going on in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, with its striking imagery, bawdy humor, and grim suffering; it’s a humane film about the inhumane inevitability of death. I’m still not much of a cinephile (this is my second Bergman film, and I only watched The Virgin Spring so I could compare it in an essay to The Last House On The Left), but I’m coming to realize that the difference between a good movie and a great one are those moments of intense personal connection where it seems like the filmmaker is reaching out to you through the screen and whispering (or yelling, or cajoling, or demanding, or pleading) in your ear. As if there is no real distance between you and the director, time has changed nothing, and the moment remains as pure as it was on the day it was filmed.

Whatever its flaws as a film, a none-too-scary monster chief among them, The Blob is a uniquely compelling monster movie.

The principals are in such fine form, underplaying against their stagy backdrops, and the tragic turn of the plot is so gripping, that the movie succeeds in spite of its white-elephant pedigree.

It's like an early version of Network, and it's just as overwrought, but Kazan enlivens the material with a mise en scène so vigorous that it could make anyone buy into the auteur theory. Kazan varies his shooting style, alternating between portraiture, expressionism, and docu-realism for a look and rhythm that's about 15 years ahead of its time.

Though the jury in 12 Angry Men reaches a verdict, neither Rose nor Lumet definitively state whether they're "right." The point—as Lumet well knows—is that when it comes to making sense of a picture, a lot depends on the framing.

The Wrong Man, an overlooked masterpiece from his greatest decade, eschews suspense for the straight-up nightmare of an innocent man dragged through the justice system.

In spite of the three-and-a-half-hour running time and the stark southwestern landscapes, Giant studies little moments more intently than monumental ones, and dwells in drawing rooms as much as on the range.

Minnelli and star Kirk Douglas give Vincent Van Gogh's famously tortured existence the melodramatic treatment in 1956's Lust For Life, and the result falls closer to high camp than high art.

From the heroes’ complicated planning to the story’s cruel twist ending, The Killing illustrates how human beings have a bad habit of getting in their own way.

By the time of The Searchers, Wayne had toughened to match Ford's darker vision. Redemption is still out there, but it has to be fought for, and sometimes winning it doesn't make anyone happier.

Here was outer space as only the lavish production values of MGM could imagine it, a journey to an alien landscape painted in bold Eastmancolor and stretched across a CinemaScope frame.

The film plays just as easily as a stand-in for the mob mentality that let Joseph McCarthy run amok in his attempt to sniff out every last American with communist sympathies—past, present, and future—until all had conformed to a rigid definition of the right thinking.

Both State Fair and Oklahoma! exemplify the composers' re-imagining of the musical form, which relied on more subtle vocal techniques, and songs that were catchy without always being hooky. The movies also catch the pair's unique version of nostalgia, which salutes provincial values while suggesting that they may not be enough to satisfy.

Thief is giddy with eye candy, but the scenery is always secondary to the screenplay, which well serves the blinding star-power on display.

With no battles and a setting that primarily stays on the U.S.S. Reluctant, Mister Roberts still captivates, aided by some shimmering dialogue already polished to perfection by the Broadway version, along with the renegade hijinks of the crew.