DavidThomson

An extraordinary, very troubling picture - not just because of the irrational hostility of the birds, but because of the deep-seated neurotic explanations for their aggression. It is as if Hitchcock had at last elected to act on his most insightful reviews and had admitted sexual insecurity as his subject. All in all, it's not just a brilliant if rather academic film, but something tinged with embarrassment - ours: We wonder if we should be watching. And these birds attack the eyes.

80 _66%

The Big Lebowski (1998) - Rated 14 Sep 2012

It is one of the Coen Brother's most coherent and endearing satires on movie existence, shot through with a genuine affection for the kind of no-hopes who people this world and who hold off silence and horror by the steady beat of "dude" talk. Could the film have been made without Jeff Bridges? We doubt it, because Bridges is the weary saint of that brigade of great American actors who would never win an Oscar. It is a key work of late-twentieth-century culture, and we love everyone involved.

70 _50%

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) - Rated 14 Sep 2012

Wyler wanted Gregg Toland to shoot it, and Toland noted how the war had altered Wyler: he cut down on his old camera movements. Now he wanted simplicity with depth - naturalism as far as the eye could see - and Toland delivered. No, it's not the best American picture ever made. But it was a moment when the realpolitik, the sense of duty, and the romance of movie storytelling went hand in glove. And it was a war that needed that much good luck.

80 _66%

Beauty and the Beast (1946) - Rated 14 Sep 2012

It coincides, roughly, with the first wave of Disney feature films. The film is filled with natural miracles, and the secret to it all is that Cocteau set out to make a film that would stir adults; along the way he discovered the child's imagination, too. So it's an extraordinary and very encouraging fusion of pictures for kids and the surrealist art tradition, yet totally true to the diffused but heated sexuality of the original tale.

80 _66%

The Bellboy (1960) - Rated 14 Sep 2012

Jerry Lewis had a very successful career through the 1960s, but then his taste for material became mawkish, and young audiences apparently deserted him. Despite much ill health (he seems like a creature of illness in so many ways), he soldiers on, and I suspect he has little more than half a dozen ideas a day. But The Bellboy is a masterpiece of visual comedy in which Jerry is still a simpleton while the mind that sees the jokes is a mathematical genius.

80 _66%

Being John Malkovich (1999) - Rated 14 Sep 2012

Perhaps the most startling and innovative American film at the end of the twentieth century. And maybe best of all, it is what you want to make of it. I proposed the enchanted village of Manhattran in that this story covers the territory from fairy story to Kafka. So this is a film about acting as much as pretending, and it is truly a kind of critical essay on John Malkovich to which Malkovich has loaned himself with an absence of ego that is all the more striking in view of his work.

45 _26%

Beat the Devil (1953) - Rated 14 Sep 2012

I suppose a great documentary on the making of Beat the Devil might be more entertaining than the real thing. The first advice is to see it as Huston's laughing observation of the crack-up in the picture business and the first shuddering intimation that films are going to be made anyway - chaos, lack of preparation, narrative disorder, and willful mistake are no deterrent. The urge to make a comic caper movie is enough - there's no need to labor over the real thing, no need to take it seriously.

75 _57%

The Band Wagon (1953) - Rated 14 Sep 2012

Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse scarcely touch, yet they have the lovelist unison you ever saw. Michael Kidd did the coreography, and you'd better see it before you die. This isn't An American in Paris; it's everyday work, and maybe more appealing because of that. Not even Freed said the Arthur Freed films were going to save the world or qualify for a Nobel Prize. No one said they were important. But did Hollywood ever do anything so odd so well?

85 _74%

Bambi (1942) - Rated 14 Sep 2012

It does come closer to a point of view than anything elese Disney ever tried, and it seems blind of a critic like Manny Farber to protest the loss of fantasy without seeing the parable of maturation. Unlike so many Disney projects, Bambi is about coming of age and discarding childhood. It may be the most beautiful film Disney ever made, as well as the toughest ordeal for any of his characters. In the course of under 70 minutes, the world changes.

60 _38%

Bad Timing (1980) - Rated 14 Sep 2012

The picture is tourist Viennese, for good and ill. More or less, sexual expression here equals unitidiness, and Alex and Roeg watch with the same bated breath to see all the unexpected ways in which Alex and Milena can do it. The script comes from Yale Udoff, a playwright, and it says far too much while delivering too little. I wish Roeg would trust animal action more and intellectual justification less. Still, the atempt is remarkable.