This 1950s melodrama – as underscored by Todd Haynes' modern riff, Far from Heaven – offers smart insights into the American class system and carries a powerful emotional clout way beyond the usual limitations of its genre.

The face-off between two of the biggest legends in American pop culture, Sinatra and Brando, is something to be relished, although the roles are perhaps a little too atypical for each for the pairing itself to be legendary as the individuals. But still, what a joy it always is.

There is some stuffy, faintly reactionary stuff in this famed 1955 teen drama, but James Dean is truly extraordinary, and it has some brilliant scenes

Very few films or plays can survive the stigma of having an exclamation mark after the title, but Fred Zinnemann's bigscreen version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, originally released in 1955, still has some breezy charm and robust American music, under those vast cloud-dappled skies in Cinemascope.

Hitchcock's superbly insouciant crime caper from 1955 must surely be one of the last movies in which the American super-rich are indulged so extravagantly and adoringly – the kind of people who stub their cigarettes out in fried eggs.

Every frame of this film is brilliantly contrived, particularly the underwater nightmare at the end. A gripping, complex chiller.

Joan Collins is the only person in this film who seems to be enjoying the fact it's a big camp mess.

The 1954 film version of Oscar Hammerstein's all-black Broadway musical now feels like a relic from the gruesome social straitjacket that was segregation; every frame, you feel, is freighted with the tension imposed by the never-appearing white folks. It was, however, laudable in its desire to showcase the talents of African-American performers who were denied opportunities in Hollywood.

It's a nice, if undemanding, Yuletide treat.

What's extraordinary, for a film that works on these different levels, is that it also manages to be a riveting thriller.

This is one of the better films of its kind. [31 Jul 1954, p.3]

The movie is perfectly composed with a light touch that is the work of a certain kind of gravity and sophistication.

The result is a rather stagey film whose back projections look quaint, with 3D apparently used to foreground items of furniture, such as table-lamps, giving rise to some eccentric camera-angles. But the set-up is ingenious and the "kill" scene genuinely thrilling. [2013 3D Release]

Salt of the Earth has humour, genuine feeling and great sincerity: it's a film about hope.

The tunes are gold, and as Jane approaches a local creek, resplendent in her gorgeous yellow gown, we get one of the most famous visual gags in the history of the musical.

A melodramatic tale at heart, but carried off with some wit and flair. [01 Feb 2000, p.24]

I have to say that Clift's plot is far less compelling than Lancaster's and something of the zip goes when Frank Sinatra disappears from the action, sent to the stockade. But what a punch this movie still packs.

The more you look at it, the more perfect it seems. Hollywood doesn't make films like this now because public taste has changed. But it's doubtful if they could anyway.

Wilder takes the Broadway play, as well as the genteel camaraderie familiar from the British POW films, shakes it all up, makes it tougher, funnier, cruder and subtler.

In the work of someone so exhaustively appreciated as Hitchcock, you wouldn't expect to find forgotten masterpieces but I Confess is one. It might never catch fire, but it smoulders gloriously.

Hitch would have played it for laughs; this is a little overwrought, but steamy enough. [22 Apr 2006, p.53]

Hollywood here looks diabolically seductive.

As the synopsis suggests, plot is nothing more than an excuse to create a string of humorous set pieces featuring visual gags, snappy one-liners and lively song-and-dance numbers.

This is a hothouse flower of pure orchidaceous strangeness, enclosed in the studio’s artificial universe, fusing cinema, opera and ballet.

A ripping, gripping yarn, a surprisingly erotic love story and, as it happens, a premonition of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.

Akira Kurosawa's 1950 masterwork is a chilling, utterly memorable dissection of the nature of human communication.

The most distinctive things about the film are possibly Caron's personae-montage at the beginning, which showcases her virtuoso dance moves, and the final fantasy sequence, which resolves (a little hurriedly) the emotional obstacles to their love. An exotically contrived romance.

It's set on the suitably exotic locale of a Spanish fishing village – shortly before its obliteration by hotel development, you have to assume – and although everyone moves and speaks at about half normal pace, it all works wonderfully well: Gardner, especially, just glows on the screen.