Focus Features

A model of efficient film construction, with wonderful visual design, but it’s the dialogue in Mankiewicz’s script that makes this such a glorious film: The rhythms are flawless. Front and center is a commodity that is increasingly lacking in American cinema: wit. The cast members, meticulously chosen, are directed to a taut level of performance, and the result is an object lesson in the profound differences between realism and naturalness. [Buy]

Film buffs frequently acclaim Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II for being the sequel that outshines its precursor—but Whale accomplished it four decades earlier. The cutting-edge design still holds up today, abetted by Franz Waxman’s subtly invasive score. But what makes it inspirational is its precarious—but oh, so successful—balancing act of attitude: an exquisite combination of dark, disturbing drama and modulated camp. In the human psyche, screaming and laughter reside very close together. Perhaps nowhere else has this adjacency been presented so clearly on the screen. [Buy]

Not the best of Leone’s “Spaghetti Westerns” (that would be Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968). But, this was the first of them that I experienced. What’s notable is how Leone opts to use space—physical, visual and temporal. His work is defined by the gaps between things; the pauses between actions; the intervals that separate dialogue. His applications of silence, of nothingness, are eloquent. [Buy]

Pace Cahiers du cinéma, but Neame seems to have had relatively little to do with this film. It’s all Alec Guinness’ show, as he plays the lead to his own script—the only one he ever had produced. The key here is unflinching commitment. The character of Gulley Jimson affords the audience no breaks; we must accept, if at all, on his own terms. The result can be described as Auntie Mame without the redemption. [Buy]

An astonishingly audacious film. But, if that were the sole criterion for its being on this list, it would not. One can find comparably laudable audacity in almost all of Cronenberg’s oeuvre, as well as many of the works of Welles, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Kitano and others. Indeed, this is not even close to being Cronenberg’s most (literally) awesome work. But I include it for a particular reason, that is based on off-screen knowledge: Based on the audience response at preview screenings, Cronenberg re-edited the movie to change the sequence of certain scenes. Thus, this is the Kuleshov/Mosjukhin experiments writ large: The order in which information is doled out is crucial. [Buy]