1. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, France, 1939)

2. Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, France, 1937)

3. M (Fritz Lang, Germany, 1931)

4. The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, Germany, 1930)

5. City Lights (Charles Chaplin, USA, 1931)

6. The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, USA, 1935)

7. Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1932)

8. A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, USA, 1935)

9. Stagecoach (John Ford, USA, 1939)

10. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, USA, 1939)

• 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, USA, 1933) The young starlet getting her big break (which unfortunately happens to belong to the ankle of the leading lady) is clichéd and cornball, but Busby Berkeley's trademark geometrically-inspired choreography is stupendous, and the songs are marvelously risqué. Warner Baxter's beleaguered director provides just enough depth (especially in the end shot, as he reacts to patrons' derogatory comments as they leave the show) to elevate 42nd Street to the upper tier of first-class movie musicals.
• The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz, William Keighley, USA, 1938) Immensely entertaining adventure fantasy, skillfully interweaving English history with heroic derring-do. Errol Flynn gives his finest performance as the cheeky archer protecting the lowly Saxons from the rapacious Normans, and Curtiz's renowned narrative economy and uniformly consistent attention to detail help make this Merry Olde England That Never Was a believable, enchanted world where atrocity is held accountable and nobility has little to do with title or rank.
• L'Age D'Or (Age of Gold) (Luis Buñuel, France, 1930) There's an underlying contempt to every comedic frame that drives home this film's anti-clerical, anti-privileged class themes, where public displays of affection are discouraged, but lewd conduct in secreted hideaways is perfectly acceptable.
• Alexander Nevsky (Sergei Eisenstein, USSR, 1938) Need a savior? Call a fisherman. Thirteenth-century hero Alexander Nevsky is just the one to repulse German invaders and unite the fractured Russian people. Eisenstein's acute sense of compositional balance and direct, no-frills narrative flow, especially during the epic Battle of the Ice sequence, are in top form. As propaganda to bolster Russian spirits against Nazi aggression, Alexander Nevsky more than does its job, but its greater message is communal unity in the face of adversity.
• All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, USA, 1930) The dialogue is too rigid and preachy, and the young actors overly mannered and raw (though this adds an undeniable degree of verisimilitude, as they are playing teenage recruits thrust into the meat grinder that was trench warfare). All Quiet's true power comes from its remarkable and disturbing battle sequences. The sweeping battlefield pans and in-your-face, hand-to-hand combat encounters are stunning. Words are not required to reveal the true horror of warfare, and in that respect All Quiet remains the great anti-war film.
• La Bete Humaine (The Human Beast) (Jean Renoir, France, 1938) Triangles, triangles, everywhere, intersecting and deadly. Renoir's railway-driven proto-noir may not gaze as deeply into the human psyche as his greatest works, but it's still an effective examination of one man's self-loathing and the brazen acts of his lover and her husband that compel him to commit murder and, ultimately, suicide.
• Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, USA, 1938) Take Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and a leopard. Mix them together and you've got one humdinger of a screwball comedy. Bringing Up Baby operates within its own loony universe of bored rich girls, daft paleontologists and prudish fiancés. Hawks' pacing and the cast's uniformly precise timing (verbal as well as physical) are the gold standard of the genre. Want a little subtext, too? How about Grant carrying around a bone and having nowhere to put it? But don't overthink this gem. Simply enjoy the madcap rollercoaster ride. it's worth every minute.
• Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, USA, 1939) Producer David O. Selznick's adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's epic romance set against the waning days of the decidedly un-Roots-like Old South is Hollywood excess at its most gloriously extravagant. Boasting sky-high production values and remarkably agile pacing (especially impressive considering its near four-hour running time), Gone With the Wind works primarily due to its two leads. Vivien Leigh's self-centered, irrepressibly resourceful Scarlett O'Hara and Clark Gable's pragmatic, devil-may-care Rhett Butler deserve each other. That two thoroughly unlikable characters hold our rapt attention throughout is a true testament to the magic Leigh and Gable bring to their respective roles.
• I Am a Fugitive from A Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, USA, 1932) Paul Muni excels as an everyman World War I vet who's unjustly convicted of a robbery and sentenced to ten years hard labor. Director LeRoy and his trio of screenwriters do an outstanding job with a plot that could have easily wallowed in cheap melodrama. Instead they carefully deconstruct Muni's fugitive, stripping away his dignity and limiting his options until he's reduced to little more than a wild animal, scurrying about in the dark and shunning meaningful human contact.
• It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, USA, 1934) The chemistry between Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable is the wellspring from which all good things derive in this whimsical Capra road picture. The narrative meanders a tad, but the tried-and-true formula of spoiled rich girl and worn-soles reporter falling in love still sparkles, thanks to incomparable performances from its talented stars.
• Umarete wa mita keredo (I Was Born, But...) (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1932) Two brothers learn a harsh lesson about the adult world when they witness their seemingly proud father obsequiously become the butt of his superior's jokes. Ozu masterfully anchors the film from a child's perspective, never letting false sentiment or contrived plot devices detract from the emotional impact of the father's actions on the young boys.
• King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, USA, 1933) Stop-motion animation whiz Willis O'Brien and his team deserve enormous credit for imbuing a 50-foot gorilla with an impressive array of emotions. You care for Kong in this movie, and that's why it works. Co-directors Cooper and Schoedsack also manage to tell a rousing adventure tale, complete with remote island, testy natives and a Land of the Lost-like jungle that's mysterious and thrilling. More than a mere B-picture given an A-list treatment, King Kong is a popcorn classic with its heart in the right place.
• Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier, France, 1937) From its obvious influence on Casablanca to Jean Gabin's commanding performance as a doomed gangster held prisoner within the safe confines of Algier's Casbah district, Pépé le Moko is a significant and compelling film. Though the ending is quintessentially downbeat French fatalism, the enduring impression imparted by Pépé is of the jumbled, labyrinthine Casbah, with its foreign blend of cutthroats, gangsters and refugee renegades.
• The Scarlet Empress (Josef Von Sternberg, USA, 1934) Josef Von Sternberg rarely skimped in the visual banquet department, and The Scarlet Empress is no exception. The opulent, if garish, set designs stand out. And this highly fictionalized but wickedly fun take on the ascendancy of Catherine the Great to the throne of Russia is an economically told, thoroughly involving joyride. Marlene Dietrich is luminously sensual, and her transformation from innocent ingénue to crafty seductress is expertly conveyed.
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Various Walt Disney animators, USA, 1937) A landmark feature-length animated classic. Disney's innovative mixture of realistic human characters and more cartoonish, rounded creatures meshes seamlessly in this exemplary, "happily ever after" fairy tale world. More importantly, Disney understood the psychology of fear and how it could add gravity to a simple narrative.
• The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, USA, 1939) The third screen version of L. Frank Baum's beloved tale proved a charm -- albeit not in the financial sense until years later, when repeated showings on television helped cement its status as a classic. From the sepia-toned, King Vidor-lensed framing Kansas sequences (highlighted by Judy Garland's endearing performance of "Over the Rainbow") to the eye-popping visual splendor of Oz in all its Technicolor glory, this is one of the most enjoyable and creatively expressive films a major studio ever bankrolled.
• Zéro de Conduite (Zero for Conduct) (Jean Vigo, France, 1933) Absurdist fantasy meets youthful rebellion. Vigo's free-flowing narrative approach is ideally suited to this autobiographical look at boarding school resistance, as filtered through the whimsy of a few rebellious students.

• L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, France, 1934) Jean Vigo deserves enormous credit for taking a hackneyed tale of two quarrelsome newlyweds living on a barge and imbuing it with a poetically surreal insight into the nature of longing and temptation. Vigo captures some indelibly striking images (the bride's arrival on the barge; the montage of the separated couple's lustful thoughts in bed; the husband glimpsing his wife's image beneath the water), but the story, which did not originate with the director, is pedestrian and predictable. Had we spent more time with first mate Michel Simon's eccentric but pragmatic career sailor, exploring the deeper origins of the bizarre bric-a-brac littering his cabin, perhaps L'Atalante would add up to more than a meandering voyage whose conclusion treads too familiar "will the lovers ultimately reunite?" waters.
• Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, USA, 1936) The "in the end, we have each other" message, which echoes René Clair's earlier, superior À Nous la Liberté (Freedom For Us), is hopeful but pat. Modern Times contains some of Chaplin's most memorable sight gags (the assembly line auto-feeder; lost in machinery gears; roller-skating at edge of a department store drop-off). But the narrative is too disjointed, and there's no overriding sense of momentum. The individual parts are wonderful, but the connective bolts simply don't fit.