Godzilla

Not a monster romp. Ishiro Honda made a sober, grief-stricken film about nuclear annihilation, released nine years after Hiroshima and months after an American test irradiated a Japanese fishing crew. The creature is a walking atom bomb, and the film treats the destruction of Tokyo as genuine catastrophe, not spectacle.

The effects are handmade and the tone is funereal, closer to a war film than a creature feature, and the scientist's moral anguish over the weapon that can kill Godzilla is the real drama. The American recut with Raymond Burr guts most of this.

Watch the Japanese original. It is a serious film, and a great one.