Filmsite: written by tim dirks

Twitter

Facebook

The greatest films The "Greatest" and the "Best" in Cinematic History www.filmsite.org

GREATEST FILMS

THE BEST

OSCARS

QUOTES

GENRES

SCENES

HISTORY

POSTERS

DIRECTORS & STARS

REVIEWS

VIDEO

All-Time 100 Best Movies

by Time Magazine
Part 1

Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

All-Time 100 Best Movies

(part 1, alphabetical)

Descriptions are excerpted from the copyrighted Time Magazine site.

Aguirre: the Wrath of God (1972)

Directed By: Werner Herzog
Screenplay: Werner Herzog
Cast: Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo

Aguirre is the prototype Herzog-Kinski collaboration, about a Spanish explorer who

loses his mission, men and mind on an Amazon adventure. Answering only to the
logic of Peru's natural beauty, the film seems an examination of madness from the
inside. Sumptuous, spellbinding and immediately, eternally scary.

The Apu Trilogy (1955, 1956, 1959)

Directed By: Satyajit Ray

Screenplay: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (novel); Satyajit Ray

Comprising three films: Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Apur Sansar. The story of a
child growing to manhood in modern India. His triumphs are small, his tragedies

large, but Ray's filmmaking is direct in manner, simple in its means and profound
in its impact.

The Awful Truth (1937)

Directed By: Leo McCarey

Screenplay: Via Delmar, Arthur Richman (play)

Cast: Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy
A divorcing couple (Cary Grant and Irene Dunne) squabble delightfully about
custody of their dog, her lamebrained suitor (Ralph Bellamy), his waywardness and
her career in what may be the most perfect romantic comedy ever made.

Baby Face (1933)

Directed By: Alfred E. Green

Screenplay: Darryl F. Zanuck (story) (as Mark Canfield); Gene Markey, Kathryn
Scola
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent
In this invigorating affront of a movie, Lily (Stanwyck) escapes to New York from
an Erie, Pa., speakeasy where her father has rented her out to the customers. In
a big-city bank, she sleeps her way to the top, leaving a heap of discarded men
(and one or two corpses)...Baby Face was the definitive pre-Code statement of
how the Depression created a new morality of no morality.

Bande part (1964)

Directed By: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cast: Anna Karina, Danile Girard
...This film, about some slackers who drop out of a dubious language school and
retreat to the suburbs for a lazy frolic that turns into absurdist murder, is among
[Godard's] most weirdly entertaining efforts to rewrite not just the grammar of

cinema, but its ruling narrative conventions as well.

Barry Lyndon (1975)

Directed By: Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay: William Makepeace Thackeray (novel); Stanley Kubrick (Screenplay)
Cast: Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson
In 18th century England [Kubrick's] eponymous protagonist peers into the candle-lit
dimness of stately homes, seeking clues to correct behavior. He learns enough to
rise in society, but not enough to prevent his fall.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)

Directed By: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Screenplay: Alfred Dblin (novel); Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Cast: Gnter Lamprecht, Elisabeth Trissenaar
[Fassbinder's] biggest film, likely his masterpiece, is this 15-1/2 hr. made-for-TV
adaptation of Alfred Dblin's 1929 novel, which had thrilled Fassbinder since his
teen years. In the lumpen figure of Franz Biberkopf (Gnter Lamprecht), the
filmmaker found a passive, pathetic non-hero around whom dozens of predators
and victims could swarm.

Blade Runner (1982)

Directed By: Ridley Scott

Screenplay: Philip K. Dick (novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?);

Hampton Fancher, David Webb Peoples
Cast: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer
Blade Runner is set in the year 2019, in a big city that suggests a Tokyo gone
daft. Androids (like the ones played by Rutger Hauer, Sean Young and Darryl
Hannah) are so evolved they think they're human. They need a 1940s-style cop
(Harrison Ford) to put a bullet through their delusion.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Directed By: Arthur Penn

Screenplay: David Newman, Robert Benton, Robert Towne (uncredited)

Cast: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman
Two beautiful idiots (Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway) find love, death and
rollicking good humor as backroads bank robbers in 1930s America. And telling
the story of their petty, bloody crime wave, director Arthur Penn creates a film that
is both a signature work of its era (the troubled 60s) and one that is as joyously
entrancing now as it was the day it was released.

Brazil (1985)

Directed By: Terry Gilliam

Screenplay: Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown
Cast: Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro
...in Gilliam's complex comic fantasia, a mild-minded bureaucrat (Jonathan Pryce)
gets run through a police state's inner workings, like Charlie Chaplin in

Modern

Times, while being manipulated by an insurgent (Robert De Niro) who flies into his
life like a deranged Douglas Fairbanks.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Directed By: James Whale

Screenplay: William Hurlbut, William Hurlbut, John L. Balderston (adaptation); Mary

Shelley (novel)
Cast: Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Valerie Hobson, Elsa Lanchester
This is one of those rare sequels that is infinitely superior to its source. Boris
Karloff is a perfect klutz as the monstrously eager lover of Elsa Lanchester, whose
creator, the divinely hysterical Colin Clive, endowed her with virginity and attitude.

Camille (1936)

Directed By: George Cukor

Screenplay: Alexandre Dumas fils (novel); Zoe Akins, Frances Marion, James
Hilton
Cast: Greta Garbo, Robert Taylor, Lionel Barrymore
In this romance of selfless renunciation and the nobility of the call-girl class,
Garbo's achievement may strike younger viewers as odd, silly, for she is
performing in a gestural language utterly remote from today's. Yet it is an elegant,
eloquent tongue, and no one "spoke" it as brilliantly as Garbo did in this great
and grand soap opera.

Casablanca (1942)

Directed By: Michael Curtiz

Screenplay: Murray Burnett, Joan Alison (play); Julius J. Epstein, Philip G.
Epstein, Howard Koch
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid
Everyone, by now, has come to Rick'sand come away continuing to admire the
film's doomy romance, political idealism, crackling dialogue and wonderful
performances. It's a studio film that exemplifies (and even justifies) the studio
system at its best: slick, efficient, and able to make some pretty stale clichs feel
to us like high truth. This is populist movie-making transformed into something like

art.

Charade (1963)

Directed By: Stanley Donen

Screenplay: Peter Stone , Marc Behm (story); Peter Stone (screenplay)
Cast: Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Coburn
The great movie-star man, Cary Grant, meets the great movie-star lady, Audrey
Hepburn, in a souffle-light thriller-romance-comedy whipped up by Donen, who did
blithe American elegance as well as anyone, and writers Marc Behm and Peter

Stone. Audrey is a Parisian thief's widow, now in ignorant possession of his loot,
and Cary is a mystery man with a protective or pernicious interest in her. Walter
Matthau plays an avuncular type over at the U.S. Treasury office, and James
Coburn, George Kennedy and Ned Glass are bad guys whose consecutive
demises were considered quite violent for the time.

Children of Paradise (1945)

Directed By: Marcel Carn

Screenplay: Jacques Prvert

Cast: Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault
At 3hr. 9min. the film is an epic romance viewed through an ironic prism. Baptiste
the ethereal mime (Jean-Louis Barrault), Garance the worldly-wise courtesan
(Arletty) and a dozen other scapegraces and victims are creatures with the
fullness and ambiguity of a Balzac novel, thanks to Jacques Prvert, the poet and
screenwriter who more than anyone shaped French cinema in one of its richest
periods.

Chinatown (1974) - BEST FILM OF ITS DECADE

Directed By: Roman Polanski

Screenplay: Robert Towne

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston

Set against the background of innocent, sun-splashed Los Angeles in the 1930s,
this may be the movies' most resonant study of personal and political corruption.
Robert Towne's great script is a high romantic tragedy, impeccably directed by
Polanski and heart-breakingly played by Jack Nicholson as the private eye who
falls and Faye Dunaway as the rich, mysterious and doomed dark lady with whom
he falls in love in this perfect summary of the film noir spirit.

Chungking Express (1994)

Directed By: Wong Kar Wai
Screenplay: Wong Kar Wai

Cast: Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai

The film tells two stories: one of young Takeshi Kaneshiro falling for ageless
Brigitte Lin, the other pairing Hong Kong cop Tony Leung Chiu-wai with the elfin
beauty Faye Wong. With his two essential collaborators, cinematographer
Christopher Doyle and designer William Chang, Wong weaves a tapestry of
longing and seduction that puts both the characters and the audience in the mood
for love.

Citizen Kane (1941) - BEST FILM OF ITS DECADE

Directed By: Orson Welles

Screenplay: Herman J. Mankiewicz, Orson Welles

Cast: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead
This crypto-biography of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst worked,
fabulously, thanks to the insider's knowledge and narrative savvy of screenwriter
Herman J. Mankiewicz, to cinematographer Gregg Toland's openness to
experiment (he virtually created the film-noir style with this film) and, of course, to
the boy-genius vigor the 25-year-old Welles brought to his first Hollywood
enterprise.

City Lights (1931)

Directed By: Charles Chaplin

Screenplay: Charles Chaplin
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill
The immortal tramp falls in love with a blind flower seller, with results that are
both poignant and deeply comic. Chaplin's sentimental side was never more
delicately stated. But his funny side, as he desperately tries to earn money for the
operation that will restore the girl's sight, was never more hilariously deployed than
it was in this spare, curiously haunting film.

City of God (2002)

Directed By: Fernando Meirelles, Ktia Lund

Screenplay: Paulo Lins (novel); Brulio Mantovani (screenplay)
Cast: Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino
The Rio de Janeiro slum known as Cidade de Deus might be a Martian
landscape, so remote in spirit is it from the smooth beaches where the rich work
on their tans and lines of seduction. In the inner city the activity is life-and-death,
mostly death, and the ruthless men who run the place are boys, some not yet
adolescents. Boys their age elsewhere play with plastic guns; these kids shoot real
bullets, kill people, for the love or the hell of it.

Filmsite: written by tim dirks

Twitter

Facebook

The greatest films The "Greatest" and the "Best" in Cinematic History www.filmsite.org

GREATEST FILMS

THE BEST

OSCARS

QUOTES

GENRES

SCENES

HISTORY

POSTERS

DIRECTORS & STARS

REVIEWS

VIDEO

All-Time 100 Best Movies

by Time Magazine
Part 2

Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

All-Time 100 Best Movies

(part 2, alphabetical)

Descriptions are excerpted from the copyrighted Time Magazine site.

Closely Watched Trains (1966)

Directed By: Jir Menzel

Screenplay: Bohumil Hrabal (also novel), Jir Menzel

Cast: Vclav Neckr, Josef Somr

...Menzel's film, about a feckless young crossing guard at a sleepy railroad station
who becomes an unlikely (and tragic) hero of the resistance to German occupation
was [Czech cinema's] sweetly funny, curiously moving masterpiece.

The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

Directed By: Jean Renoir

Screenplay: Jean Castanyer (story); Jacques Prvert

Cast: Ren Lefvre, Florelle

...it tells the story of a hack writer of pulp westerns, cruelly exploited by his
crooked publisher, who finally, justifiably, murders the man. It is not, however, a
mystery story. It is, among other things, an idealistic parable (the publishing house
employees turn the company into a cooperative) and an affecting romance (it ends
with Lange and his lover on the run, hoping for a better life, and the audience
thinking perhaps they will attain the happiness they deserve).

The Crowd (1928)

Directed By: King Vidor

Screenplay: King Vidor, John V.A. Weaver

Cast: Eleanor Boardman, James Murray
In this silent film, Vidor traces the sad life of a totally ordinary citizen, dreaming
big, living small, in a brilliant expressionistic style. But his manner, which might
have had a distancing effect, never interferes with the heartbreaking emotions this
powerful film stirs.

Day for Night (1973)

Directed By: Franois Truffaut

Screenplay: Jean-Louis Richard, Suzanne Schiffman
Cast: Jacqueline Bisset, Franois Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Laud, Valentina Cortse
...perhaps the best movie about moviemaking ever made. Truffaut perfectly
captures the romance and hysteria, the guiding obsessions, the lunatic distractions
and the desperate improvisations of a company shooting a film, which may not be
as great as they delude themselves into thinking it is.

The Decalogue (1989) - BEST FILM OF ITS DECADE

Directed By: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Screenplay: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz

Kieslowski's [made for television] series: ten little dramas, each about 55 mins.
long, each finding a contemporary metaphor for one of the Commandments. Its
characters, all of whom live in a drab Warsaw apartment block, must cope with
infidelity, cupidity, murder, abortion, the loss of a child...Viewers who haven't 10

hours to devote to Decalogue may get the most pleasure from episodes 1, 5, 6
and 7.

Detour (1945)

Directed By: Edgar G. Ulmer

Screenplay: Martin Goldsmith (novel); Martin Goldsmith, Martin Mooney
Cast: Tom Neal, Ann Savage
Al (Tom Neal), a piano-playing loser hitching west to meet his girlfriend, and Vera
(Ann Savage), the schemer who embodies all the bad luck a man could ever
have...this uncompromisingly bleak tale of a sadist and a schlemiel. They can
communicate only their mutual loathing in a realm where words can wound and a
telephone cord is an inadvertently lethal weapon.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

Directed By: Luis Buuel

Screenplay: Luis Buuel, Jean-Claude Carrire

Cast: Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Stephane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel
People start showing up for a dinner party its hosts are unaware they are
throwingturns into a genial exercise in surrealism. Six middle-class friends keep
trying to have a nice meal together, but somethinglove-making, military exercises,
criminal activities, even a sequence where they find themselves on stage in a
play, playing themselveskeeps preventing them from breaking bread.

Dodsworth (1936) - BEST FILM OF ITS DECADE

Directed By: William Wyler

Screenplay: Sinclair Lewis (novel); Sidney Howard (screenplay)

Cast: Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton, Mary Astor
Wyler and his film of the Sinclair Lewis novel about the fraying ties of a plutocrat
(Walter Huston), comfortable in his life of prosperity and propriety, and his restless
wife (Ruth Chatterton), who needs a sexual fling to prove she is not ready to
trudge placidly into old age. Here is a fearlessly mature drama, wise about affairs
of the heart and the ego, with acute performances by the stars, including Mary
Astor as a dream woman worth traveling the world for.

Double Indemnity (1944)

Directed By: Billy Wilder

Screenplay: James M. Cain (novel); Billy Wilder, Raymond Chandler (screenplay)

Cast: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson
Fred MacMurray's weak-willed insurance agent falls under the spell of a client's
scheming wife (Barbara Stanwyck). They murder her husband, but, of course,

bloodily fall out themselves. However dark the plotting, the dialogue (by Wilder and
Raymond Chandler) remains bright as a penny and hard as nails. One of the few
screen adaptations that actually improves on its source (a James M. Cain novel).

Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love

the Bomb (1964)

Directed By: Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay: Peter George (novel); Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, Peter George
(screenplay and adaptation)

Cast: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn

In Kubricks version, one last bomber plows through to Armageddon, a food fight
takes place in the U.S. War Room and crippled scientist is moved by the thrill of
it all to lurch to his feet, raise his arm in the Nazi salute and cry out, Mein
Fuhrer, I can walk. Kubricks remains perhaps the blackest comedy ever put on
screen, and with Peter Sellers brilliantly playing multiple roles, the blackest,
funniest movie of the post-war era.

Drunken Master II (1994)

Directed By: Chia-Liang Liu, Jackie Chan

Screenplay: Edward Tang, Man-Ming Tong, Kai-Chi Yun
Cast: Jackie Chan, Felix Wong

In his 1978 breakthrough, Yuen Wo-ping's Drunken Master, Chan played the reallife kung-fu hero Wong Fei-hung as an impish young man in need of a sifu

(teacher) who could purify his technique and his spirit. In the sequel, 16 years
later, Jackie is still a young Fei-hung (Anita Mui, eight years his junior, played his
mother!), now up against malicious generals, spies and a hundred bad guys with
superhuman fighting skills. The greatest of these is Ken Lo (Chan's offscreen
bodyguard), whose battle over hot coals is an exhibition of flying arms and feet
that leaves the two actors exhausted and the viewer's jaw on the floor.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Directed By: Steven Spielberg

Screenplay: Melissa Mathison

Cast: Henry Thomas, Robert MacNaughton, Drew Barrymore

Screenwriter Melissa Mathison lent a fairy-tale clarity to the director's standard plot
of a lost boy seeking his way back home. And Spielberg orchestrated the
movements of the camera and the puppet spaceman with the feelings ofit has to
be called loveexpressed in young Henry Thomas' yearning face.

8 1/2 (1963)

Directed By: Federico Fellini

Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano (story); Ennio Flaiano , Tullio Pinelli,
Federico Fellini, Brunello Rondi
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aime
Marcello Mastroianni's blocked movie director consults his dreams, his memories,
his fantasies as he attempts to imagine the movie his producers are demanding of
him. A suspicion of autobiography hovers over the film, but the comic frenzy of his
imaginings redeems the movie from solipsism and its endingfigures from his past
triumphs emerge on his set to rescue the moviemaker from his desperationis
both calmative and lovely.

The 400 Blows (1959)

Directed By: Franois Truffaut

Screenplay: Franois Truffaut, Marcel Moussy
Cast: Jean-Pierre Laud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rmy
The movie that defined the French New Wave for the world. Partly
autobiographical, both realistic and gently experimental in manner, it tells the story
of a mischievous boy flirting with full-scale delinquency.

Farewell My Concubine (1993)

Directed By: Kaige Chen

Screenplay: Lillian Lee (also novel), Bik-Wa Lei, Wei Lu

Cast: Leslie Cheung, Gong Li
Two boys meet as students in a punishing Peking Opera school in the 1920s and
remain partners, friends and enemies for 50 years...one of the boldest, most
beautiful Chinese films in a decade dominated by them. In the Concubine opera
that becomes their trademark, stolid Duan Xiaolou (Zhang Fengyi) plays the
emperor, luscious Cheng Dieyi (the late, great Leslie Cheung) the concubine. Yin
and yang are the roles they assume offstage as well, as Xiaolou has an affair
with a courtesan (Gong Li, the imperious queen of Chinese cinema) and Dieyi
flirts with the satrap of the occupying Japanese government. Sexual politics gives
way to political horror during the Cultural Revolution, when personal betrayal may
be the one way to stay alive.

Finding Nemo (2003)

Directed By: Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich

Screenplay: Andrew Stanton, Bob Peterson, David Reynolds
Cast: Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Alexander Gould, Willem Dafoe

Finding Nemo is, so far, the apotheosis of the Pixar style: the ultimate fish-out-ofwater story, with a fretful dad (voiced by Albert Brooks) enlisting a forgetful friend

(Ellen DeGeneres) to find his lost son...Pixar doesn't make cute movies for kids. It
tells universal stories through a graphic language so persuasive that children and
adults respond with the same pleasure and awe.

The Fly (1986)

Directed By: David Cronenberg

Screenplay: David Cronenberg, George Langelaan, Charles Edward Pogue
Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis

The Fly is about a scientist, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), who slowly and

irrevocably morphs into a giant insect, much to his horror and that of his girlfriend
(Geena Davis). Brundle might be the victim of any degenerative diseasecancer,
AIDS, Alzheimer'swho struggles to retain his humanity even as he decays into
something ... monstrous.

The Godfather, Parts I and II (1972, 1974)

Directed By: Francis Ford Coppola

Screenplay: Mario Puzo (novel); Francis Ford Coppola (screenplay)

Cast: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, John
Cazale, Robert De Niro
The gangster movie transformed into dark epicand, more important, into a
metaphor for every family's dysfunction, and a lot of America's, too. The burnished
darkness of Gordon Willis's cinematography sets an unforgettable tone. The
grandeur of the acting (Brando, Pacino, DeNiro among others) gives it a curious
nobility and the multigenerational narrative has the power to move us to terror,
pity and, occasionally, bitter laughter.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966)

Directed By: Sergio Leone

Screenplay: Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Leone

Cast: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach
Leone's reinvention of the western reaches its epic apotheosis in a movie about
the pursuit of gold lost by the Confederates during the Civil War in the Texas
theater. Clint Eastwood is the "good" (slow to anger, but quick on the trigger), Lee
Van Cleef is the bad (an elegant exemplar of absolute evil) and Eli Wallach is the
"ugly" (a menacingly funny, totally amoral bandido whose relationship with the
Eastwood character consists largely of betrayals). Leone's magnificent style is all
contrasts (huge panoramic shots alternating with tight close-ups, very slow buildups to lightning-fast action).

GoodFellas (1990)

Directed By: Martin Scorsese

Screenplay: Nicholas Pileggi (book); Nicholas Pileggi, Martin Scorsese (screenplay)
Cast: Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino
The director wanted his bloody, dirty-talking study of small-time Mafiosos to have
the spirit of "a rollicking road picture," and he achieved this paradoxical goal
brilliantly. The picture only seems amoral. Behind its grinning mask it is an acute
parody of "family values" and of moral incomprehension. And Joe Pesci is
awesome as the most psychopathic of hoods.

Filmsite: written by tim dirks

Twitter

Facebook

The greatest films The "Greatest" and the "Best" in Cinematic History www.filmsite.org

GREATEST FILMS

THE BEST

OSCARS

QUOTES

GENRES

SCENES

HISTORY

POSTERS

DIRECTORS & STARS

REVIEWS

VIDEO

All-Time 100 Best Movies

by Time Magazine
Part 3

Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

All-Time 100 Best Movies

(part 3, alphabetical)

Descriptions are excerpted from the copyrighted Time Magazine site.

A Hard Day's Night (1964)

Directed By: Richard Lester
Screenplay: Alun Owen
Cast: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr
They didn't have enough time to make an ordinary pop musical. A month or two
for Alun Owen to write situations and dialogue for a quartet of non-actors, and for
Lester to prepare his on-the-fly shoot; then four months from first day of filming to
premiere.

His Girl Friday (1940)

Directed By: Howard Hawks

Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur (play The Front Page); Charles
Lederer (screenplay)

Cast: Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy

An adaptation of The Front Page, this may be the fastest- (and smartest-) talking
romantic comedy ever made. With Cary Grant as a newspaper editor determined

to win back his ex-wife (and best reporter), played by Rosalind Russell, who gives
as good as she gets from her co-star. It is all heartless hilarity, directed in a mad
but curiously logical rush by a great master of overlapping dialogue, vicious asides
and over-the-shoulder put-downs.

Ikiru (1952) - BEST FILM OF ITS DECADE

Directed By: Akira Kurosawa

Screenplay: Shinobu Hashimoto, Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni

Cast: Takashi Shimura, Shinichi Himori

Ikiru, which means "to live," is about Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), a Tokyo
office chief whose stamp of disapproval falls on almost any project, regardless of
merit. Gray and unemotional, he's less a man than a stolid piece of furniture, a
bureaucrat who might as well be a bureau. Then he learns he has stomach

cancer, and takes stock of all he has left undone.

In A Lonely Place (1950)

Directed By: Nicholas Ray

Screenplay: Dorothy B. Hughes (novel); Edmund H. North (adaptation); Andrew

Solt
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame
Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) is a paranoid screenwriter succumbing to a rage
that may or may not be murderous...this sardonic portrayal of life on Hollywoods

fringes (the characters surrounding Steele are etched in acid). And we see him as
a modern archetypea talented, disappointed man surrendering to an anger he
cannot govern, an existential blackness he cannot understand.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Directed By: Don Siegel

Screenplay: Richard Collins (uncredited); Jack Finney (novel); Daniel Mainwaring,

Sam Peckinpah (uncredited)
Cast: Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter
You never see the alien invaders in what may be the best of the science fiction
breed. They just quietly replace them with pod. They look the same, but theyre
turned into them into smiling, completely passive conformists. Kevin McCarthy and
Dana Wynter do their best to resist (with mixed results) in this parable about
McCarthyism, which remains a suspenseful (and still relevant) icon of its era.

It's A Gift (1934)

Directed By: Norman Z. McLeod

Cast: W.C. Fields, Kathleen Howard
W.C. Fields, stringing together a succession of his best gag sequences. He plays
the proprietor of a moribund grocery store, tormented by his awful wife and
children, driven half-mad by every passer-by, registering victimization and
misanthropy in his best, curiously minimalist, comic manner.

It's A Wonderful Life (1946)

Directed By: Frank Capra

Screenplay: Philip Van Doren Stern

Cast: James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore
Capra traces the decline of a man driven to the edge of madness. George
Bailey's life is not, in worldly terms, wonderful; he is Bedford Falls' designated
saint, a suburban Job, for his fellow townsfolks' use as a friend or generous
banker, through which they can exercise their weakness or meanness. It's a noir

portrait with holly stuck in the frame, a sanity hearing in the form of a greeting
card.

Kandahar (2001)

Directed By: Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Screenplay: Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Cast: Nelofer Pazira, Hassan Tantai
The Taliban-ruled Afghanistan - that is the setting for Makhmalbaf's masterpiece,

with scenes of horrific beauty. At a Red Cross outpost, artificial legs rain from the
sky in parachutes dropped from a plane, and the legless Afghani men race out of
the tents to scavenge for them.

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Directed By: Robert Hamer

Screenplay: Roy Horniman (novel Israel Rank); Robert Hamer, John Dighton
Cast: Dennis Price, Valerie Hobson, Joan Greenwood, Alec Guinness

Narrated by the fastidious Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price), who has plotted to murder
eight members of an aristocratic family that had slighted his saintly mother, the
film proceeds on tiptoe through the blackest of comedy. It's fun noir. Price and his
fellow conniver Joan Greenwood, whose voice plays dark music over every
seductive syllable, are splendid, as is Alec Guinness as all eight
d'Ascoynes...Hamer's direction is a thing of dry delicacy, but it's the script that
makes it the definitive Ealing Studio comedy.

King Kong (1933)

Directed By: Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack

Screenplay: Merian C. Cooper, Edgar Wallace (story); James Ashmore Creelman,
Ruth Rose
Cast: Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot
This remains one of the movies' immortal tales of unrequited love. And the
heartbroken, heartbreaking look in [the great ape's] eyes as the planes shoot him
off the Empire State building remains the greatest single special effects shot ever
made.

The Lady Eve (1941)

Directed By: Preston Sturges

Screenplay: Monckton Hoffe (story); Preston Sturges
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda
Relocating the Garden of Eden to a cruise ship on the North Atlantic, Sturges
tosses a gullible Adam (Henry Fonda as a balletically awkward rich boy) into the

expert hands of a conniving Eve (Barbara Stanwyck as a card shark). Her toying
seduction of him is as smoldering as it is funny. His revenge is that this superior
woman finally falls for the pathetic lug in her cross hairs.

The Last Command (1928)

Directed By: Josef von Sternberg

Screenplay: Lajos Bir, Josef von Sternberg (story); John F. Goodrich, Herman J.
Mankiewicz (titles)

Cast: Emil Jannings, Evelyn Brent, William Powell

White Russian general emigrates to Hollywood, finds work as an extra, then dies
on a movie setwhile portraying a White Russian general. The ironies are broad,
but the emotions are authentic. Emil Jannings won the first screen acting Oscar
for this portrayal but William Powell is equally good as the directoronce his rival
in Russia, now risen to auteur statuswho viciously exploits the old man.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Directed By: David Lean

Screenplay: Robert Bolt

Cast: Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Omar Sharif
Robert Bolts eloquent, epigrammatic script traced Lawrences career from
mapmaking in the British armys Cairo headquarters to masterminding Arab
nationalism. Lean, a superb pictorial dramatizer, filled the wide screen with an
endless desert occasionally peopled by passionate warriors (well played by
Anthony Quinn, Alec Guinness and an actual Arab, Omar Sharif). Peter OTooles
swashbuckling incarnation made Lawrence a towering, tragic, high-camp sheik of
Araby.

Lolo (1992)

Directed By: Jean-Claude Lauzon

Screenplay: Jean-Claude Lauzon
Cast: Gilbert Sicotte, Maxime Collin
Lo (Maxime Collin), 12...watches his deranged Qubecois brood mismanage their
lives. He renames himself Lolo after determining that his mother had actually
been impregnated by a Sicilian tomato. This is the first of Lauzon's extravagant
fantasies and, like other, odder ones, it is cogently grounded in the solitude that
can smother any childanybody. Lurching from the everyday obscenities of Lo's
home life to his rapturous dream life and back again, Lolo takes the elixir of
Latin Americas magical realism and spikes it with the tartest French-Canadian
satire.

The Lord of the Rings (2001-03)

Directed By: Peter Jackson

Screenplay: J.R.R. Tolkien (novels); Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson
(screenplay)
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen
Conceived and executed as one gigantic, 9hr. 18min. film, this faithful, innovative
adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy kept children and everyone else hanging on
to the grand story, though it was released over three consecutive Decembers.

The Man With a Camera (1929)

Directed By: Dziga Vertov
Screenplay: Dziga Vertov
The director loved machinerylooms, trolley cars, speeding automobiles. He also
loved cinematic tricksfreeze frames, superimpositions, speeded-up action and slomo. He put both of his obsessions together in this jazzy, delirious portrait of urban
Russia, and his innovative film retains its power to stun and delight 76 years after
its release. Technically it is a documentary, but really it is a poetic tribute to
modernism's hopeful beginnings.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

Directed By: John Frankenheimer

Screenplay: Richard Condon (novel); George Axelrod (screenplay)

Cast: Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury
The plot is preposterous: Brainwashed Korean War POW (Laurence Harvey)
becomes a political assassin when he returns home to Momma (the divinely
clutching Angela Lansbury). But who cares? The flash and conviction of
Frankenheimer's filmmaking drives our commonsensical dubiousness right out of
our heads, replacing it with high-energy paranoia. And sheer delight at this manic
boldness.

Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

Directed By: Vincente Minnelli

Screenplay: Sally Benson (novel); Irving Brecher, Fred F. Finklehoffe

Cast: Judy Garland, Margaret O'Brien
It let real people burst into song in realistic settingsno backstage romances
permitted. It had wonderful songs, a sweetly unneurotic performance by Judy
Garland (the nutsiness in the piece was handled by Margaret O'Brien, as a little
girl haunted by death). Despite its nostalgic charm, Minnelli infused the piece with
a dreamy, occasionally surreal, darkness and it remains, for some of us, the

greatest of American movie musicals.

Metropolis (1927) - BEST FILM OF ITS DECADE

Directed By: Fritz Lang

Screenplay: Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou

Cast: Alfred Abel, Gustav Frhlich, Brigitte Helm
It's an epic poem of urban dystopia (and class warfare) by a misanthropic director
who, in his Weimar Republic phase, had a taste for spectacular imagery that, for
all our modern digital wizardry, has not been aesthetically surpassed. And his
imagined world remains, after all these years, eerily prescient.

Miller's Crossing (1990)

Directed By: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Screenplay: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, Albert Finney, John Turturro

In Miller's Crossing (a reworking of the social chicanery in Dashiell Hammett's

novel Red Harvest), the antagonists are smart and out-smarter. Albert Finney runs
a corrupt town in the 1920s, Gabriel Byrne is a brainy sort sometimes allied with
Finney, and a stellar lineup of eccentrics (John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Jon
Polito) fills in the background of this marvelous, and pretty serious, fresco.

Filmsite: written by tim dirks

Twitter

Facebook

The greatest films The "Greatest" and the "Best" in Cinematic History www.filmsite.org

GREATEST FILMS

THE BEST

OSCARS

QUOTES

GENRES

SCENES

HISTORY

POSTERS

DIRECTORS & STARS

REVIEWS

VIDEO

All-Time 100 Best Movies

by Time Magazine
Part 4

Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

All-Time 100 Best Movies

(part 4, alphabetical)

Descriptions are excerpted from the copyrighted Time Magazine site.

Mon oncle d'Amrique (1980)

Directed By: Alain Resnais
Screenplay: Jean Gruault
Cast: Grard Depardieu, Nicole Garcia

Mon oncle d'Amrique, written by Jean Gruault, is a science lesson, given by the
biologist Henri Laborit, that is made lucid and entertaining by illustrative skits

featuring three characters (Roger-Pierre, Grard Depardieu, Nicole Garcia) and a

lab full of white mice. Laborit's questions about the impact of behavioral codes in
inhibiting mans so-called free will dovetail elegantly with Resnais's and Gruault's
mission to overthrow the codes of film behavior.

Mouchette (1967)

Directed By: Robert Bresson

Screenplay: Georges Bernanos (novel); Robert Bresson
Cast: Nadine Nortier, Jean-Claude Guilbert

Mouchette, one of the purest Bressons, is the story of a teenage outcast (Nadine

Nortier) so abused by everyone in her village that death seems like God's caress,
and so maladroit that she must try three times before she succeeds in drowning

herself. Its effect as you watch it is beautifully unforgiving; as you recall it, brutally
radiant.

Nayakan (1987)

Directed By: Mani Ratnam

Screenplay: Rajasri , Mani Ratnam
Cast: Kamal Hassan, Saranya, Janagaraj

Nayakan, an early, defining work in [Ratnam's] career, tells the Godfatherish tale

of Velu, a boy who embraces a life of crime after his father is killed by the police.
Velu (Kamal Hasan) has trouble juggling his family life with his life-and-death mob
"family"; Ratnam has no such difficulty blending melodrama and music, violence
and comedy, realism and delirium, into a two-and-a-half-hour demonstration that,
when a gangster's miseries are mounting, the most natural solution is to go singin'
in the rain.

Ninotchka (1939)

Directed By: Ernst Lubitsch

Screenplay: Melchior Lengyel (story); Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Walter Reisch
Cast: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas
Garbo's stern Soviet commissar understandably succumbs to the charms of Paris,
less understandably to the more mysterious charms of louche Melvyn Douglas.
"Garbo Laughs!" the ads proclaimed, and we were delighted to join in the fun.

Notorious (1946)

Directed By: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: John Taintor Foote (story The Song of the Dragon); Ben Hecht
(written by), Alfred Hitchcock (screenplay contributor); Clifford Odets
Cast: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains
The master's masterpiece. A government agent (Cary Grant) introduces the harddrinking daughter of a Nazi war criminal into a nest of spies in post-war Rio. She
is obliged to marry one of them (Claude Rains in one of his great performances).
And Grant, of course, is obliged to fall in love with her. The result is dark
romance, dark comedy and, finally, almost unbearable suspense.

Olympia, Parts 1 and 2 (1938)

Directed By: Leni Riefenstahl

A two-part summary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics - Riefenstahl gave the heroic
treatment to Jesse Owens, the black American track star. Politics and politiques
aside, Olympia is an amazing technical and artistic achievement. The film's

innovations directly influenced all televised sports coverage. Its narrative ingenuity

unearthed the human stories behind every back-page headline.

On the Waterfront (1954)

Directed By: Elia Kazan

Screenplay: Malcolm Johnson (suggested by articles); Budd Schulberg

Cast: Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Eva Marie Saint
Brando gives his greatest performance as a young longshoreman who comes to
political consciousness and helps oust a corrupt, mob-controlled union from the

docks...the yearning love affair between Brando's roughneck and Eva Marie Saint's
hesitant convent girl is as fresh and poignant as it was a half-century ago.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Directed By: Sergio Leone

Screenplay: Dario Argento, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sergio Leone (story); Sergio

Leone and Sergio Donati (screenplay)
Cast: Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson
This is a story of the "civilizing" of the West through two agents: one coolly
mechanical (the railroad), the other warmly human (Claudia Cardinale, representing
womanhood at its most nurturing and radiant). Shooting in Italy, Spain and, for
one spectacular moment, Monument Valley, Leone turned Charles Bronson into a
leading man, and Henry Fonda into a sneering villain.

Out of the Past (1947)

Directed By: Jacques Tourneur

Screenplay: Daniel Mainwaring (novel Build My Gallows High) (as Geoffrey

Homes); Daniel Mainwaring (as Geoffrey Homes), Frank Fenton (uncredited),

James M. Cain (uncredited)
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas
It has the smartest dialogue and the most persuasively labyrinthine plot of any film
noir. And Robert Mitchum gives a great performance as the tough, laconic guy in
a trench coat, undone by his love foror is it merely sexual obsession with?Jane
Greer's scheming bitch-goddess.

Persona (1966) - BEST FILM OF ITS DECADE

Directed By: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cast: Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Margaretha Krook, Gunnar Bjrnstrand
This story is presented as a film-within-an (unrealized)-film and it constitutes
Bergman's most austere masterpiecehis camera placements and editing have a
simple rightness that belies the complex and enigmatic psychologies he is

exploring.

Pinocchio (1940)

Directed By: Hamilton Luske, Ben Sharpsteen

Screenplay: Aurelius Battaglia (story); Carlo Collodi (novel) William Cottrell, Otto
Englander, Erdman Penner, Joseph Sabo, Ted Sears, Webb Smith (story
adaptation)
Cast: Mel Blanc, Christian Rub, Dickie Jones

Pinocchio is tops for its blending of the animator's craft and a themethat a child

is not human until he can feel loss and act with spontaneous generositythat can
move viewers of every age, and for all ages.

Psycho (1960)

Directed By: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: Robert Bloch (novel); Joseph Stefano (screenplay)
Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh
The nut case managing the motel, the not-so innocent woman who takes refuge
there one dark and stormy night, the inevitable murder and the deeply weird
explanation of the crime that follows. History is less shocked by the doings at the
old Bates place, appreciating Hitch's masterful technique, the formal elegance of
his style and, above all, the way he toys with some of his favorite themesguilt,
obsession and the wayward ways they drive us all.

Pulp Fiction (1994) - BEST FILM OF ITS DECADE

Directed By: Quentin Tarantino

Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary

Cast: Tim Roth, Samuel L. Jackson, John Travolta, Uma Thurman
Tarantino's multipart murder comedy is (unquestionably) the most influential
American movie of the 90s. It established the former video-store geek as the
auteur of the decade, proved that the Weinsteins at Miramax could produce films
as well as import them, sparked the third or fourth coming of John Travolta's
career (while, sort of, killing him off in the middle of the movie) and gave directors
not a tenth as gifted as Q.T. the license to daub their pictures with gaudy
mayhem.

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)

Directed By: Woody Allen
Screenplay: Woody Allen
Cast: Jeff Daniels, Mia Farrow, Danny Aiello
Leading man (Jeff Daniels) steps down off the movie screen to bring a touch of

romance to the life of Mia Farrow's downtrodden waitress. Set in Depression-era

America, this astonishing exercise in Magic Realism is both an arresting spin on
romantic comedy conventions and a light, lovely meditation on the cost of
surrendering our lives to commercialized fantasy.

Pyaasa (1957)

Directed By: Guru Dutt

Screenplay: Abrar Alvi

Cast: Guru Dutt, Waheeda Rehman

Vijay (Dutt) is an unpublished poet, dismissed by family and office colleagues but
befriended by a prostitute (Waheeda Rehman). In a twist out of

Sullivan's

Travels, Vijay is believed dead and his poetry "posthumously" lionized.

Raging Bull (1980)

Directed By: Martin Scorsese

Screenplay: Jake LaMotta, Joseph Carter & Peter Savage (book); Paul Schrader,
Mardik Martin
Cast: Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci
Boxer Jake LaMotta's brutal life becomes in Robert DeNiros towering performance,
a study of blind fate driving a man to the edge of self-destruction. This brilliantly
shot film finally does allow LaMotta a sliver of redemption and leaves us harrowed
by its unblinking portrayal of a life lived essentially without conscience or useful
consciousness.

Schindler's List (1993)

Directed By: Steven Spielberg

Screenplay: Thomas Keneally (book); Steven Zaillian (screenplay)
Cast: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes
Before the war, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) was the Playboy of the Eastern
World, a hard-drinking, womanizing wastrel. After the war, he was essentially a
failure. But during the Holocaust a mysterious grace fell upon him and he bravely,
cleverly schemed to save the Jews working in his factory from the Nazi death
camps.

The Searchers (1956)

Directed By: John Ford

Screenplay: Alan LeMay, Frank Nugent

Cast: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Natalie Wood
Though it has cowboys and Indians, and Monument Valley vistas shot in gorgeous
color, this is at heart the grimmest film noirthe story of a man's obsession for the

ravages done to his niece (Natalie Wood) by a Comanche chief. Conflicting

impulses of race, sex and violence smolder throughout the Frank Nugent script,
and on Wayne's implacable face, in an epic that spans five years of brutal winters
and scalding summers.

Sherlock, Jr. (1924)

Directed By: Buster Keaton

Screenplay: Clyde Bruckman, Jean C. Havez, Joseph A. Mitchell
Cast: Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton, Ward Crane

Buster Keaton - the man with the flat hat and the dead pan has a night job as a
movie theater projectionist but daydreams about becoming a famous (and natty)
master detective. In real life he is falsely accused by a shameless cad of stealing
a watch from his girlfriend's father. At work that evening he sleepwalks himself
into the film he's projecting (its plot eerily mirrors his real-life problem) and solves
the crime in a series of magnificently imaginative, physically perilous, perfectly
orchestrated gags.

The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

Directed By: Ernst Lubitsch

Screenplay: Mikls Lszl (play), Samson Raphaelson, Ben Hecht (uncredited)

Cast: Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart
In far off, interwar Budapest, the intricately connected employees of an upscale
shop live out their little, charmed lives. At the center of the story lives an
Assistant Manager (James Stewart) who does not know that the woman with
whom he is exchanging love letters is, in fact, his newest employee (Margaret
Sullavan). Samson Raphaelson's perfectly plotted script is impeccably realized. The
once-famous "Lubitsch touch" was a combination of wry observation, delicate
sentiment and gently controlled romanticism.

Filmsite: written by tim dirks

Twitter

Facebook

The greatest films The "Greatest" and the "Best" in Cinematic History www.filmsite.org

GREATEST FILMS

THE BEST

OSCARS

QUOTES

GENRES

SCENES

HISTORY

POSTERS

DIRECTORS & STARS

REVIEWS

VIDEO

All-Time 100 Best Movies

by Time Magazine
Part 5

Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

All-Time 100 Best Movies

(part 5, alphabetical)

Descriptions are excerpted from the copyrighted Time Magazine site.

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

Directed By: Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly

Screenplay: Betty Comden, Adolph Green
Cast: Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds
Everybody's all-time favorite musicaland justifiably so. Ham actor (Kelly) falls in
love with pert ingnue (Debbie Reynolds) while his best pal (Donald O'Connor)
kibitzes from the sidelines. Meantime, Hollywood makes its panicky adjustment to
the coming of sound pictures. The score is joyful, the comedy smart and knowing,
the dancing spectacular in the most easily (and genuinely) likeable movie ever
made.

The Singing Detective (1986)

Directed By: Jon Amiel

Screenplay: Dennis Potter

Cast: Michael Gambon, Patrick Malahide, Joanne Whalley
Jon Amiel was the director of this magnificent six-part BBC series, and a suave
job he made of it. But the true guiding and compelling force was the author,
Dennis Potter. He poured much of his own biography into the scripta childhood
in the Forest of Dean, a lifelong siege of crippling eczemathen extended it into

the interior epic of a hospitalized pulp-fiction writer (named Philip Marlow!) whose
agonized misery drives him into dark fantasy and bitter memory.

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

Directed By: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cast: Eva Dahlbeck, Ulla Jacobsson, Harrient Andersson, Margit Carlqvist
It was this comedy that earned "the solemn Swede" his first international
eminence. On the long night of the summer solstice, ten people from the
aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the servant class stumble through brief trysts until
they find their proper mates. Indefatigable lover of women's wisdom, remorseless
anatomizer of men's insecurities, Bergman would make sterner, possibly more
profound works, but never again one so blithely understanding of the mischief
humans commit on one anotherthe folly they know is sex and fleetingly convince
themselves is love.

Some Like It Hot (1959)

Directed By: Billy Wilder

Screenplay: Robert Thoeren, Michael Logan (story); Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond
(screenplay)
Cast: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon
Two guys (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) dolled up as girls, and Marilyn Monroe
between them...Some Like It Hot is also plenty smart in its twisting of gender

stereotypes (Lemmon gets more romantic action in a dress than he did in pants)
and the possibility that a wolf (Curtis, donning thick glasses and a Cary Grant
accent) could find true love the hard way.

Star Wars (1977)

Directed By: George Lucas

Screenplay: George Lucas
Cast: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness

It changed forever the way movies are marketed. Forget the endlessly hyped
sequels. Try to recall the rushing joy in your heart when Harrison Ford first threw
the Millennium Falcon into hyperspace. Remember the innocence (and

technological inventiveness) of the film, the fun of the dialogue, the astonishment
of the creatures we encountered, the propulsive dash of the editing.

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

Directed By: Elia Kazan

Screenplay: Tennessee Williams (play); Oscar Saul (adaptation)

Cast: Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden
It has been called the best adaptation of a great play ever made, and we're not
going to dispute that judgment. Marlon Brando, repeating his stage performance as
Stanley Kowalksihalf child, half animal, all menacing masculinityis simply great.
And so is Vivien Leigh, as his flirtatious, half-mad sister-in-law who teases him
toward the brutal rape that destroys her. Tennessee Williams saw them
symbolizing the contest between genteel civility and crude lower-class vitality.

Sunrise (1927)

Directed By: F.W. Murnau

Screenplay: Hermann Sudermann (novella Die Reise nach Tilsit); Carl Mayer
(scenario)

Cast: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston

The acclaimed German director made his first, masterful American film the same
summer Warner Bros. was cranking out The Jazz Singer, the talkie that brought
the silent cinema to a (literally) screeching halt. History thinks the story of a

farmer who deserts his wife for the bright lights of the big city, then returns to her
sadder but wiser one of the last poetic masterpieces of a dying cinematic era.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

Directed By: Alexander Mackendrick

Screenplay: Ernest Lehman (novelette); Clifford Odets, Ernest Lehman

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison
Psychopathic gossip columnist (Burt Lancaster) rules Broadway with an iron fist,
destroying everyone who dares to cross him. These include a small time press
agent (Tony Curtis) and a sister (Susan Harrison) on whom he casts an
incestuous eye. The dialogue (by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets) is etched in
acid, and Mackendrick's direction perfectly captures the dark side of The Great
White Way.

Swing Time (1936)

Directed By: George Stevens

Screenplay: Erwin S. Gelsey, Howard Lindsay, Allan Scott
Cast: Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers
Astaire's grace, as he gently steered Ginger Rogers across those parquet floors,
defined easy elegance and defined the American style in Hollywood's Golden Age.
In the comic duet "Pick Yourself Up," Fred turns Ginger from an angry competitor
into a perfectly synchronous partner. The climactic number, "Never Gonna Dance,"
pours courtship, conquest, lovers' quarrel and loss into a five-minute poem in
synchronized motion.

Talk to Her (2002) - BEST FILM OF ITS DECADE

Directed By: Pedro Almodvar
Screenplay: Pedro Almodvar
Cast: Javier Cmara, Daro Grandinetti, Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores
The male nurse tending a beautiful comatose woman bathes her nude body, talks
endlessly to her of art (she was a dancer) finally makes love to her and
impregnates her. Escandalo. The nurse is jailed but, giving birth, speech and
movement are restored to his patient. And out of dark materials and an offhand
surrealist style, Almodvar fashions a wondrously ironic tale of redemption.

Taxi Driver (1976)

Directed By: Martin Scorsese

Screenplay: Paul Schrader
Cast: Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster
Robert DeNiro's portrait of that increasingly familiar American figure-the lone
(psycho) gunman-grows ever scarier and more relevant. The movie's great twist, in
which he becomes a media hero, also engenders deep, dark thoughts about the
world we live in. The power of Scorsese's filmmaking grows ever more punishing
with the passage of time.

Tokyo Story (1953)

Directed By: Yasujiro Ozu, Screenplay: Kgo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu

Cast: Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama
An old couple comes to the big city to visit their children, who are more irritated
than pleased by this interruption of their lives, which are scarcely glamorous. "Isn't
life disappointing?" one of them says. "Yes, it is" another replies. But this wry,
ironic movie is anything but, as it patiently, wisely explores the generational and
universal tensions between the generations.

A Touch of Zen (1971)

Directed By: King Hu

Screenplay: King Hu, Songling Pu (story)
Cast: Billy Chan, Ping-Yu Chang
In this three-hour epic, a modest scholar (Shih Jun) hooks up with a resolute girl
(Hsu Feng) to challenge a vicious warlord. Influenced, like so many major Hong
Kong action directors of the period, by the samurai epics of Akira Kurosawa and
other Japanese directors, Hu brought a unique buoyancy to the action genre.

Ugetsu (1953)

Directed By: Kenji Mizoguchi

Screenplay: Matsutar Kawaguchi, Akinari Ueda, Yoshikata Yoda
Cast: Masayuki Mori, Machiko Ky, Kinuyo Tanaka, Eitar Ozawa

Ugetsu is both a magnificent war film and a parable of careless love. A villager,

Genjuro (Masayuki Mori), leaves his wife to go to battle, not to serve the Emperor
but to find wealth in war's spoils. In a spooky castle he meets the glamorous
Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyo)and falls under her spectral spell. Ozu wants to define
man's restless, acquisitive nature and woman's homing instinct.

Ulysses' Gaze (1995)

Directed By: Theo Angelopoulos

Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra
Cast: Harvey Keitel, Maia Morgenstern, Erland Josephson

Ulysses' Gaze is nothing less than a synopsis of 20th century Greek history in a
film of about three hours and 60 shots. Dozens, then hundreds of protestors

materialize on an Athens street. A ship with a huge bust of Lenin floats down a
canal. The most amazing scene, again a single shot, tells the story of five family
gatherings on New Year's Eve during the Communist insurgency from 1945 to
1950. "Auld Lang Syne" is sung; a son is arrested; the son returns; a death is
announced; "Auld Lang Syne."

Umberto D (1952)

Directed By: Vittorio De Sica

Screenplay: Vittorio De Sica (screenplay uncredited); Cesare Zavattini (screenplay);
Cesare Zavattini (story)
Cast: Carlo Battisti, Maria-Pia Casilio, Lina Gennari
One of Italian Neorealisms last and deepest sighs, with Carlo Battisti as a retired
civil servant, impoverished and isolated trying to survive in a society that has
dispensed with him. His only relationship is with his beloved dog, and when it
runs away the effect on himon us watchingis devastating.

Unforgiven (1992)

Directed By: Clint Eastwood

Screenplay: David Webb Peoples
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman
A bad man who thinks he has reformed returns to his old ways in order to
revenge the death of his best friend. The actor-director achieved his masterpiece
with this dark, brooding tale of souls seeking redemption but doomed by their
flawed natures to a tragic outcome.

White Heat (1949)

Directed By: Raoul Walsh

Screenplay: Virginia Kellogg (story); Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts
Cast: James Cagney, Margaret Wycherly, Virginia Mayo
James Cagney's gangster at one point in this film climbs on to his Mommy's lap,
seeking comfort from one of the blinding headaches that are the chief symptom of
his raging psychopathy. But that's the only "explanation" this wonderfully vicious
movie offers for his relentlessly bad behavior. The rest is all snarl and gunfire.

Wings of Desire (1987)

Directed By: Wim Wenders

Screenplay: Wim Wenders, Peter Handke

Cast: Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin
Angels are poised on Munichs rooftops, privy to every conversation, every stupid
idea and intention going on below, but powerless to intervene. Or, for that matter,
to smell, taste or feel an apple. One of them (the superb Bruno Ganz) notices an
equally lost and lonely trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) and encouraged by Peter
Falk (playing a version of himself) his needs break through the barriers of angelic
convention, love sweetly triumphs and a black and white film blushes into color.

Yojimbo (1961)

Directed By: Akira Kurosawa

Screenplay: Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai
A Samurai (the great Toshiro Mifune) having lost his master discovers an utterly
corrupt town and uses both his cunning and his sword to clean it up. The
filmmaking is marvelously austere, yet in its sudden bursts of action electrifying, in
its stern morality sobering, in the blackness of its comedy often quite delicious.

Omissions: Some of the more obvious choices (of American English-language films) were missing
from Time's list, however, as noted by many readers, such as: Vertigo (1958), Touch of Evil
(1958), Paths of Glory (1957), Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Third Man (1949), Duck Soup
(1933), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Gone With the Wind (1939), Modern Times (1936), The
General (1927), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), The Graduate (1967), From Here to Eternity
(1953), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Fantasia (1940), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962),
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Apocalypse Now (1979), North By Northwest (1959), The
Wizard of Oz (1939), Annie Hall (1977), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Do the Right Thing
(1989), and more.