Geoffrey O’Brien

In the great American writer’s Gothic tales, Corman found themes that inspired him to riff, invent, and create immersive cinematic environments.

This uncanny tale of existential anxiety stands out as the most rigorously pared-down American science-fiction film of the 1950s.

A ballad from the 1910s becomes a precarious way station between life and death in Akira Kurosawa’s portrait of an ordinary man’s final days.

Sprawling across more than half a century of American history, Martin Scorsese’s crime saga combines epic ambition with a mood of isolation and dissolution.

Hollywood has never produced a comedy more acutely witty, more sexually playful, or more unexpectedly moving than this flawlessly engineered masterpiece by Preston Sturges.

Often credited with inciting full enforcement of the Hays Code, this harrowing melodrama is one of the few Faulkner adaptations that successfully evokes the writer’s distinctive ambience and unsettling contradictions.

In the string of early-career triumphs that established him as the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock captured his native England with a tactile immediacy.

Unlike his adaptations of Shakespeare and Kafka, Orson Welles’s take on a Pulitzer Prize winner by Booth Tarkington is remarkably faithful to its source.

Martin Scorsese brought his trademark attentiveness to the intricacies of social custom to this devastating adaptation of an Edith Wharton novel.

The result of a tumultuous production, Orson Welles’s eccentric take on Othello infuses the play with a convulsive rhythm and disorienting sense of abstraction.

In this lavishly mounted epic, Stanley Kubrick captures the ghostly ephemerality of a vanishing world with paradoxical immediacy.

John Huston’s meticulously calibrated crime film combines nail-biting suspense with a mood of Chekhovian regret.

Cloaked in chiaroscuro and innuendo, this stylistically innovative creature feature leaves its greatest horrors to the imagination.

Masaki Kobayashi takes on broken vows and the unreality of the past in his sensual and spooky four-part adaptation of Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese folktales.

Two precocious youngsters try to carve out a corner of the world just for themselves in Wes Anderson’s alternately melancholy and boisterous tale of growing pains.

In his first feature, Jean-Pierre Melville found subtly radical ways to adapt Vercors's underground French novel about quiet resistance against the German occupation.

Georges Franju evokes the surreal silent serials of Louis Feuillade while constructing his own personal cinematic paradise.

Howard Hawks was both a skillful Hollywood craftsman and a deeply personal artist, and this western of uncommon wit and grandeur is among his greatest and quirkiest films.

He massages, he gambles, and he’s great with a blade. Who is this blind swordsman, anyway?

Ernst Lubitsch’s World War II–era high-wire act is a profound take on the absurdity cruelty of civilization and a perfect black comedy to boot.

The prophetic voice of H. G. Wells resonates throughout this singularly ambitious, spectacularly designed vision.

In René Clément’s sparkling but menacing anti-noir, the Mediterranean setting is as seductive as Alain Delon’s baby blues.