THE BIG SLEEP comes magically alive through Hawks's careful direction and Bogart's persona, which is twin to his character of Philip Marlowe.

The Godfather is a generational saga; it's also an action film; but above all, it catches the imagination of audiences because it suggests that the career of a gangster is not so very different from the career of a businessman or a politician.

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

Judy Garland is at her peak, pulling out all the stops, daring the gods in this dark, weighty fable of the price one pays to be at the top.

This brilliant Hitchcock offering combines romance, suspense, and international intrigue with unforgettable performances from Grant and Bergman.

The second film in John Ford's "Cavalry Trilogy" features John Wayne at his best and boasts some incredible, Oscar-winning Technicolor photography of Monument Valley.

Francois Truffaut's greatest achievement, Jules and Jim is a shrine to lovers who have known obsession and been destroyed by it.

Excellent animation, marvelous color, and lovely music make Cinderella a delight all the way around.

Chic, sly little masterpiece of comic seduction.

A slow-paced but hypnotically absorbing movie, it's buoyed by Jarmusch's trademark off-key humor and embellished throughout by an electrifying instrumental score, courtesy of Neil Young.

Too cool for words, then switches past midstream into a work of poignancy and power.

You get the feeling that, had Pixar been in business 25 years ago, Steven Spielberg might have made this movie for them as a follow-up to "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

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

The period detail is letter-perfect, the cast is uniformly excellent, and Delerue's score is haunting and evocative. TRUE CONFESSIONS is a thoughtful but deeply disturbing film, and its frank portrayal of corruption and murder makes it for adults only.

A thrilling return to form.

WHITE HEAT is primal, flamboyant stuff--close your eyes and you could be watching a 30s picture. But don't close them more than momentarily; the film's visuals make it linger in the mind's eye.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST has everything--thrills, suspense, mystery, and black humor, as well as dark undertones of sexual exploitation and covert political machination.

This early precursor to Sunset Boulevard and The Bad and the Beautiful was so inside that many people outside the movie business didn't catch the nuances, and it still packs a considerable comic punch.

Straw Dogs is one of Sam Peckinpah's finest films, a relentless study in violence and machismo that is shocking, not only for its explicit gore, but for the degree to which it manipulates "civilized" audiences. Even the most passive viewer may find himself silently cheering on the carnage at the film's climax--an act that, in retrospect, gives much cause for discomfort.

The point isn't what happens, but how it happens, and under the direction of George Cukor--working from the script by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon--Tracy and Hepburn turn in unforgettable performances.

Mean Streets is a brilliantly made film--terrifically acted, sharply photographed and crisply edited.

What makes husband-and-wife directing team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' hilarious debut such a great family film isn't that it's suitable for the whole family (it's not), but that it speaks a simple truth about what it means to be part of one.

Beauty And The Beast is a nostalgic feast, drawing shamelessly on the best traditions of screen animation and American musical theater and film. Thoroughly derivative but thoroughly charming.

It's big, it's garish, it's loud, and most of all, it's wonderful. This is Cecil B. DeMille's superlative salute to the circus world, and all its glamour and flashy hoopla suits perfectly the director whose middle name was epic.

One of the most harrowing, viscerally upsetting films ever made.

Released simultaneously in the U.S. with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Oscar-nominated fictional thriller "The Lives of Others," this chilling 82-minute documentary about three souls destroyed by the Stasi, the notorious secret police of East Germany, puts a cold, factual gloss on what might otherwise be taken for fiction.

Straightforward, energetic, updated Bard. 28-year-old star-director-adapter Kenneth Branagh's spellbinding version of Shakespeare's Henry isn't superior to Olivier's 1944 version - it's different, and complementary to it.

Few of China's Sixth Generation filmmakers have turned to their country's explosive economic growth and its attendant upheavals with so sharp an eye and so heavy a heart as Jia Zhang-ke.