The Most Underrated Movies of All Time

About Elly is a stunning surprise package, profound in utterly unexpected ways.

Having put us at ease through the first act, director Asghar Farhadi introduces tension in the second and then something frightening happens in the third. Abruptly, not once but several times, the movie changes tone as a rolling series of crises amplify the seaside tension exponentially. As we are pulled in deeper, the tightly structured story takes drastic turns as deceit by multiple characters is exposed and mistrust grows. Go with your eyes wide open and your mind engaged and prepare to be astonished. Emotional intensity is Farhadi's métier, and to see About Elly is to revel in his skill. It’s an incisive portrait of a particular society, but it should resonate everywhere.

As with all his films, Farhadi refuses to exaggerate his stories with cinematic trickery. His characters may lie as much as they breathe, but as a filmmaker, Farhadi couldn’t be any more honest.

Twenty years before the phrase ‘media-circus’ found its way into the lexicon, Billy Wilder envisaged a literal one.

Over 60 years later, Ace in the Hole has lost none of its sharpness. As a diatribe against all that is worst in human nature, it is dipped in pure vitriol. It's as dirty a noir as ever there was. Its world is fallen and irredeemable; its people are impotent ideologues; and concepts of faith and love are childish lies. It's the most cynical, uncompromising work from Billy Wilder - a searing indictment that is clairvoyant in the manner in which it mirrors our fascination with cheap sensationalism and shallow journalistic practices.

Ace in the Hole is like a punch in the gut, a kick in the nuts, a bucket of bile flung in the face. Bitter to the end, Ace in the Hole nearly suffocates you on its cynicism. But this is one time you will enjoy being breathless!

It says quite a lot about director Robert Zemeckis and writer Bob Gale's enduring strengths that a story that sounds so complex on paper makes absolutely perfect sense while you're watching it. And that all the jerry-rigged elements concocted at the end of the movie harmonize rather effortlessly with the original, turning casual gags into clever foreshadowing and building recurring motifs out of one-liners, while also providing a fine story that hangs together and is perfectly effective on its own. The film knows just how, and when, to entertain us, and it does so in spades.

Zemeckis takes the sequel narrative and splices it into the intricate web of the first feature. The first two Back to the Futures ask a number of unresolved and unresolvable questions about causality, order, and intention; and taken as a pair, they're also a hell of a lot of fun.

Back to the Future Part II is simultaneously an entertaining follow-up to Part I and a tantalizing introduction to Part III - a giddily and merrily mind-boggling sci-fi fantasy.

Two decades after Richard Linklater’s beguiling 1995 romance Before Sunrise and nine years after 2004’s equally charming Before Sunset, Ethan Hawke’s American writer Jesse and Julie Delpy’s French environmentalist Celine are back together in Before Midnight and they are still captivating company for anyone who fell for them during their previous strolls.

It's been another nine years between films, and if so much has changed in the meantime, the unparalleled chemistry between Hawke and Delpy hasn't slipped even a little. They may be older, a bit wiser, and certainly more wrinkled, but their performances are nothing less than natural throughout. Witnessing their ageing, nagging, toying love on screen is a true privilege. Before Midnight is like an old friend who has grown sharper and saltier with life; and for students of cinema, the film is a master-class in the portrayal of human nature. It’s one of the most convincing and charming representations of long-term coupledom you’ll ever see - a literary as well as cinematic achievement to cherish!

Changeling, a riveting true crime story set in Los Angeles in 1928, is proof of Clint Eastwood's sure touch and emotional acuity as a director on powerful display. It's a mesmerizing human drama that pulls us in, to the haunting strains of Eastwood's resonant score.

As Changeling gathers momentum and shifts tone, it retains a unifying quality, a bleak and melancholy air that sustains it through its transformations. Eastwood, at the peak of his artful powers, tightens the screws of suspense without ever forgetting where the heart of his film lies. Lesser hands might let the story sink into teary sentiment. Angelina Jolie plays Christine Collins like a gathering storm, moving from terror to a fierce resolve. The trauma she suffers is almost tangible as it pours off the screen.

All in all, a devastating and touching story, beautifully told by a filmmaker still at the top of his game. A failure that’s more involving than most successes!

Charade is often hailed as “the best Hitchcock film that Hitchcock never got around to making”, sometimes thought of in terms of ersatz Hitchcock, and that’s understandable. But in hindsight, it really does director Stanley Donen a disservice because he brings into Charade a lot of flair and chutzpah, resulting in a delightful mystery-cum-romance that sparkles with all the vigor of freshly uncorked champagne. The sexual chemistry between its leading stars - the always elegant 32-year-old Audrey Hepburn and the always charismatic 60-year-old Cary Grant, when set against Charade's tumultuous backdrop of shifting identities, makes this movie an enduring favorite.

After all these years, Charade still remains the real deal, not some cheap, exploding cheeseburger of a movie pretender. Charade reminds us that when all the elements come together, it's possible for Hollywood to make a flawless entertainment that thoroughly whisks us away. Too bad it doesn't happen more often.

Ron Howard's Cinderella Man skillfully delivers a primal, heart-pounding satisfaction as he directs this rousing saga with an admirable sense of restraint, which works to underscore the resilience of characters and allows the actors and the story enough time to breathe. His presentation of the bout is dynamic and tense, not giving into histrionic display. He keeps a consistent, sharp tone throughout, not resorting to any overtly sappy moments which many films of this ilk have a tendency to do.

But it is Russell Crowe who steals the show with his towering performance. He adopts a flawless period 'Noo-Yawk' accent, a tough guy attitude, and undergoes a physical transformation to look remarkably like Braddock. But he ensures that the character does not fall into these superficial accoutrements and carries the film forward with a kind of quiet dignity only he can.

As a true-grit tale of redemption, Cinderella Man lands one solid body punch after another!

Painting a relentlessly bleak picture of the London’s landscape as experienced by Eastern European immigrants, Eastern Promises is a visceral and cerebral masterpiece depicting both the compassionate and monstrous aspects of the human condition. From its genuinely shocking throat-slitting opening to a harrowing fight to the death in a sauna, David Cronenberg lives up to his reputation as the 'master of body horror'. He once again highlights the secrets lurking among us as only he can. The result gets underneath our skin and stays put. The acting is uniformly top-notch, but Viggo Mortensen's portrayal of laconic chauffeur Nikolai is truly astounding and keeps us guessing the true nature that lurks behind his shades.

Eastern Promises is an utterly engrossing story laden with magnificently understated performances, a compelling narrative and sublime direction - an orgy of slit throats, lopped digits and a naked fight scene that will tattoo itself on to your brain!

With countless procedural cop dramas on air, it’d be easy to figure End of Watch can’t possibly have anything new to add let alone be worth two hours of your time. But if you did, you’d be cheating yourself out of seeing one of those rare brilliant dramas that feels so real you forget what you’re watching has been carefully edited, acted, written and researched.

Director David Ayer is completely in his element bringing the gritty, unfiltered look at police work. He’s able to make an officer’s life seem exhilarating without glamorizing it. What gives it life are the performances of Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña. They emerge as beacons of friendship in a bleak world of barred windows and barking dogs. The actors, both excellent, get right into Ayer's groove. So by the time we arrive at the unsparing climax, we really know and care about these guys.

End of Watch is a deeply affecting, powerful film that goes beyond mere entertainment. It’s a thrilling experience that fully explores the bond of two partners bound by duty and friendship in a way that few films have accomplished in such a satisfying manner.

In Erin Brockovich, Steven Soderbergh tests Erin's limits of likability numerous times throughout the movie. Erin, the film makes clear early on, is no sentimental crusader. Rather, she is a tough, hard-nosed cookie who dresses like a hoochie and who would use anything from here heavily coiffured hair to her cleavage or also her baby to get what she needs. In short, Erin is adrift in a hard world. But what makes this potentially despicable character so affable is Julia Roberts’ vulnerable and fiercely dynamic performance. As the eponymous character, she is undoubtedly the heart and soul of the film. Her scenes with Albert Finney crackle with chemistry and it's a joy to see this kind of male/female interaction where there is absolutely no hint of sexual attraction.

Soderbergh infuses the proceedings with a vibrant, almost peppy sense of style that would not have been half as compelling had a less edgy director helmed it. It would have been easy for him to have allowed Erin Brockovich to descend into manipulative melodrama, but he resists that path of least resistance, instead giving us a film that is smart, savvy, funny, and, at times, poignant.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Cold War was threatening to get hot and World War III didn't just seem possible, it seemed inevitable. Fail-Safe, Sidney Lumet’s disturbing brink-of-doom thriller shows one possible scenario about how our leaders would have handled just such a catastrophe.

In Fail Safe, Sidney Lumet opts for a deadly serious mix of cold-war melodrama and rampant psychosis. Creeping unease builds up to terminal paranoia as the machines run away from their masters, the 'fail safe' fails, and the unstoppable bomber homes in on Moscow - all by accident. He sensibly avoids pyrotechnics in favor of tightening the psychological screws, with great flair. With this movie, Lumet brought several innovative camera tricks and visual effects to mainstream cinema.

Highly underrated, it's long past time for Fail Safe to be viewed independently as a taut, claustrophobic thriller and to take its place as a Cold War classic.

With his debut feature, writer-director Ryan Coogler recreates a real-life event with remarkable artistry. Based on the killing of Ocar Grant III, a young African-American man by police in Oakland, California, Coogler's realistic debut recreates Grant's final day with affection, refusing to cast him as either saint or sinner. His spare, sombre style serves the story well, skillfully avoiding cliche and formula to soberly rage against a grave miscarriage of justice.

Michael Jordan is simply outstanding as Grant. He doesn't beg for our sympathy and is all the more magnetic as a result. The air of impending disaster culminates in a harrowing final act that is both chilling and heartbreaking.

Fruitvale Station is a story so compassionate and powerfully told, that it surpasses the sadness of its subject matter to almost be a celebration of life.

One of the all-time-great "procedurals," High and Low is a combination of immensely powerful psychodrama and exquisitely detailed police procedural - a movie that illuminates its world with a wholeness and complexity you rarely see in film. The images populate the widescreen frame like a pressure cooker that is ready to blow up. And in High and Low, blow up they do.

As the lead character Gondo, Mifune sheds his samurai garb to play the modern-day millionaire in a suit and tie and conveys all the terrible rage of his ambition as well as the indestructible germ of compassion that lives inside him with remarkable effortlessness. But the real hero of the movie is Akira Kurosawa, who weaves together character study, social commentary and police procedure and combines what might have been a whole series of movies for another, lesser director. Nothing compares to the experience of watching a movie where every scene, every sequence, every shot are alive with confidence in the medium. Your complaints with Kurosawa (if any) would dissolve in the backwash of pure film pleasure High and low offers, as you're introduced once again to the master.

In this remake of the 1933 epic ‘King Kong’, Peter Jackson proves himself an unbeatable showman with the soul of a poet. The most arresting spectacle is the 30-foot-tall gorilla – the titular King Kong himself with a nasty disposition. Kong is a miraculous feat of CGI wizardry, integrating seamlessly with his live action co-stars. Andy Serkis makes Kong's movements perfectly apelike, but there is just enough of an element of humanity to him. He feels real and he really feels.

Where the movie succeeds so brilliantly is by managing to treat the original material with respect without being overly reverent. The basic story is in place but Peter Jackson is not afraid to delve deeper into the characters in order to get the most out of the movie. Jackson treats the story with the utmost veneration and makes you believe by caring so much, it's contagious! He crafts and composes his action sequences like symphonies, with the most eye-popping crescendos. He also treats the romance between the beauty and the beast with so much love that you are left awestruck as you watch Kong’s unreconstructed machismo rubs up against her feminine defiance to amusing effect. This could well be called Peter Jackson’s “Return of the Kong”!

The limited possibilities of making drama out of attempted prison breaks have been worked so often and so astutely in the congenial medium of films, that it is amazing to find the subject handled again with genuine tension and even some originality in Jacques Becker's classic Le Trou - widely regarded as the last great flowering of French classicism. It's a prison-break film, which follows the dictates of the genre almost every step of the way but makes the conventions shine with new life and meaning.

Using a cast of nonprofessionals, Becker works up a big house cliff-hanger that throbs with excitement and suspense and, at the same time, offers some stabbing insights into the anxieties and energies of imprisoned men, with great simplicity. Le Trou has such an amazing kinetic rhythm to it that one both feels and forgets the claustrophobic environs. It does so without trying for any untoward suspense gambits because it is a film rooted in the immediate, the concrete and the human! Jacques Becker's swan song is nothing short of a masterpiece!

Looper is a wildly entertaining film that isn't content with science and cinematic tricks. It desires, and achieves, much more.

Accessible to a general audience while still having moments that will warm any film geek's heart, this is the kind of genre film that elevates the form. With feigned effortlessness, Rian Johnson manages to mess around with a pile of tired tropes and clichés, coming out in the end with something that feels entirely new and fresh. This Twelve Monkeys-meets-The Terminator-via-The Shining is an absolute joy to watch, with the filmmakers at every turn showing how in control of their material they are.

With a heady script, stunning performances and fist-pumping action, LOOPER is the most enjoyable combination of immensely watchable yet poignant, even cerebral. This is filmmaking of the highest order from Rian Johnson.

Memories of Murder is such a taut, effective thriller it's a shame you have to read subtitles to gauge just how good a movie it is.

The movie seems so American from afar. It's got serial killers and comic detectives and sex crimes and night chases and squabbling partners. But literally in the first sequence it establishes its uniqueness and the understated eye of its director, Joon-ho Bong. A policier beset by melancholy and infused with turbulent social-political shadings, Bong’s masterpiece almost single-handedly resuscitates the moribund serial killer genre. Throughout the film, Bong fills his compositions with elements that sum up the incongruity, the sheer messiness, of life at its most banal, even in the middle of a murder investigation.

Yet even as the movie presses towards resolution, one can feel the director's reluctance to provide easy epiphanies, smug outcomes, tame answers. He's more interested in capturing a society in flux as illuminated by the crisis of the murder investigation. What emerges is quite extraordinary!

Miller's Crossing is an intricate tale of a gang war, about Irish criminals who are running an anonymous American metropolis in 1929 and a rising group of Italian mobsters who are tired of playing second fiddle.

Miller’s Crossing attempts to both sum up, and revivify, the gangster genre. Guns, booze and fast women - all timeworn gangster film clichés are given a fresh twist in this masterpiece from Joel and Ethan Coen. The Coens’ play this icy gangster tale mostly straight, but they can't help throwing in a few of their dark, comic explosions; it's one of their best, most cohesive films and it holds up to repeated viewings. There’s not a false move, a bad angle, an awkward line or a wanting performance at any point in their fascinating tale of gang warfare, family loyalty, personal loyalty and homoerotic bonding - a sardonic neo-noir gangster story with a wicked sense of humor and unfettered violence.

A gleeful riff on a very old genre; the Coens make Miller’s Crossing sing anew with wit, intensity, and irresistible black humor, thanks to a screenplay of pure gold. I still think it's the Coen brother's best film yet!

Inspired by Chicago's infamous Leopold-Loeb murder case, there is a great stroke of craftsmanship at work in Rope. Shot in ten long takes, the movies creates an elaborate illusion that there is no cutaway from the action, as if to indicate a quiet observer is present in the room for the whole duration of the story, resulting in perverse, provocative entertainment.

However, none of this might have worked in hands less capable than Alfred Hitchcock’s. His obsession with telling a story without resorting to the usual methods of montage results in a film of unusual technical brilliance, whose chilliness almost perfectly suits the subject. Hitchcock is less concerned with the moral dilemmas of his characters and focuses entirely on the overall spectacle of how a perfect crime goes wrong. What is oddly fascinating is the way Hitchcock's sly cheekiness forces us, through the suspense, to side with the killers.

Rope remains one of Hitchcock’s most underrated masterpieces – a movie where he married an intriguing screenplay with witty, insightful dialogues with almost fiendish execution. While doing so, he sure walks a tightrope, but with astounding buoyancy!

In Akira Kurosawa’s highly underrated sequel to the much revered Yojimbo, Toshiro Mifune reprises his role as the titular master-less samurai, this time having the arduous task of cleaning up the mess created by the younger generation of a ruling clan, whose misplaced trust leaves them vulnerable to the clan's true enemy.

The fact that Sanjuro is played by none other than the grunting, swashbuckling Toshiro Mifune makes the movie thoroughly enjoyable from beginning to end. Besides, Akira Kurosawa applies the full force of his cinematic genius, with brilliant widescreen composition that tells the story in visual terms as clear as the verbal ones. He guides the narrative mostly for laughs, but when the action kicks in the sword fighting is brutal and memorable.

Sanjuro may not be Akira Kurosawa’s most celebrated work, but you will find his witty paw prints all over the snappy dialogue, unique characters and intriguing plot – an effort that I personally rank higher than Yojimbo!

You will be most astonished by this electrifying documentary if you are not a racing fan, and even more if you have never heard of Ayrton Senna. The movie matches this character in being captivating beyond belief; incredibly powerful and sublime.

Director Asif Kapadia develops a compelling and exciting picture of F1 and the man that was Ayrton Senna. He allows his documentary gaze to fall upon the sport of motor-racing in this thrilling exploration into the life of a man who aimed to do as much for those less fortunate than him than he did for the sport. It's impossible not to be impressed by how Kapadia and writer Manish Pandey have managed to craft a biographical film completely out of archive footage. Kapadia uses an astonishing wealth of racing and interview footage - including film shot by in-car cameras during races - to chart in a compelling way the dramatic rise and heart-rending end of the Brazilian legend.

An engrossing, nerve-wracking and beautifully crafted examination of a sporting hero, Kapadia's documentary is a must-see!

Shrek 2 is as much of a shriek as the original and if they keep putting out films as charming as this one, we'll all live happily ever after.

Just like the original, what gives Shrek 2 its special artistic distinction is its witty and knowingly sassy dialogue, delivered by vocally charismatic performers. Shrek may be a mean, green halitosis machine, but it doesn't take long to love him, warts and all, thanks to Mike Myers who reprises his Scottish accent to great comic effect. Eddie Murphy again steals every scene he's in with equal parts bounce and warmth as the yakky Donkey and practically gallops off with the movie. Puss-in-Boots proves to be a wonderful addition to the clan.

With improbable finesse, Shrek 2 buffs up some of the oldest tropes of storytelling and then gives them a mischievous tilt, so that we appear to be watching a celebration of a genre and a sneaky subversion of it at the same time. It is an adorable, infectious work of true sophistication and that rare instance where the sequel is as good, if not better than the original!

Tangerines is a simple but gripping look at human side of conflict.

Except for brief outbursts of violence, Tangerines is, like its hero Ivo, a stoic and introspective thing. The story moves slowly and methodically, tempering the expected — and only fleetingly heartwarming — rapprochement between enemies with a more acerbic outlook about human nature. Although there are moments of quiet humor, Tangerines is mostly a tragedy, told via looks exchanged between heated adversaries and their imperturbable intermediary. Over the course of the film, those looks soften from glaring mistrust to acceptance to heartbroken endurance in the face of the meaninglessness and inevitability of death.

For anyone looking for an uncomplicated anti-war argument painted by historical insight, superb performances and airtight direction, 'Tangerines' is a must-see. Just like a tangerine, it is a delicious mix of sweet and acidic flavors.

Moviegoers can be forgiven for feeling a little Holocaust fatigue. There have been so many films about the subject, or using it as a backdrop, that there's no shame in feeling a bit numb to it all. And then The Boy in the Striped Pajamas comes along and brings us fresh eyes and the wounds reopen anew.

The power of this story and the way director Mark Herman tells it through the innocent eyes of our eight year old protagonist Bruno overcome all the hurdles with its child-like simplicity that clutches our hearts. Much of the film depends on our ability to suspend disbelief and see the world as Bruno sees it. We are left in no doubt about the brutality of what's going on there but it's almost entirely off-screen. Still, the film is terribly confronting.

You may get halfway through and wonder why it's getting so heavily recommended here. Once you've experienced it in its entirety, you'll know why. It has a finale designed to shock. That Mark Herman's film manages such poignancy in 90 compact minutes is nothing short of miraculous.

The Chaser is a clever riff on cops-and-criminals formalism that interpolates old-fashioned plot devices (a missing girl, a cryptic phone number, an epicene serial killer, a corrupt mayor) into a Borgesian web of forking paths and gleeful McGuffins. It lets loose with a jolt every few minutes, from a gross-out torture sequence to the death of an innocent that leaves us gasping. However, in between moments of chisel-hacking horror, there is some impressively dark humor and top-notch acting. But be warned – emotionally this movie will reach deep into the pit of your stomach and wriggle your guts about before wrenching them out.

Director Hong-Jin Na reserves his cheeky ardor for subtle displays of craftsmanship. His superb direction ensures that the film remains suspenseful on a number of different levels, by sustaining an atmosphere of rhythmically festering futility without the possibility of facile redemption. The Chaser is a superbly directed, thoroughly gripping and morally twisted crime thriller that's worth every minute of your time!

Sometimes a director and a film are a divine match. 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' is the even rarer case of a divine match happening twice.

Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo manages to build on the original film without copying it, reinventing it or ignoring it. Rooney Mara is a revelation as Lisbeth Salander while Daniel Craig is a commanding presence as crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Steve Zaillian's script trims some of the novel's fat, keeping the film a lean, mean and frightening beast. It's ultimately David Fincher's perfectionist talent for creating a gripping aesthetic that raises this film above your average adaptation. What Fincher brings to the table is a particular talent for atmospheric, highly stylized mystery.

If you enjoy a good mystery that's as grimy as a stomped on cigarette on the pavement then this film will have you hooked. Fans of the books should be pleased.

Sidney Lumet’s The Hill is a stark, uncompromising look at the inside of a British military prison in North Africa during WW II. The all-male film, based on Ray Rigby's autobiographical play, is about the brutal mistreatment of prisoners by the screws at a stockade for court-martialed British soldiers.

In this long and unrelenting documentation of life in a military stockade, Sidney Lumet comes up with the sobering revelation that inhumanity is not unique with the enemy, in his own inimitable style. The cinematography is superlative as Oswald Morris shoots the film in monochromatic hues, making you feel parched from minute one. The acting is also top-notch. Harry Andrews is devastating as the taut sergeant major that runs the camp and Ian Hendry is brilliantly sinister as the evil sergeant who precipitates the crisis. Connery tears up the screen as the rebellious inmate, giving an intelligently restrained performance, carefully avoiding forced histrionics.

‘The Hill’ is a harsh, sadistic and brutal entertainment, made without any concessions to officialdom - among the best of the subgenre has to offer.

Technically impeccable, ‘The Impossible’ gives the brutal caprice of nature its due, never romanticizing it or demonizing it. It begins as a steady radio dial, suddenly and violently spun into fits of static and garbled chaos. Director Juan Antonio Bayona conducts this symphony with a steady hand and a wonderful visual eye. This swift wrath of nature is expertly realized, but the heart of the film is in its characters and how they respond to the betrayal of the world around them. Naomi Watts, in her career best performance, expresses the rooted emotions of a mother both physically and emotionally, filling the film with so much fearlessness and unshakable motivation, that she enraptures the audience with her survival instincts. Tom Holland beautifully delivers a complex series of emotions with natural serenity.

The Impossible separates itself from the other disaster films by focusing not just on the scale of the mayhem, but the intimacy of the struggle. Yes it takes us back to an epic nightmare that was the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, but the flashback is vertiginous and horrible and oddly poetic.

The Lion in Winter is an intense, fierce, personal drama, directed with evident pleasure about treachery in the family of King Henry II. Cataloging the vicious wrangling for inheritance one Christmas holiday, the action is mostly contained within one day. In a single day, the characters are stripped bare of all inner torments, outward pretensions and governing personality traits. The relationships between people, though ambivalent, are ambivalent with a certain satisfying ferocity.

Director Anthony Harvey’s knowledge of the craft aids him in keeping the tension high and never letting the audience settle for long on an outcome in the constant feud, with twists, turns and plenty of incredible backstabbing. This film, however, is all about the thorny and turbulent relationship between Henry and his wife Eleanor. A marvelously flamboyant Peter O'Toole plays the revolting king to the hilt and holds his own against Katherine Hepburn in a witty, literate, and inventive script. Katherine Hepburn is simply magnificent as the scheming and shrewd Eleanor of Aquitaine.

It’s a nuanced, gorgeous film that keeps you riveted right from the word go.

The Ox-Bow Incident is a stark, lyrical and somber Western about frontier justice.

In a little over an hour, it exhibits tragic violation of justice with little backlash to sweeten the bitter aftertaste. Director William A. Wellman has directed the picture with a realism that is as sharp and cold as a knife from a beautiful script. The movie is impressively taut largely because of Wellman's succinct pacing of the material. The manner in which he has studied his characters is a lesson in close-up art and the terror which he has packed into that night ‘trial’ is drama at its cruel and cynical best. The acting is first-rate all around: with Fonda's heart-wringing performance taking center stage as the rough cowboy made an unwilling affiliate of the lynching.

The Ox-Bow Incident is not a movie which will brighten your day. However, there's a certain gripping power about it that makes it a landmark Western and one of the most poignant films ever made.

John Frankenheimer’s thrilling war drama ‘The Train’ concerns an elaborate railroad resistance plot to keep a train full of French art treasures from being shipped to Germany, in the waning days of the war.

Even at 133 minutes, there’s scarcely a second of The Train that doesn’t move it forward on the tracks. Though The Train is a marvel of old-fashioned action craft, from invisible dolly shots of breathtaking sophistication to the careful staging of massive railway catastrophes, it’s not a thoughtless adventure by any means. In Frankenheimer's hands, the whole paraphernalia of trains, tracks and shunting yards acquires an almost hypnotic fascination as the screen becomes a giant chessboard on which huge metallic pawns are maneuvered. The action scenes hold up really well nearly five decades on largely because Frankenheimer crashes real steam locomotives on several occasions — including a three-way pileup that puts any modern CGI conflagration to shame.

It all adds up to a thrilling, ingenious World War II drama that still ranks as one of the best train movies of all time.