Movies: All-Time Greatest, Nos. 75-51

Directed by Orson Welles

Set in a squalid Mexican border town, Welles' most fully realized film after Citizen Kane is a yarn of kidnapping and murder that was so shockingly dark for its time (and we don't just mean the gorgeous chiaroscuro photography) that its studio cut it to ribbons. Completely restored, it now looks like the missing link between film noir and David Lynch.

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PG-13

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Bigelow's powerful portrait of bomb defusers during the Iraq war uses the hair-trigger suspense of men who could die at any moment to express the mad reality of combat in the age of modern guerrilla war.

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R

Directed by Bob Fosse

Liza Minnelli's Sally Bowles, a ''divinely decadent'' American in pre-WWII Berlin, belts out ''Life is a cabaret,'' and we believe every word, even when the meaning turns ominously ironic. No one does Bowles like Liza.

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PG

Directed by François Truffaut

Truffaut's first film was also his first collaboration with his onscreen alter ego, Jean-Pierre Léaud. A piercing study of a Parisian kid, adrift and on the road to nothing good.

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NOT RATED

Directed by George Lucas

Before he took us to a galaxy far, far away, Lucas more or less invented nostalgia culture with this loving tribute to the last days of greasers, drive-in diners, and cruising up and down Main Street in classic American cars. For a movie full of iconic moments, it's a breathtakingly fluid and spontaneous rock & roll comedy (with a who's who of future big stars). It's set just as the '50s youthquake was winding down, but the key to its wistful melancholy is that it's really about the changes coming around the corner that no one could see.

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PG

Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

Antonioni's immortal tale of aristocratic ennui is a kind of anti-thriller about the search for a woman who vanishes mysteriously during a day trip...and never returns.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

A pitch-black comedy about the threat of nuclear annihilation that only gets funnier — and blacker — as the decades go by, Kubrick's satire is shot like a documentary and laced with an almost psychotic sense of danger. Peter Sellers plays three different roles, all brilliantly.

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PG

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Scorsese's crackerjack gangster drama, starring Ray Liotta as an up-and-coming mobster, is a showcase for the filmmaker's famous virtuosity, from his perfectionist craftsmanship (check out that restaurant tracking shot!) to his kid-from-city-streets feel for Italian-American blood bonds. The film's highlight performance is the one by Joe (''I amuse you?'') Pesci.

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R

Directed by Nicholas Ray

James Dean's smashing star turn as an alienated young guy set the standard for the movie representation of alienated young guys (and their like-minded gals).

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PG-13

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Kubrick turns Stephen King's domestic ghost story about a kid who sees visions of his father's hidden malevolence into a gothic horror movie as dislocatingly odd as it is scary. Just because Jack Nicholson's marvelously controlled nutjob performance (''Heeeere's Johnny!'') is drop-dead funny doesn't mean it's not also seriously terrifying.

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R

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Bertolucci's landmark of screen eroticism has become famous for its emotionally naked sex scenes, but Marlon Brando, in one of his greatest performances, also makes the film into a searing tragedy of midlife despair.

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NC-17

Directed by William Wyler

Three World War II veterans return home in one of the least sentimental war pictures of all time, a soldiers' story as vital and relevant today as it was then.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Sidney Lumet

In the '70s, Paddy Chayefsky's biting vision of where TV and celebrity were headed seemed like an over-the-top satire. It now looks like one of the most prophetic movies ever, as Peter Finch's mad truth-teller single-handedly invents reality TV. The movie foresaw how even authentic populist anger could turn itself into entertainment.

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R

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Its special effects no longer look as dazzling, but that only underscores the storytelling incandescence of Spielberg's suburban fairy tale about a family's close encounter with a scrunchy-faced munchkin from outer space.

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PG

Directed by Jonathan Demme

To find a serial killer, an FBI trainee (Jodie Foster) consults a genius of a psychopath (Anthony Hopkins, the chillingly urbane face of evil as Hannibal Lecter) in a horror-thriller classic that's at once disquieting, moving, and mesmerizing.

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R

Directed by Mark Sandrich

Heaven, we're in heaven — and we seem to find the happiness we seek when Fred and Ginger are dancing cheek to cheek.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Alan J. Pakula

The ultimate newspaper film, this dramatization of how Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered the Watergate scandal is a true-life testament to the fervor — and obsessive, midnight-oil dedication — that fuels the fourth estate.

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PG

Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Bergman's tale of a medieval knight's journey is full of legendary symbols (like the chess game with Death), and the film itself has come to stand for the heady pleasures of foreign cinema.

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NOT RATED

Directed by John Schlesinger

Jon Voight, as a naive would-be gigolo, and Dustin Hoffman, as a down-and-out disabled con artist, make for filmdom's most moving buddies in this epochal portrait of life on the mean streets of late-'60s Manhattan.

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R

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Spielberg's shattering Holocaust epic, based on the real life of a gentile who saved Jews in World War II, made the darkest chapter of 20th-century history real in a way that no other dramatic reenactment has.

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R

Directed by James Whale

Whale's enduring tale of the undead is a myth of science gone mad, featuring an unforgettable Boris Karloff as the horror genre's most sympathetic monster.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Cops chase a French punk and his American girl in Godard's seismically influential cornerstone of the French New Wave, based on a story by fellow cinema poet-rebel François Truffaut.

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NOT RATED

Directed by Irvin Kershner

Cloud City! The AT-AT Walkers! The sage of the Dagobah system, Yoda! The deepening relationships among darkening characters! For those reasons and so many more, this centerpiece in the first Star Wars trilogy remains the jewel in the intergalactic crown.

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PG

Directed by James Cameron

The one disaster movie that's also a work of art, Cameron's magnificent epic moves us with a youthful love story made memorable by tragedy. The sinking of the Titanic unfolds in real time, which only heightens the film's everlasting romantic grandeur.

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PG-13

Directed by Richard Lester

A jukebox rock fable that's really one of the great screen musicals, with the young Beatles snarking and cavorting like gods at play.

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