1940s

It is remarkable on its own that George Cukor united Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart in one film and captured such fine performances from each, though The Philadelphia Story is also even more delightful for its marvellously constructed web of romantic entanglements, which its lively screenplay and stars pick apart with insurmountable charm…

As a crafter of truly stunning set pieces, Raoul Walsh expertly matches gangster Cody Jarrett’s huge emotions with kinetic, bombastic visuals in White Heat, but such slick direction is also perfectly suited to the Freudian bond he shares with his mother, exposing a pitiful underside to the tough, vicious persona he puts out into the…

Alfred Hitchcock’s eerie adaptation of Rebecca maintains the Gothic novel’s mysterious, lyrical quality, but it is especially through his floating camerawork and evocative expressionism that he conjures the memory of its unseen title character, psychologically haunting the new wife of a wealthy widower with the legacy she hangs over his estate.

To be human in Pinocchio is to possess both free will and a conscience, and it is through its rich allegory of puppets and donkeys that Walt Disney imparts his dark, moralistic musings with dynamic visual expressions, crafting a staggering accomplishment in hand-drawn animation, each one tangibly alive in their tactile movements and wood-carved textures.

Alcoholic writer Don Birnam may be totally infatuated with his vice, and yet the steady downward slide that Billy Wilder sets him on in The Lost Weekend sinks him deeper than he has ever been before, building out this compelling journey to rock bottom through intoxicating motifs and richly drawn characterisations that paint out an…

There are few film noirs one could point to that typifies the genre more than Double Indemnity, where Billy Wilder’s gloriously expressionistic set pieces and passionately cynical writing evolves one man’s macabre curiosity into a hideous corruption of his soul, absorbing him in a murder plot almost as tightly wound as the gripping narrative that…