Delicately constructed and deliberately leisurely, TOKYO STORY allows its dramatic content and thematic concerns to envelop an audience the way social mores envelop the films' characters.

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.

It is the epitome of filmmaking, a masterpiece for which Welles, one of the greatest practitioners of the cinematic art, will be forever remembered.

A superb example of suspense filmmaking, especially when one considers the technical limitations of its single set.

This is a gorgeous, fascinating account of the interplay between the personal and the social, directed with the kind of insight that only an aristocrat turned Marxist like Visconti could afford. (Review of Original Release)

More an icon than a work of art, CASABLANCA is still thoroughly entertaining romantic melodrama, flawlessly directed, subtly played, lovingly evoking our collective daydreams about lost chances and lost loves and love versus honor; everything about CASABLANCA is just right--it seems to have been filmed under a lucky star.

One of Bertolucci's best films, The Conformist makes a provocative connection between repressed sexual desires and fascist politics. It's an intriguing, elegantly photographed study of the twisted Italian character of the 1930s. (Review of Original Release)

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

VERTIGO is also a masterpiece of filmmaking which includes one of the most important technical discoveries since the dawn of cinema--the dolly-out, zoom-in shot, which visually represents the dizzying sensation of vertigo. The result is a shot unique to Hitchcock, unlike any other before in film, one which will always bear his stamp.

Captures the sleazy allure of Manhattan like no other film.

The results are quite frightening and far superior to the lengthy gloom and doom that fill many earlier Bergman films. A magical movie, Fanny and Alexander is likely to be the achievement for which Bergman will be most remembered. (Review of Original Release)

Very likely the greatest musical MGM or anyone else ever produced, SINGIN' IN THE RAIN has everything--great songs, great dances, a wonderful, nostalgic story, and a dependable cast, although we're beginning to find Kelly and O'Connor a trifle overanimated in scenes they needn't be (butthen whenever we see the talented yet obsequious Mr. Kelly play modest, we get a strange olfactory sensation--that of ham baking)

This nightmarish descent into dark entertainment has so much weirdness going on it's amazing.

One of the cinema's greatest and most durable masterpieces.

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.

This was Disney's second full-length animated feature and it may well the greatest of the studio's cartoon classics.

Much imitated, still unsurpassed. By critical consensus one of the best movies ever made, The Seven Samurai covers so much emotional, historical, and cinematic ground that that it demands to be viewed over and over again.

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.

This great film, made with uncompromising honesty and devastating reality, is, according to Jean-Luc Godard, "the world in an hour and a half."

This is one of Hitchcock's finest British films, a classic mystery that manages to combine humor with a genuine sense of menace--not to mention the kinds of characters that everyone dreams of meeting on a Central European train journey.

Arguably John Huston's greatest film, this powerful study of masculinity under pressure retains its power.

Del Toro's film ranks with the best examinations of children's inner lives, but be warned: Its haunting insights are best left to adults.

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.

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

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.

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC is one of the all-time masterpieces of pure cinema, not only for its unparalleled use of camera movement, composition, and editing, but for its transcendent spirituality and intense emotional impact.

ALL ABOUT EVE is the consummate backstage story, a film that holds a magnifying glass up to theatrical environs and exposes all the egos, tempers, conspiracies and backstage back-biting that make up the world of make-believe on Broadway.

What ultimately saves the film from both silliness and ponderousness is not its simplistic social message, not its now-stale theme, nor its disappointing characterizations, but rather the dazzling cinematic (and theatrical) bag of tricks which Lang and company employed to keep things moving.