This early Hitchcock talkie shows none of the mastery that would subsequently make the director an internationally recognized genius.

Fascinating and brutally realistic, THE PUBLIC ENEMY, along with LITTLE CAESAR, BAD COMPANY, and SCARFACE, set the pattern for the gangster films of the 1930s.

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.

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

The atmospheric opening is the best part--moody and full of sinister potential. After that, it's stilted drawing-room talk, variably acted, except for the cultish over-the-top dementia of Dwight Frye. Still, Dracula is the film that started the 1930s horror cycle, secured Universal's position as the horror studio, and made Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi a worldwide curiosity.

Dunne is superb and Cimarron was considered until the late 1940s the finest Western ever made.

The one and only; an unqualified masterpiece and milestone.

Exceedingly stagy and theatrical, even by 1930's standards, but is nevertheless very funny and highly enjoyable.

Perhaps the greatest antiwar film ever made, holding considerable power even now due to Lewis Milestone's inventive direction.

A smash success as a stage play, JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK did not translate well to film, even under the sure hand of master filmmaker Hitchcock.

Grimly realistic and often brutal, it exposes the inhuman conditions and paranoia that deepen criminal resolve among inmates.

Hitchcock's handling of the comic material was praised by contemporary critics, and modern-day fans of his work will see many directorial flourishes that hint at the mastery he displays in later films.

A love triangle played out on the Isle of Man is the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's last silent film, THE MANXMAN, an uncharacteristic example of Hitchcock with tongue out of cheek.

Moodily filmed in an effectively Germanic style, with a neat supporting turn by Calthrop and fine set pieces such as the chase through the British Museum, BLACKMAIL still plays well, and is a suitable precursor to the master director's later work.

This is a crude, shapeless talkie, a technically unsophisticated film in which the sound is static and the camera immobile, with the comedians leaping into the set scenes. Yet the boys are there in all their frenetic glory.

First musical to win Academy Award reeks of mothballs, but is undeniably the basis of perhaps a hundred others. At least there's an old curiosity shoppe charm and a few classic tunes.

It's a startlingly avant-garde cross-examination of modern life, as well as a lesson in the power of filmmaking and an autopsy of its methods.

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.

The only silent film to win an Oscar for Best Picture of the year, WINGS was a spectacular tribute to WWI combat pilots.

Adapted from the play by Noel Coward, this dissection of the prejudices of English country artistocrats shows Alfred Hitchcock in fine early form.

An undisputed masterpiece, and that rarest of films that achieves absolute perfection in every area.

By today's standards, THE JAZZ SINGER is mawkish, crudely filmed, and full of schmaltz. Yet it remains fascinating in its historical value, not only for its technical innovation, but because director Alan Crosland took his cameras on location into New York's Jewish ghetto around Hester and Orchard streets and then along the Great White Way of Broadway, showing the colorful, divergent, and now vanished ways of immigrant and show business life.

A vibrant, cinematically radical, and extremely accomplished work which went on to become one of the most celebrated movies ever made.

Harsh and unsparing, Dumont's all-too-believable film charts with breath taking precision the distance between the unencumbered beauty of moving through space and the agony of inexorably falling to earth.