The Big Heat: Fritz Lang's dark masterpiece of film noir. Glenn Ford stars as a rogue homicide cop who takes the law into his own hands when he sets out to smash a vicious crime syndicate responsible for the car bomb that killed his wife.

C.C. Baxter knows the way to success in the corporate world...it's through the door of his apartment! By providing a perfect hideaway for philandering bosses, the ambitious young employee reaps a series of undeserved promotions. But when Baxter lends the key to the big boss J.D. Sheldrake, he not only advances his career, but lessens his chance of wooing the lovely Fran Kubelik, elevator girl and angel of his dreams. Convinced that he is the only man for Fran, Baxter must make the most important executive decision of his career: lose the girl...or lose his job.

It's the hope that sustains the spirit of every GI: the dream of the day when he will finally return home. For three WWII veterans, the day has arrived. But for each man, the dream is about to become a nightmare. Captain Derry is returning to a loveless marriage; Sergeant Stephenson is a stranger to a family that's grown up without him; and young sailor Homer Parrish is tormented by the loss of his hands. Can these three men find the courage to rebuild their world? Or are the best years of their lives a thing of the past? This postwar classic garnered seven Oscars, including Best Picture. Heart-wrenching, touching and filled with emotional dynamite, it remains one of the best films about war veterans ever made.

Stanley Kubrick’s account of an ambitious racetrack robbery is one of Hollywood’s tautest, twistiest noirs. Aided by a radically time-shuffling narrative, razor-sharp dialogue from pulp novelist Jim Thompson, and a phenomenal cast of character actors, The Killing is both a jaunty thriller and a cold-blooded punch to the gut. And with its precise tracking shots and gratifying sense of irony, it’s Kubrick to the core.

Winner of seven 1970 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor for George C. Scott, Patton is a riveting portrayal of one of the Twentieth century's greatest military geniuses. As rebellious as he was brilliant, George Patton was the only general truly feared by the Nazis, yet his own volatile personality was the one enemy he could never defeat.

Roy Neary experiences a close encounter of the first kind - witnessing UFOs soaring across the sky. Meanwhile, government agents have close encounters of the second kind - discovering physical evidence of extraterrestrial visitors in the form of lost fighter aircraft from World War II and a stranded ship that disappeared decades earlier only to suddenly reappear in an unusual place. Roy and Jillian, whose son was abducted by the aliens, along with others who have had similar experiences follow the clues that have drawn them to reach a site where they will have a close encounter of the third kind - contact.

Working together for the 12th time, John Wayne and director John Ford forged The Searchers into a landmark Western offering an indelible image of the frontier and the men and women who challenged it. Wayne plays an ex-Confederate soldier seeking his niece, captured by Comanches who massacred his family. He won't surrender to hunger, thirst, the elements, or loneliness. And in his five-year search, he encounters something unexpected: his own humanity. Beautifully shot, thrillingly scored, and memorably acted The Searchers endures as a great film of enormous scope and breathtaking physical beauty.

When a street musician meets a feisty keyboardist during one of his performances, the pair immediately bond over their shared love of music. Over the course of one electric week, the duo writes, performs, and records an incredible cycle of songs every bit as spontaneous and souful as their improbable romance.

The General is an epic of silent comedy, one of the most expensive films of its time, including an accurate historical recreation of a Civil War episode, hundreds of extras, dangerous stunt sequences, and an actual locomotive falling from a burning bridge into a gorge far below. It was inspired by a real event; the screenplay was based on the book "The Great Locomotive Chase,” written by William Pittenger, the engineer who was involved.

The master of the American western, Sam Peckinpah, directs a stellar cast in this movie that breathed new life into the genre and broke ground in the realistic portrayal of screen violence. This explosive adventure drama is about the last of the legendary lawless breed who lived to kill -- and killed to live. Receiving two Academy Award nominations, this bitter, brutal story of magnificent losers in a dying West remains one of the screen's all-time classics.

Philip Kaufman's intimate epic about the Mercury astronauts (based on Tom Wolfe's book) is one of the most ambitious and spectacularly exciting movies of all time. Combining history, adventure, behind-the-scenes drama, spectacular visuals, and a down-to-earth sense of humor, The Right Stuff chronicles NASA's efforts to put a man in space. Such an achievement would be the first step toward President Kennedy's goal of reaching the moon, and, perhaps most important of all, would win a crucial public relations/morale victory over the Soviets, who had delivered a stunning blow to American pride by launching Sputnik, the first satellite. The movie contrasts the daring feats of the unsung test pilots--one of whom, Chuck Yeager, embodied more than anyone else the skill and spirit of Wolfe's "right stuff"--against the heavily publicized (and sanitized) accomplishments of the Mercury astronauts. Through no fault of their own, the spacemen became prisoners of the heroic images the government created for them in order to capture the public's imagination.

In this seven-time Oscar-nominated film, things go terribly awry when small-time Minnesota car salesman Jerry Lundegaard hires two thugs to kidnap his wife so he can collect the ransom from his wealthy father-in-law. Once people start dying, the very chipper and very pregnant Police Chief Marge Gunderson takes the case. Is she up for this challenge? You betcha.

When a gifted but washed-up screenwriter with a hair-trigger temper becomes the prime suspect in a brutal Tinseltown murder, the only person who can supply an alibi for him is a seductive neighbor with her own troubled past. In a Lonely Place is a brilliant, emotionally charged, suspenseful noir fueled by the powerhouse performances of Bogart and Grahame. An uncompromising tale of two people desperate to love yet struggling with their demons and each other, this is one of the greatest films of the 1950s, and a benchmark in the career of the classic Hollywood auteur Nicholas Ray.

Director Jean-Luc Godard burst onto the film scene in 1960 with this jazzy, free-form, and sexy homage to the American film genres that inspired him as a writer for the French movie magazine “Cahiers du Cinéma.” With its lack of polish, surplus of attitude, anything-goes crime narrative, and effervescent young stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, Breathless helped launch the French New Wave and ensured that cinema would never be the same.

Stanley Kubrick's dazzling, Academy Award-winning achievement is a compelling drama of man vs. machine, a stunning meld of music and motion. Kubrick (who co-wrote the screenplay with Arthur C. Clarke) first visits our prehistoric ape-ancestry past, then leaps millennia (via one of the most mind-blowing jump cuts ever) into colonized space, and ultimately whisks astronaut Bowman into uncharted space, perhaps even into immortality. "Open the pod bay doors, HAL." Let an awesome journey unlike any other begin.

This is where it all started. John Ford’s smash hit and enduring masterpiece Stagecoach revolutionized the western, elevating it from B-movie to the A-list and establishing the genre as we know it today. The quintessential tale of a group of strangers thrown together into extraordinary circumstances, Stagecoach features outstanding performances from Hollywood stalwarts Claire Trevor, John Carradine, and Thomas Mitchell, and, of course, John Wayne, in his first starring role for Ford, as the daredevil outlaw the Ringo Kid. Superbly shot and tightly edited, Stagecoach (Ford’s first trip to Monument Valley) is Hollywood storytelling at its finest.

No matter what genre he worked in, Howard Hawks played by his own rules, and never was this more evident than in his first western, the rowdy and whip-smart Red River. In it, John Wayne found one of his greatest roles, as an embittered, tyrannical Texas rancher whose tensions with his independent-minded adopted son—played by Montgomery Clift, in a breakout performance—reach epic proportions during a cattle drive to Missouri. The film is based on a novel that dramatizes the real-life late nineteenth-century expeditions along the Chisholm Trail, but Hawks is less interested in historical accuracy than in tweaking the codes of masculinity that propel the myths of the American West. The unerringly macho Wayne and the neurotic, boyish Clift make for an improbably perfect pair, held aloft by a quick-witted, multilayered screenplay and Hawks’s formidable direction.

Jean Gabin is at his most wearily romantic as aging gangster Max in the Jacques Becker gem Touchez Pas au Grisbi. Having pulled off the heist of a lifetime, Max looks forward to spending his remaining days relaxing with his beautiful young girlfriend. But when Riton, Max’s hapless partner and best friend, lets word of the loot slip to loose-lipped, two-timing Josy, Max is reluctantly drawn back into the underworld. A touchstone of the gangster-film genre, Touchez Pas au Grisbi is also pure Becker—understated, elegant, evocative.

Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin’s last outing as the Little Tramp, puts the iconic character to work as a giddily inept factory employee who becomes smitten with a gorgeous gamine. With its barrage of unforgettable gags and sly commentary on class struggle during the Great Depression, Modern Times—though made almost a decade into the talkie era and containing moments of sound (even song!)—is a timeless showcase of Chaplin’s untouchable genius as a director of silent comedy.

Screen legends star in this brilliantly made courtroom drama that left audiences reeling from its surprise twists and shocking climax. Directed by Billy Wilder, scripted by Wilder and Harry Kurnitz, and based on Agatha Christie's hit London play, this splendid, one-of-a-kind classic crackles with emotional electricity and continues to keep movie lovers riveted until the final, mesmerizing frame. When a wealthy widow is found murdered, her married suitor, Leonard Vole, is accused of the crime. Vole's only hope for acquittal is the testimony of his wife ... but his airtight alibi shatters when she reveals some shocking secrets of her own! Nominated for 6 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Laughton) and Supporting Actress (Lanchester).

Sergio Leone's monumental picture ranks among his most admired achievments. In the dying days of the Old West, a struggle to control water in a dusty desert town embroils three hard-bitten gunmen in an epic clash of greed, honor, and revenge. Henry Fonda stars in his most sinister role as Frank, a hired killer who ruthlessly slays an entire family. Jason Robards plays Cheyenne, an infamous bandit framed for the slaughter. And Charles Bronson is Harmonica, a mysterious loner determined to exact vengeance for a grudge he refuses to divulge. An influence on countless directors, Leone's masterpiece is considered among the greatest Westerns ever made.

Nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Apollo 13 is the inspiring and riveting story of the real-life space flight that gripped the nation and changed the world. It had been less than a year since man first walked on the moon, but as far as the American public was concerned, Apollo 13 was just another "routine" space flight - until these infamous words pierced the immense void of space: "Houston, we have a problem." Apollo 13 showcases NASA's epic operation to save the lives of three astronauts battling to survive an ill-fated mission to the moon.

Before the night is out, the star witness for an important trial lies dying and Detective Frank Bullitt won't rest until the shooters -- and the kingpin pulling their strings -- are nailed. From opening shot to closing shootout, Bullitt crackles with authenticity: San Francisco locations, crisp dialogue, and to-the-letter police, hospital, and morgue procedures. An Oscar winner for Best Film Editing, this razor-edged thriller features one of cinema history's most memorable car chases. Buckle up and brace for unbeatable action.

Toshirô Mifune is unforgettable as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy industrialist whose family becomes the target of a cold-blooded kidnapper in High and Low, the highly influential domestic drama and police procedural from director Akira Kurosawa. Adapting Ed McBain’s detective novel King’s Ransom, Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a diabolical treatise on contemporary Japanese society.

A virtuoso James Stewart plays a small-town Michigan lawyer who takes on a difficult case: the defense of a young army lieutenant accused of murdering a local tavern owner who he believes raped his wife. This gripping envelope-pusher, the most popular film by Hollywood provocateur Otto Preminger, was groundbreaking for the frankness of its discussion of sex -- but more than anything else, it is a striking depiction of the power of words. Featuring an outstanding supporting cast, Anatomy of a Murder is an American movie landmark, nominated for seven Oscars, including best picture.