One of last year's best films, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was nominated for four Oscars and won numerous other awards.

Julian Schnabel won the Best Director award at last year's Cannes Film Festival, as well as the Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for the film based on the autobiography of Jean Dominique Bauby, the bon vivant editor of the pre-eminent French fashion magazine, Elle.

The victim of a stroke, paralyzed from head to toe with his right eye sewn shut, he can only communicate by blinking his left eye. Remarkably, as he hovers between life and death, he uses his memory and his imagination to write a book about his situation as his translator patiently goes through the alphabet and he blinks to each letter he wants to use. He awakens at five each morning and formulates in his mind what he wants to have put down in writing that day. By 8 a.m., he is ready and the rest of the day is spent in the slow process of dictating by blinking. The poetry in his story is matched by the poetry in Schnabel's painterly camera.

Filmed at the actual hospital in Calais in which Bauby stayed, with some of his actual caregivers in minor roles, the principal roles are played by Mathieu Amalric as Bauby, Emmanuelle Seigner as the mother of his children who he never quite got around to marrying, Marie-Josée Croze as the nurse who comes up with the communication by alphabet, Anne Consigny as his translator, and Olatz Lopez Garmendia, Shnabel's real life wife, as the religious nurse who wants to take him on a pilgrimage to Lourdes.

The great Max von Sydow has just two scenes as Bauby's 92-year-old father, but they are both memorable. Old and frail with problems of memory loss, he is still authoritative as ever as he looks in the mirror and says "God! They don't make them like me any more."

Given the subject matter, one might expect the film to be depressing, but it isn't at all. It's a remarkable life-affirming achievement helped immeasurably by the Oscar-nominated screenplay by Ronald Harwood, who already has a trophy for The Pianist, and cinematography by Janusz Kaminksi who has two for Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan.

Not as great an artistic triumph, but equally inspiring, Steven Sawalich's Music Within about Richard Pimental, the man behind the Americans with Disabilities Act stars Ron Livingston as the gifted speaker who suffers hearing loss in Vietnam. As good as Livingston is, he is overshadowed by the almost unrecognizable Michael Sheen, who all but steals the film as his best friend, a wheelchair-bound man afflicted with cerebral palsy. Melissa George is Pimental's on-again, off-again lover, Yul Vazquez plays a dysfunctional vet and Rebecca de Mornay appears as Pimental's mentally ill mother. Hector Elizondo and Leslie Nielsen have minor roles.

A harrowing suspense thriller about international human trafficking, Marco Kruezpaintner's Trade stars young Cesar Ramos as a 17-year-old boy following the kidnappers of his 13-year-old sister. Kevin Kline is the Texas cop who joins him in the chase while the parallel story of the girl and those who took her unfolds. Paulina Gaitan is the young girl and Alicja Bachelda is a young Polish mother who is also kidnapped. There is also a subplot concerning Kline's daughter, who had been kidnapped some ten years before, which has a shocking outcome. The film carries the ironic subtitle Wilkommen in America (Welcome to America) in Germany.

One of last year's most eagerly anticipated films, Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs was dead on arrival at the box office despite the star power of Redford, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise. Though its failure was blamed on the public's apathy towards films dealing with the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact of the matter is the film is not very good. It preaches to the choir concerning the current administration's failed warmongering and the media's continuing complicity in promoting it. It is also badly structured with the three stars sitting and talking for most of the film, TV reporter Streep talks with oily GOP senator Cruise while Redford chats with student Andrew Garfield about former students Michael Pena and Derek Luke, the latest G.I. victims of the war in Afghanistan. It's a noble failure, but a failure nonetheless.

Chris Weitz's film of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, the first book of Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, was also a disappointment at the box office causing doubt that the other two books in the trilogy will ever be filmed, a pity because this is one of the better fantasy films of recent years.

Pullman, an avowed atheist, has criticized C.S. Lewis' series, The Chronicles of Narnia as religious propaganda, and although he has denied making his own books anti-religion as he did not want to offend anyone, it's quite apparent that the Magisterium in his parallel universe is the equivalent of either the Catholic or Anglican Churches in ours. However, as many Christian theologians and scholars have noted, his attacks are really against dogmatism and the use of religion to oppress, not against Christianity itself, which makes the religious splinter groups' attacks against the film seem all the more out of line.

The film ironically has many similarities to the first film from the C.S. Lewis series, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. There are children in peril and a large, heroic animal (a polar bear instead of a lion) in this otherworldly universe, in which people's souls live outside their bodies and are called daemons. An Oscar winner for special effects, it was also nominated for its glorious art direction and might as easily have been nominated for cinematography, editing, makeup and scoring as well.

The intriguing cast is headed by newcomer Dakota Blue Richards who is terrific as the young heroine, Nicole Kidman as the arch villainess, Daniel Craig, Tom Courtney, Sam Elliott, Eva Green, Derek Jacobi, Christopher Lee and the voices of Ian McKellen, Ian McShane, Freddie Highmore and Kristen Scott Thomas. Only Kathy Bates, voicing Sam Elliott's soul, seems out of place.

If you're looking for a pleasant time killer that goes exactly where you expect it to, look no further than Anne Fletcher's 27 Dresses. Katherine Heigl is the perennial bridesmaid looking for Mr. Right in all the wrong places and James Marsden is the cynical newspaper writer who may just be Mr. Right in the right place. Ed Burns is the boss Heigl thinks she's in love with, Malin Akerman is her model sister who steals him from her, and Judy Greer is her requisite wisecracking friend.

Originally intended for release last May, Sony's special editions of The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia were postponed to coincide with the release of the special edition of A Passage to India two weeks ago to celebrate what would have been director David Lean's 100th birthday. Postponed again to June 10th, both films are available through certain sellers who apparently didn't get notification of the latest delay.

Lean was filming Summertime with Katharime Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi in Venice when he received the script for The Bridge on the River Kwai from producer Sam Spiegel. Although he deemed the script by Carl Foreman a mess, he agreed to make the film, his first epic, because he needed the money, having been taken to the cleaners in a bitter divorce action by his third wife, actress Ann Todd. Lean's reworking of the script was unacceptable to Spiegel and Michael Wilson was brought in to produce what was eventually the working script. Screen credit, and the Oscar, went to the book's author, Pierre Bouille, who didn't speak English and had nothing to do with the script. Spiegel made the change in order to get past the Production Code office, because both Foreman and Wilson were blacklisted at the time. Corrections have since been made by both the producers and the Academy to give credit where it was due.

Based on true World War II incidents in which the Japanese used British and American prisoners of war to build bridges for Japanese access in Thailand and Burma, the film is the fictionalized story of the building of one such bridge in Burma. Filmed in Ceylon over a ten-month period, the building of the bridge is the main set piece but it is secondary to the complex relationship between the mad British colonel, played by Alec Guinness, and his Japanese counterpart, played by Sessue Hayakaya. William Holden, Jack Hawkins and Geoffrey Horne have prominent roles as the men who plot to blow the bridge up and James Donald is the British doctor who observes the madness. Nominated for eight Academy Awards, the film won seven including Best Picture, Director and Actor (Guinness). Hayakawa had to be content with just a nomination.

Originally scheduled for a five-month shoot in the Arabian Desert, Lean's masterpiece, Lawrence of Arabia, ended up at two years and three months there to capture some of the most breathtaking scenes of all time. The film, about British military figure T.E. Lawrence's efforts to unite various Arab tribes against the Turks in World War II, was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won seven. It made international stars of Best Actor and Supporting Actor nominees Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif and is universally regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. It is certainly one of the most visually splendid, thanks in large measure to Freddie Young's cinematography. Maurice Jarre's haunting score is another of its great assets.

Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jose Ferrer, Arthur Kennedy and Claude Rains figure prominently in the cast.

-Peter J. Patrick (April 29, 2008)

It's Philip Seymour Hoffman week at the DVD store. The actor, who won an Oscar for Capote two years ago, starred in three of 2008's major films, all newly released on DVD.

Once you get over the sight of Hoffman in the altogether that opens Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, you discover that the film is 83-year-old director Sidney Lumet's most accomplished work in years. He directs with a vigor and pace that directors half his age would find exhausting. The film itself is a lurid melodrama about a robbery that goes terribly wrong, but Lumet's veteran Broadway stars play it as though their actions were perfectly within the bounds of ordinary everyday life, and what actors they are. Hoffman as the drug-addicted, white collar thief; Ethan Hawke as his ne'er-do-well brother; Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris as their parents; Brian F. O'Byrne and Michael Shannon as low-level criminals; Amy Ryan as Hawke's bitter ex-wife; and Marisa Tomei as Hoffman's wife and Hawke's lover. All turn in exceptional performances.

Hoffman does a complete about-face as a struggling academic in Tamara Jenkins' The Savages in which he and Laura Linney, as an unpublished playwright, play siblings who put their lives on hold to spend time with their dying father, Philip Bosco, a cantankerous old man suffering from dementia. Jenkins' script, which captures all the nuances of family dynamics as well as the look and feel of life in such differing places as Sun City, Arizona, New York City and Buffalo, New York, won numerous awards including an Oscar nomination. Linney was also nominated for her performance, which deftly walks a fine line between comedy and drama. She and Hoffman are so in tune as brother and sister it would have been nice to see them both nominated, but his was a more crowded field, forcing him to take a consolation prize as Best Supporting Actor in another film.

That film was Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War, based on the true story of the playboy Texas congressman no one took seriously, who nevertheless was able to push through funding for a covert war in Afghanistan that brought down the Russians and led to the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, the film moves uneasily from comedy to drama, from alcohol- and cocaine-fueled Las Vegas jaunts to visits with children whose hands have been blown off in Afghanistan. Tom Hanks seems to lack the gravitas that a Tommy Lee Jones would have easily brought to the role. Julia Roberts, as a Texas matron descended from George Washington's sister, seems to be acting in another film, if not another universe. Hoffman in his Oscar-nominated role as a CIA operative and Amy Adams as Hanks' administrative assistant are much better.

An unexpected delight, the oddly marketed Lars and the Real Girl, directed by veteran TV commercial director Craig Gillespie, is not the leering comedy the trailer would lead you to believe. Instead, it's a sweet fable about a mentally ill young man whose illness is embraced by his family, friends, co-workers and ultimately the whole town in which he lives. Ryan Gosling, who is fast becoming the young actor to go to for quirky, yet sensitive and ultimately moving lead characters, won a well deserved Satellite Award as well as Golden Globe and SAG nominations for his portrayal of the shy young man who falls in love with a life-size mail order doll. Nancy Oliver's screenplay was nominated for numerous awards including an Oscar. The entire cast is perfect, especially Emily Mortimer as Gosling's caring sister-in-law and Patricia Clarkson as his gentle shrink.

A huge box office success, Jason Reitman's Oscar-nominated Juno is no less a fable than Lars , yet one that audiences embraced much more enthusiastically. The Oscar-winning script by Diablo Cody starts out with its teenage protagonist, played by Oscar-nominated Ellen Page, spouting rapid fire New Speak dialogue that is difficult to follow. Once it settles down into its narrative, though, it becomes a sweet little movie about a nice young girl who just happens to be pregnant and in need of finding a nice couple to adopt her baby. Michael Cera is her nice boyfriend, Allison Janney and J.K. Simmons are her nice parents, and Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman are the nice childless couple who might just be perfect to raise the baby. The soundtrack by the Moldy Peaches became an unexpected hit as well.

A character study about an aging writer and the graduate student who seeks him out as the subject of her thesis, Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening provides Frank Langella with an actor's showcase. He plays the writer. Lili Taylor plays his daughter going through a mid-life crisis, Adrian Lester plays the man who loves her but doesn't want to marry her, and Lauren Ambrose plays the callow grad student. Each seems more like literary contrivances than real people do. Curiously, there seems to be a deliberate attempt on the part of the director to flesh out Langella's character by using his matinee idol era pictures the same way that Henry Fonda's old movie photographs were used to provide audience sympathy with his geezer characterin On Golden Pond. Perhaps what he was really doing was paying tribute to his uncle, Mark Rydell, who directed Pond.

Another film that is primarily an actor's showcase is Terry George's Reservation Road, which provides meaty characters for both Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Ruffalo to sink their teeth into. Ruffalo plays a small town attorney who kills Phoenix's son in a hit-and-run accident and spends the rest of the film suffering pangs of conscience while Phoenix tries to discover who did it. Both actors are fine, but the plot relies too heavily on coincidence to bring the characters to their inevitable showdown. Both men's sons were in the same class at school and Ruffalo's ex-wife, played by Mira Sorvino, is Phoenix's daughter's, played by Elle Fanning, piano teacher. On top of that, Phoenix picks Ruffalo's firm to represent him from the local telephone directory. The women, including Sorvino and Jennifer Connelly as Phoenix's wife, are treated as peripheral characters.

So much for new releases of new films. Universal, which is slow to release its library of Universal and pre-1950 Paramount films, has released four classic comedies with introductions by TCM host Robert Osborne. The films are 1933's She Done Him Wrong, 1937's Easy Living, 1939's Midnight and 1942's The Major and the Minor.

The film version of Diamond Lil, Mae West's notorious Broadway play, re-titled She Done Him Wrong, replaced the coarse one-liners of the play with double entendres and innuendos that made it a stronger script, but one that still infuriated the censors and led to the 1934 imposition of the Production Code. The film, directed by Lowell Sherman, made enough money to stave off bankruptcy for Paramount Studios who produced it, and AMPAS, ignoring the blue noses, nominated it for a Best Picture Oscar. This was West's second film, and her first of many starring roles. It also advanced the career of her handpicked leading man, Cary Grant.

With a script by Preston Sturges and knowing direction by Mitchell Leisen, Easy Living is one of the fastest and funniest of the great screwball comedies of the 1930s. Jean Arthur stars as a young working woman who, through a series of misadventures, is thought to be the mistress of tycoon Edward Arnold to the consternation of many, including his son and Arthur's eventual true love, Ray Milland. It's great fun all the way with at least two of the most hilarious sequences ever captured on film.

Leisen also directed the equally hilarious Midnight from a script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. Claudette Colbert stars as a showgirl stranded in Paris. Don Ameche is the poor taxi driver who loves her while John Barrymore chews up the scenery as the aristocrat who enlists Colbert to pretend to be a baroness in order to get wife Mary Astor away from gigolo Francis Lederer. It's sparkling light comedy at its best.

Billy Wilder's first directorial effort, The Major and the Minor, is one of the last of the screwball comedies, with Ginger Rogers pretending to be a twelve-year-old in order to pay a lower fare on a transcontinental train ride home. Complications ensue when the train is stalled and military cadet school commandant, Ray Milland, whom she has met on the train, brings her home.

Columbia previously postponed its special editions of The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia in order to coincide with the release of the special edition of A Passage to India to celebrate director David Lean's centenary. Now Passage has been released while Bridge and Lawencehave been postponed to June. No matter, taking in all three films at one sitting would have been too much anyway.

The film version of E.M. Forster's most famous novel, 1984's A Passage to India was Lean's first film in fourteen years and his last. It is a sumptuous feast of a film about how East is East, West is West and never the twain shall mix in colonial India despite the best intentions of some of the parties. Judy Davis stars as the well-bred young English lady who may or may not have been raped in a suffocating cave by Indian doctor Victor Banerjee. Davis' intended mother-in-law, the saintly Mrs. Moore is the one person who can solve the mystery, or can she? She's played by the marvelous Peggy Ashcroft who won a much-deserved Oscar for her performance.

The special edition includes a commentary and numerous documentaries, including one fascinating one on the design of the film. Though filmed in India, most of the film's sets were constructed on the grounds of an elaborate estate in order to minimize street noise. Even the entrance to the cave is a facade on the face of a mountain that had no cave, as Lean deemed the real caves not cinematic enough.

Finally of interest to collectors of old movies on DVD, Warner Bros. has put into general release a pair of films previously available only through Critics' Choice Video.

One of the most charming of the MGM musicals of the late 1940s, Richard Thorpe's A Date With Judy stars Jane Powell at her delightful best as a small town girl attempting to spread her wings. Wallace Beery, Carmen Miranda, Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Stack and Scotty Beckett all figure in the merriment. The score includes the infectious "It's a Most Unusual Day" sung by the entire cast.

Best known as Jeff Chandler's last film, Samuel Fuller's Merrill's Marauders is actually a pretty good psychological war movie about the effects of lack of food and sleep on solders fighting in the jungles of Burma. Chandler's death from blood poisoning following routine slipped disc surgery on July 17, 1962, four days after release of the film, put a damper on its box office potential. The film has since become a cult classic.

-Peter J. Patrick (April 22, 2008)

I'm not clairvoyant. I don't have a crystal ball. I have no way of knowing which films from any given year will stand the test of time. Yet every now and then the films that I love from a particular year turn out to be more popular over time than those that were more widely heralded at the time. Such is the case with 1958.

The two films I most admired when I was 14 in the Spring and Summer of 1958 have emerged as the most revered films of that year even if at the time they won no awards and were not on the ten best lists of even the most prestigious critics. They were, of course, Vertigo and Touch of Evil.

Alfred Hitchcock's tale of obsession, Vertigo, had its perfect leading man in James Stewart. Playing a retired cop, afraid of heights, who is lured into following enigmatic Kim Novak into the bell tower of an old mission, Stewart combines the boyish charms of his pre-World War II films with the hard edge he developed in his Anthony Mann-directed Westerns of the early 1950s. Filmed in and around San Francisco,it's aided immeasurably by its great location cinematography as well as Bernard Herrmann's hypnotic score. Stewart and Novak make a great team and are ably supported by Barbara Bel Geddes as Stewart's long time girlfriend.

Originally hired just to play the bad guy, Orson Welles ended up re-writing and directing Touch of Evil thanks to the intervention of the film's star, Charlton Heston. Welles, desperate to direct his first major studio film in years, agreed to perform the additional jobs at his original salary. The result is his most accomplished film since Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. The opening tracking shot alone is worth the money they paid him. It's a classic B-film delivered in a Grade A style all the way. Heston is good as the protagonist, but he's eclipsed by Welles, Akim Tamiroff and Marlene Dietrich in supporting roles.

Good as those two films were, they were just the tip of the iceberg. Rounding out my top ten for 1958 were these classics:

Stage-bound it may be, but Morton Da Costa's Oscar-nominated film Auntie Mame is so hilariously funny from beginning to end that you don't have time to notice. Rosalind Russell, Oscar-nominated for the performance of her considerable career, is the madcap aunt who raises her orphaned nephew with her irrepressible charm. She's supported by a gallery of fine character performers at their best. Among them: Coral Browne, Oscar nominee Peggy Cass, Forrest Tucker, Patric Knowles, Fred Clark, Lee Patrick, Willard Waterman, Connie Gilchrist, Roger Smith, Pippa Scott and Joanna Barnes. If you don't find something to laugh at in this one, there is something seriously wrong with you.

Conceived by Lerner and Loewe as the big screen equivalent of their long running Broadway Musical, My Fair Lady, Vincente Minnelli's Gigi was the last of the great MGM musicals. Featuring such charming songs as "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", "The Night They Invented Champagne" and "I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore", the opulently-filmed, sophisticated romantic musical comedy provided Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan and Hermione Gingold with their best big screen opportunities in some time. The film went on to win clean-sweeping nine Oscars. And Chevalier, on the strength of his charming performance, won a career achievement Oscar as well.

One of the best adaptations of a Tennessee Williams play, Richard Brooks' film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was brought to the screen with Elizabeth Taylor, at her smoldering best, as Maggie the Cat; Paul Newman, at his most virile, as Brick; and Burl Ives, at his most ferocious, as Big Daddy. With the homoerotic subtext played down and a more hopeful ending, it is not a pure adaptation, but an exceptionally strong one. It is second only in Williams adaptations, in my opinion, to Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire, made seven years earlier. Roof's supporting cast includes Judith Anderson as Big Mama, Jack Carson as Gooper and Madeleine Sherwood as Mae (a.k.a. Sister Woman).

Three years after winning his Best Director Oscar for Marty, Delbert Mann assembled one of the best casts of all time for the screen version of Terrence Rattigan's Separate Tables set in an English seaside hotel out of season. Nominated for Best Picture, David Niven won an Oscar as Best Actor for playing a fake retired Army colonel who is really a dirty old man and Wendy Hiller won Best Supporting Actress for playing the hotel manager. Deborah Kerr was nominated for her homely, shy wallflower, but Gladys Cooper as Kerr's controlling mother easily steals the show. Rita Hayworth, Burt Lancaster, Cathleen Nesbitt, May Hallat and Felix Aylmer are also quite good as other hotel guests.

An old man's film in the best sense of the term, John Ford's film of Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah provided Spencer Tracy with one of his best roles as the old-style big city mayor and political boss hanging on for re-election against the odds. He's superbly supported by Jeffrey Hunter, Dianne Foster and a cast of veteran performers, each one given their own key scene. For many of them it was their own last hurrah on screen. They include Pat O'Brien, James Gleason, Donald Crisp, Basil Rathbone, John Carradine, Edward Brophy, Wallace Ford, Frank McHugh, Richardo Cortez, Basil Ruysdael, Jane Darwell, Anna Lee and O.Z. Whitehead.

Joshua Logan's film of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, South Pacific,was a huge commercial hit, but not one with critics. However, I love it anyway. The film's only real downside is Logan's ill-conceived decision to have ace cinematographer Leon Shamroy employ hideous color filters for several of the song sequences. The songs, including "Some Enchanted Evening", "Younger Than Springtime" and "There's Nothing Like a Dame", are more than strong enough to overcome even that obstacle. Rossano Brazzi, Mitzi Gaynor, John Kerr, France Nuyen, Ray Walston, and Juanita Hall, reprising her Tony-winning role as Bloody Mary, are all perfectly cast.

Susan Hayward won an Oscar for going through all the tortures of the damned as convicted murderess Barbara Graham in Robert Wise's superb anti-capital punishment treatise, I Want to Live! The scenes of the preparation of the gas chamber and of Hayward's on-again, off-again execution are superbly crafted. Hayward is at her peak here, especially in the film's excruciating final scenes, but so is the rest of the cast headed by Simon Oakland as the reporter who narrates her story. Other key roles are played by Theodore Bikel, Virginia Vincent, Wesley Lau, Virginia Vincent, Dabs Greer and Raymond Bailey as the sympathetic warden.

Stanley Kramer's social drama, The Defiant Ones can be enjoyed as both a high adrenaline escape yarn and as a tough examination of the racial politics of the day. Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier are escaped prisoners linked together both literally and figuratively by a piece of chain. They must learn to put aside their differences if they are to outsmart and outrun the posse hard on their heels. The film won a slew of awards including the New York Film Critics Award for Best Picture. It was also nominated for Oscars for Best Picture, Director, both lead actors, and supporting players Theodore Bikel as their pursuer, and Cara Williams as the woman who has a brief affair with Curtis.

Honorable mention goes to three legendary foreign films: Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal from Sweden, in which Max von Sydow plays an on-going game of chess with Death; Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali from India, the first of his trilogy of films about the life of a poor Brahmin; and Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle from France, in which sound effects and music convey most the comic genius' then-latest adventure.

Not to be outdone, the British came up with three legendary films of their own: the docudrama A Night to Remember, Roy Ward Baker's film about the sinking of the Titanic; Ronald Neame's hilarious The Horse's Mouth, with Alec Guinness as an eccentric artist; and Terence Fisher's Horror of Dracula, a bloody re-telling of the greatest of the vampire tales that caused me to sleep with the lights on for an entire summer.

To these six and the aforementioned ten, I would add four other Hollywood gems.

Anthony Mann's Man of the West substitutes Gary Cooper for James Stewart in this existential western that also features Julie London, Lee J. Cobb and Jack Lord.

A third great musical,George Abbott and Stanley Donen'sfilm of Adler and Ross' Damn Yankees, substitutes movie star Tab Hunter for stage star Stephen Douglass, but otherwise leaves the original show in tact, including the Tony-winning performances of Gwen Verdon and Ray Walston.

William Wyler puts his stamp on the sprawling western with The Big Country,which features a superb cast headed by Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Charlton Heston, Carroll Baker, Charles Bickford and Oscar winner Burl Ives, more or less reprising his Big Daddy role from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Joseph Anthony's film of Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker, the source material for Hello, Dolly!, was an uproarious comedy which provided Shirley Booth one of only four big screen opportunities, all of which she made the most of. She's aided and abetted here by Paul Ford, Anthony Perkins and Shirley MacLaine.

Other 1958 films worth tracking down include the gentle westerns The Proud Rebel with Alan and David Ladd and Olivia de Havilland, and Cowboy with Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon; the escape-from-the-Nazis comedy-drama Me and the Colonel with Danny Kaye and Curt Jurgens; the interracial romance Kings Go Forth with Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood; and the self-explanatory I Married a Monster From Outer Space with Tom Tryon in a dual role.

If that's not enough, you can also look for The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, memorable for Ingrid Bergman's portrayal of a British missionary and for Robert Donat's last appearance as he plays a Chinese Mandarin; Hot Spell for the fireworks generated by Shirley Booth and Anthony Quinn; Bell, Book and Candle for a lesser, but still welcome, teaming of James Stewart and Kim Novak; Houseboat for the delicious teaming of Cary Grant and Sophia Loren; and Indiscreet for the first teaming of Grant and Ingrid Bergman since Hitchcock's Notorious a dozen years earlier.

Films that others liked more than I did include Some Came Running with Shirley MacLaine's Oscar-nominated performance and the stunning cinematography the film's standouts; The Young Lions which went on so long I felt like an old lion by the time it was over; and The Old Man and the Sea which not even Spencer Tracy, in an Oscar-nominated performance, could keep from becoming tedious.

-Peter J. Patrick (April 15, 2008)