
Seven Samurai
Every film about assembling a team for one last job descends from this one: Kurosawa makes seven men matter, then stages a battle in the mud nobody has equaled.

Every film about assembling a team for one last job descends from this one: Kurosawa makes seven men matter, then stages a battle in the mud nobody has equaled.

Suspense has never been constructed more purely, and the real subject is the audience: Hitchcock traps you in one room with a man who cannot stop watching his neighbors.

Screen acting changed with Brando in the back of that taxi: Kazan made the film to justify naming names, which gives the whole thing an uncomfortable heat.

It took the very first competitive foreign language Academy Award, and Giulietta Masina is the reason: her face does more with one shrug than most performances manage in full.

Humphrey Bogart hated making it and it barely shows: Billy Wilder puts Audrey Hepburn between two brothers on a Long Island estate and lets Paris do the transformation offscreen.

The first film shot in VistaVision, which was invented to compete with CinemaScope: Bing Crosby sings a song he had already made famous twelve years earlier, and it still works.