
Sunset Boulevard
Hollywood has never been crueler about itself: Louis B. Mayer told Wilder he had disgraced the industry, which is the highest praise the film could possibly have received.

Hollywood has never been crueler about itself: Louis B. Mayer told Wilder he had disgraced the industry, which is the highest praise the film could possibly have received.

Kurosawa gave the language a word for irreconcilable testimony and opened Japanese cinema to the world: four accounts of one killing, none of which can be squared with another.

The sharpest script ever written about ambition: an aging star takes in an adoring young fan, and theater people have been quoting the lines for three-quarters of a century.

Mexico City pulled it after three days and demanded it be banned, then Cannes gave Bunuel the directing prize: street children filmed without a trace of sentimentality about them.

James Stewart played it on Broadway and returned to the part for decades: an unfailingly pleasant man insists his closest friend is a six-foot-three invisible rabbit, and his family wants him committed.

Gregory Peck plays the fastest gun alive as an exhausted man who wants a quiet drink: every revisionist western owes the premise, and Zanuck blamed the mustache for the box office.