The Sting: Good-Hearted Grifters

Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Photo: Universal One of David S. Ward's first scripts introduced us to the world of confidence men. Not that they hadn't been seen on screen…

Rocky: Rise of an Italian Stallion

Sylvester Stallone. Photo: United Artists At the 1977 Academy Awards, Sylvester Stallone and Muhammad Ali staged a comic brawl as a way of showing that Ali had no ill feelings…

The Apartment: Executive Privilege

Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Photo: United Artists When Billy Wilder saw Brief Encounter (1945), where Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard have their rendezvous in an apartment belonging to a…

Wings 

When the United States enters World War I, two young men (Charles "Buddy" Rogers, Richard Arlen) from the same small town, one rich and the other poor, join the Air…

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: The Crazy Ones

Photo: United Artists Author Ken Kesey considered himself a link between beatniks and hippies, a critic of behaviorism and the conventional. His most famous novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's…

Rain Man: Escaping a Bubble

Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. Photo: MGM 1988 and 1989 were awkward years for the Academy Awards. It's not like there weren't any brilliant movies released, it's just that the…

American Beauty: Beyond Italian Upholstery

Mena Suvari. Photo: DreamWorks The story of how American Beauty, one of the most celebrated films of the 1990s, was made is the story of how a struggling TV writer…

On the Waterfront: The End of Mob Rule

Marlon Brando. Photo: Columbia In 1949, investigative journalist Malcolm Johnson won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles he had written for the New York Sun. Titled "Crime on…

From Here to Eternity: Before Armageddon

Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. Photo: Columbia This is what Michael Bay was aiming for when he made Pearl Harbor (2001) – a hopefully engaging romance that's suddenly interrupted by…