
It's a Wonderful Life
A commercial failure that decades of Christmas television turned into a national ritual: it is far darker than its reputation, and the ending earns every tear it gets.

A commercial failure that decades of Christmas television turned into a national ritual: it is far darker than its reputation, and the ending earns every tear it gets.

Hitchcock's most grown-up film, and the one where the suspense is entirely about feeling: a woman is sent to seduce a Nazi by the man who loves her.

Nobody has ever been able to follow the plot, including the men who wrote it: what you watch it for is Bogart and Bacall talking, which is more than enough.

Wyler cast a veteran who had lost both hands to play a veteran who had lost both hands, and audiences in 1946 recognized their own living rooms.

Heaven is monochrome and earth is in Technicolor, which is the whole joke: a pilot bails out without a parachute and then has to argue for his life.

Cocteau made a fairy tale that looks the way one feels: human arms hold the candelabra along the corridor, and the Beast's castle behaves like a dream that has not decided to end.

Ford claimed Wyatt Earp himself described the gunfight to him: what stays with people is not the shootout but a church dance on a bare wooden floor under an unfinished roof.