TIME OUT'S TOP 100 FILMS

(1) Citizen Kane (1941), d. Orson Welles, US
The source book of Orson Welles, and still a marvelous movie. Thematically less resonant than some of Welles' later meditations on the nature of power, perhaps, but still absolutely riveting as an investigation of a citizen - newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst by any other name - under suspicion of having soured the American Dream. Its imagery (not forgetting the oppressive ceilings) as Welles delightedly explores his mastery of a new vocabulary, still amazes and delights, from the opening shot of the forbidding gates of Xanadu to the last glimpse of the vanishing Rosebud (tarnished, maybe, but still a potent symbol). A film that gets better with each renewed acquaintance.

(2) The Godfather (1972) , d. Francis Ford Coppola, US
An everyday story of Mafia folk, incorporating severed horses' heads in the bed and a number of heartwarming family occasions, as well as pointers on how not to behave in your local tratoria (i.e., blasting the brains of your co-diners out all over their fettuccini). Mario Puzo's novel was brought to the screen in bravura style by Coppola, who was here trying out for the first time that piano/fortissimo style of crosscutting between religious ritual and bloody machine-gun massacre that was later to resurface in a watered-down version in The Cotton Club. See Brando with a mouthful of orange peel. Watch Pacino's cheek muscles twitch in incipiently psychotic fashion. Trace his rise from white sheep of the family to budding don and fully-fledged bad guy. Singalong to Nino Rota's irritatingly catchy theme tune. Its soap operatics should never have been presented separately from The Godfather, Part II (1974).

(3) La Regle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1939), d. Jean Renoir, Fr
Banned on its original release as 'too demoralizing', and only made available again in its original form in 1956, Renoir's brilliant social comedy is epitomized by the phrase 'everyone has their reasons.' Centering on a lavish country house party given by the Marquis de la Chesnaye and his wife (Dalio, Gregor), the film effects audacious slides from melodrama into farce, from realism into fantasy, and from comedy into tragedy. Romantic intrigues, social rivalries, and human foibles are all observed with an unblinking eye that nevertheless refuses to judge. The carnage of the rabbit shoot, the intimations of mortality introduced by the after-dinner entertainment, and Renoir's own performance are all unforgettable. Embracing every level of French society, from the aristocratic hosts to a poacher turned servant, the film presents a hilarious yet melancholic picture of a nation riven by petty class distinctions.

(4) Vertigo (1958), d. Alfred Hitchcock, US
Brilliant but despicably cynical view of human obsession and the tendency of those in love to try to manipulate each other. Stewart is excellent as the neurotic detective employed by an old pal to trail his wandering wife, only to fall for her himself and then crack up when she commits suicide. Then one day he sees a woman in the street who reminds him of the woman who haunts him... Hitchcock gives the game away about halfway through the movie, and focuses on Stewart's strained psychological stability; the result inevitably involves a lessening of suspense, but allows for an altogether deeper investigation of guilt, exploitation, and obsession. The bleakness is perhaps a little hard to swallow, but there's no denying that this is the director at the very peak of his powers, while Novak is a revelation. Slow, but totally compelling.

(5) Seven Samurai (1954), d. Akira Kurosawa, Jap
Kurosawa's masterpiece, testifying to his admiration for John Ford and translated effortlessly back into the form of a Western as The Magnificent Seven, has six masterless samurai - plus Mifune, the crazy farmer's boy not qualified to join the elect group, who nevertheless follows like a dog and fights like a lion - agreeing for no pay, just food and the joy of fulfilling their duty as fighters, to protect a helpless village against a ferocious gang of bandits. Despite the caricatured acting forms of Noh and Kabuki which Kurosawa adopted in his period films, the individual characterisations are precise and memorable, none more so than that by Takashi Shimura, one of the director's favorite actors, playing the sage, ageing, and oddly charismatic samurai leader. The epic action scenes involving cavalry and samurai are still without peer.

(6) Lawrence of Arabia (1962), d. David Lean, GB
Presented virtually as a desert mirage, this epic biopic of TE Lawrence constructs little more than an obfuscatory romantic glow around its enigmatic hero and his personal and political contradictions: Lean has obviously learned the 'value' of thematic fuzziness from the success of Bridge on the River Kwai, and duly garnered further Oscar successes here. Somewhere between Robert Bolt's literariness and Freddie Young's shimmering cinematography, there should be direction: all there is is a pose of statuesque seriousness.

(7) Raging Bull (1980), d. Martin Scorsese, US
With breathtaking accuracy, Raging Bull ventures still further into the territory Scorsese has mapped in all his films - men and male values; in this case through the story of 1949 middleweight champion Jake La Motta. De Niro's performance as the cocky young boxer who gradually declines into a pathetic fat slob forces you to question the rigid and sentimental codes of masculinity which he clings to even as they destroy him, like a drowning man clutching a lead weight. The anti-realism of the fights prevents them sinking back into the narrative, and instead creates a set of images which resound through Jake's personal confrontations: their smashing, storyless violence is relentlessly cut with domestic scenes until you learn to flinch in anticipation. This film does more than make you think about masculinity, it makes you see it - in a way that's relevant to all men, not just Bronx boxers.

(8) Touch Of Evil (1958), d. Orson Welles, US
A wonderfully offhand genesis (Welles adopting and adapting a shelved Paul Monash script for B-king Albert Zugsmith without ever reading the novel by Whit Masterson it was based on) marked this brief and unexpected return to Hollywood film-making for Welles. And the result more than justified the arrogance of the gesture. A sweaty thriller conundrum on character and corruption, justice and the law, worship and betrayal, it plays havoc with moral ambiguities as self-righteous Mexican cop Heston goes up against Welles' monumental Hank Quinlan, the old-time detective of vast and wearied experience who goes by instinct, gets it right, but fabricates evidence to make his case. Set in the backwater border hell-hole of Los Robles, inhabited almost solely by patented Wellesian grotesques, it's shot to resemble a nightscape from Kafka.

(9) Tokyo Story (1953), d. Yasujiro Ozu, Jap
Ozu's best known (because most widely distributed) movie is a very characteristic study of the emotional strains within a middle class Japanese family that has come to Tokyo from the country and dispersed itself. All that happens in dramatic terms is that the family grandparents arrive in Tokyo to visit their various offspring, and grow painfully aware of the chasms that exist between them and their children; only their daughter-in-law, widowed in the war, is pleased to see them. Ozu's vision, almost entirely un-inflected by tics and tropes of 'style' by this stage in his career, is emotionally overwhelming; and arguably profound for any engaged viewer; it is also formally unmatched in Western popular cinema.

(10) L'Atalante (1934), d. Jean Vigo, Fr
Mesmeric movie mutilated by Gaumont distributors on its first release, but subsequently restored to the form its devoted maker (the avant garde-ish son of an anarchist) intended. Not a lot happens: a sailor and his young bride share a barge home with an old eccentric , fall out, and fall in love again. But the aesthetic appeal lies in the tension between surface realism (the hardships of working class life on the canals) and the delicate surrealism of the landscapes (desolate Parisian suburbs bestraddled by pylons) and of the justly celebrated sequence where the sailor searches for his lost love.

(11) The Night of the Hunter (1955), d. Charles Laughton, US
Laughton's only stab at directing, with Mitchum as the psychopathic preacher with 'LOVE' and 'HATE' tattooed on his knuckles, turned out to be a genuine weirdie. Set in '30s rural America, the film polarizes into a struggle between good and evil for the souls of innocent children. Everyone's contribution is equally important. Laughton's deliberately old-fashioned direction throws up a startling array of images: an amalgam of Mark Twain-like exteriors (idyllic riverside life) and expressionist interiors, full of moody nighttime shadows. The style reaches its pitch in the extraordinary moonlight flight of the two children downriver, gliding silently in the distance, watched over by animals seen in huge close-up, filling up the foreground of the screen. James Agee's script (faithfully translating Davis Grubb's novel) treads a tight path between humor (it's a surprisingly light film in many ways) and straight suspense, a combination best realized when Gish sits the night out on the porch waiting for Mitchum to attack, and they both sing 'Leaning on the Everlasting Arms' to themselves. Finally, there's the absolute authority of Mitchum's performance - easy, charming, infinitely sinister.

(12) The Conformist (1969), d. Bernardo Bertolucci, It/Fr/WGer
Like The Spider's Stratagem, a subtle anatomy of Italy's fascist past, but here the playful Borgesian time-traveling is replaced by a more personal drive which heralds the Oedipal preoccupations that haunt Bertolucci's later work. Stripping Moravia's novel of all its psychological annotations except one - as a child, the hero suffered trauma at the hands of a homosexual - Bertolucci presents him simultaneously as a suitably murky protagonist for a film noir about political assassination, and as a conformist so anxious to live a normal life that he willingly becomes an anonymous tool of the state. Juggling past and present with the same bravura flourish as Welles in Citizen Kane, Bertolucci conjures a dazzling historical and personal perspective (the marbled insane asylum where his father is incarcerated; the classical vistas of Mussolini's corridors of power; the dance hall where two women tease in an ambiguous tango; the forest road where the assassination runs horribly counter to expectation), demonstrating how the search for normality ends in the inevitable discovery that there is no such thing.

(13) Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise) (1945), d. Marcel Carne, Fr
A marvelously witty, ineffably graceful rondo of passions and perversities animating the Boulevard du Crime, home of Parisian popular theatre in the early 19th century, and an astonishing anthill of activity in which mimes and mountebanks rub shoulders with aristocrats and assassins. Animating Jacques Prevert's script is a multi-layered meditation on the nature of performance, ranging from a vivid illustration of contrasting dramatic modes (Barrault's mime needing only gestures, Brasseur's Shakespearean actor relishing the music of words) and a consideration of the interchangeability of theatre and life (as Herrand's frustrated playwright Lacenaire elects to channel his genius into crime), to a wry acknowledgment of the social relevance of performance (all three men are captivated by Arletty's insouciant whore, who acts herself out of their depth to achieve the protection of a Count, establishing a social barrier which Lacenaire promptly breaches in his elaborate stage management of the Count's murder). Flawlessly executed and with a peerless cast, this is one of the great French movies, so perfectly at home in its period that it never seems like a costume picture, and at over three hours not a moment too long. Amazing to recall that it was produced in difficult circumstances towards the end of the German Occupation during World War II.

-- A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven) (1946), d. Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, GB
One of Powell and Pressburger's finest films. Made at the instigation of the Ministry of Information, who wanted propaganda stressing the need for goodwill between Britain and America, it emerges as an outrageous fantasy full of wit, beautiful sets and Technicolor, and perfectly judged performances. The story is just a little bizarre. RAF pilot Niven bales out of his blazing plane without a chute and survives; but - at least in his tormented mind - he was due to die, and a heavenly messenger comes down to earth to collect him. A celestial tribunal ensues to judge his case while, back on earth, doctors are fighting for his life. What makes the film so very remarkable is the assurance of Powell's direction, which manages to make heaven at least as convincing as earth. (The celestial scenes are in monochrome, the terrestrial ones in color: was Powell slyly asserting, in the faces of the British documentary boys, the greater reality of that which is imagined?). But the whole thing works like a dream, with many hilarious swipes at national stereotypes, and a love story that is as moving as it is absurd. Masterly.

(15) 8 1/2 (1963), d. Federico Fellini, It
The passage of time has not been kind to what many view as Fellini's masterpiece. Certainly Di Venanzo's high-key images and the director's flash-card approach place 8 1/2 firmly in its early '60s context. As a self-referential work it lacks the layering and the profundity of, for example, Tristram Shandy, and the central character, the stalled director (Mastroianni), seems less in torment than doodling. And yet...The bathing of Guido sequence is a study extract for film-makers, and La Saraghina's rumba for the seminary is a gift to pop video. Amiably spiking all criticism through a gloomy scriptwriter mouthpiece, Fellini pulls a multitude of rabbits out of the showman's hat.

-- The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), d. Orson Welles, US
Hacked about by a confused RKO, Welles' second film still looks a masterpiece, astounding for its almost magical recreation of a gentler age when cars were still a nightmare of the future and the Ambersons felt safe in their mansion on the edge of town. Right from the wryly comic opening, detailing changes in fashions and the family's exalted status, Welles takes an ambivalent view of the way the quality of life would change under the impact of a new industrial age, stressing the strength of community as evidenced in the old order while admitting to its rampant snobbery and petty sense of manners. With immaculate period reconstruction, and virtuoso acting shot in long, elegant takes, it remains the director's most moving film, despite the artificiality of the sentimental tacked-on ending.

(17) Apocalypse Now (1979), d. Francis Ford Coppola, US
Film-as-opera, as spectacular as its plot is simple: Vietnam in mid-war, and a dazed American captain (Sheen) is sent up a long river to assassinate a renegade colonel (Brando) who is waging a brutal, unsanctioned war in Cambodia. Burdened by excessive respect for its source novel (Conrad's Heart of Darkness), this is a film of great effects (a flaming bridge, Wagnerian air strikes) and considerable pretension (quotes from TS Eliot!?). The casting of Brando is perhaps the acid-test: brilliant as movie-making, but it turns Vietnam into a vast trip, into a War of the Imagination.

-- North By Northwest (1959), d. Alfred Hitchcock, US
From the glossy '60s-style surface of Saul Bass' credit sequence to Hitchcock's almost audible chortle at his final phallic image, North by Northwest treads a bizarre tightrope between sex and repression, nightmarish thriller and urbane comedy. Cary Grant is truly superb as the light-hearted advertising executive who's abducted, escapes, and is then hounded across America trying to find out what's going on and slowly being forced to assume another man's identity. And it's one of those films from which you can take as many readings as you want: conspiracy paranoia, Freudian nightmare (in which mothers, lovers, gays and cops all conspire against a man), parable on modern America in which final escape must be made down the treacherous face of Mount Rushmore (the one carved with US Presidents' heads). All in all, an improbable classic.

(19) Chinatown (1974), d. Roman Polanski, US
Classic detective film, with Nicholson's JJ Gittes moving through the familiar world of the Forties film noir uncovering a plot whose enigma lies as much within the people he encounters as within the mystery itself. Gittes' peculiar vulnerability is closer to Chandler's concept of Philip Marlowe than many screen Marlowes, and the sense of time and place (the formation of LA in the '30s) is very strong. Directed by Polanski in bravura style, it is undoubtedly one of the great films of the '70s.

(20) La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life) (1960), d. Federico Fellini, It
The opening shot shows a helicopter lifting a statue of Christ into the skies and out of Rome. God departs and paves the way for Fellini's extraordinarily prophetic vision of a generation's spiritual and moral decay. The depravity is gauged against the exploits of Marcello (Mastroianni), a playboy hack who seeks out sensationalist stories by bedding socialites and going to parties. Marcello is both repelled by and drawn to the lifestyles he records: he becomes besotted with a fleshy, dimwit starlet (Ekberg), he joins in the media hysteria surrounding a child's alleged sighting of the Virgin Mary, yet he longs for the bohemian life of his intellectual friend Steiner (Cuny). There are perhaps a couple of party scenes too many, and the peripheral characters can be unconvincing, but the stylish cinematography and Fellini's bizarre, extravagant visuals are absolutely riveting.

-- The Searchers (1956), d. John Ford, US
A marvelous Western which turns Monument Valley into an interior landscape as Wayne pursues his five-year odyssey, a grim quest - to kill both the Indian who abducted his niece and the tainted girl herself - which is miraculously purified of its raacist furies in a final moment of epiphany. There is perhaps some discrepancy in the play between Wayne's heroic image and the pathological outsider he plays here (forever excluded from home, as the doorway shots at beginning and end suggest), but it hardly matters, given the film's visual splendor and muscular poetry in its celebration of the spirit that vanished with the taming of the American wilderness.

(22) The Wild Bunch (1969), d. Sam Peckinpah, US
From the opening sequence, in which a circle of laughing children poke at a scorpion writhing in a sea of ants, to the infamous blood-spurting finale, Peckinpah completely rewrites John Ford's Western mythology - by looking at the passing of the Old West from the point of view of the marginalized outlaws rather than the law-abiding settlers. Though he spares us none of the callousness and brutality of Holden and his gang, Peckinpah nevertheless presents their macho code of loyalty as a positive value in a world increasingly dominated by corrupt railroad magnates and their mercenary killers (Holden's old buddy Ryan). The flight into Mexico, where they virtually embrace their death at the hands of double-crossing general Fernandez and his rabble army, is a nihilistic acknowledgment of the men's anachronistic status. In purely cinematic terms, the film is a savagely beautiful spectacle, Lucien Ballard's superb cinematography complementing Peckinpah's darkly elegiac vision.

(23) The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), d. Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, GB
At a time when 'Blimpishness' in the high command was under suspicion as detrimental to the war effort, Powell and Pressburger gave us their own Blimp based on David Low's cartoon character - Major General Clive Wynne-Candy, VC - and back-track over his life, drawing us into sympathy with the prime virtues of honor and chivalry which have transformed him from dashing young spark of the Nineties into crusty old buffer of World War II. Roger Livesey gives us not just a great performance, but a man's whole life: losing his only love (Deborah Kerr) to the German officer (Walbrook) with whom he fought a duel in pre-First War Berlin, then becoming the latter's lifelong friend and protector. Like much of Powell and Pressburger's work, it is a salute to all that is paradoxical about the English; no one else has so well captured their romanticism banked down beneath emotional reticence and honor. And it is marked by an enormous generosity of spirit: in the history of the British cinema there is nothing to touch it.

-- Some Like It Hot (1959), d. Billy Wilder, US
Still one of Wilder's funniest satires, its pace flagging only once for a short time. Curtis and Lemmon play jazz musicians on the run after witnessing the St. Valentine's Day massacre, masquerading in drag as members of an all-girl band (with resulting gender confusions involving Marilyn) to escape the clutches of Chicago mobster George Raft (bespatted and dime-flipping, of course). Deliberately shot in black-and-white to avoid the pitfalls of camp or transvestism, though the best sequences are the gangland ones anyhow. Highlights include Curtis' playboy parody of Cary Grant, and what is surely one of the great curtain lines of all time: Joe E. Brown's bland 'Nobody's perfect' when his fiancee (Lemmon) finally confesses that she's a he.

-- Taxi Driver (1976), d. Martin Scorsese, US
Taxi Driver makes you realize just how many directors, from Schlesinger to Friedkin and Winner, have piddled around on the surface of New York in their films. Utilizing, especially Bernard Herrmann's most menacing score since Psycho, Scorsese has set about recreating the landscape of the city in a way that constitutes a truly original and terrifying Gothic canvas. But, much more than that: Taxi Driver is also, thanks partly to De Niro's extreme implosive performance, the first film since Alphaville to set about a really intelligent appraisal of the fundamental ingredients of contemporary insanity. Its final upsurge of violence doesn't seem to be cathartic in the now predictable fashion of the 'new' American movie, but lavatorial; the nauseating effluence of the giant flesh emporium that the film has so single-mindedly depicted.

(26) Napoleon (1927), d. Abel Gance, Fr
To see Napoleon with a full orchestra performing Carl Davis' score is an almost unimaginably thrilling experience. The 'concert' aspect heightens the sense of occasion, and the Beethoven-based score fully equals Gance's own grandiloquent poetry. The film itself is a paradox. Presumably nobody applauds it for its politics: it offers a crudely psychologized vision of Bonaparte as a 'man of destiny' (said to have inspired De Gaulle in 1927), and ends on a note of fascistic triumph with the invasion of Italy. It is nonetheless a great film, the work of a man with a raving enthusiasm for cinema. Purely visual storytelling had reached a peak of sophistication by the mid-1920s, but Gance pushed the 'language' of cinema further than anyone else: he moved easily between lyricism, bombast, intimacy and dementia, mixed vivid performances with daring montage experiments. No superlative is enough.

-- Rear Window (1954), d. Alfred Hitchcock, US
Of all Hitchcock's films, this is the one which most reveals the man. As usual it evolves from one brilliantly plain idea: Stewart, immobilized in his apartment by a broken leg and aided by his girlfriend (Grace Kelly at her most Vogue-coverish), takes to watching the inhabitants across the courtyard, first with binoculars, later with his camera. He thinks he witnesses a murder...There is suspense enough, of course, but the important thing is the way that it is filmed: the camera never strays from inside Stewart's apartment, and every shot is closely aligned with his point of view. And what this relentless monomaniac witnesses is everybody's dirty linen: suicide, broken dreams, and cheap death. Quite aside from the violation of intimacy, which is shocking enough, Hitchcock has nowhere else come so close to pure misanthropy, nor given us so disturbing a definition of what it is to watch the 'silent film' of other people's lives, whether across a courtyard or up on a screen. No wonder the sensual puritan in him punishes Stewart by breaking his other leg.

(28) Battleship Potemkin (1925), d. Sergei Eisenstein, USSR
What more can be said about Potemkin - the celebrated re-creation, in documentary style, of the key events of the failed 1905 Kronstadt revolution against Tsarist oppression - re-issued (in 1998) in a new print, with music by Shostakovich replacing Meisel's original score. It exemplifies, we know, Eisenstein's fascination with 'montage' (the use of dialectical forms of editing to create meaning) and 'typage' (non-actors cast for physical characteristics). This, however, is propaganda, just as much as art, and looking back after more than 70 years there's something cold, academic, even manipulative about the meticulous compositions, schematic characterizations and complex choreography of massed movement. It lacks the genuinely fiery passion of Eisenstein's earlier Strike, not to mention the lyricism of Dovzhenko or the perky wit of Vertov. Edward Tisse's camerawork remains impressive, and there's no doubt that the whole is a technical tour de force, but the obsession with forces of power, as opposed to individual experience, is ultimately oppressive.

-- It's A Wonderful Life (1946), d. Frank Capra, US
An extraordinary, unabashed testament to the homely small-town moral values and glossy studio production values that shaped Capra's films so successfully in the late '30s and rapidly disappeared thereafter. It's a film designed to grab your cockles and warm them till they smoulder, particularly at the end, with its Christmas card setting, its whimsical angel sent down to save the despairing do-gooder (Stewart) from doing evil by committing suicide. Capra has total command of his cast and technical resources, and a touching determination to believe that it is indeed a wonderful life.

-- Performance (1970), d. Nicolas Roeg/Donald Cammell, GB
Roeg's debut as a director is a virtuoso juggling act which manipulates its visual and verbal imagery so cunningly that the borderline between reality and fantasy is gradually eliminated. The first half-hour is straight thriller enough to suggest a Kray Bros. documentary as Fox, enforcer for a London protection racket, goes about his work with such relish that he involves the gang in a murder and has to hide from retribution in a Notting Hill basement. There, waiting to escape abroad, he becomes involved with a fading pop star (Jagger) brooding in exile over the loss of his powers of incantation. In what might be described (to borrow from Kenneth Anger) as an invocation to his demon brother, the pop star recognizes his lost power lurking in the blind impulse to violence of his visitor, and so teases and torments him with drug-induced psychedelics that the latter responds in the only way he knows how: by rewarding one mind-blowing with another, at gunpoint. Ideas in profusion here about power and persuasion and performance ('The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is one that achieves madness'); and the latter half becomes one of Roeg's most complex visual kaleidoscopes as pop star and enforcer coalesce in a marriage of heaven and hell (or underworld and underground) where the common denominator is Big Business.

(31) The General (1927), d. Buster Keaton/Clyde Bruckman, US
Keaton's best, and arguably the greatest screen comedy ever made. Against a meticulously evoked Civil War background, Buster risks life, limb and love as he pursues his beloved railway engine, hijacked by Northern spies up to no good in the Southern cause. The result is everything one could wish for: witty, dramatic, visually stunning, full of subtle, delightful human insights, and constantly hilarious.

(32) A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) (1959), d. Jean-Luc Godard, Fr
Godard's first feature spins a pastiche with pathos as joyrider Belmondo shoots a cop, chases friends and debts across a night-time Paris, and falls in love with a literary lady. Seberg quotes books and ideas and names; Belmondo measures his profile against Bogart's, pawns a stolen car, and talks his girlfriend into a cash loan 'just till midday'. The camera lavishes black-and-white love on Paris, strolling up the Champs-Elysees, edging across cafe terraces, sweeping over the rooftop skyline, Mozart mixing with cool jazz riffs in the night air. The ultimate night-time film noir noir noir..until Belmondo pulls his own eyelids shut when he dies. More than any other, this was the film which epitomized the iconoclasm of the early Nouvelle Vague, not least in its insolent use of the jump-cut.

-- Mean Streets (1973), d. Martin Scorsese, US
The definitive New York movie, and one of the few to successfully integrate rock music into the structure of film: watch Keitel waking to the sound of the Ronettes, or De Niro dancing solo in the street to 'Mickey's Monkey'. Mean Streets is also pure Italian-American. Charlie (Keitel), a punk on the fringes of 'respectable' organized crime, ponders his adolescent confusions and loyalties. Beneath the swagger, he's embarrassed by his work, his religion, and by women and his friends, particularly Johnny Boy (De Niro), who owes everyone money. Scorsese directs with a breathless, head-on energy which infuses the performances, the sharp fast talk, the noise, neon and violence with a charge of adrenalin. One of the best American films of the decade.

-- Once Upon a Time In The West (1968), d. Sergio Leone, It
The Western is dead, they tell us. Long live Leone's timeless monument to the death of the West itself, rivalled only by Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid for the title of best ever made. We're talking favorite films here, so only superlatives will do. Worth starting at the beginning: a stakeout at a deserted station, Jack Elam and a fly - the most audacious credit sequence in fiilm history. A soundtrack never bettered by any Dolby knob-twiddlers - unnatural sounds of 'silence' and Morricone's greatest score, handing Bronson his identity with a plangent, shivery harmonica riff, carrying Leone's crane shots upwards over a railhead township, clip-clopping Robards into the rigorous good/bad/ugly schema. Countercasting (sadist Fonda) and location choice (Monument Valley) that render an iconic base for Leone and collaborators (Bertolucci and Argento, no less) to perform their revisionist/revolutionary critique of the Classic American (i.e., Fordian) Creation Myth. And more, too. Critical tools needed are eyes and ears - this is Cinema.

-- Rio Bravo (1959), d. Howard Hawks, US
Arguably Hawks' greatest film, a deceptively rambling chamber Western made in response to the liberal homilies of High Noon. Here the marshal in need of help is Wayne, desperately fending off a clan of villains determined to release the murderer he's holding in jail until the arrival of the state magistrate. Unlike Cooper, however, he rejects rather than courts offers of help, simply because his supporters are either too old (Brennan), too young (Nelson), female (Dickinson) or alcoholic (Martin). Thus the film becomes an examination of various forms of pride, prejudice and professionalism, as the various outcasts slowly cohere through mutual aid to form one of the director's beloved self-contained groups. Little of the film is shot outdoors, with a subsequent increase in claustrophobic tension, while Hawks peppers the generally relaxed and easy narrative - which even takes time out to include a couple of songs for Dino and Ricky - with superb set pieces: Dino's redemptory shooting of a fugitive villain; the explosive finale in which Duke realizes he needs all the help he can get. Beautifully acted, wonderfully observed, and scripted with enormous wit and generosity, it's the sort of film, in David Thomson's words, which reveals that 'men are more expressive rolling a cigarette than saving the world.'

(36) Once Upon a Time in America (1983), d. Sergio Leone, US
In 1968, Noodles (De Niro) returns to New York an old man after 35 years of exile, ridden by guilt. His cross-cut memories of the Jewish Mafia's coming of age on the Lower East Side in 1923, their rise to wealth during Prohibition, and their Gotterdammerung in 1933, provide the epic background to a story of friendship and betrayal, love and death. While Leone's vision still has a magnificent sweep, the film finally subsides to an emotional core that is sombre, even elegiac, and which centers on a man who is bent and broken by time, and finally left with nothing but an impotent sadness.

(37) All About Eve (1950), d. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, US
Davis plays the successful actress, ageing and fundamentally insecure, who employs Baxter in exchange for her flattery. From there the scheming Baxter connives her way to the top at the expense of her employer, who realizes what is happening but is powerless to do anything. Mankiewicz's bitchy screenplay makes the most of the situation, being both witty and intelligent. The young Monroe gets to have a stairway entrance (introduced by cynical critic Sanders as a 'graduate of the Copacabana school of acting').

-- My Darling Clementine (1946), d. John Ford, US
Like many Hollywood directors, Ford's claims for his films are very modest. For him the key thing about My Darling Clementine is its authenticity: 'I knew Wyatt Earp...and he told me about the fight at the OK Corral. So we did it exactly the way it had been'. For viewers, however, the film's greatness (and enjoyability) rests not in the accuracy of the final shootout, but in the orchestrated series of incidents - the drunken Shakespearean actor, Earp's visit to the barber, the dance in the unfinished church - which give meaning to the shootout. Peteer Wollen's comment on the significance of Earp's visit to the barber's and its outcome makes clear just how complex the ideas contained in these incidents are: 'This moment marks the turning point of Earp's transition from wandering cowboy, nomadic savage, bent on revenge, unmarried, to married man, settled, civilized, the sheriff who administers the law'.

-- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), d. Stanley Kubrick, US
A characteristically pessimistic account of human aspiration from Kubrick, this tripartite sci-fi look at civilization's progress from prehistoric times (the apes learning to kill) to a visionary future (astronauts on a mission to Jupiter encountering superior life and rebirth in some sort of embryonic divine form) is beautiful, infuriatingly slow, and pretty half-baked. Quite how the general theme fits in with the central drama of the astronauts' battle with the arrogant computer HAL, who tries to take over their mission, is unclear; while the final farrago of light-show psychedelia is simply so much pap. Nevertheless, for all the essential coldness of Kubrick's vision, it demands attention as superior sci-fi, simply because it's more concerned with ideas than with Boy's Own-style pyrotechnics.

(40) The Piano (1993), d. Jane Campion, NZ/Fr
Nineteenth century Scotland: Ada (Hunter) hasn't spoken since she was six. She communicates with hand signs, and doesn't consider herself silent, thanks to the joy she takes in playing her piano. But when she arrives in New Zealand for an arranged marriage, her husband (Neill) insists the piano is too unwieldy to be carried from the beach. So, when Baines (Keitel), a neighboring settler turned half-Maori, buys it, Ada agrees to give him piano lessons, unaware that he intends eventually to give her the instrument in return for small but illicit sexual favors. Campion's Gothic romance is notable for its performances and Michael Nyman's score. The writer/director offers something more starkly, strangely beautiful than most costume dramas, and the whole film puts a fresh spin on the traditional love story. The characters are stubborn and inward-looking, and it's the refusal to sentimentalize that makes this harsh tale of obsession so moving. Campion never underestimates the power physical obsession exerts over human souls, and, for once, a modern film treats erotic passion honestly.

-- Pierrot le Fou (1965), d. Jean-Luc Godard, Fr/It
'Put a tiger in my tank' says Belmondo to an outraged Esso pump attendant...and the voyage begins. Pierrot le Fou was a turning-point in Godard's career, the film in which he tried to do everything (and almost succeeded). It's the tragic tale of a last romantic couple fleeing Paris for the South of France. But then again, it's a painting by Velazquez (says Godard), or the story of a bourgeois hubby eloping with the babysitter; a musical under the high-summer pine trees; or a gangster story (with Karina the moll and Belmondo the sucker). She was never more cautious about her love; he was never more drily self-aware; and the film agonizes for two hours over a relationship that is equal parts nonsense and despair. In desperation he finally kills her and himself while the camera sweeps out over a majestic Mediterranean sea. And a voice mockingly asks: 'Eternity? No, it's just the sun and the sea.'

(42) Bringing Up Baby (1938), d. Howard Hawks, US
One of the finest screwball comedies ever, with Grant - a dry, nervous, conventional palaeontologist - meeting up with madcap socialite Hepburn and undergoing the destruction of his career, marriage, sanity and sexual identity. The catalyst in the process is Baby, a leopard that causes chaos wherever he goes and finally awakens Grant to the attractions of irresponsible insanity. Fast, furious and very, very funny.

-- The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups) (1959), d. Francois Truffaut, Fr
Truffaut's first feature, and although not his best, infinitely better than the self-indulgent, increasingly compromised work he was turning out towards the end of his career. Revealing a complicity with downtrodden, neglected and rebellious adolescence that is intensely moving but never mawkish, shot on location in Paris with a casually vivid eye that is almost documentary, it still has an amazing freshness in its (quasi-autobiographical) account of 13 year-old Antoine Doinel's bleak odyssey through family life, reform school, and an escape whose precarious permanence is questioned by the final frozen image of the boy's face as he reaches the sea - freedom or point of no return? Still onee of the cinema's most perceptive forays into childhood, and fun for spotting the guest appearances of such Nouvelle Vague luminaries as Jeanne Moreau, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jacques Demy and (in the funfair scene) Truffaut himself.

-- Gone With The Wind (1939), d. Victor Fleming, US
What more can one say about his much-loved, much-discussed blockbuster? It epitomizes Hollywood at its most ambitious (not so much in terms of art, but of middlebrow, respectable entertainment served up on a polished platter); it's inevitably racist, alarmingly sexist (Scarlett's submissive smile after marital rape), nostalgically reactionary (wistful for a vanished, supposedly more elegant and honorable past), and often supremely entertaining. It never really confronts the political or historical context of the Civil War, relegating it to a backdrop for the emotional upheavals of Leigh's conversion from bitchy Southern belle to loving wife. It's also the perfect example of Hollywood as an essentially collaborative artistic production center. Cukor, Sam Wood and Fleming directed from a script by numerous writers (including Scott Fitzgerald and Ben Hecht); William Cameron Menzies provided the art designs; there's a top-notch cast; and producer David O. Selznick oversaw the whole project obsessively from start to finish. Yet, although anonymous, it's still remarkable coherent.

-- The Lady Eve (1941), d. Preston Sturges, US
A beguilingly ribald sex comedy, spattered with characteristic Sturges slapstick (Fonda can hardly move without courting disaster) and speech patterns ('Let us be crooked, but never common,' urges Coburn's conman). Fonda and Stanwyck are superbly paired as the prissy professor and the brassy card-sharp who meet on a liner for a ferociously funny battle of the sexes in which she proves triumphantly that Eve and the serpent still have the drop on poor old Adam. The glittering screwball comedy of love's labors that ensues - denounced as a brazen gold-digger and cast off, Stanwyck vengefully seeks revenge by reconquering Fonda's heart while masquerading (inimitably) as a flower of English society - is not just funny but surprisingly moving, given the tender romantic warmth of the early shipboard scenes in which, with Stanwyck's veneer slowly melted by Fonda's vulnerability, the pair first fall irrevocably in love. Very nearly perfection, and quintessential Sturges.

-- Last Year in Marienbad (1961), d. Alain Resnais, Fr
Something of a key film in the development of concepts of cinematic modernism, simply because - with a script by nouveau roman iconoclast Alain Robbe-Grillet - it sets up a puzzle that is never resolved: a man meets a woman in a rambling hotel and believes he may have had an affair with her the previous year at Marienbad - or did he? Or was it somewhere else? Deliberately scrambling chronology to the point where past, present and future become meaningless, resnais creates a vaguely unsettling mood by means of stylish composition, long, smooth tracking shots along the hotel's deserted corridors, and strangely detached performances. Obscure, oneiric, it's either some sort of masterpiece or meaningless twaddle.

-- Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948), d. Max Ophuls, US
Of all the cinema's fables of doomed love, none is more piercing than this. Fontaine nurses an undeclared childhood crush on her next-door neighbor, a concert pianist (Jourdan); much later, he adds her to his long list of conquests, makes her pregnant - and forgets all about her. Ophuls' endlessly elaborate camera movements, forever circling the characters or co-opting them into larger designs, expose the impasse with hallucinatory clarity: we see how these people see each other and why they are hopelessly, inextricably stuck.

(48) The Battle of Algiers (1965), d. Gillo Pontecorvo, It/Alg
The prototype for all the mainstream political cinema of the '70s, from Rosi to Costa-Gavras. It relegates the actual liberation of Algeria to an epilogue, and focuses instead on a specific phase of the Algerian guerrilla struggle against the French, the years between 1954 (when the FLN regrouped, recruited new members, and tackled the problem of organized crime in the Casbah) and 1957 (when French paratroopers under Colonel Mathieu launched a systematic - and largely successful - attack on the FLN from the roots up). Some fifteen minutes were cut from prints shown in both Britain and America, removing the more graphic sequences of French torture methods, but it seems clear that even these would not have altered the film's scrupulous balance. Pontecorvo refuses to caricature the French or glamorize the Algerians; instead he sketches the way a guerrilla movement is organized and the way a colonial force sets about decimating it. There's a minimum of verbal rhetoric: the urgent images and Ennio Morricone's thunderous score spell out the underlying political sympathies.

(49) The Gold Rush (1925), d. Charles Chaplin, US
The Little Tramp is here the Lone Prospector, poverty stricken, infatuated with Hale, and menaced by thugs and blizzards during the Klondike gold rush of 1898. Famous for various imaginative sequences - Charlie eating a Thanksgiving meal of an old boot and laces, Charlie imagined as a chicken by a starving and delirious Swain, a log-cabin teetering on the brink of an abyss - the film is nevertheless flawed by its mawkish sentimentality and by its star's endless winsome attempts to ingratiate himself into the sympathies of his audience. Mercifully, it lacks the pretentious moralizing of his later work, and is far more professionally put together. But for all its relative dramatic coherence, it's still hard to see how it was ever taken as a masterpiece.

-- La Grande Illusion (1937), d. Jean Renoir, Fr
Renoir films have a way of talking about one thing while being about another. La Grande Illusion was the only one of his '30s movies to be received with unqualified admiration at the time, lauded as a warmly humane indictment of war, a pacifist statement as nobly moving as All Quiet on the Western Front. Practically nobody noted the irony with which this archetypal prison camp escape story also outlined a barbed social analysis, demonstrating how shared aristocratic backgrounds (and military professionalism) forge a bond of sympathy between the German commandant (von Stroheim) and the senior French officer (Fresnay); how the exigencies of a wartime situation impel Fresnay to sacrifice himself (and Stroheim to shoot him) so that two of his men may make good their escape; and how these two escapees (Gabin and Dalio), once their roles as hero-warriors are over, will return home reduced to being working class and dirty Jew once more. The Grand Illusion, often cited as an enigmatic title, is surely not that peace can ever be permanent, but that liberty, equality and fraternity is ever likely to become a social reality rather than a token ideal.

-- Une Partie de Campagne (1936), d. Jean Renoir, Fr
Supposedly left unfinished, but filming was in fact completed, except that the producers wanted Renoir to expand to feature length; he was reluctant, other things intervened, then the war, and the film was finally released in 1946 with the addition of a couple of titles. It may be only a featurette, but this masterly adaptation of a Maupassant story is rich in both poetry and thematic content. On an idyllic country picnic, a young girl leaves her family and fiancee for a while, and succumbs to an all-too-brief romance. The careful reconstruction of period (around 1860) is enhanced by a typically touching generosity towards the characters and an aching, poignant sense of love lost but never forgotten. And, as always in Renoir, the river is far, far more than just a picturesque stretch of water. Witty and sensuous, it's pure magic.

-- The Philadelphia Story (1940), d. George Cukor, US
Cukor and Donald Ogden Stewart's evergreen version of Philip Barry's romantic farce, centering on a socialite wedding threatened by scandal, is a delight from start to finish, with everyone involved working on peak form. Hepburn's the ice maiden, recently divorced from irresponsible millionaire Grant and just about to marry a truly dull but supposedly more considerate type (Howard). Enter Grant, importunate and distinctly skeptical. Also enter Stewart and Hussey, snoopers from Spy magazine, to cover the society wedding of the year and throw another spanner in the works. Superbly directed by Cukor, the film is a marvel of timing and understated performances, effortlessly transcending its stage origins without ever feeling the need to 'open out' in any way. The wit still sparkles; the ambivalent attitude towards the rich and idle is still resonant; and the moments between Stewart and Hepburn, drunk and flirty on the moonlit terrace, tingle with a real, if rarely explicit, eroticism.

-- Pickpocket (1959), d. Robert Bresson, Fr
Bresson is the dark Catholic of French cinema. Here a young man, unwilling/unable to find work, flirts with the idea of pickpocketing: an initial, almost disastrous attempt leads him on. Theft follows theft, on the Paris Metro, in the streets, for the activity occupies an obsessive, erotic position in his daily life. Increasing skill leads to increasing desire, and so to alienation from his only friend, and from the moral counsel of the detective who watches over him with paternal concern. Black-and-white images in the summer sun...of hands flexing uncontrollably, of eyes opaque to the camera's gaze...all part of a diary/flashback that is in the process of being 'written' by the thief himself in prison. Read it as an allegory on the insufficiency of human reason; as a tone poem on displaced desire; as Catholic first cousin to Camus' The Outsider (written about the same time): one of the few postwar European films that is both cerebral (an essay on The Human Condition) and resolutely sensual (the constant, restless evaporation of our daily lives).

-- Schindler's List (1993), d. Steven Spielberg, US
The film of Thomas Keneally's novel is Spielberg's finest since Jaws. The elastic editing and grainy camerawork lend an immediacy as surprising as the shockingly matter-of-fact depiction of violence and casual killing. And Spielberg can handle actors - Neeson as Schindler, the German profiteer whose use of cheap labor in his Cracow factory saved 1,100 Jews from death; Kingsley as Stern, the canny accountant; Fiennes as Goeth, bloodless commandant of Plaszow camp. Wisely, the director rarely seeks to simplify the mysterious complexity of Schindler, an opportunist whose deeds became giddily selfless. As in his earlier work, there's a sense of wonder at the inexplicable, but it's no longer childlike. At times the film becomes a scream of horror at the inhumanity it recalls and recreates, and the b/w images never become aesthetically sanitized. True, the Jews are huddled, victimized masses. True, too, that Spielberg finally relents and tries to 'explain' Schindler so that the last hour becomes steadily more simplistic and sentimental. Otherwise, however, it's a noble achievement, and essential viewing.

-- The Shining (1980), d. Stanley Kubrick, GB
If you go to this adaptation of Stephen King's novel expecting to see a horror movie, you'll be disappointed. From the start, Kubrick undercuts potential tension builders by a process of anti-climax; eerie aerial shots accompanied by ponderous music prove to be nothing more than that; the setting is promising enough - an empty, isolated hotel in dead-of-winter Colorado - but Kubrick makes it warm, well-lit, and devoid of threat. Granted, John Alcott's cinematography is impressive, and occasionally produces a 'look behind you' panic; but to hang the movie's psychological tension on the leers and grimaces of Nicholson's face (suited though it is to demoniacal expressions), while refusing to develop any sense of the man, is asking for trouble. Similarly, the narrative is too often disregarded in favor of crude and confusing visual shocks. Kubrick's unbalanced approach (over-emphasis on production values) results in soulless cardboard cutouts who can do little to generate audience empathy.

-- The Third Man (1949), d. Carol Reed, GB
Justly celebrated British noir, charting post-war dis-ease in Vienna as Cotten's naive American pulp writer chases the shadows of Welles' quintessential underground man Harry Lime, an old friend now involved in black market drug-dealing and hiding out in the foreign sector of the rubble-strewn city. Robert Krasker's camerawork matches the baroque conception of Graham Greene's characters, Welles' contributions (script rewrites included) add intriguing internal tension, and even the 'gimmick' of Anton Karas' solo zither score works perfectly. A tender/tough classic.

(57) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying... (1964), d. Stanley Kubrick, GB
Perhaps Kubrick's most perfectly realized film, simply because his cynical vision of the progress of technology and human stupidity is wedded with comedy, in this case Terry Southern's sparkling script in which the world comes to an end thanks to a mad US general's paranoia about women and commies. Sellers' three roles are something of an indulgent showcase, though as the tight-lipped RAF officer and the US president, he gives excellent performances. Better, however, are Scott as the gung-ho military man frustrated by political soft-pedalling, and - especially - Hayden as the beleaguered lunatic who prresses the button. Kubrick wanted to have the antics end up with a custard-pie finale, but thank heavens he didn't; the result is scary, hilarious, and night-marishly beautiful, far more effective in its portrait of insanity and call for disarmament than any number of worthy anti-nuke documentaries.

-- The Reckless Moment (1949), d. Max Ophuls, US
Having concealed her daughter's accidental killing of her seedy older lover, upper middle class housewife Bennett finds herself being blackmailed by a loan shark; fortunately for her, the man he sends - small-time crook and loner Mason - becomes infatuated with Bennett, and ends up killing his partner. Ophuls' noir melodrama, like his previous film, Caught, can be seen as a subtle, subversive critique of American ambitions and class-structures: in committing the moral and legal transgression of concealing a corpse, Bennett is merely protecting the comfort and respectability of her family life, and the irony is that Mason's self-sacrifice, made on her behalf, simply serves to preserve the status quo that has relegated him to the role of social outcast. This sense of waste, however, is implied rather than emphasized by Ophuls' elegant, low key direction, which counterpoints the stylization of Burnett Guffey's shadowy photography with long, mobile takes that stress the everyday reality of the milieu. A marvelous, tantalizing thriller, it also features never-better performances from Mason and Bennett.

-- Singin' In The Rain (1952), d. Stanley Donen/Gene Kelly, US
Is there a film clip more often shown than the title number of this most astoundingly popular musical? The rest of the movie is great too. It shouldn't be. There never was a masterpiece created from such a mishmash of elements: Arthur Freed's favorites among his own songs from back in the '20s and '30s, along with a new number, 'Make 'Em Laugh', which is a straight rip-off from Cole Porter's 'Be a Clown'; the barely blooded Debbie Reynolds pitched into the deep end with tyrannical perfectionist Kelly; choreography very nearly improvised because of pressures of time; and Kelly filming his greatest number with a heavy cold. Somehow it all comes together. The 'Broadway Melody' ballet is Kelly's least pretentious, Jean Hagen and Donald O'Connor are very funny, and the Comden/Green script is a loving-care job. If you've never seen it and don't, you're bonkers.

(60) Blade Runner (1982), d. Ridley Scott, US
An ambitious and expensive adaptation of one of Philip K. Dick's best novels (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), with Ford as the cop in 2019 Los Angeles whose job is hunting mutinous androids that have escaped from the off-world colonies. The script has some superb scenes, notably between Ford and the (android) femme fatale Young, while Scott succeeds beautifully in portraying the LA of the future as a cross between a Hong Kong street-market and a decaying 200-story Metropolis. But something has gone badly wrong with the dramatic structure: the hero's voice-over and the ending feel as if they've strayed in from another movie, and the android villains are neither menacing nor sympathetic, when ideally they should have been both. This leaves Scott's picturesque violence looking dull and exploitative.

-- Blue Velvet (1986), d. David Lynch, US
Jeffrey (MacLachlan) is the contemporary knight in slightly tarnished armor, a shy and adolescent inhabitant of Lumberton, USA. After discovering a severed ear in an overgrown backlot, he embarks upon an investigation that leads him into a hellish netherworld, where he observes - and comes to participate in - a terrifyiing sado-masochistic relationship between damsel-in-distress Dorothy (Rossellini) and mad mobster Frank Booth (Hopper). Grafting on to this story his own idiosyncratic preoccupations, Lynch creates a visually stunning, convincingly coherent portrait of a nightmarish sub-stratum to conventional, respectable society. The seamless blending of beauty and horror is remarkable - although many will be profoundly disturbed by Lynch's vision of male-female relationships, centered as it is on Dorothy's psychopathic hunger for violence - the terror very real, and the sheer wealth of imagination virtually unequaled in recent cinema.

-- Pather Panchali (1955), d. Satyajit Ray, Ind
Ray's first film, and the first installment of what came to be known as The Apu Trilogy, completed by Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956, 113 min, b/w) and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959, 106 min, b/w). The first Indian film to cause any real stir in Europe and America, it is still something to wonder at: a simple story of country folk told with all the effortless beauty, drama and humanity which seem beyond the grasp of most Western directors. The plot is nothing more than a string of ordinary events, focused on the experiences of Apu, child of a small family eking out an existence in a ramshackle Bengal village; a train thunders by across the plains, a frugal meal is prepared, the rains and the wind flatten and drench the landscape, someone dies. The two later films show Apu's development in more 'civilized' societies - particularly Calcutta, where he pursues his studies until money runs out, falls into an arranged marriage, painfully lives through the deaths of his parents and wife, loses direction, and pulls through chastened but undefeated. There are three changes of actor (Apu at different ages), and Ray's narrative methods sometimes veer distractingly from the episodic to the linear. What doesn't change is his remarkably natural way with symbolism (spot all those trains!), his eye for the visual poetry of both raw nature and industrial squalor, and his faith in the human ability to grow with experience. Pather Panchali, in particular, retains a fresh and pellucid beauty.

-- Le Samourai (The Samurai) (1967), d. Jean-Pierre Melville, Fr
Melville's hombres don't talk a lot, they just move in and out of the shadows, their trenchcoats lined with guilt and their hats hiding their eyes. This is a great movie, an austere masterpiece, with Delon as a cold, enigmatic contract killer who lives by a personal code of bushido. Essentially, the plot is about an alibi, yet Melville turns this into a mythical revenge story, with Cathy Rosier as Delon's black, piano-playing nemesis who might just as easily have stepped from the pages of Cocteau or Sophocles as Vogue. Similarly, if Delon is Death, Perier's cop is a date with Destiny. Melville's film had a major influence in Hollywood: Delon lying on his bed is echoed in Taxi Driver, and Paul Schrader might have made Le Samourai as American Gigolo. Another remake is The Driver, despite Walter Hill's insistence that he'd never seen it: someone on that movie had to have seen it.

-- Sans Soleil (Sunless) (1983), d. Chris Marker, Fr
Imagine getting letters from a friend in Japan, letters full of images, sounds and ideas. Your friend is an inveterate globe-trotter, and his letters are full of memories of other trips. He has a wry and very engaging sense of humor, he's a movie fan, he used to be quite an activist (though he was never much into 'ideology'), and he's thoughtful and very well read. In his letters, he wants to share with you the faces that have caught his eye, the events that made him smile or weep, the places where he's felt at home. He wants to tell you stories, but he can't find a story big enough to deal with his sense of contrasts, his wish to grasp fleeting moments, his recurring memories. Above all he hopes to excite you, to share his secrets with you, to consolidate your friendship. Now stop imagining things and go to see Sans Soleil, in which Marker, the cinema's greatest essayist, sums up a lifetime's travels, speculations and passions. Among very many other things, his film is the most intimate portrait of Tokyo yet made: from neighborhood festivals to robots, under the sign of the Owl and the Pussycat.

-- Sweet Smell of Success (1957), d. Alexander Mackendrick, US
A film noir from the Ealing funny man? But Mackendrick's involvement with cozy British humor was always less innocent than it looked: remember the anti-social wit of The Man in the White Suit, or the cruel cynicism of The Ladykillers? Sweet Smell of Success was Mackendrick's American debut, a rat trap of a film in which a vicious NY gossip hustler (Curtis) grovels for his 'Mr. Big' (Lancaster), a monster newspaper columnist who is incestuously obsessed with destroying his kid sister's romance...and a figure as evil and memorable as Orson Welles in The Third Man or Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter. The dark streets gleam with the sweat of fear; Elmer Bernstein's limpid jazz score (courtesy of Chico Hamilton) whispers corruption in the Big City. The screen was rarely so dark or cruel.

(66) Amarcord (1973), d. Federico Fellini, It/Fr
Fellini at his ripest and loudest recreates a fantasy-vision of his home town during the fascist period. With generous helpings of soap opera and burlesque, he generally gets his better effects by orchestrating his colorful cast of characters around the town square, on a boat outing, or at a festive wedding. When he narrows his focus down to individual groups, he usually limits himself to corny bathroom and bedroom jokes, which produce the desired titters but little else. But despite the ups and downs, it's still Fellini, which has become an identifiable substance like salami or pepperoni that can be sliced into at any point, yielding pretty much the same general consistency and flavor.

-- Greed (1924), d. Erich von Stroheim, US
Originally planned to run around ten hours but hacked to just over two by Thalberg's MGM, von Stroheim's greatest film still survives as a true masterpiece of cinema. Even now its relentlessly cynical portrait of physical and moral squalor retains the ability to shock, while the Von's obsessive attention to realist detail - both in terms of the San Francisco and Death Valley locations, and the minutely observed characters - is never prosaic as the two men and a woman fall out over filthy lucre (a surprise lottery win), their motivations are explored with a remarkably powerful visual poetry, and Frank Norris' novel is translated into the cinematic equivalent of, say, Zola at the peak of his powers. Never has a wedding been so bitterly depicted, never a moral denouement been delivered with such vicious irony.

-- The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), d. Carl Theodor Dreyer, Fr
Dreyer's most universally acclaimed masterpiece remains one of the most staggeringly intense films ever made. It deals only with the final stages of Joan's trial and her execution, and is composed almost exclusively of close-ups: hands, robes, crosses, metal bars, and (most of all) faces. The face we see most is, naturally, Falconetti's as Joan, and it's hard to imagine a performer evincing physical anguish and spiritual exaltation more palpably. Dreyer encloses this stark, infinitely expressive face with other characters and sets that are equally devoid of decoration and equally direct in conveying both material and metaphysical essences. The entire film is less molded in light than carved in stone: it's magisterial cinema, and almost unbearably moving.

-- Persona (1966), d. Ingmar Bergman, Swe
Bergman at his most brilliant as he explores the symbiotic relationship that evolves between an actress suffering a breakdown in which she refuses to speak, and the nurse in charge as she recuperates in a country cottage. To comment is to betray the film's extraordinary complexity, but basically it returns to two favorite Bergman themes: the difficulty of true communication between human beings, and the essentially egocentric nature of art. Here the actress (named Vogler after the charlatan/artist in The Face) dries up in the middle of a performance, thereafter refusing to exercise her art. We aren't told why, but from the context it's a fair guess that she withdraws from a feeling of inadequacy in face of the horrors of the modern world; and in her withdrawal, she watches with detached tolerance as humanity (the nurse chattering on about her troubled sex life) reveals its petty woes. Then comes the weird moment of communion in which the two women merge as one: charlatan or not, the artist can still be understood, and can therefore still understand. Not an easy film, but an infinitely rewarding one.

-- Rashomon (1951), d. Akira Kurosawa, Jap
If it weren't for the closing spasm of gratuitous, humanist optimism, Rashomon could be warmly recommended as one of Kurosawa's most inventive and sustained achievements. The main part of the film, set in 12th century Kyoto, offers four mutually contradictory versions of an ambush, rape and murder, each through the eyes of one of those involved. The view of human weaknesses and vices is notably astringent, although the sheer animal vigor of Mifune's bandit is perhaps a celebration of a sort. The film is much less formally daring than its literary source, but its virtues are still plentiful: kurosawa's visual style at its most muscular, rhythmically nuanced editing, and excellent performances.

-- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), d. John Huston, US
For once, Bogart plays a really vicious bastard, Fred C. Dobbs, in this, the first of two movies he made in 1948 with Huston. It's a sort of lifeboat drama for three, with Holt the young innocent and director's dad Walter as the wise old buzzard, flanking Bogart's bravura paranoia. Director Huston tries to yank the basic elements - gold lust in a Mexican wilderness - into the spare eloquence of a fable, and tends to look pretentious rather than profound. In any case, outrageously Oscar-seeking performances like actor Huston's, coupled with director Huston's comparative conviction with action sequences, work against any yearning for significance. There's a quite enjoyable yarn buried under the hollow laughter.

(72) All That Heaven Allows (1955), d. Douglas Sirk, US
On the surface a glossy tearjerker about the problems besetting a love affair between an attractive middle class widow and her younger, 'bohemian' gardener, Sirk's film is in fact a scathing attack on all those facets of the American Dream widely held dear. Wealth produces snobbery and intolerance, family togetherness creates xenophobia and the cult of the dead; cozy kindness can be stultifyingly patronizing; and materialism results in alienation from natural feelings. Beneath the stunningly lovely visuals - all expressionist colors, reflections, and frames-within-frames, used to produce a precise symbolism - lies a kernel of terrifying despair created by lives dedicated to respectability and security, given its most harrowing expression when Wyman, having give up her affair with Hudson in order to protect her children from gossip, is presented with a television set as a replacement companion. Hardly surprising that Fassbinder chose to remake the film as Fear Eats the Soul.

-- Black Narcissus (1946), d. Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, GB
Interesting to compare with another version of a Rumer Godden story, Renoir's The River, in that whereas Renoir shot on location in India and created an almost documentary feel to his film, Powell refused to go to the Himalayas and shot at Pinewood, coming up with a heady melodrama that treats India as a state of mind rather than a real country. A group of nuns lead a tough, isolated existence in a mountain convent, and find themselves psychologically disturbed by all manner of physical phenomena: extremes of weather and temperature, illness, a local agent's naked thighs, a young prince's perfume purchased, ironically, at London's Army and Navy stores. As temptation draws the women away from their vocation, they fall prey to doubt, jealousy and madness. Powell's use of color, design and music was never so perfectly in tune with the emotional complexities of Pressburger's script, their talents combining to create one of Britain's great cinematic masterpieces, a marvelous evocation of hysteria and repression, and incidentally one of the few genuinely erotic films ever to emerge from these sexually staid isles.

-- Double Indemnity (1944), d. Billy Wilder, US
Before he settled down to being an ultra-cynical connoisseur of vulgarity, Wilder helped (as much as any of his fellow Austro-German emigres in Hollywood) to define the mood of brooding pessimism that laced so many American movies in the '40s. Adapted from James M. Cain's novel, Double Indemnity is certainly one of the darkest thrillers of its time. Wilder presents Stanwyck and MacMurray's attempt at an elaborate insurance fraud as a labryinth of sexual dominance, guilt, suspicion and sweaty duplicity. Chandler gave the dialogue a sprinkling of characteristic wit, without mitigating any of the overall sense of oppression.

-- Intolerance (1916), d. D.W. Griffith, US
Griffith's immensely influential silent film inter-cuts four parallel tales from history (spanning Babylon, Christ's Judaea, Reformation Europe, and turn-of-the-century America) to embroider a moral tapestry on personal, social and political repression through the ages. The thematic approach no longer works (if it ever did); the title cards are stiffly Victorian and sometimes laughably pedantic; but the visual poetry is overwhelming, especially in the massed crowd scenes. And the unbridled eroticism of the Babylon harem scenes demonstrate just what Hollywood lost when it later bowed to the censorship of the Hays Code.

-- Notorious (1946), d. Alfred Hitchcock, US
One of Hitchcock's finest films of the '40s, using its espionage plot about Nazis hiding out in South America as a mere MacGuffin, in order to focus on a perverse, cruel love affair between US agent Grant and alcoholic Bergman, whom he blackmails into providing sexual favors for the German Rains as a means of getting information. Suspense there is, but what really distinguishes the film is the way its smooth, polished surface illuminates a sickening tangle of self-sacrifice, exploitation, suspicion, and emotional dependence. Grant, in fact, is the least sympathetic character in the dark, ever-shifting relationships on view, while Rains, oppressed by a cigar-chewing, possessive mother and deceived by all around him, is treated with great generosity. Less war thriller than black romance, it in fact looks forward to the misanthropic portrait of manipulation in Vertigo.

-- Out Of The Past (1947), d. Jacques Tourneur, US
The definitive flashback movie, in which our fated hero Mitchum makes a rendezvous with death and his own past in the shape of Jane Greer. Beguiling and resolutely ominous, this hallucinatory voyage has two more distinctions: as the only movie with both a deaf-mute garage hand and death by fishing-rod, and as one of the most bewildering and beautiful films ever made. From a traditionally doomed and perversely corrupt world, the mood of obsession was never more powerfully suggestive: Mitchum waitin

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