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A Town Like Alice
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Sleeping Beauty (Fully Restored Limited Edition) (Walt Disney's Masterpiece)
: :Disney's 1959 animated effort was the studio's most ambitious to date, a widescreen spectacle boasting a gorgeous waltz-filled score adapting Tchaikovsky. In the 14th century, the malevolent Maleficent (not dissimilar to the wicked Queen in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) taunts a king that his infant Aurora will fatally prick her finger on a spinning wheel before sundown on her 16th birthday. This, of course, would deny her a happily-ever-after with her true love. Things almost but not ...
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Napoleon
: :Abel Gance's 1927 masterpiece is absolutely indispensable for silent-film buffs or anyone interested in classic world cinema. From the future emperor's first strategic victory, a schoolyard snowball fight, to the climactic invasion of Italy, Napoleon truly rules! This is no static, antiquated relic. Among Gance's innovations was to free the camera (for one battle scene, he had it mounted on horseback!). The film's justly celebrated climax features a triptych of synchronized images that anticipates by more than 30 years Cinerama ...
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Quo Vadis (1951)
: :'Welcome to Nero's House of Women' greets a concubine to a slave girl, Lygia (Deborah Kerr). Later this self-same greeter reveals that she, too, like Lygia, is really a fellow Christian neophyte. And it's that mixture of tawdry Hollywood sex and a strong Christian message that makes this film an enjoyable 'gentiles and gladiators' flick. Marcus Vinicius returns home after conquering the Britons to find that Rome is infected with a crazy new sect called Christians and that his beloved ...
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Night Train to Munich (B&W)
: :The unofficial sequel to The Lady Vanishes (also scripted by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat) attempts to recapture the thrills of Hitchcock's charming confection of espionage and romance with generally fine results. Margaret Lockwood reprises her role as the flighty heroine, now the daughter of a Czech scientist captured by the Nazis as her father leaves the country. She escapes from a concentration camp with the help of a defiant male prisoner (Paul Henreid) and rejoins her father, only to ...
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Five Graves to Cairo (1943)
: :The unofficial sequel to The Lady Vanishes (also scripted by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat) attempts to recapture the thrills of Hitchcock's charming confection of espionage and romance with generally fine results. Margaret Lockwood reprises her role as the flighty heroine, now the daughter of a Czech scientist captured by the Nazis as her father leaves the country. She escapes from a concentration camp with the help of a defiant male prisoner (Paul Henreid) and rejoins her father, only to ...
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It's a Wonderful Life
: essential video:Now perhaps the most beloved American film, It's a Wonderful Life was largely forgotten for years, due to a copyright quirk. Only in the late 1970s did it find its audience through repeated TV showings. Frank Capra's masterwork deserves its status as a feel-good communal event, but it is also one of the most fascinating films in the American cinema, a multilayered work of Dickensian density. George Bailey (played superbly by James Stewart) grows up in the small ...
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Mr Skeffington
: :Fanny Skeffington, an incorrigible society flirt of the WWI era, was one of the meatiest roles and most exasperating women Bette Davis ever played. Flighty Fanny loves the attention of her male suitors, but marries the steadfast Jewish financier Job Skeffington (Claude Rains) for security; long after their wedding day, she still enjoys receiving gentlemen callers. Time catches up with Fanny, of course, and the bills are due by the time World War II rolls around. Mr. Skeffington is a ...
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Monster on the Campus
: :More Fifties sci-fi fun from auteur Jack Arnold (director of Creature from the Black Lagoon). The body of a celocanth, long thought to be extinct, is brought to a university for study. This particular prehistoric fish, though, was exposed to gamma radiation; contact with its blood turns a German Shepherd into a slavering, snarling wolf-dog. The fish juice makes a dragonfly roughly the size of a radio-controlled model plane; when Professor Franz gets the stuff in his pipe (go figure) ...
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Private Life of Henry VIII
: :More Fifties sci-fi fun from auteur Jack Arnold (director of Creature from the Black Lagoon). The body of a celocanth, long thought to be extinct, is brought to a university for study. This particular prehistoric fish, though, was exposed to gamma radiation; contact with its blood turns a German Shepherd into a slavering, snarling wolf-dog. The fish juice makes a dragonfly roughly the size of a radio-controlled model plane; when Professor Franz gets the stuff in his pipe (go figure) ...
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