No other motion picture about Hollywood comes near Billy Wilder's searing, uncompromising and utterly fascinating portrait of the film community.

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.

An arresting, superbly produced and downbeat Western photographed in stark black and white, The Gunfighter presents an unglorified view of the Old West as a grim, dirty and decidedly desperate place.

Director Malick endows this simple, timeless story with the enormous scope and resonance of myth through a clear vision unclouded by sentimentality and by a deft juxtaposition of image, music, and character.

Although the film downplays the comic aspects of the Falstaff-Hal relationship, the two lead performances are splendid, with Baxter alternately playful, cunning, icy, and commanding and Welles giving the performance of his career in a part he deeply understands.

Despite its length, the film only starts feeling as long at the end -- or, more correctly, ends. Serious fans of the novels will be prepared for the serial codicils, but the uninitiated are likely to think the film is over several times before it actually is.

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

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

Welles's second great masterpiece.

Irons's canny performance dominates the film. He plays the role with apparent frankness and dignity rather than melodramatic villainy.

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.

Jean-Luc Godard visited the world of young folk to create his most humane film. (Review of Original Release)

A masterpiece...DUCK SOUP is perhaps the best, and funniest, depiction of the absurdities of war ever committed to celluloid.

One of Hitchcock's best British films, and a prototype for so much of what would follow in his American career. For those who love a grand spy mystery, a wild chase, and a harrowing portrait of an innocent man struggling to prove his innocence while the world turns inexplicably against him, The 39 Steps is ideal.

A brilliant surrealistic joke about a group of friends whose attempts to dine are continually thwarted.

A grim and dirty slice of bleak frontier life rendered with extraordinary beauty.

The best coming home movie ever made. "I don't care if it doesn't make a nickel," Sam Goldwyn reportedly said of THE BEST YEARS, "I just want every man, woman, and child in America to see it."

If this film is less engaged with social and political realities than most of Godard's other work from this period and seems like nothing more than a playful attempt to re-create an old Hollywood genre, one must remember that even a lesser Godard is likely to be much more stimulating than another director's better films.

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

One of the most celebrated films from the extraordinary director-writer partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP is a warm and wise work that displays extraordinary generosity of spirit.

After years of work-for-hire, writer-director Wong Kar-wai found his creative voice, discovered his themes and styles, and solidified his collaborative creative team with this brilliant examination of one-way love and crashed relationships. (Review of Original Release)

Ambitious, deeply flawed and studded with sequences that achieve pure, majestic greatness.

Bogdanovich's finest effort; bleak and beguiling.

It is a subtle and humane entertainment with a refreshingly serious view of the world.

Creatively edited and as insightful as any film can be about the lowest rungs of the music scene, this overview expertly captures the time and place. Still, the movie lacks the crossover potential to appeal to non-punk viewers.

The film could easily be reduced to a parable of post-Communist Eastern Europe, but the allegory digs deeper into the very order of things, exemplified by 17th-century musicologist Andreas Werckmeister's arbitrary imposition of a "tempered" tonal system over naturally occurring tunings.

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.

Brother's Keeper offers a rich tapestry of rural American life in both light and dark shades.