The Academy got it right.
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The Academy and the numbers agree.
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Dir. Lewis Milestone · Louis Wolheim · Lew Ayres · John Wray · Arnold Lucy
When a group of idealistic young men join the German Army during the Great War, they are assigned to the Western Front, where their patriotism is destroyed by the harsh realities of combat.
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Dir. Josef von Sternberg · Emil Jannings · Marlene Dietrich · Kurt Gerron · Rosa Valetti
Prim professor Immanuel Rath finds some of his students ogling racy photos of cabaret performer Lola Lola and visits a local club, The Blue Angel, in an attempt to catch them there. Seeing Lola perform, the teacher is filled with lust, eventually resigning his position at the school to marry the young woman. However, his marriage to a coquette -- whose job is to entice men -- proves to be more difficult than Rath imagined.
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Dir. Victor Heerman · Groucho Marx · Harpo Marx · Chico Marx · Zeppo Marx
The well-known explorer and hunter Captain Spaulding has just returned from Africa, and is being welcomed home with a lavish party at the estate of influential society matron Mrs. Rittenhouse when a valuable painting goes missing. The intrepid Captain Spaulding attempts to solve the crime with the help of his silly secretary Horatio Jamison, while sparring with the anarchic Signor Emanuel Ravelli and his nutty sidekick The Professor.
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Dir. F. W. Murnau · Charles Farrell · Mary Duncan · David Torrence · Edith Yorke
A waitress from Chicago falls in love with a man from rural Minnesota and marries him, with the intent of living a better life - but life on the farm has its own challenges.
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Dir. Luis Buñuel · Gaston Modot · Lya Lys · Caridad de Laberdesque · Max Ernst
The film consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most sustained of which details the story of a man and a woman who are passionately in love. Their attempts to consummate their passion are constantly thwarted, by their families, by the Church and bourgeois society in general.
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Dir. Robert Siodmak · Erwin Splettstößer · Brigitte Borchert · Wolfgang von Waltershausen · Christl Ehlers
A semi-documentary experimental 1930 German silent film created by amateurs with a small budget. With authentic scenes of the metropolis city of Berlin, it's the first film from the later famous screenwriters/directors Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann.
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Dir. Raoul Walsh · John Wayne · Marguerite Churchill · El Brendel · Tully Marshall
Young scout Breck Coleman leads a wagon train along the dangerous trail to Oregon as he tries to get the affection of the beautiful pioneer Ruth Cameron and plans his revenge on the harsh scoundrels who murdered a friend of his in the past.
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Dir. Oleksandr Dovzhenko · Stepan Shkurat · Semyon Svashenko · Yuliya Solntseva · Elena Maksimova
The film tells about the creation of the first collective farm communes and class enmity. Vasyl, a member of the Komsomol, with the help of a local party organization, gets a tractor and plows private boundaries "on kulak fields." However, this enthusiasm will cost him dearly.
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Dir. Howard Hughes · Ben Lyon · James Hall · Jean Harlow · John Darrow
When the Great War breaks out, brothers Roy and Monte Rutledge, each attending Oxford University, enlist with the Royal Flying Corps.
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Dir. Josef von Sternberg · Gary Cooper · Marlene Dietrich · Adolphe Menjou · Ullrich Haupt
Mogador, Morocco. Late 1920s. A complex romance develops between a womanizing Legionnaire and a disillusioned Parisian cabaret singer.
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Dir. George W. Hill · Chester Morris · Wallace Beery · Lewis Stone · Robert Montgomery
Convicted of manslaughter for a drunken driving accident, Kent Marlowe is sent to prison, where he meets vicious incarcerated figures who are planning an escape from the brutal conditions.
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Dir. G.W. Pabst · Fritz Kampers · Gustav Diessl · Hans-Joachim Moebis · Claus Clausen
A group of German infantrymen of the First World War live out their lives in the trenches of France. They find brief entertainment and relief in a village behind the lines, but primarily terror fills their lives as the attacks on and from the French army ebb and flow. One of the men, Karl, goes home on leave only to discover the degradation forced on his family by wartime poverty. He returns to the lines in time to face an enormous attack by French tanks.
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Dir. René Clair · Albert Préjean · Pola Illéry · Edmond T. Gréville · Bill Bocket
In the tenement slums of Paris between the world wars, impoverished street singer Albert yearns for beautiful Romanian immigrant Pola. Pola's boyfriend, local hoodlum Fred, grows jealous of Albert's constant attention to his woman and frames the hapless musician for one of his own petty crimes. But while Albert is in prison for Fred's misdeed, Pola ends up falling for Albert's faithful best friend, Louis.
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Dir. Robert Z. Leonard · Norma Shearer · Chester Morris · Conrad Nagel · Robert Montgomery
When a woman discovers that her husband has been unfaithful, she decides to pay him back in kind.
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Dir. Clarence Brown · Greta Garbo · Charles Bickford · George F. Marion · Marie Dressler
Old sailor Chris Christofferson eagerly awaits the arrival of his grown daughter Anna, whom he sent at five years old to live with relatives in Minnesota. He has not seen her since, but believes her to be a decent and respectably employed young woman. When Anna arrives, however, it is clear that she has lived a hard life in the dregs of society, and that much of spirit has been extinguished. She falls in love with a young sailor rescued at sea by her father, but dreads to reveal to him the truth of her past. Both father and young man are deluded about her background, yet Anna cannot quite bring herself to allow them to remain deluded.
How scoring works: films are ranked by a composite of a weighted (Bayesian) IMDb rating — the same method as the IMDb Top 250, so a high score from few voters can't outrank a strong score from many — blended with TMDB. Box office is a tiebreaker and a badge, never part of the score. Raw IMDb ratings and vote counts are shown on each card.