Films released between 1940 and 1949, a decade shaped at both ends by the war. The first half is propaganda, home-front melodrama and combat pictures made while the outcome was unknown. The second half is the return, and the noir cycle that came with it. The reviews here treat the shift seriously, because the same studios and often the same directors produced both, and the change in tone across five years is one of the clearest in film history.
1940sHow Green Was My Valley (1941) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. John Ford's film about a Welsh mining family across roughly twenty years is a good film that has spent eighty-four years being the answer to…
1940sPan's Labyrinth (2006) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Del Toro built two worlds with identical rules and let a child move between them, and the fascist captain is more frightening than anything in the labyrinth. It…
1940sThe Notebook (2004) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The young romance is a competent, conventional and occasionally irritating class melodrama. The framing story, an old man reading to a woman with dementia who does not know…
1940sThe Pianist (2002) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Polanski survived the Krakow Ghetto as a child and spent sixty years declining to film the Holocaust before he made this. It won the Palme d'Or and three…
1940sInglourious Basterds (2009) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Tarantino wrote it in 1998, could not solve the ending, made Kill Bill instead, and came back a decade later. The opening scene is a twenty-five minute conversation…
1940sNow, Voyager (1942) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A woman boards a cruise as her mother's property and comes back a person. The most famous cigarette in cinema, and a last line that refuses the ending…
1940sA department store Santa claims to be the real Kris Kringle, and a lawyer must defend him in court. Miracle on 34th Street is George Seaton's 1947 American Christmas drama about a department store Santa who claims to be the…
1940sTwo Budapest shop employees who can't stand each other are unknowingly falling in love through anonymous correspondence. The Shop Around the Corner is Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 American romantic comedy adapted from Miklós László's Hungarian play Parfumerie, depicting two Budapest leather-goods…
1940sAn Episcopal bishop praying for help with his cathedral project receives an angel who arrives to assist, though not in the way expected. David Niven plays Bishop Henry Brougham.
1940sA singer retires to a Connecticut farm and converts it into an inn that only opens on holidays, leading to a rivalry with his former dance partner. Holiday Inn is Mark Sandrich's 1942 American musical depicting Jim Hardy, a singer…
1940sAn American family in 1903 St. Louis faces upheaval when the father announces a move to New York, with Christmas as the season of crisis. Meet Me in St. Louis is Vincente Minnelli's 1944 American musical depicting the upper-middle-class Smith…
1940sA prosecutor takes a shoplifter home to Indiana for Christmas after her trial is delayed, and they fall in love. Remember the Night is Mitchell Leisen's 1940 American romantic drama about a Manhattan prosecutor who postpones a shoplifter's trial until…
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