Whatever a person's opinion of the play's accuracy, William Friedkin's 1970 film adaptation remains gripping, translating a story that takes place in a cramped apartment into a movie that rarely feels stagey.

A giant Rorschach blot of a film, Patton can be read any number of ways, from a sly satire of gung-ho militarism to an epic glorification of Patton's old-school mentality.

That nauseous mixture of laughs and shocks, and the fact that real passion drives Kastle's characters even when they plot against each other, is what makes The Honeymoon Killers such an enduring one-off.

The movie is so unrelievedly pessimistic that only the most dedicated misanthrope could love it. But there’s something oddly bracing—noble, even—about a Hollywood picture that’s willing to say, without even a hint of soft-pedaling, that life isn’t worth living, and that it’s squalid, unfair, and disappointing.

Like its spiritual predecessor The Battle Of Algiers, Z is as much a mini-revolution as it is a movie, actively engaging in a political battle as it was unfolding.

Nobody can accuse Downhill Racer of lacking artistic integrity. Trouble is, artistic integrity is all it has to offer.

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.

Hunter is the stuff of nightmares, but it’s the stuff of dreams, too, and it beckons you to follow it downstream.

Not As A Stranger taps into the raging fury and animal sexuality lurking underneath Mitchum’s quiet-storm demeanor; the film’s redemptive arc requires him to realize what he has in a good, wholesome woman like de Havilland, but Mitchum’s bedroom eyes and leering swagger suggest that he really belongs to a femme fatale like Grahame, who undoubtedly tumbled out of the womb clutching a cigarette in one hand and a glass of scotch in the other.

As in all things, Lady And The Tramp is far more interested in raising complicated questions than in providing easy answers.

Most vitally, the filmmakers never let the audience lose track of how cool it would be to cruise the bottom of the ocean in an elegantly appointed super-boat. The secret of good escapist fare, as Disney's crew knew, is giving the audience someplace remarkable to escape to.

In its perfect fusion of popular entertainment and high art, Rear Window ranks among Hitchcock's best.

It's one wacked-out melodrama, but it's wildly entertaining.

Stalag 17's irreverence likely didn't revolutionize moviemaking for adults so much as it paved the way for the likes of M*A*S*H and Animal House. Then again, that alone is an achievement worth celebrating.

Characters are occasionally in physical danger (a young Charles Bronson, still billed as Charles Buchinsky, plays Jarrod’s mute muscle), but true horror derives from the juxtaposition of composed behavior and obscene acts. No one delivered that combination better than Vincent Price.

Though Barrie's stories are about a rite of passage into adulthood, Disney's Peter Pan treats the issue superficially, retreating from the dark places of movies like Pinocchio in favor of amped-up tomfoolery.

This is studio-system product at its juiciest and most sophisticated, full of insights into the mess behind the art.

In short, everything that sounds potentially magnificent about Limelight disappoints, while the aspect that sounds potentially dreary—Chaplin playing earnest life coach to a sickly ballerina—works like a charm. The man was full of surprises.

Shot partly on location in Ireland and designed in the lushest greens ever squeezed out of Technicolor, The Quiet Man is a movie that isn’t about a whole lot, but yet seems to contain so much—from Wayne’s easygoing charisma to the notoriously protracted climactic fight to the febrile, film-noir-like flashback to Sean’s boxing days.

This is art everyone can live for. And The Tales of Hoffmann makes it possible to live completely, gloriously within it.

There's not much juice to the movie's central romantic triangle between money-minded boss Charlton Heston and his two star attractions, dueling trapeze artists Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde. Still, Jimmy Stewart does some appealingly subtle work as a clown on the run from the law, and DeMille's narration has a charming, corny, true-life-adventure quality, as he hypes the circus as a life-and-death proposition.

Escapism raised to the level of art, Singin' In The Rain inventively satirizes the illusions of the filmmaking process while celebrating their life-affirming joy. Half parody, half homage, the movie became the apex of the splashy MGM musical, while showcasing the collaborative possibilities of the studio system.

Every element in the film, from the dense thicket of forest branches to master cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa's deceptive framing and lighting design, is precisely calibrated to make the facts more difficult to discern.

An American In Paris is muddled as an artistic statement, yet unsatisfying as conventional Hollywood product.

Though [Guinness's] performance may not immediately announce itself as his best, it's certainly one of his most representative, a thoroughly recognizable character of unseen depths and unexpected capabilities.

The characters are sketchy by design, but the set design is wondrously opulent, and Ophüls cleverly picks up on Schnitzler's central theme, about how sexual desire erases class distinctions.

Working from a script by Edmund North (Patton), taken from a story by Harry Bates, Robert Wise directs the movie with a minimum of spectacle.

The movie Streetcar still seethes with lust, and retains so much of Williams’ florid dialogue and insinuation that it often feels like Kazan and his cast are getting away with something.

Little besides an endless stream of ditties—only a few of them memorable—carries the film from one scene to the next. For anyone not just coasting along with the visuals, it can start to feel like a movie to be gotten through more than enjoyed.

Although Billy Wilder's 1950 Hollywood noir Sunset Boulevard gets less attention as a travelogue, it's both an examination of the dark psychological landscape of out-of-fashion show-business types (as underlined by the title) and an actual trip through its physical environment.

The Asphalt Jungle would be considered a heist picture if the mood didn't dictate otherwise. The standard "honor among thieves" theme applies, but dishonor gives the film its special noir flavor.

Far from muting the satire, Renoir's hearty characterization complicates it and gives it life, which is rare among broadsides at the bourgeoisie.

Joseph H. Lewis’ kinetic, psychosexual B-movie laid many of the creative foundations of the American cinema of the 1970s, though it took a round trip to Europe for the movie to develop a reputation at home.

George Cukor employs an unusually large number of long takes, often allowing the inspired spats between his leads to play out in unbroken real time. But the much more likely explanation for the film’s enduring popularity has to be the way it took the gender politics underlying many of the duo’s collaborations and made them the full-fledged focus.

It's a strikingly poetic first feature, more about the naïve romance between young hoodlum Granger and his reluctant nursemaid Cathy O'Donnell than it is about robbing banks and dodging cops.

Fort Apache and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon both dwell on the problems of leadership, balancing out a respect for classic American frontier virtues with a less generous assessment of how those virtues were applied.

A sharp, exciting thriller that beautifully captures a dispirited Europe nowhere near recovered from WWII, Carol Reed's The Third Man is one of those miraculous films that work on every level.

Cagney's magnetism stems from his note-perfect combination of broad gestures and subtle shifts of posture, but the keen eyes of his directors are what make his gangster pictures classics.

A Canterbury Tale is a strange little movie, overlong and even shrill at times, but with a point to make that belies its slightness.

The fairy-tale-like 3 Godfathers casts Wayne as one of a trio of outlaws charged with caring for a baby, and discovering responsibility and perhaps his soul (the two go hand-in-hand for Ford) in the process.

The incongruous pairing—the late-’40s equivalent of dropping the American Pie gang into a Saw movie—really shouldn’t have worked, but it resulted in a highly entertaining film that became a huge hit and breathed new life into the comedy team’s career, while providing a convenient tombstone for the monsters, who faded from screens.

Though not the masterpiece Disney's marketing would indicate, it is a charming, imaginative anthology of cartoon shorts set to music by the likes of such '40s favorites as Roy Rogers and The Andrews Sisters.

Perhaps the best thing about Naked City is that it does justice to that source material. At times, it rivals Weegee's best work in its harsh, unsentimental portrayal of New York as a city with a dark side the size of the Hudson River.

It remains a rapturous, near-indescribable work of cinematic art, spun from a simple story about nuns who travel to the Himalayas to start a school and a hospital, only to have mountain winds and native mysticism weaken their confidence and their faith.

Quintessential noir.

Fun And Fancy Free is a mixed bag with more than enough interesting material to make it worth seeing, even if it falls short of Disney's shameless self-praise.

Dark Passage is usually ranked as the least of the four Bogart-Bacall collaborations, but it's a practically perfect little noir exercise, with Bogart as a prison escapee tracking his wife's killer.

Brilliantly photographed by William H. Daniels, Brute Force is both a humanistic personal drama and a bravura piece of genre filmmaking.

In the battle of the classic Hollywood Christmas movies, It's A Wonderful Life feels charmingly ancient, fixed in an early-20th-century America that scarcely anyone today remembers first-hand. Miracle On 34th Street feels more modern, with slangy dialogue and naturalistic asides, and a general awareness of how Christmas has become about the intertwined stresses of shopping and selling.

The film isn't as deep or ambitious as some of the Powell-Pressburger films that followed, but it's still a delightful love story, blessed with attractive leads, lovely locations, and witty dialogue.

Encounter remains the definition of timeless, a beautifully shot, heartbreakingly acted, minutely detailed illustration of thoroughly recognizable human frailty.

The liberal Ford and the conservative Wayne had nothing in common politically, but artistically, they're perfectly in sync.

A masterful weepie adapted from a James M. Cain novel.

A thoroughly wacky 1945 screwball comedy that also doubles as a fascinatingly subversive commentary on conventional gender roles. It’s a bit of a hidden gem in the Christmas canon.

Powell and Pressburger bring their combination of good humor, visual flair, and unflinching insight to the three telling episodes that make up the film's 160-minute run time.

Where the prequel is weighed down with noble intentions, Caballeros boasts a breezy, exhilarating lightness and a refreshing undercurrent of perversity.

An ambitious nostalgia piece with a broad emotional palette.

The roots of reality TV can be found here, but unlike most reality TV, Hitchcock shows a genuine (though characteristically distant) interest in people.

Amigos sandwiches four pedestrian animated shorts—two featuring Donald Duck, one featuring a Gaucho Goofy, and the fourth starring a family of anthropomorphic planes—inside agonizingly dull travelogue footage of Disney writers, artists, and musicians on a research trip, exploring all that Latin and South America have to offer. The stale, joy-killing odor of the classroom hangs heavy over Saludos Amigos: it aspires to educate and entertain, but fails on both counts.

The horror is fueled by sexual frustration, repressed passion, and the everyday anxieties of marriage and urban life, and it plays out in a noir-lit New York filled with everyday people. No fan of gothic castles, Lewton brought horror home with Cat People.

With its bittersweet romance and air of tragic empowerment, Now, Voyager represents the pinnacle of the woman's picture.

More than any self-declared masterpiece in the Disney catalog, Bambi has earned the right to be called timeless, because its concerns are transcendent and universal.

The Magnificent Ambersons is still masterly. It’s the movie that all other films about families in decline are measured against.

There may be no American movie more patriotic than Yankee Doodle Dandy, a jingoistic biopic of famed Broadway star George M. Cohan that transcends its innumerable genre clichés through the sheer willpower of its star.

Hard-to-follow action and a silly, inconsistent tone work against the film, but Hope's reluctant can-do attitude and wry comments keep the energy level up.

Because the second half of To Be Or Not To Be, once Benny starts impersonating Nazis, is so outlandishly hilarious, it’s easy to forgive the film’s comparatively sluggish first half, which is mostly setup for gags to come.

As history, it's mostly bunk. Flynn's Custer is a heroic, high-spirited, Indian-respecting dunderhead prone to plunging into battle without thought and winning the day in spite of overwhelming odds (until, of course, the odds catch up with him). Dramatically, however, it's much more interesting.

The Curt Siodmak-penned, George Waggner-directed film uses werewolf legends as an excuse to put modern minds comfortable living with moral ambiguity into conflict with undeniable evil.

It's not only one of the best classic-era Disney features, but also one of the best animated films from any studio at any time.

Originally released at a time of national anxiety—four months before Pearl Harbor—the comic fantasy Here Comes Mr. Jordan positively radiates reassurement, in the form of a beatific and perpetually amused Claude Rains.

A star in every genre, Stanwyck epitomized both the steely femme fatale (Double Indemnity) and the heartbreaking melodramatic heroine (Stella Dallas), but her performance in The Lady Eve was the only one to showcase her full range of ability. Her line readings sparkle with ruthless intelligence and wit, but she's also capable of surprising openness and vulnerability.

Foreign Correspondent seems a sterling example of how the director could help the war effort by using current events as a launching point for his signature brand of suspense.

Shot like a horror film and featuring Olivier as one of the least sympathetic heroes in the Hitchcock canon, Rebecca's smart extrapolation on themes inherited from gothic thrillers and Brontë novels allows the director to begin with a suspenseful romance that barely keeps its subtext under the surface, and smuggle in a story of one woman's immersion into the sexual expectations of her era.

Road To Singapore isn’t as funny or as cleverly self-referential as what would come later; it became a hit largely due to the fast-paced, partially ad-libbed repartee between the two stars, which was unlike anything that movie audiences had heard before.

For all its Jiminy Cricket optimism, Pinocchio is a potent illustration of how people can only improve because they’re so lousy to begin with.

For the first time, the formula feels strained, due to excessive baby/dog humor and not enough Powell/Loy interaction.

This is an exciting, sweeping vision of American life, which treats crime like the ultimate small business, crushed by the machinations of the truly powerful.

Exuding nobility, modesty, and down-home wit, Henry Fonda assumes the iconic top hat as America’s 16th president in Young Mr. Lincoln. Far from a traditional decades-spanning biopic, John Ford’s drama instead provides a snapshot of a moment in Lincoln’s life.

The film offers genuine intrigue and excitement.... But its ultimate power derives largely from its unusual ethos, which celebrates pragmatism at the expense of emotional behavior while simultaneously acknowledging just how profound a pragmatist’s emotions can be.

Stagecoach gives fine shading to a simple story, making it look and feel like a forgotten American myth.

It's typical Hitchcock: taut, morbid, stylish, and determined to confound expectations all the way up to the final shot.

As Hawks admits, Bringing Up Baby isn’t a perfect film. But there’s an undeniable, ephemeral magic that comes from watching him, Hepburn, and Grant all work together on such a madcap story.

On either end of Harvey’s adventure, Captains Courageous goes on a bit too long; the circumstances of his boarding-school transgressions are needlessly overcomplicated, and the emotional denouement is less than concise. But the seafaring section that makes up the majority of the film is well-crafted and gives way to surprising emotion.

One of the first and still among the best of the '30s screwball comedies, My Man Godfrey serves up absurdist romance and light social commentary in a fizzy mix that benefits from director Gregory La Cava's willingness to indulge improvisation, a trait he acquired from friend and frequent collaborator W.C. Fields.

It's not quite as charming as Top Hat or Shall We Dance, and the plotting drags heavily in spots, but whenever it gets free from the demands of farce, it's a dizzy delight.

The dialogue is witty and piquant, and the supporting players droll, but the labored farce of madcap marital misunderstandings are as flatfooted as the dance numbers are memorably airy.

Hitchcock would make richer films in Hollywood, but The 39 Steps came off the line as the Model T of cinematic plot machines.

The Man Who Knew Too Much finds the director firmly back in his wheelhouse, extracting all the wit and suspense he can from a pulpy exercise in abduction and conspiracy.

Powell and Loy's light, witty, unflappable characterizations became the unwavering backbone of a terrific series.

It’s every goddamn romantic comedy you’ve ever seen. They can all be traced back here, virtually without exception, for eight straight decades now. Technically, the film has never been remade, but that’s largely because, in spirit, it has never stopped being remade. Something so perfectly structured can support nearly endless variations. It’s timeless.

A striking effort in its own right, though not in the ways that make one generation pass a film lovingly down to the next.

Few drug-induced visions, however, can match the playful ingenuity of this freewheeling assault on the senses, which eschews conventional narrative in favor of one mesmerizingly bizarre image after another.

Anarchy finally reigned supreme in 1932's classic Horse Feathers, which was the first Marx brothers comedy that smoothly integrated the story into the troupe's routine.

Much of what makes Freaks so unsettling comes from its refusal to treat its stars as, well, freaks.

Frankenstein works as a fast-moving thriller and, even now, a stylish, frighteningly atmospheric horror film, but also as a sad outcast parable. Frankenstein's creature may be a monstrosity, but he's also instantly sympathetic to anyone who's ever felt like a misfit.

In casting the brothers as stowaways on an ocean liner, Monkey Business gets laughs from broad Keystone Kops chase scenes, but extends the absurdity even further with bizarre one-liners (Groucho claims he "licked his weight in wild caterpillars") and a sequence in which all four brothers try to get off the boat by impersonating Maurice Chevalier.

Alfred Hitchcock's early films run the gamut from not-bad to dreary, but they're mainly remarkable for how Hitchcockian they are.

Animal Crackers leaves the song-and-dance to Groucho in the great "Hooray For Captain Spaulding," sends Harpo running after screaming blondes in the background, and breaks down the fourth wall for a wry Eugene O'Neill parody.

Milestone’s visual style lacks the flourish of Wellman’s Wings, but it’s no less explicit, as the camera pans across battlefields where dismembered body parts hang from barbed wire.

Only about half of 1929's The Cocoanuts, an early sound-era comedy, was entrusted to the Marx brothers' vaudevillian antics; the rest was left to drippy Irving Berlin songs, kick-lines of bathing beauties, and a half-baked subplot about a stolen necklace. Yet the good scenes establish the Marx dynamic to hilarious effect.

It's a unique, unforgettable, enlightening experience.

Danish director Carl Dreyer's 1928 film The Passion Of Joan Of Arc is one of the indisputable masterpieces of the silent era.

Wings is primarily a grand spectacle, with an ingenious piece of visual storytelling rolling along every few minutes.

Sunrise remains a magnificent tale of adultery and forgiveness, and contains more lessons in visual storytelling in any given five-minute sequence than most film schools deliver in a semester.

As for its quality as an actual movie, well, The Jazz Singer is hardly great, but it provides solid melodrama and a valuable look at the ethnic stereotypes of early-20th-century entertainment.

Battleship Potemkin remains remarkable for the way it builds over a brisk 69 minutes, setting the pace for nearly every action movie made since.

Its refusal to over-simplify gives it the structure of a rough cut. Being a grown-up, as far as I Love You, Daddy is concerned, means picking your failures and frustrations; it picks to be too long and poky.

The Seventh Continent deals with the deterioration of an average middle-class family by focusing obsessively on mundane life details. As images and actions start repeating themselves, it becomes clear to the family (and to us) that their lives are little more than a collection of routines, without joy or meaning. The conclusion they reach is better left as a surprise, but suffice to say, the third act shifts gears completely.

This sixth film in the series just completely ignores the self-aware spoofing of the most recent installments, instead returning to the back-to-basics horrors of a possessed doll who’s out to murder a family—one that could just kick it in the face at any time, because it’s a doll.