Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley: The con is on

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

Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons: Our City

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

Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd: Elemental conflict in a vivid tapestry of life at sea

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

Stifled yearnings and bittersweet small-town comedy in Alice Adams

Intruder in the Dust captures the chilling reality of Jim Crow

Dance of the damned: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

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

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

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