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I’m thinking about all those dedicated, overwhelmed doctors, nurses, and technicians, providing care at grave risk to their own health and safety. Just how do we protect them, and then, how do we thank them properly? In tribute to their crucial, courageous work, here are ten top titles that feature doctors and nurses — some noble, others less so. 

Today the concept of someone writing and directing their own films is, if not commonplace, hardly unusual. A quick Google search yields many prominent names. So it’s hard to imagine that way back in the thirties, during Hollywood’s Golden Age, there was no such animal. Writers and directors were kept in different silos, and never the ‘twain met.

“Orson Welles lists ‘Citizen Kane’ as his best film, Alfred Hitchcock opts for ‘Shadow of a Doubt’, and Sir Carol Reed chose ‘The Third Man’ - and I'm in all of them.” Those are the words of Joseph Cotten, perhaps the finest screen actor never to be nominated for an Oscar. The more time passes, the more it feels like a serious oversight.

Today his name may be familiar only to film buffs, scholars and students, but some of Fritz Lang's movies have never really left us. For the most part his work explored nefarious doings in society’s criminal underbelly. But he also gave us our first real science fiction epic (1927’s “Metropolis”).

Thanks to a couple of stellar releases from the Criterion Collection, I’m being reminded of a big star from Hollywood’s golden age who risks being forgotten, but shouldn’t be. His name was Charles Boyer, and he was one of only two French actors to break through in Hollywood during the thirties (the other was singer Maurice Chevalier, who unlike Boyer, confined himself to musical comedies).

In the days before films relied on computers to entertain us, Billy Wilder used a movie camera to tell us stories. His stories might be funny or sad, but all held some grain of human insight, with even hard observations tempered by an underlying affection for his fellow man. At the closing titles, this made his many fans feel not only satisfied, but edified.