Now perhaps the most beloved American film, It's a Wonderful Life was largely forgotten for years, due to a copyright quirk. Only in the late 1970s did it find its audience through repeated TV showings. Frank Capra's masterwork deserves its status as a feel-good communal event, but it is also one of the most fascinating films in the American cinema, a multilayered work of Dickensian ...

Manufacturer: Universal Pictures UK
Starring: James Stewart, Charles Lane, Charles Williams, Bob Scott, H.B. Warner
Directed By: Frank Capra

Disney's 1959 Sleeping Beauty was the studio's most ambitious effort to date, a lavish spectacle boasting a gorgeous waltz-filled score adapted from the music of Tchaikovsky. In the 14th century, the malevolent Maleficent (not dissimilar to the wicked queen in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) taunts a king that his infant Aurora will fatally prick her finger on a ...

Manufacturer: Disney
Starring: Mary Costa, Bill Shirley, Eleanor Audley, Verna Felton
Directed By: Clyde Geronimi

Disney's 1967 animated feature The Jungle Book seems even more entertaining now than it did upon first release, with a hall-of-fame vocal performance by Phil Harris as Baloo, the genial bear friend of feral child Mowgli. Loosely based on Rudyard Kipling's original, the film goes its own way as Disney animation will, but the strong characters and smart casting (George Sanders as the ...

Manufacturer: Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Directed By: Wolfgang Reitherman

Arguably the greatest black comedy ever made, Stanley Kubrick's cold war classic is the ultimate satire of the nuclear age. Dr. Strangelove is a perfect spoof of political and military insanity, beginning when General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), a maniacal warrior obsessed with "the purity of precious bodily fluids," mounts his singular campaign against Communism by ordering a ...

Manufacturer: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Starring: George C. Scott, Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens
Directed By: Stanley Kubrick

There is only one word that comes close to accurately describing the enchanting Mary Poppins, and that term was coined by the movie itself: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! Even at 2 hours and 20 minutes, Disney's pioneering mixture of live action and animation (based on the books by P.L. Travers) still holds kids spellbound. Julie Andrews won an Oscar as the world's most magically ...

Manufacturer: Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Starring: Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke, David Tomlinson, Glynis Johns, Hermione Baddeley
Directed By: Robert Stevenson

Sidney Lumet's directorial debut Twelve Angry Men remains a tense, atmospheric (though slightly manipulative and stagey) courtroom thriller, in which the viewer never sees a trial and the only action is verbal. As he does in his later corruption commentaries such as Serpico or Q & A, Lumet focuses on the lonely one-man battles of a protagonist whose ethics alienate him from ...

Manufacturer: MGM Entertainment
Starring: Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, E.G. Marshall
Directed By: Sidney Lumet

Manufacturer: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Starring: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones

Peter Pan has a special place in the realm of classic animated Disney films: it instills an element of childlike wonder. The 1953 version of James M. Barrie's story is colourfully told and keeps on the straight and narrow of the book. Barrie's wondrous focus on child's play is the key to its longevity: kids who don't grow up, shadows that run away from their owners, pirates, a fairy, and ...

Manufacturer: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainm

Hollywood's legendary "woman's director," George Cukor (The Women, The Philadelphia Story), transformed Audrey Hepburn into street-urchin-turned-proper-lady Eliza Doolittle in this film version of the Lerner and Loewe musical. Based on George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, My Fair Lady stars Rex Harrison as linguist Henry Higgins (Harrison also played the role, opposite ...

Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
Starring: Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison, Stanley Holloway, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Gladys Cooper
Directed By: George Cukor

Based on the true story of the building of a bridge on the Burma railway by British prisoners-of-war held under a savage Japanese regime in World War II, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) is one of the greatest war films ever made. The film received seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, Performance (Alex Guinness), for Sir Malcolm Arnold's superb music, and for the screenplay ...

Manufacturer: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Starring: William Holden, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Sessue Hayakawa, James Donald
Directed By: David Lean