Aguirre: the Wrath of God
"The most admirable thing about Aguirre may be the discipline with which Herzog tells his tale"
—Meditation on Madness
—From the Archive, May 16, 1977
Year: 1972 Country: West Germany
Director: Werner Herzog
Starring: Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo
The Apu Trilogy
"Director Ray reveals an order of poetic insight and a gift of visual anecdote that combine to produce some astonishing effects"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Sep. 26, 1960
Year: 1955, 1956, 1959 Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray
The Awful Truth
"McCarey spins a brightly-written Vina Delmar script into the gayest screen comedy the season has seen"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Nov. 1, 1937
Year: 1937 Country: USA
Director: Leo McCarey
Starring: Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy
Baby Face
"When the Hays organization ordered portions of Baby Face changed, it caused one of the studio rows between Darryl Zanuck and Harry Warner as a result of which Zanuck quit Warners, formed a new company called Twentieth Century Pictures, Inc."
—Musicomedies of the Week
—From the Archive, Jul. 3, 1933
Year: 1933 Country: USA
Director: Alfred E. Green
Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent
Bande à part
"Godard's blazing love affair with the art of film sometimes resembles nothing so much as a schoolboy's crush"
—New Wave Felony
—From the Archive, Apr. 1, 1966
Year: 1964 Country: France
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Starring: Anna Karina, Danièle Girard
Barry Lyndon
"Kubrick demonstrates singularity of vision, mature mastery of his medium, near-reckless courage in asserting through this work a claim to greatness that time alone can—and probably will—confirm"
—Kubrick's Grandest Gamble
—From the Archive, Dec. 15, 1975
Year: 1975 Country: UK
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson
Berlin Alexanderplatz
"Once out of prison, Franz takes an oath to stay honest. In his terms, that means peddling tie clips, shoelaces, sex books, even Nazi newspapers, but not pimping or joining a gang of thieves"
—Germany Without Tears
—From the Archive, Aug. 15, 1983
Year: 1980 Country: West Germany
Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Starring: Günter Lamprecht, Elisabeth Trissenaar
Blade Runner
"Blade Runner is likely to disappoint moviegoers hoping for sleek thrills and derring-do. But as a display terminal for the wizardry of Designers Lawrence G. Paull, Douglas Trumbull and Syd Mead, the movie delivers."
—The Pleasures of Texture
—From the Archive, Jul. 12, 1982
Year: 1982 Country: USA
Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer
Bonnie and Clyde
"The real fault with Bonnie and Clyde is its sheer, tasteless aimlessness"
—The Shock of Freedom in Films
—From the Archive, Dec. 8, 1967
Year: 1967 Country: USA
Director: Arthur Penn
Starring: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman
Brazil
"There is not a more daft, more original or haunting vision to be seen on American movie screens this year"
—Happy Ending for a Nightmare
—From the Archive, Dec. 30, 1985
Year: 1985 Country: UK
Director: Terry Gilliam
Starring: Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro
Bride of Frankenstein
"Screenwriters Hurlbut & Balderston and Director James Whale have given it the macabre intensity proper to all good horror pieces, but have substituted a queer kind of mechanistic pathos for the sheer evil that was Frankenstein"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Apr. 29, 1935
Year: 1935 Country: USA
Director: James Whale
Starring: Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Valerie Hobson, Elsa Lanchester
Camille
"For this version of Alexandre Dumas' famed tearjerker, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer assembled the three best current writers of tearjerkers, the top director of tearjerkers, the screen's No. 1 tragedienne and the industry's current male box-office sensation"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Apr. 29, 1935
Year: 1936 Country: USA
Director: George Cukor
Starring: Greta Garbo, Robert Taylor, Lionel Barrymore
Casablanca
"Nothing short of an invasion could add much to Casablanca"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Nov. 30, 1942
Year: 1942 Country: USA
Director: Michael Curtiz
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid
Charade
Year: 1963 Country: USA
Director: Stanley Donen
Starring: Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Coburn
Children of Paradise
"In production for three years and three months, most of the time during the German occupation, the film crackles with an undiluted Gallicism that is its most winning characteristic"
—Also Showing
—From the Archive, Nov. 25, 1946
Year: 1945 Country: France
Director: Marcel Carné
Starring: Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault
Chinatown
"Polanski and Towne turned out a smart and elegant recreation"
—Lost Angelenos
—From the Archive, Jul. 1, 1974
Year: 1974 Country: USA
Director: Roman Polanski
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston
Chungking Express
"Wong, himself a star of cinema's future, has already shown that he possesses a uniquely '90s voice, eye and spirit. You'll simply have to get to know his work"
—First Jackie Chan, Now This
—From the Archive, Mar. 11, 1996
Year: 1994 Country: Hong Kong
Director: Wong Kar Wai
Starring: Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chiu Wai
Citizen Kane
"So sharply does Citizen Kane veer from cinema cliche, it hardly seems like a movie"
—Kane Case
—From the Archive, Mar. 17, 1941
Year: 1941 Country: USA
Director: Orson Welles
Starring: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead
City Lights
"Chaplin does not reject the sound-device because he does not think his voice will register. His objection is that cinema is essentially a pantomimic art"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Feb. 9, 1931
Year: 1931 Country: USA
Director: Charles Chaplin
Starring: Charles Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill
City of God
"The film is seductive, disturbing, enthralling—a trip to hell that gives the passengers a great ride"
—Gangs of Rio de Janeiro
—From the Archive, Jan. 20, 2003
Year: 2002 Country: Brazil
Director: Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund
Starring: Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino
Closely Watched Trains
"Closely Watched Trains is a series of contradictions: a tragic comedy, a peaceful war movie, a success story of a failure"
—Absurdity
—From the Archive, Sep. 15, 1967
Year: 1966 Country: Czechoslovakia
Director: Jirí Menzel
Starring: Václav Neckár, Josef Somr
The Crime of Monsieur Lange
Year: 1936 Country: France
Director: Jean Renoir
Starring: René Lefèvre, Florelle
The Crowd
"Director King Vidor and Scenarist John V. A. Weaver tell here honestly, finely, the story of an American Everyman, the man in the street, born to run with the pack"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Mar. 5, 1928
Year: 1928 Country: USA
Director: King Vidor
Starring: Eleanor Boardman, James Murray
Day for Night
"This new movie of Truffaut's is a sly and loving tribute to the elaborate and inspiring chaos of film making—and Truffaut's funniest, shrewdest, most relaxed work in some time"
—A Sly, Loving Tribute to Film Making
—From the Archive, Oct. 15, 1973
Year: 1973 Country: France
Director: François Truffaut
Starring: Jacqueline Bisset, François Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Valentina Cortèse
The Decalogue
"Every once in a while a unique film work appears on one screen as a lonely reminder of what cinema can summon in intelligence, scope and power"
—Dazzling Decalogue
—From the Archive, Jul. 27, 1998
Year: 1989 Country: Poland
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Detour
Year: 1945 Country: USA
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Starring: Tom Neal, Ann Savage
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
"Each episode of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is consistently amusing and often hilariously shrewd"
—Dinner for Six
—From the Archive, Nov. 6, 1972
Year: 1972 Country: France, Italy, Spain
Director: Luis Buñuel
Starring: Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Stephane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel
Dodsworth
"Dodsworth, a forthright investigation of a universal problem, tells the story of a man battling to save his marriage from his wife's desire to keep young by cutting amorous capers"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Sep. 28, 1936
Year: 1936 Country: USA
Director: William Wyler
Starring: Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton, Mary Astor
Double Indemnity
"Double Indemnity is the season's nattiest, nastiest, most satisfying melodrama"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Jul. 10, 1944
Year: 1944 Country: USA
Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson
Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
"Scott is the brash, boyish paradigm of technological know-how, whether he is contemplating megadeaths or the superstructure of his bikini-clad secretary Tracy Reed, a Miss Foreign Affairs with no top secrets"
—Detonating Comedy
—From the Archive, Jan. 31, 1964
Year: 1964 Country: UK
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Starring: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn
Drunken Master II
Year: 1994 Country: Hong Kong
Director: Chia-Liang Liu, Jackie Chan
Starring: Jackie Chan, Felix Wong
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
"E. T. is a miracle movie, and one that confirms Spielberg as a master storyteller of his medium"
—Steve's Summer Magic
—From the Archive, May. 31, 1982
Year: 1982 Country: USA
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Henry Thomas, Robert MacNaughton, Drew Barrymore
8 1/2
"Fellini has a singular personal problem: why is he so preoccupied with making movies that speak of the emptiness of life?"
—Director on the Couch
—From the Archive, Jun. 28, 1963
Year: 1963 Country: Italy
Director: Federico Fellini
Starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimée
The 400 Blows
"Truffaut's people are merely people, doing their limited best, caught in the relentless, centrifugal round of daily life"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Dec. 14, 1959
Year: 1959 Country: France
Director: François Truffaut
Starring: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy
Farewell My Concubine
"Anyone can appreciate the splendor of the theatrical pageantry or the dagger eyes of Gong Li, as a dragon lady whose only commandment is survival"
—Betrayal in Beijing
—From the Archive, Oct. 4, 1993
Year: 1993 Country: China
Director: Kaige Chen
Starring: Leslie Cheung, Gong Li
Finding Nemo
"Nemo, with its ravishing underwater fantasia, manages to trump the design glamour of earlier Pixar films"
—Hook, Line and Thinker
—From the Archive, May. 26, 2003
Year: 2003 Country: USA
Director: Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich
Starring: Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Alexander Gould, Willem Dafoe
The Fly
"That nice guy lying next to you in bed, breathing in your rhythm, smiling in his sleep—what demons sleep within him? And why does his snore sound like a gentle bzzzzz?"
—Love in the Animal Kingdom
—From the Archive, Aug. 18, 1986
Year: 1986 Country: USA
Director: David Cronenberg
Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis
The Godfather, Parts I and II
"Brando's only major fault as an actor was that he would not or could not learn his lines, and had to read them from hidden cue cards"
—The Making of The Godfather
—From the Archive, Mar. 13, 1972
Year: 1972, 1974 Country: USA
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Starring: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, John Cazale, Robert De Niro
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
"Ugly is Leone's insatiable appetite for beatings, disembowelings and mutilations, complete with closeups of mashed-in faces and death-rattle sound effects"
—The Good, the Bad & the Ugly
—From the Archive, Feb. 9, 1968
Year: 1966 Country: Italy/USA
Director: Sergio Leone
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach
Goodfellas
"GoodFellas offers the fastest, sharpest 2 1/2-hr. ride in recent film history"
—Married to The Mob
—From the Archive, Sep. 24, 1990
Year: 1990 Country: USA
Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino
A Hard Day's Night
"More than a movie, it is the answer to a maiden's prayer"
—Yeah? Yeah. Yeah!
—From the Archive, Aug. 14, 1964
Year: 1964 Country: UK
Director: Richard Lester
Starring: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr
His Girl Friday
"Synthetic sample: "What does he [Ralph Bellamy] look like?" Editor Burns: "Oh, he looks like that movie actor—Ralph Bellamy.""
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Jan. 22, 1940
Year: 1940 Country: USA
Director: Howard Hawks
Starring: Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy
Ikiru
"The great strength of the picture is the total seriousness and importance of what Kurosawa has to say: to live is to love; the rest is cancer"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Feb. 15, 1960
Year: 1952 Country: Japan
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Takashi Shimura, Shinichi Himori
In A Lonely Place
"In a Lonely Place is a Humphrey Bogart melodrama that seems to take forever getting to the point and just about as long driving it home"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Jun. 5, 1950
Year: 1950 Country: USA
Director: Nicholas Ray
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Year: 1956 Country: USA
Director: Don Siegel
Starring: Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter
It's A Gift
Year: 1934 Country: USA
Director: Norman Z. McLeod
Starring: W.C. Fields, Kathleen Howard
It's A Wonderful Life
"Director Capra's inventiveness, humor and affection for human beings keep it glowing with life and excitement"
—New Picture
—From the Archive, Dec. 23, 1946
Year: 1946 Country: USA
Director: Frank Capra
Starring: James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore
Kandahar
"It has a painter's acute eye for beauty within horror: the handsome face of a child in a Taliban school as he expertly assembles a Kalashnikov rifle; the vision of one-legged men scrambling to retrieve prostheses dropped in parachutes from a plane"
—Cinema
—From the Archive, Dec. 24, 2001
Year: 2001 Country: Iran, France
Director: Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Starring: Nelofer Pazira, Hassan Tantai
Kind Hearts and Coronets
"Guinness' eight-role performance is a brilliantly successful tour de force, with each character so sharply defined and acted that it is hard to see how eight different players could have done as well"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Jul. 3, 1950
Year: 1949 Country: UK
Director: Robert Hamer
Starring: Dennis Price, Valerie Hobson, Joan Greenwood, Alec Guinness
King Kong
"Kong was not made entirely by enlarging miniatures. Kong is actually 50 ft. tall, 36 ft. around the chest. His face is 61/2 ft. wide with 10-in. teeth and ears 1 ft. long. His furry outside is made of 30 bearskins"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Mar. 13, 1933
Year: 1933 Country: USA
Director: Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack
Starring: Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot
The Lady Eve
"The picture returns the lately heavily dramatic Barbara Stanwyck to glamor and reveals homespun Henry Fonda as one of the screen's most socially eligible juveniles"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Mar. 10, 1941
Year: 1941 Country: USA
Director: Preston Sturges
Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda
The Last Command
"Clumsy-faced, blacksmith-muscled, thick-fingered Emil Jannings, the thoroughly unhandsome hero, is the most finished, the most subtle cinemactor in the U.S."
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Jan. 30, 1928
Year: 1928 Country: USA
Director: Josef von Sternberg
Starring: Emil Jannings, Evelyn Brent, William Powell
Lawrence of Arabia
"Lawrence of Arabia is a cinema colossus that takes four hours to see, employed 1,500 camels and horses and one comparatively obscure young man (Peter OToole) who will soon be as famous as anybody in show business"
—The Spirit of the Wind
—From the Archive, Jan. 4, 1963
Year: 1962 Country: UK
Director: David Lean
Starring: Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Omar Sharif
Léolo
"For a movie that worms inside a child's hopes and fears, that understands how kids can be both shaped by their family and in righteous rebellion against it, you should see—immediately—Leolo"
—The Art of Childhood
—From the Archive, Apr. 5, 1993
Year: 1992 Country: France, Canada
Director: Jean-Claude Lauzon
Starring: Gilbert Sicotte, Maxime Collin
The Lord of the Rings
"The king in the story is the hunky human warrior Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen). But Peter Jackson is the true lord of these Rings"
—Seven Holiday Treats
—From the Archive, Dec. 15, 2003
Year: 2001-03 Country: New Zealand
Director: Peter Jackson
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen
The Man With a Camera
Year: 1929 Country: Soviet Union
Director: Dziga Vertov
The Manchurian Candidate
"The story is notable chiefly for a systematic error it makes. It tries so hard to be different that it fails to be itself"
—Down South in North Korea
—From the Archive, Nov. 2, 1962
Year: 1962 Country: USA
Director: John Frankenheimer
Starring: Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury
Meet Me in St. Louis
"Meet Me in St. Louis is a musical that even the deaf should enjoy"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Nov. 27, 1944
Year: 1944 Country: USA
Director: Vincente Minnelli
Starring: Judy Garland, Margaret O'Brien
Metropolis
Year: 1927 Country: Germany
Director: Fritz Lang
Starring: Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Brigitte Helm
Miller's Crossing
"Like Red Harvest, but unlike most movies, Miller's Crossing has a good novel's narrative density"
—Married to The Mob
—From the Archive, Sep. 24, 1990
Year: 1990 Country: USA
Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Starring: Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, Albert Finney, John Turturro
Mon oncle d'Amérique
"If every classroom lecture were as lucid and entertaining as Mon Oncle d'Amerique our colleges would be filled with scholars and our movie theaters with works of art"
—The Brain Game
—From the Archive, Dec. 8, 1980
Year: 1980 Country: France
Director: Alain Resnais
Starring: Gérard Depardieu, Nicole Garcia
Mouchette
Year: 1967 Country: France
Director: Robert Bresson
Starring: Nadine Nortier, Jean-Claude Guilbert
Nayakan
"A terrific gangster epic in the Godfather style"
—Hooray For Bollywood
—From the Archive, Sep. 16, 1996
Year: 1987 Country: India
Director: Mani Ratnam
Starring: Kamal Hassan, Saranya, Janagaraj
Ninotchka
"Garbo, who plays her first full-length comedy with iron, Bolshevik disregard for glamor, succeeds in the difficult task of making her tight-lipped fanaticism funny without making it ridiculous"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Nov. 6, 1939
Year: 1939 Country: USA
Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Starring: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas
Notorious
"If anyone in the audience is not sitting up in his theater chair by this time he is Hitchcock-proof"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Aug. 19, 1946
Year: 1946 Country: USA
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains
Olympia, Parts 1 and 2
"The film remains a brilliant solo on the optic nerve"
—Olympic Games
—From the Archive, May. 3, 1948
Year: 1938 Country: Germany
Director: Leni Riefenstahl
On the Waterfront
"Kazan succeeds in producing a shrewd piece of screen journalism. But he fails to do anything more serious—largely because he tries too hard"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Aug. 9, 1954
Year: 1954 Country: USA
Director: Elia Kazan
Starring: Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Eva Marie Saint
Once Upon a Time in the West
"Leone's newest effort, with a major cast and a lot of big studio money behind it, proves that he is simply a serious bore"
—Tedium in the Tumbleweed
—From the Archive, Jun. 13, 1969
Year: 1968 Country: Italy/USA
Director: Sergio Leone
Starring: Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson
Out of the Past
"Fairly well played, and very well photographed, the action develops a routine kind of pseudo-tension"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Dec. 15, 1947
Year: 1947 Country: USA
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Starring: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas
Persona
"Persona is too deliberately difficult to rank with Bergman's best"
—Accidie Becomes Electro
—From the Archive, Mar. 17, 1967
Year: 1966 Country: Sweden
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Starring: Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Margaretha Krook, Gunnar Björnstrand
Pinocchio
"The charm, humor and loving care with which it treats its inanimate characters puts it in a class by itself"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Feb. 26, 1940
Year: 1940 Country: USA
Director: Hamilton Luske, Ben Sharpsteen
Starring: Mel Blanc, Christian Rub, Dickie Jones
Psycho
"Psycho at first seems to be a typical Hitchcock spine tingler, whose moral is that heaven may protect the working girl but not if she takes long lunch hours in hotel rooms"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Jun. 27, 1960
Year: 1960 Country: USA
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Starring: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh
Pulp Fiction
"Tarantino's movies are smartly intoxicating cocktails of rampage and meditation; they're in-your-face, with a mac-10 machine pistol and a quote from the Old Testament"
—A Blast to the Heart
—From the Archive, Oct. 10, 1994
Year: 1994 Country: USA
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Tim Roth, Samuel L. Jackson, John Travolta, Uma Thurman
The Purple Rose of Cairo
"The Purple Rose of Cairo is not merely one of the best movies about movies ever made. Its subject is not how movies work but how they work on the audience"
—Now Playing At the Jewel the Purple Rose of Cairo
—From the Archive, Mar. 4, 1985
Year: 1985 Country: USA
Director: Woody Allen
Starring: Jeff Daniels, Mia Farrow, Danny Aiello
Pyaasa
Year: 1957 Country: India
Director: Guru Dutt
Starring: Guru Dutt, Waheeda Rehman
Raging Bull
"Much of Raging Bull exists because of the possibilities it offers De Niro to display his own explosive art"
—Animal House
—From the Archive, Nov. 24, 1980
Year: 1980 Country: USA
Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci
Schindler's List
"One direction was death; the other was one more day of life"
—Heart of Darkness
—From the Archive, Dec. 13, 1993
Year: 1993 Country: USA
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes
The Searchers
"The lapses in logic and the general air of incoherence are only minor imperfections in a film as carefully contrived as a matchstick castle"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Jun. 25, 1956
Year: 1956 Country: USA
Director: John Ford
Starring: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Natalie Wood
Sherlock, Jr.
"A cinema operator falls asleep at his machine and dreams he is a great detective—the kind that only the cinema can produce"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Jun. 2, 1924
Year: 1924 Country: USA
Director: Buster Keaton
Starring: Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton, Ward Crane
The Shop Around the Corner
"James Stewart walks through the amiable business of being James Stewart"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Feb. 5, 1940
Year: 1940 Country: USA
Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Starring: Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart
Singin' in the Rain
"Sweet-faced Debbie Reynolds manages to keep up with Kelly's fast stepping, but it is sultry Cyd Charisse who brings some real dancing excitement to the film in the finale"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Apr. 21, 1952
Year: 1952 Country: USA
Director: Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly
Starring: Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds
The Singing Detective
"Potter's works have provoked disgust in the more easily shockable segments of the British public"
—Notes From The Singing Detective
—From the Archive, Dec. 19, 1988
Year: 1986 Country: UK
Director: Jon Amiel
Starring: Michael Gambon, Patrick Malahide, Joanne Whalley
Smiles of a Summer Night
"Plainly, Director Bergman intended to produce the best French picture ever made in Sweden"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Jan. 27, 1958
Year: 1955 Country: Sweden
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Starring: Eva Dahlbeck, Ulla Jacobsson, Harrient Andersson, Margit Carlqvist
Some Like It Hot
"Actor Lemmon digs out most of the laughs in the script. As for Marilyn, she's been trimmer, slimmer and sexier in earlier pictures"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Mar. 23, 1959
Year: 1959 Country: USA
Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon
Star Wars
"Star Wars is a grand and glorious film that may well be the smash hit of 1977, and certainly is the best movie of the year so far"
—The Year's Best Movie
—From the Archive, May 30, 1977
Year: 1977 Country: USA
Director: George Lucas
Starring: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness
A Streetcar Named Desire
"Though the movie has its flaws, it can claim a merit rare in Hollywood films: it is a grownup, gloves-off drama of real human beings"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Sep. 17, 1951
Year: 1951 Country: USA
Director: Elia Kazan
Starring: Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden
Sunrise
"Sunrise manages to remain picturesquely soporific for a long evening"
—New Pictures
—From the Archive, Oct. 3, 1927
Year: 1927 Country: USA
Director: F.W. Murnau
Starring: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston
Sweet Smell of Success
"Sweet Smell, which could have been offal, is raised to considerable dramatic heights by intense acting, taut direction, superb camera work and, above all, by its whiplash dialogue"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Jun. 24, 1957
Year: 1957 Country: USA
Director: Alexander Mackendrick
Starring: Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison
Swing Time
"Sublimated hoofing that has made the team of Ginger Rogers & Fred Astaire the No. 1 cinema attraction of the world"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Sep. 7, 1936
Year: 1936 Country: USA
Director: George Stevens
Starring: Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers
Talk to Her
"Talk To Her is not just a title. To Pedro Almodovar, the film's brilliant writer-director, it is a command, an imperative"
—If Conversation Be the Food of Love, Talk On
—From the Archive, Dec. 16, 2002
Year: 2002 Country: Spain
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Starring: Javier Cámara, Darío Grandinetti, Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores
Taxi Driver
"The film goes most disastrously wrong when it tries to turn slice-of-life realism into full-scale melodrama"
—Potholes
—From the Archive, Feb. 16, 1976
Year: 1976 Country: USA
Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster
Tokyo Story
Year: 1953 Country: Japan
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Starring: Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama
A Touch of Zen
Year: 1971 Country: Taiwan
Director: King Hu
Starring: Billy Chan, Ping-Yu Chang
Ugetsu
"Ugetsu is contemplative in the midst of violence, wholly Oriental in its lidded introspection"
—New Picture
—From the Archive, Sep. 20, 1954
Year: 1953 Country: Japan
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Starring: Masayuki Mori, Machiko Kyô, Kinuyo Tanaka, Eitarô Ozawa
Ulysses' Gaze
"Ugetsu is contemplative in the midst of violence, wholly Oriental in its lidded introspection"
—New Picture
—From the Archive, Sep. 20, 1954
Year: 1995 Country: Greece
Director: Theo Angelopoulos
Starring: Harvey Keitel, Maia Morgenstern, Erland Josephson
Umberto D
Year: 1952 Country: Italy
Director: Vittorio De Sica
Starring: Carlo Battisti, Maria-Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari
Unforgiven
"Unforgiven questions the rules of a macho genre, summing up and maybe atoning for the flinty violence that made Eastwood famous"
—The Last Roundup
—From the Archive, Aug. 10, 1992
Year: 1992 Country: USA
Director: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman
White Heat
"Brilliantly directed by Raoul Walsh, it returns a more subtle James Cagney to the kind of thug role that made him famous"
—The New Pictures
—From the Archive, Sep. 19, 1949
Year: 1949 Country: USA
Director: Raoul Walsh
Starring: James Cagney, Margaret Wycherly, Virginia Mayo
Wings of Desire
"Wings of Desire works hard to be both an essay and a love story, a mural and an intimate portrait"
—The Angel Who Fell to Earth
—From the Archive, May. 9, 1988
Year: 1987 Country: West Germany
Director: Wim Wenders
Starring: Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin
Yojimbo
"Kurosawa emerges as a bone-cracking satirist who with red-toothed glee chews out his century as no dramatist has done since Bertolt Brecht"
—A Japanese Apocalypse
—From the Archive, Sep. 21, 1962
Year: 1961 Country: Japan
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai
