This means to be James Franco’s An Officer and a Gentleman and Top Gun all rolled into one, but I don’t remember Tom Cruise grimacing much in Top Gun, which is about all Franco manages. As a young welder who has grown up across the water from the U.S. Naval Academy and has been given

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington runs on just the sort of idealism that gave director Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life) his reputation for cornball sentimentality. Yet Capra could pull this tone off better than anyone, especially when he teamed up with James Stewart, an actor of towering sincerity. Stewart stars here as Jefferson Smith,

Along with 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire, also directed by Elia Kazan, this announced Brando as the new paragon of screen acting. His was a raw, unpredictable talent, one of guttural bursts, not crisp line readings. Here he plays Terry Malloy, a former boxer and current longshoreman caught between a corrupt union and his conscience.

Youth, beauty, love, fame – all of these fade, as La Dolce Vita so poignantly reveals, but thankfully the movies never do. Director Federico Fellini’s epic account of our endless chase of “the sweet life” looks as shimmering and feels as vital as ever – even though its ironic message is that the party always

Watching Bernardo Bertolucci’s erotic drama now, it’s not the graphic sex scenes that startle – these days they would pass for R-rated material. Instead, the jarring intensity of Marlon Brando in full fury keeps you off-balance. His portrayal of Paul, a recent widower who tries to exorcise his rage by having callous sex in a

Though Dashiell Hammett’s novel had already been filmed twice before, it is this 1941 version that many consider to be the first noir picture. Bogart defined the tough, fast-talking hero as Sam Spade; Mary Astor had three parts in one as the mysterious and alluring femme fatale; and director John Huston, making his debut, set

An early effort from director Jonathan Demme, Melvin and Howard takes off from a real-life situation – a contested will of Howard Hughes, who may have left millions to an unknown gas-station worker – and turns it into a comic satire on the fickleness of the American dream. As the movie opens, Melvin Dumar (Paul