A Raisin in the Sun (1961)

A Raisin in the Sun is one of the best films of the 60s based on one of the best plays of the 50s that is still as relevant today as it was almost fifty years ago. The emotional resonance in the story of an African-American family that comes into a large sum of money also offers incredible and indelible performances by Sidney Poitier, Claudia MacNeil, Ruby Dee, Diana Sands and Louis Gosset, Jr. (in his film debut). Don't let the black and white cinematography steer you away from this magnificent film that looks and feels as if it was released yesterday.

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...The Stand (1994)

I kept watching The Stand, an excruciatingly long television mini-series that attempts to act as a treatise on good and evil but fails miserably, in the hopes that it might get better but, because the underlying post-apocalyptic tale seems a separate film from the morality tale (between Mother Abigail and Randall Flagg), the whole series was just disjointed and uninteresting. Although it seems a precursor to the current crop of multiple story line television series' (like Lost and Jericho), the performances, script and production values of the latter are more intriguing and expensive than those in the former. And if that doesn't cap it all in a top hat, the banal ending was poor manipulation; if you're gonna manipulate my emotions, do it right.