A brash young American comes to London to star in a major new production-and becomes the central character in a mystery fueled by intrigue and passion.

Noel Coward's favorite play was certainly a departure for David Lean, best known for adapting Dickens in the '40s. While it's the director's only comedy, the result is a delightful gem. Rex Harrison is an acerbic author haunted by the ghost of first wife Elvira (Kay Hammond), who tries to seduce him all over again. This throws his second wife (Constance Cummings) into a panic, second-guessing her lack of passion. It's a celestial sex romp that hasn't lost its bite. Margaret Rutherford, as always, steals the show as the sardonic medium. -Bill Desowitz.

Before Velvet Goldmine, there was Buddha of Suburbia. The coming of age story of Karim, an assimilated Indian in London during the swinging seventies. Winner of seven international film awards. Soundtrack by David Bowie.

Few directors polarize audiences like Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker as influenced by Jacobean revenge tragedy and 17th century painting as by the French New Wave. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is both adored and detested for its combination of sumptuous beauty and revolting decadence. A vile, gluttonous thief (Michael Gambon, The Singing Detective) spews hate and abuse at a restaurant run by a stoic French cook (Richard Bohringer, Diva), but under the thief's nose his wife (the ever-sensuous Helen Mirren, Prime Suspect) conducts an affair with a bookish lover (Alan Howard, Strapless). Clothing (by avant-garde designer Jean-Paul Gaultier) changes color as the characters move from room to room. Nudity, torture, rotting meat, and Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs) at his sleaziest all contribute the atmosphere of decay and excess. Not for everyone, but for some, essential. -Bret Fetzer.

Producer Gabriel Pascal brought the undiluted wit and wisdom of Bernard Shaw to world cinemas, and the world is grateful. But for all Shaw's philosophical irreverence and bracing ironies, as a screenwriter he had a lot to learn about structure and movement. Major Barbara made the transition to film less fluidly than Pygmalion (1938). Production took a year and a half. Pascal made himself director but left the real work to assistants Harold French (acting) and David Lean (visuals). The initial designer and cameraman had to be replaced, one actor died (Donald Calthrop), and oh yes, there were German air raids. Still, what a dream cast: Wendy Hiller as Salvation Army crusader Barbara; Robert Morley as her arch-fiend millionaire father Undershaft, preaching the gospel of money and munitions; Rex Harrison as Barbara's classics-professor suitor, Adolphus Cusins; plus Robert Newton, Emlyn Williams, Marie Lohr, and 18-year-old Deborah Kerr as sweet Jenny Hill. -Richard T. Jameson Laced with ironic humor and social satire, this well-known classic film is the story of Barbara Undershaft, daughter of a wealthy munitions manufacturer and an ardent member of the Salvation Army. Filmed in war-torn England, Gabriel Pascal's screen translation of George Bernard Shaw's play is brilliantly directed and magnificently acted.

David Lean's finest films, from Great Expectations (1946) to Lawrence of Arabia (1962), are resolutely sober, which is more than can be said of Henry Horatio Hobson in his wonderfully comic encounter with the moon in Hobson's Choice (1954). Lean's only other comedy was Blithe Spirit (1945), but here he approaches matters of the heart with a surprising lightness of touch and wins a marvelous performance from Charles Laughton-himself soon to make his one and only film as a director, Night of the Hunter (1955). The setting is late-19th-century Salford, England (the black-and-white location filming is exceptional), and widower Henry Hobson forbids his three daughters to marry to avoid paying their dowries. Romance will not be thwarted by economics, and much humorous conflict ensues, interspersed with some serious and even disturbing moments. Brenda De Banzie is splendidly spirited as the eldest daughter, Maggie, while her fiancé is played by the ever excellent John Mills, who would later win an Oscar® for his part in Lean's much more serious love story, Ryan's Daughter (1970). -Gary S. Dalkin David Lean backs up vicious wit with tender romance in this thrilling adaptation of Harold Brighouse's play. As Henry Hobson, a tyrannical bootshop owner, Charles Laughton (Mutiny on the Bounty, Ruggles of Red Gap) is a comical drunk of Falstaffian proportions. When Hobson forbids his daughters to marry (their unpaid labor supports his pub visits!), his eldest daughter defiantly sets her cap for Willie, the shop's best bootmaker. Brenda de Banzie (The Man Who Knew Too Much), as the eldest daughter, hounds the flabbergasted Willie into marriage, resulting in a thriving new shop of their own. [+]

Alec Guinness delivers a masterful, not-to-be-missed performance in a brilliant screenplay by J. B. Priestley that combines irony, humor, and tenderness. Shy George Bird (Guinness) learns his days are numbered, so he decides to take a "last holiday. " He withdraws his life savings and dashes off to a fashionable seaside resort, where he is taken for a man of substance and becomes a favorite with his newfound aristocratic friends.

Writer-director Alan Parker's feature debut Bugsy Malone is a pastiche of American movies, a musical gangster comedy set in 1929, featuring prohibition, showgirls, and gang warfare, with references to everything from Some Like It Hot to The Godfather. Uniquely, though, all the parts are played by children, including an excellent if underused Jodie Foster as platinum-blonde singer Tallulah, Scott Baio in the title role and a nine-year-old Dexter Fletcher wielding a baseball bat. Cream-firing "spluge guns" sidestep any real violence and the movie climaxes cheerfully with the biggest custard pie fight this side of Casino Royale (1967). Unfortunately for a musical, Paul Williams's score-part honky-tonk jazz homage, part 1970s Elton John-style pop-lets the side down with a lack of memorable tunes. Nevertheless, Parker's direction is spot on and the look of the film is superb, a fantasy movie-movie existing in the same parallel reality as The Cotton Club and Chicago. A rare British love letter to classic American cinema, Bugsy Malone remains a true original; in Parker's words "the work of a madman" and one of the strangest yet most stylish children's films ever made. -Gary S. Dalkin.