J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga (originally published in three volumes from July 1954 to October 1955) was bound to be adapted eventually to the cinema, but the task of visualizing Tolkien's imaginary world was daunting, and the project awaited a director bold enough and inventive enough to take it on. (Ralph Bakshi had done a partial animated adaptation in 1978 that Variety considered "unsuccessful.") New Zealand director Peter Jackson was apparently up to the challenge, one would surmise, on the evidence of the Rings trilogy's first installment, The Fellowship of the Rings.

 

The film was a huge, sprawling spectacle, astonishing in its grand achievement. Not many Hollywood analogues come to mind, but the nearest one might be The Wizard of Oz (1939), though Tolkien's vision is far darker than that of L. Frank Baum. Although the casting of Oz would be impossible to match, of course, the casting of Rings also impresses. No less impressive is the scope of the tale, elegant, mythic, and fantastic in the truest sense of the word.

In a fairy-tale setting conjured up by a kindly Oxford University specialist in medieval literature, the story involves a mythic quest to destroy a magical ring forged by the wicked Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor, in a volcano. The ring is evil and seductive for anyone who wears it. It is a touchstone that can endow its wearer with power of world domination, but the ring itself is evil and must be destroyed. Once lost for centuries, the ring is found by Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm), a good-natured Hobbit, a gentle race of furry-footed diminutive creatures who are perfectly happy to live their sheltered little world, called The Shire, amusing themselves with rustic entertainments, and generally unconcerned and unaware of the larger world or ordinary mortals.

Bilbo, a paradigm of decency, has never worn the ring and has therefore avoided being seduced by its evil powers. It has

Nosferatu was the first film version of Dracula; more than 70 years later, it remains easily the most intelligent adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel (its nearest, not very close, rival being John Badham's 1978 version with Frank Langella).

Given the way in which Stoker's vampire aristocrat has haunted popular culture since the appearance of the novel in 1890, the figure's social/ideological significance can scarcely be exaggerated.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest – the first film to win Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay since It Happened One Night in 1934 – is more than a superlative human drama. It is, on a broader level, one of the seminal works of its time in that it keenly reflects the systematic stifling of individuality within post-World War II American society.

The plot of Sunrise was adapted to Hollywood conventions from a naturalistic novella by Hermann Sudermann. It is wrong, however, to assume the changes were all for the bad, as so many critics have done. The film's plot is neither hopelessly sentimental nor melodramatic. It is true that Carl Mayer and F. W. Murnau, with a free hand from the studio, changed the tragic ending of the novella

Although it has been seldom shown in the years since its introduction in 1932 as a "masterpiece of horror," Tod Browning's Freaks has achieved near-legendary cult status and continues to exert a major influence on modern attempts at the baroque film. Certainly the powers of its wedding feast sequence was not lost on Luis Buñuel when he staged the tramp's "last supper" in his 1961 Viridiana. And the

A pet project of Darryl Zanuck's, The Grapes of Wrath exercised the packaging talents of Fox's studio head for a large part of 1939 as he put together a team appropriate to a book with the stature of Steinbeck's novel. John Ford was an obvious choice to direct, Dudley Nichols to write the script, and Henry Fonda to star as Tom Joad, the uneducated ex-convict "Oakie" who becomes

The Maltese Falcon opens with credits appearing over the falcon statue, which casts a shadow into the depth of the frame. There follows a printed commentary, over the image, about the falcon's history. A shot of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, establishes location, and we move to the Spade and Archer sign on the window of their office. The shadow letters "Spade and Archer" appear on the

Martin Scorsese's telling of the story of Jake La Motta, Raging Bull, has given rise to a number of different, often conflicting, readings. For Scorsese himself, La Motta's trajectory from promising boxer to middleweight champion of the world to night-club performer is the story of "a guy attaining something and losing everything, and then redeeming himself." Such a reading is clearly reinforced by the quotation from St. John's

Hiroshima mon amour was the first feature directed by Alain Resnais. Besides establishing the director's international reputation, the film was one of several released in 1959 signalling the emergence of a new generation of French filmmakers working in a modernist narrative vein. Indeed, the film is considered something of a landmark in the history of modernist cinema. The film is also seen as an exemplary instance of artistic

In itself, E.T. would hardly concern us; if not entirely negligible (it manifests certain skills, and contains a few memorable turns of dialogue, such as the question of how one explains "school" to a "higher intelligence"), it has no greater claim on the attention than countless other minor Hollywood movies. It does demand consideration as a cultural phenomenon: not merely the film itself and what it signifies, but