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]