The Mad Miss Manton (Leigh Jason, 1938)

Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in The Mad Miss Manton

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Sam Levene, Frances Mercer, Stanley Ridges, Hattie McDaniel. Screenplay: Philip G. Epstein, Wilson Collison. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: George Hively. Music: Roy Webb.

If The Mad Miss Manton seems to me a laborious misfire of a screwball comedy, it may be because I can't help comparing it to another film that also stars Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, Preston Sturges's sublime The Lady Eve (1941). Stanwyck plays the doyenne of a gaggle of silly socialites who get involved in trying to solve a murder. They tangle with a police lieutenant played by Sam Levene and a reporter played by Fonda in the process, but Stanwyck's character and Fonda's naturally fall in love during the proceedings. It's over-frantic and under-motivated.

My Name Is Julia Ross (Joseph H. Lewis, 1945)

May Whitty in My Name Is Julia Ross

Cast: Nina Foch, May Whitty, George Macready, Roland Varno, Anita Sharp-Bolster, Doris Lloyd. Screenplay: Muriel Roy Bolton, based on a novel by Anthony Gilbert. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Art direction: Jerome Pycha Jr. Film editing: Henry Batista. Costume design: Jean Louis.

A tidy, twisty thriller about a woman (Nina Foch) who, when she gets hired as a secretary to a wealthy elderly woman (May Whitty) who lives in a lonely, isolated old house by the sea, becomes a pawn in a plot to cover up a murder. It's one of the films -- another is Gun Crazy (1950) -- that suggest that Joseph H. Lewis could have been more than just a B-movie director. Short (65 minutes) and to the point.

Dream Wife (Sidney Sheldon, 1953)

Betta St. John, Cary Grant, and Deborah Kerr in Dream Wife

Cast: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Betta St. John, Walter Pidgeon, Eduard Franz, Buddy Baer. Screenplay: Sidney Sheldon, Herbert Baker, Alfred Lewis Lewitt. Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner. Art direction: Daniel B. Cathcart, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: George White. Music: Conrad Salinger.

A romantic comedy so inane and inept that it seems to have driven Cary Grant into retirement for a couple of years, until Alfred Hitchcock persuaded him to return in To Catch a Thief (1955). It's certainly a waste of the considerable talents of Grant and Deborah Kerr. Grant plays a businessman who gets tired of his fiancée's (Kerr) devotion to her career with the State Department and calls off the engagement when he falls for a Middle Eastern princess (Betta St. John) who has been raised to serve men. Because the princess comes from an oil-rich country, the State Department enlists Kerr's character in handling the negotiations leading to the princess's marriage to the businessman. The result is a queasy 1950s take on feminism and international relations in which no one behaves like the rational human beings they're supposed to be.

Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong, 2007)

Jeon Do-yeon, Seon Jung-yeop, and Song Kang-ho in Secret Sunshine

Cast: Jeon Do-yeon, Song Kang-ho, Seon Jung-yeop, Cho Yung-jin, Kim Young-jae, Song Mi-rim. Screenplay: Lee Chang-dong, based on a novel by Lee Chung-Joon. Cinematography: Cho Yong-kyu. Production design: Shin Jum-hee. Film editing: Kim Hyun. Music: Christian Basso.

Painful without being oppressive, Lee Chang-dong's Secret Sunshine manages to be a film critical of religion without being either against it or for it. It centers on the great loss suffered by Lee Shin-aie (Jeon Do-yeon in a performance that won best actress at Cannes), a young widow trying to start a new life with her small son. But when he is abducted and murdered, she finds herself seeking comfort in an evangelical Christian community. It's primarily a film about otherness, about the struggles of the solitary spirit, and Lee accomplishes wonders without taking sides in the struggles of his characters.

The Hudsucker Proxy (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 1994)

Cast: Tim Robbins, Paul Newman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Charles Durning, Jim True-Frost, John Mahoney, Bill Cobbs, Bruce Campbell. Screenplay: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Sam Raimi. Cinematography: Roger Deakins. Production design: Dennis Gassner. Film editing: Thom Noble. Music: Carter Burwell.

Maybe the most divisive of the Coen brothers' movies. It's certified rotten on Rotten Tomatoes at 57%, but even there you'll find reviewers who think it "criminally overlooked and sinfully wonderful" and "A wickedly funny and incisive lampoon of big business." I had avoided it for years, but when I gave in and finally watched it I was occasionally amused and sometimes surprised. What doesn't work for me, however, is its hommage to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and '40s. That sort of thing is rarely worth doing, unless you do it with unabashed affection, as Peter Bogdanovich did in What's Up, Doc? (1972). Bogdanovich wisely took the tropes of classic screwball and updated them. The Coens and co-writer Sam Raimi, however, make the mistake of retaining for their film the period in which screwball flourished, and the contrast of their ersatz screwball with the real thing becomes apparent.

The Rocket From Calabuch (Luis García Berlanga, 1956)

Valentina Cortese and Edmund Gwenn in The Rocket From Calabuch

Cast: Edmund Gwenn, Franco Fabrizi, Valentina Cortese, Juan Calvo, José Isbert, Félix Fernández. Screenplay: Leonardo Martín, Florentino Soria, Ennio Flaiano, Luis García Berlanga. Cinematography: Francisco Sempere. Film editing: Pepita Orduna. Music: Guido Guerrini, Angelo Francesco Lavagnino.

In his last film role, Edmund Gwenn plays an atomic scientist who hides out in a small Spanish town, fleeing the demands made on him by the American military. But his cover gets blown when he helps the villagers in their annual fireworks competition with another town. It's the usual droll, loving comedy from one of its masters, Luis García Berlanga.

More (Barbet Schroeder, 1969)

Klaus Grünberg and Mimsy Farmer in More

Cast: Klaus Grünberg, Mimsy Farmer, Heinz Engelmann, Michel Chanderli, Henry Wolf, Louise Wink. Screenplay: Paul Gégauff, Barbet Schroeder, Mimsy Farmer, Eugene Archer, Paul Gardner. Cinematography: Néstor Almendros. Art direction: Néstor Almendros, Fran Lewis. Film editing: Denise de Casablanca, Rita Roland. Music: Pink Floyd.

A vivid downer film, in which a German student (Klaus Grünberg) and an American hippie (Mimsy Farmer) get more deeply involved in drugs, moving from pot to LSD to heroin. More avoids some of the clichés of films about the counterculture of the late '60s -- it doesn't try to re-create the drug experience with camera tricks but instead views its characters externally as it traces their disintegration. It places its more sordid sequences against the beauty of Ibiza to good effect, and the cinematography of Néstor Almendros makes the most of the location, but the film still feels heavy and dated.

Our Man in Havana (Carol Reed, 1959)

Noël Coward and Alec Guinness in Our Man in Havana

Cast: Alec Guinness, Burl Ives, Maureen O'Hara, Ernie Kovacs, Noël Coward, Ralph Richardson, Jo Morrow. Screenplay: Graham Greene, based on his novel. Cinematography: Oswald Morris. Art direction: John Box. Film editing: Bert Bates. Music: Frank Deniz, Laurence Deniz.

Given its cast, its director, and its screenwriter, Our Man in Havana has always seemed to me that it should be a little bit better than it is. I think director Carol Reed may be mostly at fault: His best films, like Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), and The Third Man (1949), have just the right mixture of gravitas and wit. Here there's a little too much gravitas weighing down what could have a more pronounced satiric edge: a tale of bumbling British espionage. It's possible, too, that a little uncertainty of tone lingers over the movie because it was filmed on location in Cuba just after the fall of Batista -- Fidel Castro himself visited the shoot -- and the subsequent course of the revolution lends a queasiness to the subject matter. Nevertheless, we are in the hands of masters like Alec Guinness, Noël Coward, and Ralph Richardson here, so there's enough to enjoy. 

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010)

Benjamin Millepied and Natalie Portman in Black Swan

Cast: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder. Screenplay: Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, John J. McLaughlin. Cinematography: Matthew Libatique. Production design: Thérèse DePrez. Film editing: Andrew Weisblum. Music: Clint Mansell.

Overheated melodrama with horror movie elements that seems determined to make ballet into more of a psychological and physical trial by torture than is entirely plausible. Natalie Portman won an Oscar for her role as the tormented dancer, and she gets good support from Mila Kunis as her potential rival and Barbara Hershey as her mother. But I found myself laughing at its excesses when I think director Darren Aronofsky, over the top as usual, meant for me to shudder at them.

Welcome, Mr. Marshall! (Luis García Berlanga, 1953)

Cast: Manolo Morán, José Isbert, Lolita Sevilla, Alberto Romea, Elvira Quintillá, Luis Pérez de León, Félix Fernández, Fernando Aguirre. Screenplay: Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis García Berlanga, Miguel Mihura. Cinematography: Manuel Berenguer. Film editing: Pepita Orduna. Music: Jesús García Leoz.

As he so often did, Luis García Berlanga thumbed his nose at the Franco-era censors with a satiric look at a small Spanish village out to court foreign aid from the Americans under the Marshall Plan. The residents set up a kind of Andalusian Potemkin village, donning costumes they don't usually wear and generally dressing up the place in the fashion they think American tourists will expect. In dream sequences, we see what the villagers not only hope but also what they fear they will get from the Americans.