
Bicycle Thieves
Italian neorealism starts with this, and it still guts people: De Sica cast a factory worker as his lead and found a whole society inside one stolen bicycle.

Italian neorealism starts with this, and it still guts people: De Sica cast a factory worker as his lead and found a whole society inside one stolen bicycle.

Huston won two Oscars for it and directed his own father to a third: three men look for gold in Mexico and the heat does the rest.

Scorsese has been watching it since childhood and has never stopped: Powell and Pressburger put a ballet on screen in Technicolor so saturated that it plays like a fever.

Ford said he never knew Wayne could act until he saw this: a cattle drive turns into a mutiny, and the man in charge becomes the thing to escape.

Alfred Hitchcock disguised half the cuts so the film plays like one unbroken take: two students host a dinner party in the apartment where they have done something, and the camera never leaves.

The first film made outside America to be named Best Picture: Laurence Olivier cut half the play, shot it in high-contrast monochrome, and moves the camera through Elsinore like a ghost.