Time

Apr 4, 1988 — Back in 1968 when The Producers made its debut, writer-director Mel Brooks was better known within the entertainment industry than by the public at large. His writing for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and the Get Smart television series,...

Feb 29, 1988 — Marx Brothers aficionados have argued for years over the relative merits of A Night at the Opera and the “purer” Marx movies such as Duck Soup. Certainly there’s no comparison on a point-by-point basis: Duck Soup is a classic of...

Feb 8, 1988 — Sidney Lumet’s courtroom drama explores the process of law in human hands, where prejudice, fear, weakness, and even weather can divert the carriage of justice.

Feb 1, 1988 — Based on the novel by W.T. Burnett, this heist film set in a nameless midwestern city offered moviegoers in 1950 a new view of crime.

Jan 11, 1988 — Alfred Hitchcock committed a shocking murder in Sabotage (1936). Here, in one of the director’s darkest works, a child unknowingly carrying a bomb is blown to pieces in the streets of London. The death of Stevie is a deliberate attempt...

Dec 6, 1987 — Mike Nichols’s treatment of a young man’s initiation into the mysteries of sex at the hands of an older married woman has become a model for this common fantasy.

Oct 12, 1987 — Akira Kurosawa’s thrilling Cinemascope epic is set squarely within the traditions of the Japanese film genre known as the “Chambara.”

Oct 12, 1987 — For more than forty years, The Seventh Seal has been a benchmark by which all other great foreign films are judged. It launched the international career of its director, Ingmar Bergman, and made a star of its 27-year-old leading actor,...

Nov 17, 1986 — The best of all the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn comedies, Adam’s Rib is as fresh and topical today as it was in 1949 when it was first released. Written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin and directed by George Cukor, this...

Nov 10, 1986 — Max Ophuls’s masterpiece is a transformation of a conventional subject into an avant-garde adventure, and a spectacular stylistic breakthrough in the utilization of wide screen and color.