Movie Recommendations

The film that defines noir. Barbara Stanwyck is outstanding as an amoral wife who wants out of her marriage and will use anyone to help her. Fred MacMurray at first refused to play her lover and accomplice, fearing it was too great a departure from his romantic comedy roles and would hurt his career; instead,…

One of the two most powerful antiwar films ever made (the other being Renoir’s Grand Illusion—interesting that both deal with WW I). Kirk Douglas is understated and most effective as the officer assigned to determine whether three soldiers named by a general as cowards for failing to fulfill his idiotic battle orders should be court-martialed and…

Another winning Alec Guinness/Ealing Studios combination. This time Guinness is a bank clerk with a seemingly foolfproof plan to rob a fortune in gold. (Audrey Hepburn’s film debut, as Chiquita.)

As Dennis Weaver drives along a near-deserted California highway to get to work, an 18-wheeler inexplicably tries to kill him. Early Spielberg TV movie has all the suspense of his big-budget thrillers.

Screenwriter Aldous Huxley takes remarkable liberties with Austen’s novel, but Greer Garson, Laurence Olivier, Edna May Oliver, and the rest of the cast make it eminently watchable.

An evocative allegory that follows an errant knight and Swedish family during the Black Death.

Phantasmagorical animation set to classical music. Not everyone’s cup of tea but entrancing if you’re in the right mood.

The real mystery is why Hitch decided to refilm this tale of a vactioning family dragged into an international assassination attempt. Stick with this version over the 1956 Jimmy Stewart/Doris Day remake.

Genial slacker John Cusack sets his sights on valedictorian Ione Skye in Cameron Crowe’s very human romance.

Hitch’s psychological magnum opus starts slowly but builds to a fever pitch of tension as acrophobic Jimmy Stewart investigates suicidal housewife Kim Novak.