Bozur
Amicus
Posts: 5,515
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Post by Bozur on May 5, 2008 11:32:35 GMT -5
Take your seats for the top 100 films 1 - Casablanca Michael Curtiz, 1942 Of all the films in all the cinemas in all the world . . . why this? The answer might sound as familiar as sliced bread, but there is nothing remotely prosaic about the magic. Casablanca is the greatest romantic thriller yet painted on screen. No one could accuse Curtiz of minting high art, but does that honestly matter? Casablanca is shameless entertainment. It’s not, as many would have it, a noble melodrama about a grumpy nightclub owner with a broken heart. It is a terrific comedy of bad Vichy manners with genuine twists of repulsion and fear. The Second World War is still in its ghastly pomp, and loyalties are bought and sold in this Moroccan stew like black market favours. Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine is a bastard with a broken heart. How broken becomes apparent when the girl who broke his heart in Paris (Ingrid Bergman) walks through the door with her new husband, Resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). Rick has the only two plane tickets out of Casablanca — a pair of precious transit papers. According to the screenwriter, Howard Koch, no one had a clue whose names would be on the boarding passes until the very end of the chaotic shoot. With no certainty about the ending, the actors went into scalding scenes with their hearts on their sleeves. The emotional shorthand between the two leads resonates more with every viewing. The dry-eyed lack of sentiment is, of course, exactly what you would expect from cinema’s most hard-boiled romantic. James Christopher --------- 2 - There Will Be Blood Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007 Few films in recent years have made such an instant and dramatic impact as Anderson’s towering yarn about crude oil and God. Fewer still have put their finger on such a mortally topical concern, which is why this melodrama, inspired by an Upton Sinclair novel, has secured such a lofty berth on our list. It’s a stormy thriller about how oil turns a frontier hero into a monster, and Daniel Day-Lewis takes possession of the role like a demonic force of nature. The year is 1898, and women have yet to be invented in Texas. After years of bitter nothing, Day-Lewis’s rake-thin, hard-as-nails prospector uncorks his first gusher and starts building an empire. By 1911 Daniel Plainview is a fully fledged tycoon, mopping up land from dirt-poor pilgrims with neither the tools, nor the nous, to dig their own fortunes. It’s a masterclass in how the West was truly sold, and a virtuoso piece of acting. The meticulous skill with which Day-Lewis assembles his performance around Plainview’s frontier tics and mannerisms is a genuine, and truly spartan, pleasure. He has a voice like Abe Lincoln, a strong handshake, and an honest limp. His ghastly ambition only becomes apparent when he clashes spectacularly with a young, evangelical minister, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), whose tiny parish sits on top of the biggest untapped reservoir in America. The self-made millionaire and the self-appointed scourge of God are acutely aware how much a contract can transfigure their less-than-divine ambitions. The deal they strike is duly blighted by horrific accidents and ugly betrayals. What makes Anderson’s film such a magnificent watch is the quality of the hypocrisy. The failure of these two emblematic characters to square religion and greed is quite sublime, and alarmingly relevant. James Christopher -------------- 3 - ET: The Extra Terrestrial Stephen Spielberg, 1982 It happened, according to movie lore, at the first Cannes Film Festival screening of E.T. Hundreds of hardened critics and cynical industry watchers were gradually melted to mush, and eventually even stood up and cheered when the bikes took flight in the third-act chase scene. They did this because they were responding to a movie that speaks not to cinephiles, to sci-fi fans or to popcorn munchers (though, in truth, it gamely addresses all three), but to a film that goes deeper than that. For this, at its most chromosomal, is the story of two lost children who find each other. Elliott (Henry Thomas) is emotionally broken and abandoned by his parents’ divorce, just as E.T. is literally abandoned by the spaceship that flees the menacing approach of Keys (Peter Coyote). The friendship of Elliot and E.T. is thus forged of necessity. Their adventures — E.T.’s housebound antics, the Hallowe’en escape, the bicycle flying — are exquisitely told by Spielberg from an exclusively childlike point of view (the camera even hovers at kiddie head height). Their bond is thus the promise of healing plenitude and total commitment that addresses the child, abandoned or not, in all of us. Kevin Maher ---------- 4 - CHINATOWN (Roman Polanski, 1974) This ultra-stylish thriller was the last film that its director Polanski made in the United States before his exile to Europe. By all accounts, Chinatown was not the easiest of shoots. Polanski apparently argued violently with both his leads. The movie truism that the more difficult the production, the better the film would seem to hold true. It is a masterful piece of work: superbly crafted and bleakly brilliant, it was one of the films that defined the golden era of Hollywood of the 1970s. Jack Nicholson plays small-time private detective Jake Gittes, Faye Dunaway plays Evelyn Mulwray, the mysterious blonde who hires him to investigate whether her husband is guilty of infidelity. The role of Evelyn was originally destined for Ali MacGraw, until she had the temerity to divorce the film’s producer, Robert Evans, for Steve McQueen. It’s evocatively set in the sun-baked Los Angeles of 1937, a city in the middle of a crippling drought where corruption is rife and nobody is trustworthy. Wendy Ide ----------- 5 - THE SHINING (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) The supernatural and the precarious nature of sanity are the themes explored in Stanley Kubrick’s outstanding horror movie. Adapted from a novel by Stephen King, the film stars Jack Nicholson as former schoolteacher turned aspiring writer Jack Torrance and Shelley Duval as his wife Wendy. Jack has taken a job as a winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, where he and his family will be snowed in for several months. His son, Danny, senses that something is amiss at the hotel — a feeling confirmed by the hotel chef d**k Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), who shares Danny’s telepathic gift. Danny’s fears are well-founded. Before long his dad is conversing with the dead and pursuing his mother with an axe. Kubrick’s perfectionism ensured that it wasn’t the easiest film to make: he allegedly demanded 127 takes from Shelley Duvall in one scene, and reduced the 69-year-old Crothers to tears. But the film that resulted is one of the scariest yet made. Wendy Ide --------- 6 - VERTIGO (Alfred Hitchc**k, 1958) A disappointment on its original release, described as tedious and overlong, Hitchc**k’s Vertigo has grown in stature over time and has become, ironically, easily his best feature. It is, of course, a deeply creepy film, and the story of an obsessive relationship between a neurasthenic detective (James Stewart) and a suicidal blonde (Kim Novak) was hardly going to appeal to a contemporary audience expecting a cutesy Catch a Thief redux. Yet Vertigo gets more eerily modern as the years progress. When, for instance, Stewart’s Scottie witnesses the “death” of his new lover, Novak’s equally fragile Madeleine, he has a complete nervous breakdown. When he meets Judy (Novak again) her low-grade doppelganger (she has bad lipstick and hairy eyebrows), his bullying attempts to remake her in Madeleine’s likeness cut to the heart of Hitchc**k’s project. Thus the film, it is said, is the director’s most autobiographical, and speaks of his compulsive desire for, and brutish treatment of, icy blonde women. Yet it’s also a testament to an image-obsessed culture that believes, like ours, in re-creating and re-moulding to create an archetype that doesn’t exist — a culture, like Scottie, that has fallen completely for the allure of fantasy over reality. Kevin Maher ------------ 7 - KES (Ken Loach, 1969) This beautifully judged adaptation of a novel by Barry Hines is never permitted to lapse into sentimentality or “it’s grim oop North” clichés. Instead, the story of a lad from Barnsley who escapes the bullying of his older brother, the sardonic indifference of his teachers and the depressing inevitability of his future by training a kestrel is a clear-eyed portrait of a boy with few options and the bird that represents hope for him. The naturalistic performances are universally impressive but it’s the teenaged David Bradley, who won the central role of Billy at an open audition, who dominates the film. He later said that he was more excited by the free food and drink at the audition than the role itself. Wendy Ide ------------- 8 - SUNSET BLVD. (Billy Wilder, 1950) Wilder turns his razor-blade cynicism onto a subject close to home — Hollywood — and reveals it as a relentless machine that digests and discards its stars. It’s a brilliantly cold-hearted piece of film-making, featuring several cruelly apposite pieces of casting. Forgotten silent star Norma Desmond was played by Gloria Swanson, whose career had stalled in the 1930s. Her butler was played by Eric von Stroheim, the silent-movie director who worked with Swanson on Queen Kelly in 1929. Screenwriter Joe Gillis is played by William Holden. The film’s longevity is evident in Norma’s endlessly quotable, magnificently deluded line: “I’m still big. It’s the films that got small.” Wendy Ide ------ 9 - ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (Michel Gondry, 2004) It should never have been this good. The story of an introspective New Yorker, Joel (Jim Carrey), who erases his memories of a recent doomed romance with the irascible Clementine (Kate Winslet) emerged from a smart yet solipsistic school of tricksy movies that included Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Eternal Sunshine took this same innovation, with non-linear narrative and berserker-style visual storytelling, and injected it with the agony and ecstasy of genuine human relationships. The result was a magnificent pairing in Winslet and Carrey, who transformed Clem and Joel’s chemistry into a relationship as painfully touching as it was tragic. Kevin Maher ---------- 10 - THE GODFATHER (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) Nobody makes fully blown mobster movies like Francis Ford Coppola. They started with Brando and Pacino as Corleone father and son in the original Godfather, with the latter a revelation as the reluctant mobster enforcing the family tradition. In The Godfather : Part II, Pacino’s Michael is still concerned with legitimacy, while Brando’s Don is given a sprawling back story and a younger self in Robert De Niro. The film is longer than the first, and regarded as the best of the series. The Godfather: Part III, often derided, has another magnetic turn from Pacino, and, most importantly, reveals that the story is utterly incomplete without it. Kevin Maher ----------- 11 - THE SOUND OF MUSIC (Robert Wise, 1965) If it’s true that, according to legendary essayist Walter Pater, “All art aspires towards the condition of music” then it follows that all movies aspire towards the condition of The Sound of Music. All emotional movies, that is. For despite the hipster cynicism that sees the film as extreme kitsch, this transparent tale of*guileless governess (Julie Andrews) who melts the heart of a martinet widower (Christopher Plummer), still commands a guttural draw. Whether it’s Plummer’s withdrawn Captain Von Trapp unexpectedly serenading his seven children with the title track, or his moist-eyed performance of Edelweiss in the finale, this is a film of simple yet big ideas — chiefly the need for forgiveness and the transformative power of, well, love. Kevin Maher ---------- 12 - ALIEN (Ridley Scott, 1979) It’s impossible to exaggerate the influence Ridley Scott’s movie has had on the science fiction genre. Dan O’Bannon’s script, about an industrial mining ship that lands on a blasted planet, is the most spare and perfect tin-can horror ever written. The crew discover the ghostly skeletal shell of a spaceship, and a few weird pods, but think little of it until a screaming sausage erupts out of John Hurt’s chest during supper. The downbeat pleasure of the film is the palpable lack of love or sophistication among this blue-collar crew. Their view of space travel is just another grubby means of getting paid. James Christopher ----------- 13 - 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) The greatest piece of quasimystical Art House sci-fi pop philosophy, 2001 is Kubrick’s Promethean attempt to solve the riddle of man’s place in the cosmos. Naturally, given the ambitious remit, this involves an epic, oblique journey from pre-Neanderthal crazy apes to a modern moon-base to the outer orbit of Jupiter and beyond, to a trippy multicoloured wormhole sequence that ends in a space-bedroom at the end of the universe. And all along the movie asks such questions as: “What is the nature of the black slab? Is man primarily destructive? Will technology set us free?” That Kubrick avoids answering these questions explicitly is part of the movie’s provocative project and, ultimately, its genius. Kevin Maher ---------- 14 - THE JUNGLE BOOK (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1967) Disney’s classic cartoon uses the character names, but otherwise bears little resemblance to the 1894 collection of Rudyard Kipling stories that inspired it. Kipling’s widow was reportedly aghast at the pronunciation of Mowgli used in the film; her late husband had always pronounced it as Mau-glee. The star is undoubtedly Baloo the bear, voiced by Phil Harris, a big-band leader turned comedian whose voice would appear in Disney’s later films The Aristocats and Robin Hood. The song The Bare Necessities was nominated for an Oscar, but lost out to Talk to the Animals from Doctor Dolittle. Nigel Kendall ------------ 15 - APOCALYPSE NOW (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) The making of this astonishing movie — recorded in the documentary Hearts of Darkness — was almost as insane as the war itself. The result is the greatest war movie yet made. Martin Sheen’s unlisted mission “to terminate with extreme prejudice” a mythic American colonel (Marlon Brando), who has turned psycho in Cambodia, owes as much to Dante and the Doors as it does to Joseph Conrad. The film is defined by its surreal set-pieces, most memorably the dawn helicopter attack on a Vietcong village so Robert Duvall’s nutty Texan can go surfing. The terrific power of the scene lies in its absurd contradictions, and the fact that Sheen can barely believe w ----------- 16 - METROPOLIS (Fritz Lang, 1927) For its scale and ambition alone, this silent film has earned its place on any list of classic movies. Lang’s dystopian science-fiction picture employed more than 37,000 extras, took two years to shoot and nearly bankrupted its production company. The tragedy is that, despite meticulous restoration, modern audiences will never get to see the film as Lang intended as a quarter of it is lost for ever. The design of the film is exceptional. The towering art deco skyscrapers — inspired, it is said, by Lang’s first view of Manhattan — became the blueprint for futuristic cityscapes for decades to come. Wendy Ide --------------- 17 - ANNIE HALL (Woody Allen, 1977) Seven movies in, and Woody Allen finally hits his stride in a witty, intellectual and hugely cinematic comedy of near perfection. The multiple Oscar-winning Annie Hall revealed the tragic romantic in Allen, detailing the demise of his fictional relationship with the titular kooky soul-mate, played by Diane Keaton (then Allen’s real-life partner). It also showed Allen the auteur at his most audacious, boldly intercutting the romantic action with direct addresses to camera, animated sequences, split screen, comedy subtitles and a game cameo from Marshall McLuhan, who helpfully silences a pontificating Fellini fan in a downtown cinema queue — Allen then turns to camera and shrugs, “Boy, if only life were like this!” If only indeed. Kevin Maher ------------ 18 - DON'T LOOK NOW (Nicolas Roeg, 1973) It is impossible to pin down exactly why Roeg’s masterpiece is so effective. Every viewing of this seminal ghost story, adapted from a Daphne du Maurier novella, yields some new and troubling thought. After their daughter drowns, John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) take a working trip to Venice in an attempt to glue back their marriage. There’s an extraordinary conflation of contrary images and emotions: the drab beauty of a wintry Venice; the inexplicable sense of loss; the intense and lonely sex; and the dribble of blood across a cracked photographic slide. One of the most haunting and enigmatic riddles in the history of cinema. James Christopher ----------- 19 - THE EXORCIST (William Friedkin, 1973) Friedkin’s controversial masterpiece about the exorcism of a 13-year-old girl is the most toxic and disturbing horror movie yet made. Never mind the pea-soup vomit, Linda Blair’s revolving head, or the famous refrigerated bedroom set. It is the sickening feeling of invasion, and the ceding of psychological control to a malevolent other, that freaked out an entire generation. There were ambulances outside cinemas in Dublin when the film opened, and spiritually there still are. Paul Schrader, the director who filmed Dominion, the prequel to The Exorcist, put it thus: “The metaphor is extraordinary: God and the Devil in the same room arguing over the body of a 13-year-old girl. It doesn’t come much purer than that.” James Christopher ----------- 20 - THE WIZARD OF OZ (Victor Fleming, 1939) The central scandal of The Wizard of Oz, the primal conceit, and the reason that it remains so resonant and so heart-breaking, is that the movie’s beloved mantra, “There’s no place like home”, is revealed to be a lie. For Judy Garland’s Dorothy leaves the grim grey drabness of Kansas for the musical multicoloured pleasure of Oz and there forges relationships, defeats her nemesis, and becomes a woman. Her return to Kansas in the film’s finale may have us weeping with delight, but in it lies the sad recognition that this return to childhood and to the myth of home is perhaps the greatest fantasy of all. Kevin Maher cont. entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/
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Bozur
Amicus
Posts: 5,515
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Post by Bozur on May 5, 2008 11:34:22 GMT -5
100 - JURASSIC PARK (Stephen Spielberg, 1993)
Michael Crichton’s novel theory that DNA specialists could clone a tyrannosaurus rex from a mosquito trapped in amber inspired the greatest theme-park movie ever made. Crichton’s premise, coupled with Spielberg’s obsession with dinosaurs, resulted in a box-office sensation. The plot could have been written on a parking ticket. Doctors Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum test-drive a dinosaur park on a tropical island before Richard Attenborough’s bumbling billionaire opens it to the public. The awe at the first sight of grazing brachiosaurs and a galloping herd of gallimimus was not confined to the cast. No one had seen computer-generated miracles on this scale before. Spielberg’s touch of genius was to make his meat-eating predators far more intelligent, indeed “human”, than the sloppy scientists who cloned them. James Christopher
99 - LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE (Jean Cocteau, 1946)
Few directors are as skilled at enchantment as Jean Cocteau, as this dreamlike version of the fairytale Beauty and the Beast demonstrates. La Belle et la bête must be among the most achingly beautiful films yet made. The black and white photography adds a sensual mystery to the story. Surreal visual enigmas captivate the viewer and the design of the beast’s magical domain, by Christian Bérard, is exquisite. Jean Marais spent five hours every day in make up for the role of the Beast. His interpretation is skilfully nuanced, despite the layers of fur: this beast is fearsome, dignified and tragic. Wendy Ide
98 - MY FAIR LADY (George Cukor, 1964)
Audrey Hepburn as a grubby urchin was always going to be a bit of a stretch, even for the most credulous audiences. But her repartee with co-star Rex Harrison (on magnificently irascible form) and the delicious design of the film by Cecil Beaton ensure that any minor quibbles about her Cockney authenticity are soon forgotten. This screen adaptation of Lerner and Loewe’s musical take on Pygmalion embraces its theatrical roots: it is archly stagey and the stylised design heightens the artificiality of the story and some of the performances. But it’s a glorious confection blessed with some of the catchiest songs and most memorable dance routines in Hollywood musical history. And Hepburn’s poise is positively regal. The film won an impressive eight Oscars in 1965. Wendy Ide
97 - POINT BREAK (Kathryn Bigelow, 1992)
The surprise in Point Break is not that it redefined the macho action flick, but that it was done by a woman. From within a derivative tale about a rookie undercover FBI agent, Keanu Reeves, who infiltrates a gang of, yes, bank-robbing surfers led by Patrick Swayze, director Bigelow magnified the homoerotic tension between agent Reeves and surfer Swayze (parodied recently in Hot Fuzz). She made an action star out of the epicene Reeves and turned the movie’s “100% Pure Adrenaline” mantra into a shooting style — the effects of which are still felt today (the Bourne movies are an elaboration of the Reeves-Swayze chase in Point Break). The surfing scenes aren’t too shabby either. Wendy Ide
96 - LOST IN TRANSLATION (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
This brief encounter between Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in a five-star hotel in Tokyo is a remarkable follow-up to The Virgin Suicides. Murray plays a washed-up Hollywood star who fronts adverts for cheap whiskey. He hasn’t been so mordantly funny since Groundhog Day. Johansson is the frustrated wife of a photographer forever on shoot. The magic of their hotel romance is how little needs to be said. The melancholic humour is deliciously taboo. The platonic loners visit karaoke bars, watch La Dolce Vita at 3am, and sizzle politely in hotel lifts. The ending is one of life’s great mysteries. James Christopher
95 - GRAND HOTEL (Edmund Goulding, 1932)
One of Hollywood’s first ultra-glamorous A-list ensembles, Grand Hotel and its legendary producer Irving Thalberg boasted the genius idea of sticking a slew of head-lining stars such as Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and John Barrymore in a Berlin hotel for 48 hours, and simply watching the drama unfold. The resulting movie is famous for a typically steely turn from Crawford, a clever criss-crossing narrative, and a scene-stealing performance from Garbo as a suicidal Russian dancer who rebuffs Barrymore with the iconic line: “But I want to be alone!” Kevin Maher
94 - THE TOWERING INFERNO (John Guillermin, Irwin Allen, 1974)
Proudly riding high in our charts, because trash this good cannot be ignored, this is the granddaddy of disaster flicks. There’s a brand-new hotel, all the guests have some extra layer of drama attached to them, and there’s a raging fire. Steve McQueen and Paul Newman play the heroes. There are brilliant scenes set in a rooftop ballroom, kiddies in peril, baddies you want to burn and an overused dangling rope ladder. O. J. Simpson plays a security guard. Elements have become so parodied in films like Airplane you may find yourself laughing at inappropriate moments. Tim Teeman
93 - COOL HAND LUKE (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967)
Eight years before Jack Nicholson took on the system in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Paul Newman’s prisoner strained against the chains of a Florida work camp in Rosenberg’s sweat-soaked allegory. Blue-eyed Newman was set up as a Christ figure, earning hero status via prodigious egg-eating and frequent escape attempts before being disowned by his fellow inmates, broken by the guards and gloriously resurrected. Luke’s prison number, 37, is a biblical reference to Luke 1:37: “For with God nothing shall be impossible.” Ed Potton
92 - A BOUT DE SOUFFLE (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
The movie that launched the French New Wave, Godard’s A bout de souffle is often mistakenly perceived as a formal experiment in film-making and an intellectual event. Whereas in fact, this story of a chain-smoking petty criminal (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his impressionable American girlfriend (Jean Seberg) is a testament to the power of propulsive film-making (the title in English, Breathless, is a hint). Everyone here is running, fleeing or marching around Paris (Belmondo, in particular is evading les flics after an opening-reel murder). The camera too, wielded by the legendary Raoul Coutard, rarely stops moving. Even a quiet bedroom scene between the two star-crossed leads is spliced to giddy shreds by Godard’s then infamous jump-cuts. The results are anything but dull. Ed Potton
91 - SHORT CUTS (Robert Altman, 1993)
The ensemble promise of Altman’s Nashville and The Player are fully realised in this breathtakingly confident homage to Los Angeles and to the poetry of alienation it engenders in its residents. Actors as disparate as Robert Downey Jr, Jack Lemmon and Julianne Moore, working from a Raymond Carver adaptation, play struggling Los Angelinos with emotional wounds and fractured relationships. Best is Jennifer Jason Leigh’s phone-sexpert, whose explicit hotline conversations eventually drive frustrated husband Chris Penn to a random act of violence. The film, ultimately, is beautiful but without hope. Which, of course, is very LA. Kevin Maher
90 - TRAINSPOTTING (Danny Boyle, 1996)
You need both hands to count the number of careers this heroin-laced black comedy helped to launch. On screen, there’s Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald and Shirley Henderson, and off it the author Irvine Welsh, the director Danny Boyle, and the photographer Lorenzo Agius, whose publicity shots for the film still adorn a million student bedsits. The film was shot in just eight weeks. For its first hour, Boyle’s frenetic editing style produces a rush that perfectly matches his subject matter. Nigel Kendall
89 - TOUCH OF EVIL (Orson Welles, 1958)
Touch of Evil may not have the dazzling virtuosity of Welles’s debut, Citizen Kane. But it has far uglier, darker and truer things to say. The agile opening tracking shot, which follows a car across the US-Mexican border, is legendary. Atmosphere and words conspire as Charlton Heston’s self-righteous Mexican narcotics agent goes toe-to-toe with Welles’s monumentally sleazy detective, Hank Quinlan, over the motives behind a fatal bombing. The moral corruption is as ripe as Welles’s enormous gut. His relationship with Marlene Dietrich’s gypsy brothel keeper is an unconsummated mystery. James Christopher Have your say
88 - WILD STRAWBERRIES (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
This beautiful film gives the lie to Bergman’s reputation as difficult to watch. An ageing professor, as dusty as the tomes on his study wall, makes the trip across Sweden to collect a prestigious award, and memories of his youthful, playful self flood back. An elegy to lost youth and the regretted compromises of adult life, the film is notable for its spectacular camera work, and for the performance of Swedish film pioneer Victor Sjöström in the lead role. Sjöström, who directed Lillian Gish in the silent classic The Wind (1928), died three years after Wild Strawberries was released. This was his last acting role. Nigel Kendall
87 - THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (Jonathan Demme, 1991)
A stunning movie that introduced the greatest monster of them all. Brian Cox had already played Hannibal “Lecktor” in Michael Mann’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon, but it was Anthony Hopkins who turned the erudite, Chianti-loving cannibal into an unforgettable icon. The brilliance of the film is that it excels on every level: as a nerve-shredding whodunnit, horror film, chase movie, and vertiginous psycho-drama. The inspired idea of using a psychopath to catch a serial killer reinvigorated a genre that had been flat-lining since Dirty Harry. The mental chess between Jodie Foster’s Agent Starling and Anthony Hopkins’s perfectly still, perfectly precise Lecter will forever send shivers down the spine. James Christopher
86 - NOSFERATU (F.W. Murnau, 1922)
As the disturbing flipside to the patrician Draculas of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, the vermin-like bloodsucker in Murnau’s silent masterpiece is a creature not from Hollywood, but from the id itself. The film, which brazenly pilfers Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the German production company was later sued into bankruptcy by Stoker’s widow), follows the misfortunes of real-estate agent Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) who is summoned to the Carpathian hideout of bald-headed, crooked-framed, kohl-eyed, bat-eared, rat-toothed Count Orlock (Max Schreck). Much neck-biting ensues, Orlock moves to Hutter’s home town, and the film produces some seminal horror images, including Orlock’s final agonising fade in the morning light. Kevin Maher
85 - DOG DAY AFTERNOON (Sidney Lumet, 1975)
A real-life botched Brooklyn bank robbery is the subject of this fascinating portrait of a charismatic criminal caught in the glare of the media spotlight. Al Pacino gives the wildcard performance of his career (he was beaten by Jack Nicholson’s Cuckoo’s Nest turn at that year’s Oscars) as Sonny, the skittish bisexual Vietnam veteran who’s robbing the bank to fund his gay lover’s sex-change operation. His incendiary relationship with the gathering crowds, the police and the rapacious news media quickly becomes the real focus of the film. Director Lumet’s depiction of the flimsy and treacherous nature of instant celebrity seems eerily prescient. Kevin Maher
84 - FESTEN (Thomas Vinterberg, 1999)
This incredibly savage comedy about a Danish family reunion was a genuine breath of fresh air. It is the first, and finest, of the Dogme films whose collective ambition was to rescue cinema’s credibility as an art form by stripping it to the bone. Vinterberg duly ditched every prop except his camera, and the result has influenced a generation of guerrilla film-makers. The splintered story about grown-up siblings who fail to bury their differences at their father’s 60th birthday party has a documentary intensity that is cleverly aggravated by an almost alarming lack of editorial control. The oldest son (Ulrich Thomsen) is manhandled out of the dining room before the main course for toasting his father’s sexual abuse of himself and his twin sister. The way the guests plough politely on is horribly real. An extraordinary piece of story-telling: chaotic, spontaneous, and refreshingly unpredictable. James Christopher
83 - SPARTACUS (Stanley Kubrick, 1960)
The making of Kubrick’s epic tale of slave rebellion under Roman rule would make an epic in itself. Kubrick was summoned by the film’s star and producer Kirk Douglas, who was at daggers drawn with the original director, Anthony Mann. Douglas also insisted that the script be written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, and the finished film therefore emphasises the power of mass uprising against a tyrannical state. Kubrick found the experience so draining that he returned to the UK, never to work in Hollywood again. The original director Mann’s work is uncredited, as it had been on the earlier epic Quo Vadis. The veteran western director finally got back into the epic saddle with El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire. Nigel Kendall
82 - CHUNGKING EXPRESS (Wong Kar Wai, 1994)
Wong Kar Wai’s parallel stories of lovelorn Hong Kong cops is an impressionistic feast of vivid neon and jewel-like colour. With its trademark slow motion and artful blurring, this was one of the films to launch the career of the maverick cinematographer Christopher Doyle. The two stories are slight, as disposable as the fast food and pop culture that form the movie’s backdrop. But there’s something seductive about the half-realised love affairs. Story one has a femme fatale and a lost soul looking for meaning in the sell-by dates of cans of pineapple; story two stars Faye Wong as a fast-food waitress obsessed with a cop in a half-hearted relationship with an air hostess. Wendy Ide
81 - NORTH BY NORTHWEST (Alfred Hitchc**k, 1959)
Hitchc**k’s classic contains many elements familiar to viewers of his films, notably the theme of mistaken identity, the “MacGuffin” (a term coined by Hitchc**k to denote an object that the cast is chasing, in this case a microfilm), a beautiful blonde, and a monumental climax, here on Mount Rushmore. But the film also leavens its thriller components with humour. The makers of the Bond films, three years later, would use this formula, MacGuffin and all, to create the most successful franchise in cinema history. Serious critics, notably the French, point out that every single character in the film is playing a part and that even Cary Grant’s hero, the executive mistaken for a government agent, works in advertising: his profession is deception. The crop-dusting chase scene is rightly fêted. Nigel Kendall
80 - TOKYO STORY (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
The spare wonder of Ozu’s masterpiece is that his characters and plot are as plain and honest as old shoes. The film is a portrait of middle-class siblings who put on their Sunday best when their elderly bumpkin parents travel to meet them in Tokyo. The excitement of the genial old couple is salted by a gradual and unspeakable awareness that their children regard them as an expensive, time-consuming inconvenience. The humble grace with which the elderly parents accept the drift between themselves and their impatient children would make stones weep. The original release was totally unmatched by anything happening in Western cinema, and made Hollywood look thoroughly superficial. Ozu would rather die than use a studio sleight of hand. His camera barely moves from the sitting position adopted by his elderly stars. The tension is exquisite. The result is profoundly moving. This is rare gold. James Christopher
79 - DELIVERANCE (John Boorman, 1972)
The original hillbilly thriller, and the scariest of them all. Boorman’s sour and violent classic loomed over the early 1970s like a Darwinian nightmare about the condescending rich and the feral poor. Four Atlanta businessmen (including two of the biggest names in Hollywood, John Voight and Burt Reynolds) are on a canoe trip in Georgia when they find themselves stalked by remorseless inbred woodsmen. A romantic alpha-male camping trip turns into a squalid fight to stay alive. The bleak message of the film — that there’s absolutely nothing civilised about survival — shook audiences to the core. It still does. James Christopher
78 - THE LADY EVE (Preston Sturges, 1941)
Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) has been studying snakes in the Amazon for two years, and hasn’t seen a woman for the duration. He was always going to fall hard for the first resourceful young woman to cross his path — literally in this case. Cruise ship con-artist Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) trips him up and reels him in. He’s rich and naive, the perfect guy as far as she’s concerned; she’s not a reptile or a pygmy which makes her pretty much ideal for him. But when Charles gets wise to his lady friend’s dubious line of work, he breaks off their relationship. Sturges’s film now kicks the comedy up a notch as Jean reinvents herself as a British aristocrat, the eponymous Lady Eve. Fonda and Stanwyck have a sexual chemistry that all but melts the screen. Wendy Ide
77 - THE APU TRILOGY (Satyajit Ray, 1956-1959)
Former ad man Ray here turns heads and preconceptions away from the idea that Indian cinema is synonymous with all-singing, all-dancing, multicoloured camp. Instead, this tri-part celebration of lived reality is defined by a quasi-documentary style, light, observational camera work and convincing non-professional acting. Pather Panchali focuses on the hardships of Apu (Subir Bannerjee, one of the three actors to play the protagonist through the series), growing up in an impoverished rural idyll. In Aparajito, his father dies, he trains to become a priest, but eventually abandons the vocation for a place at Calcutta University. While Apu Sansar details our hero’s impulsive marriage, his wife’s death in childbirth and his attempts to reconcile with his estranged son. It’s epic stuff, but on a quiet, intimate scale. Kevin Maher
76 - BLAZING SADDLES (Mel Brooks, 1974)
The first and the best of the “spoof” movies (Airplane! would follow five years later), Brooks’s comedy satire took a genre that was sacrosanct to American cinema and culture – the Western – and simply eviscerated it. A deliciously wild-eyed Gene Wilder was perfect as the alcoholic gunslinger, The Waco Kid, who joins forces with black sheriff Cleavon Little (a stinging barb at the inherent racism of the genre) to fight the expansionist plans of corrupt businessman Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman). Mostly, however, it’s just an excuse for a roll-call of anarchic gags, including the most famous flatulence scene in cinema history. Kevin Maher
75 - THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (Sergio Leone, 1966)
Ponderously slow, but never less than gripping, the third of Leone’s spaghetti westerns with Clint Eastwood is rightly the most celebrated. The Spanish army supplied the hundreds of extras needed, and agreed to build the bridge that is destroyed by explosives, on condition that a Spanish army captain got to press the button. He blew up the bridge when the cameras weren’t turning, so his army colleagues rebuilt it, and they blew it up again. The $200,000 in gold that our unlikely alliance is hunting would be worth around $8,960,000 at today’s prices. Nigel Kendall
74 - ROSEMARY'S BABY (Roman Polanski, 1968)
Inspired by Ira Levin’s novel, Polanski returned to the themes of urban alienation and the descent into madness explored in his earlier Repulsion, but this time with a genuinely horrific twist. Mia Farrow took the role against the wishes of her then husband Frank Sinatra, who threatened her with divorce if she disobeyed. In a curious echo of the film, in which Rosemary’s husband endangers his mortal soul for an acting career, she took the part and lost Frank. Nigel Kendall
73 - GREAT EXPECTATIONS (David Lean, 1946)
David Lean’s finest two hours, and still the best big-screen version of a d**kens novel yet made. The director’s master stroke was to open it like a ghost story and film it like a ripping yarn. Guy Green’s magnificently broody photography was an Oscar-winning ingredient. So too the gothic sets. There is so much to admire: the crisp pace, the crackling atmosphere, and John Mills as the arrogant hero whose expectations are built on delusions. But it is Martita Hunt’s matchless Miss Haversham that most of us will take to the grave. Wendy Ide
72 - DAYS OF HEAVEN (Terrence Malick, 1978)
Malick’s follow-up to his extraordinary Badlands is one of the great art films of the 1970s. A young Richard Gere stars as Bill, a hot-tempered labourer who is forced to flee the industrial blight of Chicago with his lover Abby (Brooke Adams) and his sister Linda (Linda Manz). They seek sanctuary in the rural heartlands, and find it on a farm owned by the ailing Sam Shepard. Days of Heaven is celebrated for the eerie half-light of the cinematography – Malick insisted that the film was shot at the “magic hour”, first thing in the morning and late at night. Wendy Ide
71 - THIS IS SPINAL TAP (Rob Reiner, 1984)
Starting life as a stunt, this faux documentary about a British heavy metal band on a disastrous tour of the United States is cinema’s most legendary spoof. Shot with deadpan candour, the film charts the squabbles, the gaffes, and the c**k-ups as Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), David St Hubbins (Michael McKean) and Harry Shearer (Derek Smalls) threaten to implode after 17 years on the road. It’s a terrific fly-on-the-wall comedy with Reiner himself playing the cheesy documentary-maker Marty DiBergi. Some scenes will forever be cherished: the band totally lost back stage before a concert; the drummer getting trapped in a stage pod; Derek Smalls setting off an airport metal detector because of a large foil-wrapped gherkin in his underpants; and Stonehenge. James Christopher
70 - THE CONVERSATION (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
This was the sorbet that Coppola made to cleanse his palate in between the first two Godfather films. But it’s anything but purifying, as Gene Hackman’s anorak-swaddled surveillance geek pulls out what remains of his hair trying to figure out whether the couple on whom he is eavesdropping are about to be murdered. Set against a claustrophobic backdrop of post-Watergate paranoia, Coppola’s favourite of his films hinges on the intonation of a single word, much as Antonioni’s Blow-Up had revolved around a single detail in a photograph. Except with much less fashionable threads. Ed Potton
69 - HIDDEN (Michael Haneke, 2005)
With the recent release of his terrifying remake of Funny Games, Haneke has justified his reputation as the most unnerving auteur in Europe. Caché (Hidden) is his masterpiece: a magnificently understated thriller about guilt and race that begins, innocuously enough, when a popular television personality and cultural commentator, Georges (Daniel Auteuil), keeps finding surveillance tapes on his doorstep with footage of his family. The menace is terrific. Failure to find a culprit, a camera, or a reason, acts like poison on Georges’s relationship with his wife (Juliette Binoche), and ultimately his sanity. His desire to pin the guilt on Maurice Benichou’s luckless immigrant, Majid, exposes an ugly, long-buried secret. Haneke brilliantly needles fears and prejudices that the educated middle-classes would be horrified to admit. Political cinema at its intimate best. James Christopher
68 - THE MALTESE FALCON (John Huston, 1941)
Was there ever a greater MacGuffin in the movies than the fabled black statue sought by Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre? The great director John Huston keeps the action rolling along at such a cracking pace that it papers over the cracks in the plot, but it is Bogey, before this a bit-part player, who gives the defining performance of his career. Nigel Kendall
67 - THE PIANO (Jane Campion, 1993)
Campion’s third film, a period melodrama set in 1850s New Zealand, redefined the concept of the Art House Blockbuster. The movie described an erotic love triangle between priggish landowner Stewart (Sam Neill), the earthy and slightly simian Baines (Harvey Keitel) and the mysterious, piano-playing protagonist Ada (Holly Hunter). Campion’s mercilessly tight direction plays to startlingly seductive effect. Kevin Maher
66 - TOY STORY (John Lasseter, 1995)
It was with this deliriously entertaining feature film that the Pixar Animation Studio burst on to the scene, rejuvenating an animation industry that had sunk into a creatively moribund routine of fairytales and prissy princesses. Toy Story reminded audiences that family entertainment didn’t necessarily have to exclude adults, and proved digital animation didn’t have to be ugly and sinister to behold. At the heart of the story is Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), a toy cowboy who is profoundly jealous of a shiny new spaceman action figure called Buzz Lightyear, which has usurped his position as favourite toy of Andy. When Buzz accidentally falls out of the window, Woody is blamed. He must prove his innocence by rescuing Buzz from the toy-destroying terror next door . . . Wendy Ide
65 - THE THIN BLUE LINE (Errol Morris, 1988)
Errol Morris’s unconventional documentary employed a series of stylised dramatic reconstructions of a crime that resulted in the death of a Dallas policeman in 1976, a murder for which a drifter called Randall Adams was convicted and sentenced to death. The event is replayed several times, incorporating new evidence and fresh perspectives each time. The resulting movie puts a persuasive case for a miscarriage of justice and poses fundamental questions about the nature of truth. As a result of its allegations, the case was reopened and Adams was eventually released. A remarkable, impassioned documentary. Wendy Ide
64 - DO THE RIGHT THING (Spike Lee, 1989)
It marked the feature debut of Martin Lawrence, but don’t hold that against Spike Lee’s sweltering tale of racial tension in Brooklyn. It had an ensemble cast that also featured actors as charismatic as Samuel L. Jackson, Rosie Perez, Danny Aiello and Lee himself, and a killer script in which grievances slowly bubble to the surface between blacks, whites and Asians on the hottest day of the year. The presidential race has demonstrated that race remains a hot potato in America, but no film in the intervening two decades has addressed it with as much honesty, nuance — and style — as this one. Ed Potton
63 - ON THE WATERFRONT (Elia Kazan, 1954)
Two years after he had identified a list of alleged communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee and been ostracised by much of Hollywood, Elia Kazan set about proving to the world that there could be honour in being “a man who named names”. And how. Inspired by a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of exposés by journalist Malcolm Johnson, he cast Marlon Brando as a guilt-ridden dock worker who risks becoming a pariah among his colleagues by testifying against the local gang boss (memorably snarled by Lee J. Cobb). Brando, who was excused from set early every day to see his therapist, walked out of a test screening because he was so depressed about his performance. Posterity, and the Academy, disagreed. Ed Potton
62 - TAXI DRIVER (Martin Scorcese, 1976)
“You talking to me?” is the repeated line but, as several observers have pointed out, the next one is the more telling. “I’m the only one here,” mumbles c**k-eyed cabbie Travis Bickle into his mirror, and Taxi Driver has proved as powerful an essay as any on the pain, frustration and mania of isolation. There was also an uncomfortable connection with assassination attempts: Bickle was partly based on Arthur Bremer, the would-be killer of the presidential candidate George Wallace, and in turn inspired John Hinckley Jr to make his attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life. Ed Potton
61 - RASHOMON (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
Kurosawa’s influential film has become a reference point for countless later pictures: it was remade as The Outrage, and was cited as an inspiration for The Usual Suspects, Basic and most recently Vantage Point. Set in feudal Japan, the story explores a single event — an ambush, rape and murder in a forest — from the conflicting points of view of four different characters: a bandit (played with gusto by Toshiru Mifune); a nobleman; his wife; and the simple woodcutter who witnessed the tragedy. As a portrait of human weakness and mendacity, it is d*mning. The subjective nature of each character’s account leads to the conclusion that everyone lies. It’s visually arresting: the black-andwhite compositions are as elegant and bold as ink calligraphy. The score is magnificent, but it’s Kurosawa’s decision to let the final account play out without musical accompaniment that confirms his genius. Wendy Ide
60 - THE CRYING GAME (Neil Jordan, 1992)
The daddy of all “twist” movies, Jordan’s gender-bending thriller puts the revelations in films such as The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense into what lead protagonist Fergus might call “The ha’penny place” (ie not very good). However, the key to the movie, which details the botched kidnapping of British squaddie Jody (Forest Whitaker) and the subsequent romance between kidnapper Fergus (Stephen Rea) and Jody’s partner Dil (Jaye Davidson) is that the twist itself (Dil is a man! I know! I couldn’t believe it either!) is subservient to the drama. The deftly written relationships between Fergus, Jody and Dil gave the movie its unexpectedly soft heart, and ultimately earned Jordan a Best Original Screenplay Oscar. Kevin Maher
59 - PULP FICTION (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
Tarantino might have settled into a rut of semi-autistic genre pastiches, but there was a time when his films got your pulse racing. He originally intended the intersecting crime stories in his and Roger Avary’s Oscar-winning script — tales of a wife, a watch and a corpse — to be handled by different directors. Thankfully, he ended up doing all three himself, shuffling them into a non-linear sequence which contrasted with the vivid naturalism of the dialogue. Laughs and thrills were never in short supply: one viewer had a seizure after watching John Travolta stab a syringe into Uma Thurman’s chest. Tarantino’s response? “This movie f***ing works!” Ed Potton Have your say
58 - DR ZHIVAGO (David Lean, 1965)
Reunited with Robert Bolt, the screenwriter of his earlier Lawrence of Arabia, Lean produced another sprawling masterpiece. Lawrence veteran Omar Sharif was surprised to be cast in a lead role that Lean had reserved for Peter O’Toole. O’Toole, however, had other ideas after the difficult shoot for Lawrence. Zhivago was critically panned on its release in 1965, but went on to make more money at the box office than all of Lean’s other films put together. The shoot, in Spain, dragged on for 12 months. Nigel Kendall
57 - RAGING BULL (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
Despite years of barracking from his leading man Robert De Niro, Scorsese was reluctant to bring the turbulent life of granite-jawed middleweight Jake La Motta to the screen. It was only when he found himself at death’s door, bleeding internally after a decade of success and excess, that the director began to empathise with a man who maimed himself as much as his opponents. Convinced it would be his final film, he pulled out all the stops, shooting the fight scenes, innovatively, from inside the ring and filming throughout in apocalyptic monochrome. La Motta was played by De Niro as a quasi-biblical figure, who paid for his director’s sins in an inferno of blood, bile and, ultimately, flab. Ed Potton
56 - WHISKY GALORE! (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949)
For a magical period of ten years from the end of the Second World War, Ealing Studios produced a run of gently satirical comedies which still command affection. Whisky Galore! by Ealing regular Alexander Mackendrick is perhaps the archetypal Ealing comedy, celebrating the eccentricity of its characters and applauding their ingenuity when it comes to bending the law and outsmarting those who would uphold it. A cast of Ealing regulars give larger-than-life performances as the inhabitants of a tiny Scottish island cursed by a wartime shortage of whisky. When a cargo ship filled with 50,000 cases of the stuff is wrecked just off the coast, the islanders plunder as much as their boats will carry. Which is quite a lot, as it turns out. Wendy Ide
55 - THE MATRIX (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999)
Arriving on the cusp of the new millennium, The Matrix was so zeitgeisty it was almost painful. The idea of a computer hacker called Neo (Keanu Reeves) who lives in a fake alternate reality, wears a leather trench-coat and saves mankind through kung-fu and interballistic mayhem spoke to the paranoia and alienation of an entire pre-9/11 generation. It helped too that the coolly aloof Reeves was born to play Neo, that the pacing was almost relentless and that the Wachowski brothers seemed intent on ripping up the blockbuster rule book even as they reinvented it. Every action movie since then (including its own sequels) has been derivative. The genre is still recovering from the shock. Kevin Maher
54 - L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (Curtis Hanson, 1977)
Hanson’s labyrinthine noir homage is a tour de force police procedural and an evocative glimpse of the seedier side of 1950s Hollywood. It’s a magnificently corrupt town that feeds upon itself, discarding the weak and attacking the strong in the pernicious gossip rags. The film launched the careers of two Australian actors — Guy Pearce, who played ambitious golden boy cop Det Lt Ed Exley, and Russell Crowe, who played the hot-tempered Officer Bud White. Even Kim Basinger acquits herself admirably as the film’s femme fatale, Lynn Bracken. Ambitious and multi-layered, this is an elegant piece of film-making that lives up to anything produced in Hollywood during the richly creative period in which the story is set. Wendy Ide
53 - MILDRED PIERCE (Michael Curtiz, 1945)
Joan Crawford suffers and then some in this archetypal women’s weepie in which she plays a middle-class mother who strives tirelessly for her ungrateful, vile daughter, Veda (Ann Blyth). Mildred is so withstanding that when she snaps and slaps Veda you can only cheer. How horribly it goes, and Crawford — playing the prototypical soap matriarch who really will do anything for her child — provides a lavish, huge performance. Later she said: “I harness that intensity and I hold it till it’s ready to go for the camera.” When she had to slap Blyth, Crawford — who won the Best Actress Oscar for the role in 1946 — remembered: “I put my arms around her and said, ‘Darling, did I hurt you?’ ” Tim Teeman
52 - LA DOLCE VITA (Federico Fellini, 1960)
Fellini’s prescient film (it coined the term “paparazzi”) is both a celebration of hedonism and a cynical satire of a celebrity-obsessed culture. Marcello Mastroianni stars as a tabloid journalist and man about town torn between the shallow pleasures of Rome’s decadent café society and the domesticity offered by his girlfriend; the allure of chasing titbits of gossip from the glamorous set and the urge to become a serious writer. Some of the most iconic images of Italian cinema came from this film: the statue of Christ suspended over Rome by a helicopter, and Anita Ekberg, fully clothed, wallowing in the Trevi Fountain. Wendy Ide
51 - CABARET (Bob Fosse, 1972)
The role of cabaret star Sally Bowles earned Liza Minnelli an iconic status to rival her mother’s: the bowler hat and black stockings became inextricably linked to her identity, as did the catchphrase “Divine decadence darling!” There’s a forced gaiety and a desperate hedonism in the world she inhabits. Under the glitter and the greasepaint is something dissolute and decaying. The musical numbers are magnificent. The beer garden scene, where an angelic Nazi sings Tomorrow Belongs To Me, remains one of cinema’s most chilling moments. Wendy Ide
50 - BLADE RUNNER (Ridley Scott, 1982)
Scott’s ravishingly dark vision of Los Angeles in 2019 is the ultimate old-fashioned movie dystopia: a fabulous hell of skyscrapers and monolithic factories. The sky is cluttered with fuming aircraft and floating neon adverts. It never stops raining on the cramped and seedy streets, and everyone, apart from Harrison Ford’s blade runner, smokes like a chimney. What does it mean to be human in such a diseased world? This is the thrust of Scott’s film noir, which charts Ford’s quest to terminate four genetically engineered replicants who want to exact revenge on the humans who invented them. The director has never ceased to tinker with the movie. The final cut is a slightly colder and lonelier place. Seminal sci-fi. James Christopher
49 - HIGH SOCIETY (Charles Walters, 1956)
A sore point for fans of The Philadelphia Story, the original 1940 comedy upon which this is based, High Society is a musical that’s smart enough to refocus attention on the Cole Porter standards and the louche milieu. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby provide the c**ktail drinking insouciance as, respectively, a Life magazine journalist and an ex-husband of soon-to-be-remarried Rhode Island socialite Grace Kelly. The tunes include Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and True Love. But the highlight is Sinatra, glugging champagne, and slurring through a duet of Did You Ever? with a typically mellow Crosby. Kevin Maher Have your say
48 - SHOAH (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
A nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust may sound like a difficult sell, but Lanzmann’s movie is unrelentingly gripping. Eschewing traditional historical documentary methods (there is no archive footage) Lanzmann instead puts human faces on camera and lets them talk. He divides his subjects into three categories — Jewish witnesses, Polish bystanders and German Nazis. With deft judgment he intercuts their testimonies with peaceful and benign footage of contemporary life in Poland. The effect, both in time and in intensity, can be dizzying and profound. A painful lesson, perfectly delivered. Kevin Maher
47 - FARGO (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 1996)
A pitch-black comedy set against a white winter in Minnesota and North Dakota: all the better to contrast with the liberal amounts of blood splattered by the film’s close. Eccentric characterisation is one of the trademarks of the Coen brothers’ films. But in Fargo they outdid themselves. William H. Macy has the look of a desperate man trying to claw his way out from under his own stupidity — he plays car salesman Jerry Lundegaard, cinema’s most inept would-be criminal. Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare are, respectively, a garrulous rodent and a stoic psychopath hired by Lundegaard to kidnap his wife to claim a ransom from her father. And heavily pregnant detective Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) is a movie heroine to be reckoned with. Wendy Ide
46 - ALL ABOUT EVE (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1960)
It’s the role that Bette Davis credited with resurrecting her career. But chain-smoking drama queen Margo Channing was almost played by another movie icon, Claudette Colbert, who had to pull out from the film after suffering an injury. Davis was going through an acrimonious divorce during the shoot, her distinctively raspy line-delivery was apparently the result of all the screaming rows with her soon-to-be ex-husband William Sherry. A peerless backstage drama, spiked with the kind of acidic wit that Davis could spit with joyous savagery, the film pits Davis’s Channing, a stage actress at the top of her game with everything to lose, against hungry newcomer Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter). Baxter’s Eve is terrifyingly driven, but it is Davis’s tough-cookie vulnerability that steals the film. Wendy Ide
45 - THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1943)
The Powell and Pressburger stable produced some of the great cinema of the 1940s. This glorious film introduces the central character, British officer Clive Candy (played superbly by Roger Livesey), in a Turkish bath in 1943. He’s a blustering old duffer wearing a walrus moustache and a towel. He seems little more than a relic. But then the film rewinds to the Boer War and we get to know him as a hero, a romantic and a thoroughly decent chap — a relic only in that his unwavering belief in good sportsmanship is sadly out of step with modern warfare. Wendy Ide
44 - A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (Ella Kazan, 1951)
Tennessee Williams’s most famous play will always be identified with Marlon Brando. No actor had displayed such raw machismo on screen before. His mesmerising performance as Stanley Kowalski — a blue-collar brute who is forced by his pregnant wife to put up her neurotic and delusional sister, Blanche (Vivien Leigh) — is also his best. What’s often overlooked is that the film features some of the finest ensemble acting ever committed to screen. It is one of the very few productions in our Top 100 that succeeded in making that perilous leap from Broadway to Hollywood. James Christopher
43 - TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (James Cameron, 1991)
It’s a decade since Sarah Connor destroyed the Terminator, an emissary from a machine-ruled future world. Its mission was to kill her, thus preventing her unborn son from leading a human uprising that threatens the dominance of the computers. In Terminator 2, Arnie is back, accessorised with a pair of Ray-Bans and just the hint of a sense of humour. The mission this time is to protect the young John Connor (Edward Furlong) from a newer, deadlier Terminator. Cameron’s sequel works on the principle that bigger is better. The whole film is pitched at the high-octane level that most action films reserve for their big climax. This is muscular, macho, ballsy film-making — and it’s tremendous fun. Wendy Ide
42 - BLUE VELVET (David Lynch, 1986)
From Twin Peaks to Mulholland Drive, David Lynch has long been obsessed by the gruesome monsters lurking behind the white picket fences of the American Dream. But this maelstrom of kinky torture, voyeurism and sado-masochistic sex remains the classic crystallisation of his preoccupation. In Kyle MacLachlan, Lynch had a leading man whose matinee looks concealed a more ambivalent psyche, while Dennis Hopper’s ether-inhaling Frank Booth was one of the most disturbing villains to stalk the screen. Steven Berkoff was among the actors who balked at the latter role; no such qualms for Hopper, who, legend has it, said, “I’ve got to play Frank. Because I am Frank!” Ed Potton
41 - A STAR IS BORN (George Cukor, 1954)
Cukor’s remake of the 1937 musical is now the one most people remember, thanks to a central performance of real class from Judy Garland, and James Mason’s memorable, tragic drunk. In the years since being fired by MGM in 1950, Garland had toured Europe to great acclaim, but the mental problems that had resulted in at least two suicide attempts were to resurface before the end of this long shoot as she became increasingly unreliable. She and Mason were both nominated for Oscars, just asJanet Gaynor and Fredric March had been 17 years before, the first time that actors playing the same roles had been nominated. Nigel Kendall
40 - THE LIFE OF BRIAN (Terry Jones, 1979)
Despite an interlude in which its put-upon hero is abducted by aliens, this savage deconstruction of the Christian story is by far the most coherent of the Python movies. Presented with a proper budget, fancy North African locations and sets borrowed from Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, Jones and his team combined public-school humour, religious satire, surrealism and timeless daftness, sidestepping accusations of blasphemy by having Graham Chapman’s messiah born on the same day as Jesus, but in the next stable. Ed Potton
39 - THE GRADUATE (Mike Nichols, 1967)
There have been few more memorable depictions of the transition from education to adulthood — or, indeed, of the complex charms of the older woman — than Nichols’s adaptation of the novel by Charles Webb, which Webb wrote shortly after graduating from Williams College, Massachusetts. Dustin Hoffman beat a far-too-assured Robert Redford to the role of Ben Braddock while Anne Bancroft, in reality only six years Hoffman’s senior, was a purringly predatory Mrs Robinson (we never learn her first name). Her stockinged leg in the promotional poster actually belonged to Linda “Sue Ellen”Gray, who went on to play the role on the West End stage four decades later. Ed Potton Have your say
38 - REAR WINDOW (Alfred Hitchc**k, 1954)
Like Rope and Lifeboat, Rear Window was one of Hitchc**k’s exercises in cinematic economy: virtually every shot originates from the apartment of James Stewart’s photographer, holed up with a broken leg during a Manhattan heat wave. He becomes fascinated by the shady deeds of his neighbours, specifically Lars Thorvald, played by Raymond Burr, whose resemblance to Hitchc**k’s interfering producer David O. Selznick has been noted. The result was one of Hitch’s most gripping and cheekily symbolic films. Freudian analysts had a field day with Stewart’s immobile (read impotent) state, and his subsequent resort to larger and larger spying apparatus: binoculars, telephoto lenses. Ed Potton
37 - BEAU TRAVAIL (Claire Denis, 1999)
Loosely based on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Denis’s stunning film is powered by wordless physical tensions and the repetitive rhythms of sculpted bodies training under the desert sun. Denis Lavant, his face weathered into a bitter history, plays Galoup, an ex-soldier who recalls his time as a Sergeant Major in the Foreign Legion. Stationed in Djibouti, Galoup is second-in-command to a commandant he idolises. When Sentain (Grégoire Colin), a new soldier, arrives at the camp, Galoup immediately sees him as a threat; a rival for the approval of the commandant. Galoup’s jealousy is the kind that drives a man to desperation. None of this is explicitly spelt out – Denis instead creates an increasingly oppressive mood. She films the soldiers’ exercises like a piece of gymnastic ballet; meanwhile gnome-like Galoup is tortured by the beauty around him. Wendy Ide
36 - JAWS (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
The blockbuster was born thanks in part to the efforts of a tuba player called Tommy Johnson and a lump of fibreglass named Bruce. Johnson played the famous “daa-da” motif on John Williams’s ominous soundtrack; Bruce was a mechanical shark, named after the lawyer of the film’s sophomore director, Spielberg. In the summer of 1976, 67 million Americans flocked to hear one, see the other and develop lifelong fears of the ocean. Curiously, though, tourist figures trebled at Martha’s Vineyard, the Massachusetts resort where the film was shot. Ed Potton
35 - WITHNAIL AND I (Bruce Robinson, 1987)
For students of the late 1980s, this bohemian comedy is as iconic as the Clash. Robinson’s scabrous account of two unemployed actors with no money — but an insatiable appetite for drugs, lighter fuel and alcohol — captures that fearful crunch when a young man’s dream hits the steel buffers of reality. Richard E. Grant is perfectly cast as Withnail, the self-appointed scourge of mediocrity, who uses his naive flatmate, Marwood (Paul McGann), to stoke his ego and fund the booze. The genius is in the gaseous mix. Withnail’s fruity blasts of indignation, and Marwood’s shrieking panic, create the combustible atmosphere of hysteria. Ralph Brown’s deadpan drug-dealer, Danny, inventor of the Camberwell Carrot, strikes the match. James Christopher
34 - THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (John Ford, 1962)
Forever hidden in the shadow of the bloated and overrated The Searchers, the subsequent John Ford/John Wayne collaboration is in fact their greatest movie, and one of the smartest westerns ever made. Wayne plays rugged frontiersman Tom Doniphon, a two-fisted hero who is gradually ostracised by the increasingly civilised West, as embodied by lawyer and idealistic smoothie Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart). And though Doniphon rids the town of the titular menace Valance (Lee Marvin), he is declared obsolete by a movie that laments the rise of a vulnerable American democracy and includes the knockout line “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!” Kevin Maher
33 - ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (Milos Forman, 1975)
Passed the rights to Ken Kesey’s asylum novel by his father Kirk — who had played its central character, Randall McMurphy, in a stage version — producer Michael Douglas binned the old man in favour of Jack Nicholson, and the rest is history. With Nicholson on riveting form, Louise Fletcher chilling as Nurse Ratched and a supporting cast full of frazzled humanity, it became only the second film after Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night to win all five major Oscars: actor, actress, director, picture and screenplay. Ed Potton
32 - THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (Irvin Kershner, 1980)
The only one of George Lucas’s six multi-billiondollar blockbusting space operas with an emotional kick, The Empire Strikes Back surrounded the usual pyrotechnics with narrative twists and morbid themes, transforming the further adventures of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) with dream sequences, Oedipal revelations (“I am your father!”), torture scenes and a gob-smackingly downbeat ending (Solo frozen and kidnapped, everyone else a bit tired). Kevin Maher
31 - HIS GIRL FRIDAY (Howard Hawks, 1940)
The fizzing, crackling dialogue and the careless way that Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell chuck their lines at each other like lit fireworks makes this one of the great screwball comedies of all time. Grant is delicious as Walter Burns, a newspaper editor and an incorrigible cad; Russell plays Hildy Johnson, his star reporter and sometime wife who is about to give up the newspaper game for a quiet married life in suburbia with Bruce (Ralph Bellamy). Meanwhile Hildy can’t resist the thrill of one final big scoop for The Morning Post. The wisecracks come so thick and fast that you barely dare breathe in case you miss one. Wendy Ide
30 - REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (Nicholas Ray, 1955)
The film that gave voice to the new phenomenon known as the generation gap also created one of the lasting film icons of the 20th century. James Dean’s Jim Stark is a masterful portrayal of a directionless teen seeking guidance from parents who are preoccupied with problems of their own. The film has acquired a morbid reputation since all three of its leads, Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo died in tragic circumstances. Dean’s death mirrored the car accident in the film, while Mineo was murdered in 1976 and Wood drowned in 1981. Nigel Kendall
29 - DUCK SOUP (Leo McCarey, 1933)
Groucho Marx, toying with the matronly Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup: “Where’s your husband?” Dumont: “He’s dead!” Marx: “I bet he’s just using that as an excuse.” Dumont: “I was with him at the very end.” Marx: “No wonder he passed away.” Dumont: “I held him in my arms and kissed him.” Marx: “I see, it was murder?” And on it goes, breathtaking rapid-fire badinage coupled with a fantastically provocative satire about the tin-pot dictatorship of Marx’s Rufus T. Firefly (he runs the European nation of Freedonia) at a time when genuine European dictatorships were emerging. Kevin Maher Have your say
28 - GONE WITH THE WIND (Victor Fleming, 1939)
Well fiddle-deedee, “as God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again!” Screen’s biggest love story, as Atlanta burns around it, is not (at 222 minutes) for those with short attention spans. But Gone with the Wind, which won eight Oscars, is more than Scarlett standing on the scorched earth of her home, or the famous staircase scene. The chemistry between Vivian Leigh (as Scarlett) and Clark Gable (as Rhett) is as colourful as the scenery of Fleming’s epic. It is remembered for “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a d*mn”, but the sparring throughout is classy. Tim Teeman
27 - A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (Stanley Jubrick, 1971)
Kubrick’s most notorious film is a striking vision of a world terrorised by fashionable delinquents. Malcolm McDowell’s bad-boy reputation was cemented by his performance as Alex, a gang leader who memorably murders a professor’s wife with a giant phallus. The film became a cult the moment the British release was pulled by Kubrick himself after tabloid reports of copy-cat violence. The film’s real target is the Orwellian “cure” embraced by the Establishment: notably the use of psychological torture to transform sick minds into model citizens. James Christopher
26 - GOODFELLAS (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
“I’ve been waiting for this book my entire life,” Martin Scorsese told Nicholas Pileggi after reading the proofs of his Mafia memoir, Wiseguy. “I’ve been waiting for this phone call my entire life,” came the delighted answer. Their collaboration was a match made in, if not heaven, then a captivating version of hell. Assuaging Scorsese’s worries about returning to the gangster genre, its authenticity and unflinching violence proved a key influence on that other Mob masterpiece The Sopranos, whose creator David Chase described it as “my Koran” and cast a total of 27 Goodfellas alumni. Ed Potton
25 - PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (Peter Weir, 1975)
A film that seeps creepiness and atmosphere, which — while shocking — doesn’t overdo overt shock. It’s crept into our heads as being based on fact but isn’t. A group of Australian Victorian schoolgirls go into the countryside for a day trip. It is stiflingly hot and Weir hints at all kinds of hidden passions and desires simmering beneath the surface. Four of the girls disappear; one returns with no memory of what has happened. A trailblazing film, it launched the Aussie avant-garde and Weir went on to direct films including Gallipoli (1981), Dead Poets Society (1989) and The Truman Show (1998). Tim Teeman
24 - THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (George Cukor, 1940)
Katharine Hepburn plays a naughty heiress in this fizzily brilliant romantic comedy. Hepburn was “box-office poison” after a string of flops, but the spunkiest of the Golden Age actresses was determined to revive her reputation. Bought the rights to Philip Barry’s play by her then boyfriend Howard Hughes, Hepburn secured a sympathetic director, Cukor, and set about finding a pair of debonair gentlemen to play her competing suitors. First choices Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy were unavailable, so the poor girl had to make do with Cary Grant and James Stewart. Ed Potton
23 - SOME LIKE IT HOT (Billy Wilder, 1959)
A brawny man in a dress is one of those failsafe devices that will always get a laugh. Add to that a wickedly sophisticated script, a gang of lantern-jawed gangsters and Marilyn Monroe, and you have one of the great American comedy films of all time. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis play a pair of itinerant musicians on the run after they inadvertently witness a gangland shoot-out. They take cover, in somewhat unconvincing drag, in an all-girl jazz band. But boys will be boys, and the arrival of Monroe’s delectable Sugar Kane has them battling for her attention like smitten schoolboys. Meanwhile Lemmon’s Daphne has her own persistent admirer in the wealthy ankle-fetishist Osgood Fielding III. And while, to quote Osgood, “Nobody’s perfect”, this film comes pretty close. Wendy Ide
22 - THE BREAKFAST CLUB (John Hughes, 1985)
We felt we couldn’t have both this and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (written and directed by Hughes, 1986), but boy it was close. The mix of characters stuck in a ball-achingly boring detention swung it: Emilio Estevez as jock Andy, Anthony Michael Hall as the nerd, Judd Nelson as the slightly terrifying John Bender, Molly Ringwald as brittle prom queen Claire and Ally Sheedy as the goth. As with Ferris Bueller, Hughes wrote and directed a teen classic, a zesty mix of squabbling, soul-searching and scrapping. Tim Teeman
21 - BONNIE AND CLYDE (Arthur Penn, 1967)
Arthur Penn’s folk legend tapped into the late 1960s zeitgeist of rebellion and counter-culture like almost no other film of its time. Violent, stylish and sexy, it had its audiences sympathising with the bad guys — the young, glamorous bank robbers Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) — while the cops are portrayed as the antagonists. Against the backdrop of depression-era America, the photogenic outlaw couple seem impossibly thrilling. Audiences adopted the distinctive fashions: thousands of berets were sold after Dunaway wore one. Wendy Ide
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