La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954)

Giulietta Masina and Anthony Quinn in La Strada 

Zampanò: Anthony Quinn
Gelsomina: Giulietta Masina
The Fool: Richard Basehart
Giraffa: Aldo Silvani
Widow: Marcella Rovere
Nun: Livia Venturini

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano
Cinematography: Otello Martelli
Production design: Mario Ravasco
Film editing: Leo Catozzo
Music: Nino Rota

Sad clowns have gone out of style, so to many of us today Giulietta Masina's Gelsomina seems more than a little cloying. But when La Strada was released, she was hailed as a master of comic pathos, as if she were the unacknowledged daughter of Charles Chaplin and Lillian Gish. Similarly, Federico Fellini's film now feels like an uneasy attempt to blend neorealistic grime and misery with a kind of moral allegory: Zampanó as Body, Gelsomina as Soul, and The Fool as Mind. So when Body kills Mind, Soul pines away, leaving Body in anguish. But La Strada has retained generations of admirers who are willing to overlook the sentimentality and latter-day mythologizing. It does remain a tremendously accomplished film, made under some difficulties, including constant battles by Fellini with his formidable producers, Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti. If it sometimes feels like a throwback to the era of silent movies, it was virtually filmed as one, with its American stars, Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart, speaking their lines in English and the rest of the cast speaking Italian, and everyone later dubbed in the studio -- which leads to that slightly disembodied quality the dialogue of many early postwar films possesses.

Kapò (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1960)

Susan Strasberg, Didi Perego, and Emmanuelle Riva in Kapò

Edith / Nicole Niepas: Susan Strasberg
Sascha: Laurent Terzieff
Terese: Emmanuelle Riva
Sofia: Didi Perego
Karl: Gianni Garko

Director: Gillo Pontecorvo
Screenplay: Gillo Pontecorvo, Franco Solinas
Cinematography: Aleksandar Sekulovic
Production design: Aleksandar Milovic
Film editing: Roberto Cinquini, Anhela Micheli
Music: Carlo Rustichelli

As a rule, filmmakers should be discouraged from using the Holocaust as a backdrop for film dramas -- or worse, as in the case of Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1997), comedies. The enormity of the Shoah inevitably undercuts even the most heartfelt attempts to dramatize it -- and I would include, even though it's a film I admire, Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993). Gillo Pontecorvo is a filmmaker whose The Battle of Algiers (1966) exhibits a real skill at portraying moral complexity, and I think he's striving for something like that in Kapò, which depicts a Jewish girl's desperate attempt to survive, even to the extent of prostituting herself to the SS and serving as a bullying kapo in the concentration camp to which she has been sent. Unfortunately, Pontecorvo muddles the moral questions the film raises by resorting to romantic melodrama, when Edith, his protagonist, who has taken on the identity of a dead prisoner to hide the fact that she's Jewish, falls in love with a Russian POW. Even before then, the film displays narrative thinness: Edith's escape from the building in which she and other children are held prior to being sent to the gas chambers is altogether too easy, and the fortuitous way in which she finds a prisoner and a camp doctor willing to help her disguise herself stretches credulity. Slight, pretty Susan Strasberg also feels miscast as the girl who turns overnight from a shy waif into a tough prison camp enforcer. It was almost a case of "stunt casting": Strasberg originated the role of Anne Frank in the 1955 Broadway dramatization of The Diary of Anne Frank, but was judged too old for the role in the 1959 film version directed by George Stevens. Her casting in Kapò looks a bit like an attempt to make amends.

The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)

Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli in The Third Man

Holly Martins: Joseph Cotten
Anna Schmidt: Alida Valli
Harry Lime: Orson Welles
Maj. Calloway: Trevor Howard
Sgt. Paine: Bernard Lee
Porter: Paul Hörbiger
Kurtz: Ernst Deutsch
Popescu: Siegfried Breuer
Dr. Winkel: Erich Ponto
Cribbin: Wilfrid Hyde-White
Anna's Landlady: Hedwig Bleibtreu

Director: Carol Reed
Screenplay: Graham Greene
Cinematography: Robert Krasker
Art direction: Vincent Korda
Film editing: Oswald Hafenrichter
Music: Anton Karas

It's my contention that the mark of a great film is the density of its texture, its ability to let you find something new or different, or simply to remember a forgotten moment, each time you watch it. I have to admit that I wasn't much looking forward to rewatching The Third Man, but I felt obliged since I hadn't seen it for some time and I do have it on my list of great movies. I knew what was coming: the great doorway revelation, the ferris wheel conversation, the chase through the sewers, and Anna walking toward and past Holly along an allée of pollarded trees. But Carol Reed's film is full of so many incidentals that bring even familiar scenes to life. For example, when Anna is picked up by the international police -- a force made up of members of each of Vienna's occupying forces -- she's allowed to pack a bag. It's the Frenchman who reminds her that she has forgotten her lipstick. Touches like this, or Anna's landlady protesting in German that needs no subtitles to get its point across, are essential to the film's greatness. I had forgotten the demon child who fingers Holly as a murderer after the porter's death. I hadn't realized how Robert Krasker's expressionistically tilted camera in much of the film is counterpointed by his concluding shot, the long, foursquare, devastatingly symmetrical take of Anna's walk along the allée. To be sure, there are things that don't quite make sense: Why is a man selling balloons at night in the deserted Vienna streets? And the light that reveals Harry Lime in the doorway comes from no plausible source. But these are moments for quibblers, not for those who luxuriate in cinematic poetry.

Wilson (Henry King, 1944)

Geraldine Fitzgerald and Alexander Knox in Wilson

Woodrow Wilson: Alexander Knox
Edith Bolling Galt: Geraldine Fitzgerald
Joseph Tumulty: Thomas Mitchell
Ellen Wilson: Ruth Nelson
Henry Cabot Lodge: Cedric Hardwicke
Henry Holmes: Charles Coburn
William Gibbs McAdoo: Vincent Price
George Felton: William Eythe
Josephus Daniels: Sidney Blackmer
Col. House: Charles Halton
"Big Ed" Jones: Thurston Hall
Georges Clemenceau: Marcel Dalio

Director: Henry King
Screenplay: Lamar Trotti
Cinematography: Leon Shamroy
Art direction: James Basevi, Wiard Ihnen
Film editing: Barbara McLean
Music: Alfred Newman

Wilson was a famous flop, its failure magnified by the angry disappointment of its producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, who thought that a film about the man who was president during World War I would be just the ticket during World War II. Still seething about it when he accepted the best picture Oscar for Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947) three years later, Zanuck grumbled, "I should have got this for Wilson." One problem was that audiences were not particularly enthusiastic about sitting through a history lesson in mid-wartime, but another was that Woodrow Wilson was not one of our more charismatic presidents. He was nominated by a deadlocked Democratic convention and elected because the Republicans were split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt's "Bull Moose" candidacy. Wilson was an intellectual, a college history professor who became president of Princeton University, and never mastered the technique of selling his lofty ideas about world peace to the electorate. Though Wilson is chock full of biopic clichés, including wall-to-wall patriotic music, and it's about an hour too long, it's not as boring as it is cracked up to be. It has moments of real energy, particularly in its depiction of the political conventions and their high-flown oratory, and the introduction of newsreel footage brings it back to reality. It's also opulently produced, with some spectacular interiors and some vivid (not to say lurid) Technicolor. Alexander Knox does what he can to warm up a man who was probably rather chilly in real life.

Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins, 2017)

Saïd Taghmaoui, Chris Pine, and Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman

Diana: Gal Gadot
Steve Trevor: Chris Pine
Hippolyta: Connie Nielsen
Antiope: Robin Wright
Ludendorff: Danny Huston
Sir Patrick: David Thewlis
Sameer: Saïd Taghmaoui
Charlie: Ewen Bremner
The Chief: Eugene Brave Rock
Etta Candy: Lucy Davis
Dr. Maru: Elena Anaya

Director: Patty Jenkins
Screenplay: Allan Heinberg, Zack Snyder, Jason Fuchs
Cinematography: Matthew Jensen
Production design: Aline Bonetto
Film editing: Martin Walsh
Music: Rupert Gregson-Williams

For much of Wonder Woman, Patty Jenkins directs Gal Gadot and Chris Pine the way Howard Hawks directed Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, keeping the romantic tension and witty byplay at the fore. But this is a superhero comic book movie, and eventually the demands of the genre force romantic wit to be subsumed in pyrotechnics and CGI. Still, for much of the film, Wonder Woman is as entertaining as you could wish. Gadot is the perfect embodiment of the Amazon demigod, carrying herself with regal power but also allowing the human vulnerability to show through. Pine seems to have become everyone's second favorite Chris: The others -- Hemsworth, Evans, and Pratt -- wound up in the currently dominant comic book universe, Marvel, whereas Pine got stuck in the second-tier DC universe. But he's probably the most talented of the four, having demonstrated his musical gifts in Into the Woods (Rob Marshall, 2014) and his dramatic ones in Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, 2016). So although Steve Trevor meets a fiery end in Wonder Woman, Pine is too valuable a performer to let go entirely, and besides, Trevor always had a way of coming back from the dead in the comics.

Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965)

Diana Scott: Julie Christie
Robert Gold: Dirk Bogarde
Miles Brand: Laurence Harvey
Prince Cesare della Romita: José Luis de Vilallonga
Malcolm: Roland Curram

Director: John Schlesinger
Screenplay: Frederic Raphael
Cinematography: Kenneth Higgins
Art direction: Ray Simm
Film editing: Jim Clark
Costume design: Julie Harris
Music: John Dankworth

When Darling was first released, the marriage of its protagonist, Diana Scott, to a minor European royal was taken to be a sly reference to the marriage of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco. Today, it looks a lot more like a strikingly prophetic vision of the future awaiting Diana Spencer, then only 4 years old, who would find that marrying a prince entails not only a lot of unwelcome attention but also a good deal of boredom. Boredom is the keynote of Darling, as well as its undoing. There were filmmakers like Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Alain Resnais who could portray the existential ennui of the glamorous upper classes without boring their audiences as well, but John Schlesinger wasn't one of them. Julie Christie gives her considerable all as Diana Scott, a pretty young model whose lack of inner substance is her undoing, and she won an Oscar for her pains. But her performance isn't enough to save the film from tedium. As written by Frederic Raphael, who also won an Oscar, there's not enough to Diana to keep us interested in her fate. Instead, the filmmakers fall back on thudding irony, like Diana's being hyped as "The Happiness Girl" when we know that she's cruelly unhappy. The blame falls on the media exploiters, of course, the producers and journalists and ad-men who could hardly care less about the person they're exploiting. But they're an easy target, and for the blame to land we need to feel that there's more to Diana than meets the eye, that she's a victim of something more than her own aimlessness. Unfortunately, we never get a sense that there's unexplored potential to the character.

Air Force (Howard Hawks, 1943)

John Garfield, George Tobias, and Harry Carey in Air Force

Capt. Quincannon: John Ridgely
Lt. Williams: Gig Young
Lt. McMartin: Arthur Kennedy
Lt. Hauser: Charles Drake
Sgt. White: Harry Carey
Cpl. Weinberg: George Tobias
Cpl. Peterson: Ward Wood
Pvt. Chester: Ray Montgomery
Sgt. Winocki: John Garfield
Lt. "Tex" Rader: James Brown
Maj. Mallory: Stanley Ridges
Col. Blake: Moroni Olsen
Susan McMartin: Faye Emerson

Director: Howard Hawks
Screenplay: Dudley Nichols
Cinematography: James Wong Howe
Art direction: John Hughes
Film editing: George Amy
Music: Franz Waxman

"Fried Jap coming down!" crows gunner Weinberg as a Japanese fighter pilot and his plane attacking the Mary-Ann are consumed in flames. It's a much-quoted and much-parodied line that puts Howard Hawks's Air Force squarely where it belongs: in the wounded jingoism of the period immediately post Pearl Harbor. We wince at the line today, but Air Force has endured not so much because it's a period piece as because it's a tremendously effective piece of filmmaking. Hawks, who was a licensed pilot and had served in the Army Air Corps during World War I, was the exactly right person to make the film, which producer Hal B. Wallis put into production shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and which he wanted to release on the first anniversary of the attack in 1942. Hawks was too savvy and persistent a craftsman to allow anything like an arbitrary deadline to hinder him, and his failure to adhere to Wallis's schedule led to a brief replacement as director by Vincent Sherman. Wallis was exasperated in particular by Hawks's constant departure from the producer-approved screenplay, particularly the dialogue. Nevertheless, Hawks persisted, and called in William Faulkner to rewrite Concannon's death scene, which the director found too saccharine. The result is one of the most affecting moments of the film. The rest is pretty much razzle-dazzle heroism and entertaining male-bonding: There's no Hawksian woman in the movie to take the guys down a peg, although Faye Emerson's bit as McMartin's sister and Williams's girlfriend has a good deal of the Hawksian tough cookie about her. Hawks wanted the film to be a wartime version of his great movie about pilots, Only Angels Have Wings (1939), but the propagandist pressures to support the war effort, and probably a good deal of meddling from Wallis and Warner Bros., kept him from achieving that goal. Still, the action is exciting and the performances are good, especially John Garfield as the reluctantly heroic Winocki and Harry Carey as the oldtimer mechanic -- though Carey, in his mid-60s, was probably more of an oldtimer than the role strictly calls for.

Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)

Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West

Jill McBain: Claudia Cardinale
Frank: Henry Fonda
Manuel "Cheyenne" Guitiérrez: Jason Robards
Harmonica: Charles Bronson
Morton: Gabriele Ferzetti
Stony; Woody Strode
Snaky: Jack Elam
Sam: Paolo Stoppa
Sheriff: Keenan Wynn
Brett McBain: Frank Wolff
Barman: Lionel Stander

Director: Sergio Leone
Screenplay: Sergio Donati, Sergio Leone, Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli
Art direction: Carlo Simi
Film editing: Nino Baragli
Music: Ennio Morricone

An acknowledged genre classic, Once Upon a Time in the West is also a rather self-conscious product of European filmmakers tipping their hats to the American masters of the Western movie, particularly John Ford, whose favorite setting, Monument Valley, plays almost a cameo role in the film. Ford would never have made anything quite so slowly paced, however. Director Sergio Leone's film is full of stylish gestures that make it immensely watchable, but draw attention to themselves rather than the story being told -- a pitfall that the great Western moviemakers like Ford or Howard Hawks or Sam Peckinpah never let themselves stumble into.

Letter Never Sent (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1960)

Sabinin: Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy
Tanya: Tatyana Samoylova
Andrey: Vasiliy Livanov
Sergey: Evgeniy Urbanskiy
Vera: Galina Kozhakina

Director: Mikhail Kalatozov
Screenplay: Grigoriy Koltunov, Valeri Osipov, Viktor Rozov
Cinematography: Sergey Urusevskiy
Production design: David Vinitsky
Film editing: N. Anikina
Music: Nikolai Kryukov

Letter Never Sent tells the story of a team of Soviet prospectors and geologists searching for diamonds in the Siberian wilderness who are trapped when a forest fire breaks out. A beautifully filmed adventure story, it's also overlaid with Soviet patriotism, from an opening title sequence that lauds the heroic pioneers of Soviet exploration and the space program, to occasional interpolated speeches in which the characters extol the country's shining future. The diamonds, it seems, are not bourgeois capitalist gemstones but minerals essential to the advancement of Soviet industry. Fortunately, the adventure story overwhelms the propaganda.

A Monster Calls (J.A. Bayona, 2016)

Lewis MacDougall in A Monster Calls

Conor: Lewis MacDougall
Grandma: Sigourney Weaver
Mum: Felicity Jones
Dad: Toby Kebbell
The Monster (voice): Liam Neeson
Harry: James Melville
The Head Teacher: Geraldine Chaplin

Director: J.A. Bayona
Screenplay: Patrick Ness
Based on a novel by Patrick Ness from an original idea by Siobhan Dowd
Cinematography: Oscar Faura
Production design: Eugenio Caballero
Film editing: Jaume Martí, Bernat Vilaplana
Music: Fernando Velázquez

The fable of A Monster Calls is the intertwining of grief and guilt. Young Conor, mourning his mother, who died of cancer, is haunted by nightmares in which he tries and fails to save her as the earth crumbles beneath their feet. The nightmares cause him to be dysfunctional at school and in the home of his grandmother, with whom he has gone to live.  Eventually, the nightmares come to life in the shape of a giant monster yew tree that gives him parables which reveal to Conor something more terrible: that he wanted his mother to die. But the revelation also makes him aware that his wish for her death was the product of his wanting her to be released from suffering. The psychological complexity of the fable is richly imagined, but its subtlety tends to get overwhelmed by the impressive special effects -- yet another lesson that film is not always the best narrative vehicle for complex ideas.