Stifled yearnings and bittersweet small-town comedy in Alice Adams

Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons: Our City

In a Lonely Place: Film noir as an opera of male fury

The Swimmer: A prophetic modernist fable set in a fading Eden

Slaughterhouse-Five: Unstuck in time, but alive and affecting on screen

Down the Nightmare Alley: A noirish dance of shadow and light

Indignation: Roth, repression, and rebellion in the early Fifties

Unforgettable lonely boy James Dean carries East of Eden on his narrow shoulders

When it’s okay to stray from the source: No Way Out resets The Big Clock

Hello, Dolly! is still looking swell on the big screen

The “tragedy of desire” in An American Tragedy and A Place in the Sun

Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina, and the romance of crime in Band of Outsiders

Reflections in a Golden Eye: a “hothouse tale” of desire and simmering violence

Intruder in the Dust captures the chilling reality of Jim Crow

Freedom Riders: Terror and profundity in eyewitness history of an epochal era

L.A. story: A dark, seductive tale of lust and murder in Double Indemnity