In terms of genre categories, the following films (in chronological order) have consistently ranked high on various lists:

* Battleship Potemkin (1925) - has regularly appeared in the top 10 of every Sight & Sound polling, also voted the greatest film ever by a panel of experts at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair
* All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) - Received Best Picture Oscar; Ranked # 54 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies polling in 1998, a list of the 100 greatest English-language movies Ranked # 33 in 2005 in the Channel 4 poll of the "100 Greatest War Films"

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Creative director Rouben Mamoulian stylishly remade the Fairbanks' 1920 Zorro tale almost two decades later as the historical swashbuckler The Mark of Zorro (1940) with Tyrone Power as the dashing, masked and foppish hero Don Diego Vega in old California, who duels with a villainous oppressor (Basil Rathbone) to the death in the film's climax. The 1940 version also featured glowing and gorgeous Linda Darnell and Gale Sondergaard as the good and bad female characters respectively.

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A wide variety of romantic melodramas in gaudy, lush, super-saturated Technicolor - classic, histrionic-laden, exaggerated, glossy, tear-jerking soaps, appeared from director Douglas Sirk. Since these overwrought films appeared during a time of Hollywood censorship, all of the sexual transgressions, ungratified desires, illegitimacies, psycho-sexual disorders (impotence, frigidity, nymphomania, Oedipal problems, etc.), rapes, adulteries, domestically-oppressed women, abuses, abortions, and affairs were not made entirely explicit. These potentially-subversive topics, nonetheless, were brought to the screen. Today, they are sometimes considered over-the-top, but should be viewed with irony for the hidden meanings contained within:

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Films that were concerned with race relations included Hollywood's first major indictment of racism in producer Stanley Kramer's and director Mark Robson's Home of the Brave (1949), the story of a black WWII soldier facing bigoted insults from his squad. Then, there was John Sturges' Bad Day At Black Rock (1955) about small-town Japanese-American prejudice uncovered by a one-armed Spencer Tracy, Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones (1958) with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as bound-together escaping convicts - and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) about an inter-racial couple (Sidney Poitier as WHO doctor John Prentiss and Katharine Houghton as SF socialite Joanna Drayton) planning on marrying who needed parental approval from Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy (in their ninth and last film together). Also, In the Heat of the Night (1967) featured a bigoted sheriff and a black homicide detective working together to solve a murder, and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) - about racial tensions and eventual violence during a hot Brooklyn summer.

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Starring Mel Gibson
Jodie Foster
Anton Yelchin

Review:

Depression is a difficult condition to explore in modern American cinema because no one wants to be around depressed people. We can see characters be sad, but only if they were happy before and will rally and be happy again by the time the movie ends. But an honest look at someone suffering from depression is rare and on that count The Beaver deserves acclaim. Unfortunately, despite the confidence of Kyle Killen’s script, director Jodie Foster never manages to bring a thoughtful vision the film. Even worse, no chemistry is developed between the characters, which is a serious issue when you’re making an intimate family drama. Individually, the actors do a terrific job, but the story never finds the emotional core that ties them together.

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Cast
Channing Tatum as Marcus Flavius Aquila
Jamie Bell as Esca
Donald Sutherland as Aquila's uncle
Mark Strong as Guern
Tahar Rahim as Liathan, Prince of the Seal People
Ned Dennehy as Chief of the Seal People


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Cast
Dolph Lundgren as Icarus aka Edward Genn
Stefanie Von Pfetten as Joey
Katelyn Mager as Taylor
Lindsay Maxwell as April
Samantha Ferris as Kerr

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Starring Ulrich Tukur
Daniel Brühl
Steve Buscemi
Anne Consigny
Jingchu Zhang

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Cast:

Winona Ryder, Ann Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Maya Angelou, Jean Simmons, Lois Smith, Kate Nelligan, Alfre Woodard, Kate Capshaw, Samantha Mathis, Dermot Mulroney, Derrick O'Connor, Joanna Going

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The Red Star, Christian Gossett’s comic book series set in a futuristic, Soviet Russia-inspired fantasy world, was originally set to become a movie at Universal Pictures.

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