Drama

Eisenstein montage theory made flesh. The Odessa Steps sequence, a baby carriage rolling down amid massacre, is maybe the most stu...

Murnau, fresh from German expressionism, brought moving cameras and painted light to Hollywood. A farmer tempted to murder his wif...

Maria Falconetti, shot mostly in stark closeups, carries the trial and martyrdom of Joan. Dreyer discarded sets and makeup for raw...

Welles, twenty five, made the film that tops most greatest lists: deep focus photography, overlapping dialogue, and a fractured in...

A love quadrangle among theater folk in 1830s Paris, filmed in occupied France under Nazi censorship. Jacques Prevert dialogue, Je...

Three veterans return home to a changed America: a banker, a sailor, and an airman who lost both hands, played by real veteran Har...

The ballet film to end all ballet films: a young dancer torn between love and art, an impresario who demands everything, and a fif...

A father and son search Rome for a stolen bicycle that means a job and survival. Nonprofessional actors, real streets, neorealism ...

A crime recounted four ways, each witness protecting their own vanity. Kurosawa pointed cameras directly at the sun, into rain and...

An elderly couple visit their grown children in Tokyo, who are too busy for them. Ozu shoots from tatami height, rarely moving the...

Ray, a former illustrator, mortgaged everything to film the Bengali classic about a boy, his sister, and a train in a poor village...

One juror, Henry Fonda, holds out against eleven, and one room becomes the conscience of a nation. Lumet shot lower and tighter as...

A medieval knight returns from crusade to a plague land and plays chess with Death on a beach. Bergman made existential inquiry po...

Marcello Mastroianni drifts through Rome nights, gossip, excess, and miracle mongers, toward emptiness. The word paparazzi comes f...

Jean-Paul Belmondo rubs his lip like Bogart, shoots a cop, and runs with an American girl selling newspapers on the Champs Elysees...

A nurse tends a mute actress on an island, and their faces merge in a famous splice. Bergman stripped cinema to two women, light, ...

Two bikers ride Mardi Gras money from Los Angeles to New Orleans and find America hostile to its dreams. Hopper directed, Peter Fo...

Jake LaMotta, a boxer whose rage wins rings and loses everything else. De Niro gained sixty pounds mid production for the decline ...

The hottest day of the year in Bed Stuy, and racial tension boils over a curbside fire. Lee wrote, directed, and starred, with Dan...

Andy Dufresne, innocent in Shawshank, keeps hope in a rock hammer and a poster. From a Stephen King novella, with Morgan Freeman v...

George Bailey wishes he had never been born and an angel shows him the town without him. A flop in 1946 that grew into the most br...

Tennessee Williams on screen, uncensored by Hollywood standards of the day. Brando in a torn t shirt rewired American acting: mumb...

Shot like newsreel in the streets where it happened, with non actors and a score that telegraphs dread. The FLN bombs the European...

McMurphy fakes insanity to serve his sentence in a ward and collides with Nurse Ratched, who runs therapy like a sentence of her o...

A news anchor announces he will kill himself on air, ratings soar, and the network gives him a pulpit for rage. Chayefskys script ...

Salieri narrates his own confession: blessed with enough talent to recognize genius and cursed with none of it, he destroys the gi...