Law and disorder in Edward Dmytryk’s Warlock

The Ox-Bow Incident: William Wellman’s stunning Western illuminates how righteous cowboys can become a mob of vigilantes

We will film them on the beaches: Darryl F. Zanuck’s The Longest Day

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