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

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

Maybe "nobody's perfect", as one character in this masterpiece suggests. But some movies are perfect, and Some Like It Hot is one of them. In Chicago, during the Prohibition era, two skirt-chasing musicians, Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon), inadvertently witness the St Valentine's Day Massacre. In order to escape the wrath of gangland chief Spats Colombo (George Raft), the boys, ...

Manufacturer: MGM Entertainment
Starring: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, George Raft, Pat O'Brien
Directed By: Billy Wilder

While perhaps not the defining moment in the making of Leonardo DiCaprio's career, his appearance in this dazzling take on William Shakepeare's Romeo & Juliet back in 1996 did the careers of both Clare Danes and himself no harm at all. Perhaps the real star of the show here though is director Baz Luhrmann, who employs a frenetic, at times downright-brilliant style to the age-old tale of ...

Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, Brian Dennehy, John Leguizamo, Pete Postlethwaite
Directed By: Baz Luhrmann

The Forsyte Saga is often cited as the first television miniseries; it wasn't, but there's no question that it was a singular, powerful cultural phenomenon that deservedly got under the skin of European viewers in 1967. Today the 26-episode production, based on several novels and short stories by John Galsworthy, is a more timeless enterprise than many of the protracted British TV dramas ...

Manufacturer: 2 Entertain Video
Starring: Susan Hampshire, Richard Armour, Christopher Benjamin, George Benson, Caroline Blakiston
Directed By: James Cellan Jones

Dating from 1969, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has never lost its popularity or its unusual appeal as a star-driven Western that tinkers with the genre's conventions and comes up with something both terrifically entertaining and--typical of its period--a tad paranoid. Paul Newman plays the legendary outlaw Butch Cassidy as an eternal optimist and self-styled visionary, conjuring ...

Manufacturer: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Starring: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katharine Ross, Strother Martin, Henry Jones
Directed By: George Roy Hill

Manufacturer: MGM Entertainment
Starring: Cary Grant, Loretta Young, David Niven, Monty Woolley, James Gleason
Directed By: Henry Koster

Ranked 34 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest American Films, To Kill a Mockingbird is quite simply one of the finest family-oriented dramas ever made. A beautiful and deeply affecting adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee, the film retains a timeless quality that transcends its historically dated subject matter (racism in the Depression-era ...

Manufacturer: Universal Pictures Video
Starring: Gregory Peck, John Megna, Frank Overton, Rosemary Murphy, Ruth White
Directed By: Robert Mulligan

A truly perfect movie, the 1942 Casablanca still wows viewers today, and for good reason. Its unique story of a love triangle set against terribly high stakes in the war against a monster is sophisticated instead of outlandish, intriguing instead of garish. Humphrey Bogart plays the allegedly apolitical club owner in unoccupied French territory that is nevertheless crawling with Nazis; ...

Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt
Directed By: Michael Curtiz

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