The fourth pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the first with a screenplay written specifically for them, Top Hat is the quintessential Astaire-Rogers musical, complete with a silly plot, romance, dapper outfits, art deco sets, and plenty of wonderful songs and dance numbers.

A wonderfully brooding, suspenseful revisitation of the land of film noir, Chinatown is not only one of the greatest detective films, but one of the most perfectly constructed of all films.

Delightful, off-the-wall, and ultimately moving.

Also unforgettable is Steiger's towering performance as the volatile survivor, a powder keg of hateful remembrances.

GRAND HOTEL remains a classic of its kind.

Filmed at considerable danger to cast and crew, MOBY DICK, under Huston's strong direction, is one of the most historically authentic, visually stunning, and powerful adventures ever made.

Hope and Glory is a wonderful film, an intelligent, heartfelt, personal, and marvelously entertaining look at what it was like to grow up in wartorn England.

As in the best Hitchcock movies, suspense, rather than actual mayhem, drives the film.

Hailed as one of Hitchcock's masterpieces by some and despised by others, The Birds is certainly among the director's more complex and fascinating works.

The second film in Leone's Dollar trilogy finds the Italian director in better form than in A Fistful of Dollars. For a Few Dollars More has better writing, superior production values, and more characters who aptly complement Eastwood's stoic Man with No Name.

Fat City is both an extraordinarily realistic look at the bottom rungs of the fight game and a moving exploration of the human condition.

A great supporting cast and Bacon's well-judged direction help make Footlight Parade one of the greatest of the Berkeley extravaganzas.

A remarkable example of Hollywood's not choking on the prestige adorning the filming of a classic, Pride and Prejudice is an unusually successful adaptation of Jane Austen's most famous novel.

Cheung gives a revelatory performance.

Douglas gives an appropriately fiery star turn as Van Gogh, delivering some of the best work of his career.

The title, by the way, is age-old slang for a soldier's complete combat gear, which for the U.S. soldiers in Iraq -- both real and otherwise -- weighs over 50 pounds.

Powerful crime drama does more than just expose the criminal underbelly of South African township life.

Face to Face is an extremely intense experience from start to finish, due in large part to Ullmann's performance as she powerfully expresses a range of emotions seldom seen in American films.

SOME LIKE IT HOT expands a one-joke premise with hysterical results, due in no small part to the contributions of the near-perfect ensemble, with each of the major characters shining like a perfect jewel. Lemmon and Curtis are marvelous as the men-turned-women, creating believable characters and generally eschewing the lower forms of camp.

Day Of The Locust exudes authenticity, from the costuming to the cars, from the exotic clothes to the marcelled hair styles.

A gorgeous, fluid, wonderfully exhilarating movie.

A superb romance, the film deftly mixes humor with pathos and passion, and takes us on an emotional voyage that never fails to please.

Excellent, but nasty stuff.

The Magician is still fascinating, presenting a myriad of challenging ideas about magic, reality, and the nature of film itself. The acting, as in typical in Bergman, is exceptionally good, with Bjornstrand a standout.

But overall, Jackson goes for the magic by sidestepping every error of judgment and failure of imagination that brought the ponderous 1976 remake thudding to Earth before Kong ever did. He delivers three solid hours of breathless, enchanting entertainment.

A vigorous, manic drama, this Lewis Milestone classic about newspapers and newsmen wonderfully preserves a host of Depression-era attitudes and a glorious headline era.

Powell is nothing less than magnificent as the mustached philosophizing patriarch, and Dunne casts a warm glow beside him. Elizabeth Taylor, Martin Milner, Jimmy Lydon, and Edmund Gwenn all contribute strong supporting performances; Michael Curtiz provides his usual sure-handed direction.

Song of the South's cartoon sequences are as fine as anything produced by the Disney animators.

If one masterpiece were to emerge from the recent glut of generally good quality Japanese horror movie, this chilling apocalyptic ghost story from Kyroshi Kurosawa is it.

Generally free of the party line one usually associates with Soviet films of its period, THE CRANES ARE FLYING is an antiwar love story, set during WWII, which centers on the romance between pretty young Samoilova and sensitive factory worker Batalov.

It's simply one of the most beautiful films he's (Hou Hsiao Hsien) made to date.

The craftsmanship, acting, and history lesson all make it among the most satisfying films of Ron Howard's career.

Tran's film is a startling achievement: brimming with moments of exquisite tenderness and shocking brutality -- sometimes simultaneously -- and each invested with an almost perverse beauty.

Amalric is extraordinary, creating a character literally without moving a muscle.

A fascinating if problematic early film from Stanley Kubrick, perhaps the most obsessive of the great auteurs of the 1960s, made just on the cusp of a run of cinematic masterpieces.

The classic western, Stagecoach is one of John Ford's greatest frontier epics.

Seamlessly directed by Vincente Minnelli, The Band Wagon is one of the finest musicals ever made. Playing its hackneyed story with tongue firmly in cheek, it simultaneously reflects upon the musical genre, satirizes its conventions and delivers marvelous entertainment.

THE STORY OF LOUIS PASTEUR is well told, with an intelligent script, excellent performances, and careful attention to scientific accuracy. Muni offers a fine characterization that shows the famed scientist as a man faced with extraordinary obstacles.

Impeccable, bleak gloss, with the supreme Crawford engineering the greatest comeback of them all. Mildred Pierce is one of the finest noir soap operas ever, with the queen of pathos shouldering the storm alone; her efforts snagged the golden statuette as 1945's Best Actress.

A landmark in Black filmmaking in the U.S., this angry, extravagant, loud, belligerent movie reaches a high pitch early on and stays there.

Director Malick neither romanticizes nor condemns his subjects, maintaining a low-key approach to the story that results in a fascinating character study.

Jordan and McCabe's real triumph here, however, is the tenderness with which they imbues "Kitten," and the astonishing grace with which the extraordinary Murphy pulls it off.

The acting is flawless throughout, with top honors going to Davis, who blazes through the picture with devastating intensity and honesty. It's an urgent, unsettling performance, perfectly complemented by Pollack, who projects quiet ease and authenticity in this, his first major role.

Beautifully acted, They Live By Night stands today as one of the most poignant and unforgettable noirs ever made.

Grim, violent, and stylishly directed, Get Carter is an interesting film that brings some freshness to British crime cinema.

A delightful piece of utter absurdity and one of director Hawks' most inspired lampoons of the battle between the sexes. Hepburn and Grant are superb in this breathlessly funny screwball comedy with a plot that could have been hatched in a mental institution.

Based on Akiyuki Nosaka's semi-autobiographical novel, Takahata's alternately sweeping and intimate animated feature is a moving depiction of the fates of cast-off children who become casualties of war.

Shakespeare himself couldn't have written better or more complex characters, and far from strange, by the end of this extraordinary film you couldn't imagine Shakespeare performed anywhere else.

Sicilian-born filmmaker Emanuele Crialese takes a huge leap forward from his pretty but simplistic "Respiro" with this highly original, startlingly beautiful and emotionally resonant film.

This is adult, intelligent stuff, marvelously shaded by the amalgamation of talents.

Davis gives a lively and humanistic performance, and the direction by Gillian Armstrong (MRS. SOFFEL, HIGH TIDE), in her feature debut, matches her heroine's character: strong, with a good sense of wanting to get something done and then doing it. The mise-en-scene is well composed, and the story is well told in this wonderful Australian work.

Rio Bravo is an excellent film featuring strong, proud, but very human characters who fight against their various handicaps and pull together to do a job and do it right.

Deliberately eschewing the fast pace, strenuous action, frenzied special effects and wall-to-wall songs of the standard Disney animated feature, the film allows the audience to get to know the character of Kiki and feel the emotional highs and lows she undergoes in the course of her year in training.

A raw, penetrating, and terrifying portrait of humanity.

Split into two sequences, this feature-length cartoon is one of Disney's finest efforts, with attention paid to every animated detail.

Director Carl Franklin, who also adapted the screenplay from Walter Mosley's prize-winning novel, isn't particularly concerned with the machinations of mystery plots. Nor is he seduced by the temptations of noir visual style (although Tak Fujimoto's camera work is plenty stylish).

One of cinema's most monumental achievements, Renoir's RULES OF THE GAME passionately tackles the pre-WWII French class system, and succeeds in bringing forth the complexities and frailties underlying bourgeois civility.

The appealing Knightley goes in a promising young actress and comes out a star, but the faultless cast of veterans and fresh-faced newcomers imbues every character with flawed and immensely appealing humanity.

MARTY, coming in the mid-1950s, in an era of epics and extravagant films designed to stifle upstart television, was all the more startling in that it was a movie expanded from an original television drama (with Rod Steiger in the lead), written brilliantly by Chayefsky, one of the leaders of what came to be known as "kitchen sink" or "clothesline" dramas.

Oshima's ambitious film is not without faults, but these are overshadowed by its emotional power.

Perfectly gorgeous and perfectly nasty.

One of the most inventive and invigorating nonfiction features ever made.

It's full of humor, pathos and a deep humanism that comes as a warm blast in this age of lifeless, cinematic junk.

Only a spirited and extravagant production could do justice to the Robin Hood legend; this film is more than equal to the task. Korngold's score won a well-deserved Oscar, as did the editing and art direction.

This tough, brilliant crime film features Hackman as the indefatigable Popeye Doyle, who passionately hates drug pushers.

The most ambitious animated feature ever to come out of the Disney studios, Fantasia integrates famous works of classical music with wildly uneven but extraordinarily imaginative visuals that run the gamut from dancing hippos to the purely abstract. It's like a feature-length compilation of elaborate Silly Symphonies

Spartacus is still a remarkable epic--one of the greatest tales of the ancient world ever to hit the screen. It's especially strong, and more typical of Kubrick, in the first half--before satire gives way to sentiment.

Beautiful, haunting, poetic, and intensely personal, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER is a unique, terrifying masterpiece.

Gus Van Sant's direction here is supremely confident, fusing witty camerawork, neat editing, and a jazz-oriented score to make Drugstore Cowboy an exhilaratingly bumpy ride.

With his carefully controlled pacing and superb use of sound, Sarkies draws the viewer deep into the experience of a town caught completely off-guard by a kind of violence they could never have expected, and won't soon forget.

Courtroom histrionics given sizzle and sex by Otto Preminger and Duke Ellington's jazz.

A mystical and exotic story of love and destruction, a film for which both star and director became legends.

It concludes Park's trilogy on a dual note of circular tragedy and fragile hope, while working equally well as an introduction to his universe of retribution and repentance or as a stand-alone thriller with a darkly feminist twist.

Brutally memorable, The Deer Hunter is an emotionally draining production that draws a vivid portrait of its characters and their milieu--and succeeds in showing the devastating effect of the war on their lives, as well as their brave attempts at renewal. Unfortunately, the film falters when it comes to the larger questions of America's involvement in Vietnam.

A beautiful and unusually quiet film from one of the world's greatest living directors.

Burtynsky's keen sense of color, pattern and composition are obvious from his work, but equally acute are his thoughts on how he as an artist as well as an inhabitant of the planet fits into the larger scheme of things.

The performances are first-rate (finally free of the casting constraints, Hitchcock displayed--in 1972's Frenzy as well--a deliciously offbeat taste in performers) and the screenplay by Ernest Lehman (North By Northwest) is a witty model of construction. The humor is more obvious and subversive than any of Hitchcock's films since The Trouble With Harry.

Deliriously expressionistic visually and aurally.

Easily the best of the many versions of the Stevenson horror classic.

Animator/fabulist Hayao Miyazaki pays homage to Hollywood’s wartime adventure films in this masterwork built around the adventures of a high-flying pig.

Visually stunning adventure. (Review of Original Release)

Fincher gets it all right, and Donovan's hippie-dippy "Hurdy Gurdy Man," which bookends the story, has never sounded so hauntingly menacing.

n a remarkable directorial effort, Eastwood shows a great flair for atmosphere and composition and presents a nuanced, complex, humane portrait of Parker's talents, obstacles, virtues and failings. Whitaker gives a towering performance as the tortured musical genius, and Venora is equally impressive as the independent, compassionate Chan.

The voices of Reynolds, Lynde, Gibson, and all the rest are perfectly cast, and the songs by the Sherman brothers are solid, although none of them became hits like those they wrote for such Disney movies as Mary Poppins.

This was the penultimate film from the ailing great director. It is also one of his best.

This is Ingmar Bergman's chaste exploration of psychosis. It's not a horror story but a poem, and remarkable for that. This is one of the director's masterworks.

The ultimate in lush melodrama, Written on the Wind is, along with Imitation of Life, Douglas Sirk's finest directorial effort, and one of the most notable critiques of the American family ever made.

This intelligent and exciting WWII tale, masterfully helmed by Lean (at the start of his "epic" period), features a splendid performance from Guinness as Col. Nicholson, a British officer who has surrendered with his regiment to the Japanese in Burma in 1943.

Ford's visualization of Steinbeck's novel is so emotionally gripping that viewers have little time to collect themselves from one powerful scene to the next.

The best-ever adaptation of a Faulkner novel for the screen, directed with passion and perception by Sirk.

WOMAN OF THE YEAR is a marvelous comedy-drama, brimming with wit, style, and sophistication.

One of the most brilliantly constructed films of all time, RASHOMON is a monument to Akira Kurosawa's greatness, combining his well-known humanism with an experimental narrative style that has become a hallmark of film history.

One of Coppola's very best.

The film ends with a return to the beach, and one of the most psychologically chilling and expertly photographed shots imaginable.

An extraordinarily well-made film about anachronistic outlaws in the early 20th century, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch feels like it should have been the final western.

The Apartment captured one of the singular images of early '60s America; the immense office (designed by Alexander Trauner) in which the human workers, seated behind endless, perfectly aligned rows of identical desks, appear completely subordinate to the dehumanizing mechanisms of conformity and efficiency.

The last of the comedies produced by the Ealing Studios, and one of the finest, with a supremely dark tone which makes a climactic series of murders as hilarious as they are grotesque.

Dunn's elegant, full-length debut presents a frightening and powerful argument against the kind of reckless, profit-driven land development that not only threatens natural resources, but life itself.