Thanks in part to McQueen, you can almost mention this in the same breath with director Don Siegel's best. [30 Mar 1990, p.3D]

We never get the scenes we really want to see, like the teacher-initiated slander trial or their snotty accuser's comeuppance. Instead, we get too many strained conversations. [21 Dec 1990, p.3D]

The three-hour dramatics are occasionally stilted, but here's the real non-CGI deal. [01 Feb 2008, p.6D]

Filmed for the cost of about two Snickers bars and given a bizarre voice-over narration in the second person, this seductively weird pioneer independent feature is the ultimate in grimy period atmospherics. [25 Apr 2008, p.5E]

Mitchum's celebrated skill with dialects has never been more evident. [02 Feb 2007, p.10D]

Critics overpraised Stanley Kramer's doomsday drama in a year when they undervalued North by Northwest and Rio Bravo, and it's still dramatically mushy. [16 July 1993, p.3D]

Goldoni is spectacular here as a light-skinned black woman with a white admirer and an apartment full of her brother's hooligan buddies. And, oh, what shots of the era's New York movie marquees. [22 May 1998, p.6E]

Another great 1950s John Wayne Western from Warner Bros. [25 May 2007, p.4E]

An intimate three-hour epic adapted less from Frank's diary than the Broadway version. [06 Feb 2004, p.6E]

Some of James Wong Howe's photography is lovely, compensating for the rear-projected fish. [12 Jul 1996]

Minnelli's other Oscar-winning perennial. [19 Sep 2008, p.4D]

Judged strictly as a movie (especially a subliminally disturbing movie), Vertigo hasn't lost a thing. You watch this guy going slowly over the brink and realize, good grief, this is Jimmy Stewart. [Restored version; Oct 1996, p.3D]

This re-edited version turns one of Orson Welles' most memorable yet flawed films into a masterpiece. [Director's Cut; 18 Sept 1998, p.11E]

A decent Korean War/collaborator court-martial drama, directed by Karl Malden (his only directing effort), and starring Richard Widmark. [15 May 2009, p.3D]

More Mexican mayhem with a you-know-what in 1957's The Black Scorpion, with effects by Harryhausen's mentor, Willis O'Brien. [24 Oct 2003]

Sci- fi classic. [20 Dec 1991, p.3D]

A small jewel. [05 May 2006, p.4E]

Oil derricks, booze, sports cars and nymphomania spelled huge box office. [10 Feb 2004]

Still the definitive 20th-century Texas movie. [13 June 2003, p.8E]

Humphrey Bogart went out with one of the best swan songs a major star ever had in this anti-boxing screed, from a novel by On the Waterfront scripter Budd Schulberg. [12 Jul 2004]

[Olivier's] greatest Shakespearean movie. [27 Feb 2004]

Conceived as froth with an edge and a smash on both counts. [11 May 2007, p.4D]

Clunkily stagebound but gorgeous to look at in VistaVision and Technicolor. [07 Oct 2005]

A flop in its day despite France's rhapsodic reaction, but a movie I've always loved even before its knockout finale, which even detractors admit redeems a lot. [29 Jun 2007, p.10E]

Consistently fun, and even sporadically powerful. [08 Dec 1989, p.3D]

The movie, a Technicolor remake of Gable's own 1932 smash Red Dust...is among Gable's best, and it also has underrated Gardner's best performance. [23 Jun 2006, p.8E]

With songs Triplets, Dancing in the Dark and Shine on Your Shoes, it's my fave musical. [18 Mar 2005, p.6E]

One of the greatest mixes ever of gritty war drama and roll-on-the-floor hilarity. [29 Mar 2002, p.2A]

A much better version and one of the most popular 3-D movies. [03 May 2005]

It's probably the weakest Alfred Hitchcock of the '50s. But that may be the greatest decade any director ever had, so this isn't the slam it seems. [28 Sep 2004]

It has always been around and easy to take for granted. But its lack of pretension weathers years nicely. [09 Mar 2007, p.12D]

With enough plot to take in a mercy killing and massive train wreck, Cecil B. DeMille's extravaganza is often cited as the worst movie to have taken the Oscar, as if a lot of lackluster picks (from Cimarron to Crash) were half as entertaining. [07 Apr 2008, p.10A]

Bernard Herrmann's great score punches up a brutal urban crime pic suddenly turned tender romance between a tough cop (Robert Ryan) and a blind woman (Ida Lupino). [21 Jul 2006, p.14D]

Filmed during that great early period of his career when he played heels better than anyone ever had, Kirk Douglas is the morally tortured 21st Precinct New York cop who lets unbridled hatred for street scum poison his marriage. [28 Oct 2005]

Dealing tangentially with Las Vegas gambling's formative years (lots of matte work here of mountains in the desert), this crackling melodrama was inspired by Bugsy Siegel's relationship with Virginia Hill. [17 Jul 2005]

Humor, poignancy and social criticism converge for an even better movie than the recent one it brings to mind: Gosford Park. [23 Jan 2004]

A timeless story. [07 Oct 2005, p.8E]

You have to love any movie in which Robert Mitchum sells trains in a toy store and Janet Leigh looks the greatest she ever did on screen this side of Jet Pilot. [19 Dec 2008, p.6E]

Under Capricorn is still stigmatized by its terrible reviews and whopping financial losses, but with one of Ingrid Bergman's best performances, a grabber setting (1831 Sydney) and Technicolor cinematography by the era's greatest color specialist (The Red Shoes' Jack Cardiff), a lot of current movies should be as lacking. [27 Jun 2003]

Pearson's scenes with Garfield are among the most supercharged ever. [28 May 2004, p.6E]

Modest yet pleasing musical pastiches that typified post-war Disney. [05 Jun 1998, p.6E]

The first movie Montgomery Clift made (but second released) was Howard Hawks' all-time Western Red River. In the interim, director Fred Zinnemann stole some thunder by showcasing the actor in this semi-documentary about European children left homeless and without parents after World War II, filmed on location in the then-U.S. Occupied Zone of Germany. [23 Oct 2009, p.3D]

It's only a mild Disney package, despite a dose of Donald Duck dyspepsia. [18 July 1997, p.3D]

Burt Lancaster's second movie also gave Hume Cronyn his most memorable screen role. [31 Jan 1996, p.5D]

David Lean's classic Cliffs Notes telescoping of Charles Dickens took Oscars for Guy Green's black-and-white photography and John Bryan's art direction, and you know right off that this is going to be a visual stunner as you watch fleeing prisoner Magwitch (Finlay Currie) dart across Green's spookily lit marshes. [22 Jan 1999]

Of all the pop-psychiatry movies from the 1940s, Spellbound survives its kitschy elements -- wallows in them, even -- to remain as fascinating as expected from a collaboration that was contentious. [04 Oct 2002]

A Casablanca-influenced love story set against a French Resistance backdrop in Martinique. [07 Nov 2003]

This Preston Sturges classic cast Hutton as a small-town girl who gets pregnant by a soldier whose name she can't remember. No film better channels her comic energy or makes better use of her obvious yearning for acceptance. [19 Jun 2000]

Greer Garson, in the same year as her Oscar-winning Mrs. Miniver role, shows good gams in a lively Scottish dance-hall number. And Harvest's seven Oscar nominations (including for picture, Colman and director Mervyn LeRoy) reflect the popularity the film has sustained for decades. [21 Jan 2005]

This breezy farce has lost just enough of its luster to seem no longer disproportionately funnier than its oft-televised Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis remake You're Never Too Young. [29 May 1998]

Boasts a classic screwball script by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder. [10 May 1995, p.5D]

Topically relevant and emotionally overwhelming, John Ford's memory-movie concerns the devastation of a Welsh coal-mining family after mine owners impose cutbacks. [16 Jun 1992, p.6D]

Fearless mix of classical music and animation, the one movie to satisfy that oft-misused adjective ''unique.'' [01 Nov 1991, p.3D]

As son Tom Joad, Henry Fonda gave the screen performance of his career. [09 Apr 2004, p.10E]

Despite pockmarking racial humor, this is an appealing Fred MacMurray-Barbara Stanwyck companion piece to Double Indemnity and Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow. [29 Sep 1995, p.3D]

The greatest newspaper comedy and one of the greatest screwball comedies ever made. [24 Nov 2000]

Leisen's direction here is more than smooth. [02 May 2008, p.6E]

A decidedly sentimental American version, with much comedy (by mistake, Bob Cratchit actually knocks Scrooge's hat off with a snowball) and fortified with a Scrooge who is not so much a born-to-be-cruel wretch but a tortured soul who lost the meaning of Christmas along the way. [15 Dec 1992, p.6D]

I'd give this Howard Hawks perennial four stars (like everyone else) if I didn't find the climactic jailhouse scene so labored. [5 May 1989, p.3D]

Rafael Sabatini's 17th-century surgeon goes from slave to swashbuckler, Michael Curtiz directs to Erich Wolfgang Korngold music, and a major studio takes an unprecedented gamble on two unknowns to star: Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. [15 Apr 2005]

So unwatchably creaky that it's hard to believe director Mitchell Leisen filmed Murder at the Vanities (with its wildly demented Sweet Marijuana production number) the same year. [04 Dec 1998]

A few years ago, the American Film Institute had the audacity to name Duck Soup (1933) merely one of the top five comedies ever made. I have no idea what they could have been thinking; it clearly is number one. [1 July 2004, p.75]

King Kong was a film that was way ahead of its time, and it remains one of the greatest films of all time.

The most un-MGM movie that the studio ever made gave Dracula director Tod Browning the chance to tell a story that horrified audiences. [13 Aug 2004, p.4E]

Express is 80 tight minutes of railroad intrigue, an Oscar winner for cinematography (there's none better) and the film with the enduring line: "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily." [22 Oct 1993, p.3D]

The granddaddy of prison pics opens with a lecture on overcrowding and ends with a high mortality rate, in which Chester Morris, a bald Wallace Beery and stoolie Robert Montgomery (Elizabeth's father) are players. [24 Jun 1994, p.3D]