greatest-ever-made's - Favourites List

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This Powell and Pressburger classic is widely considered to be one of the greatest films ever made.

Vicky Page (Moira Shearer), a young ballerina, becomes torn between her love for composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring) and artistic devotion to her profession, which is dominated by impresario Lermontov.

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Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) is drowning his sorrows after yet another fight with his wife. At a local bar, he meets a woman and they strike up a conversation. Sensing the woman is also feeling down and not wishing to be alone, he invites her to the theatre.

She agrees under one condition; she does not wish to divulge her name, preferring to remain anonymous. When Henderson returns home he finds police officers waiting for him. His wife has been murdered, strangled with one of his neckties, and he is the main suspect. Maintaining his innocence he suggests they go back and speak with someone who might provide an alibi. But no one seems to remember the mysterious lady. Charged with the murder of his wife, it seems Scott Henderson will face the electric chair if he cannot prove his innocence. His only hope just might be his loyal secretary Carol "Kansas" Richman (Ella Raines). Can she find the phantom lady before it's too late?

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After the Civil War, ranch owner Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) leads a drive of ten thousand cattle out of an impoverished Texas to the richer markets of Missouri, alongside his adopted son Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift) and a team of ranch hands.

As the conditions worsen, and Dunson's control over his cattlemen gets ever more merciless, a rebellion begins to grow within the travelling party.

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Three classic films starring and directing Buster Keaton.

Our Hospitality (1923)

Keaton is luckless William McKay, who must journey down South to view his lacklustre inheritance, only to be seduced along the way by one of the Canfields, Virginia, who lures him to her family's house so that the men of the clan can shoot him down. But William knows that the Canfield men won't kill him as long as he's in their house, so he endeavours to stay put there, against all obstacles.
Go West (1925)
Friendless abandons city life to ride the rails to an Arizona ranch, where his ineptitude at almost everything only makes his nickname even more accurate. But when his one beloved companion, a cow named Brown Eyes, seems to be headed to a slaughterhouse fate, Friendless intervenes, and the resulting cattle stampede through the streets of Los Angeles is one of Keaton's most understandably famous and acclaimed sequences.
College (1927)
Keaton is bookworm Ronald; whose high school girl Mary ditches him for someone with the athletic prowess that Ronald lacks. Determined to win her back, Ronald enters college with an eye on sports, but two left feet.

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‘City Lights’ begins with an uproarious skewering of pomp and formality, ends with one of the most famous last shots in movie history and, from start to finish, so completely touches the heart and tickles the funny bone that in 1998 it was named one of the American Film Institute’s Top-100 American

Films. Talkies were well entrenched when Charles Chaplin swam against the filmmaking tide with this forever classic that’s silent except for music and sound effects. The story, involving the Tramp’s attempts to get money for an operation that will restore sight to a blind flower girl, provides a star with an ideal framework for sentiment and laughs. The tramp is variously a street sweeper, a boxer, a rich 0poseur, and a rescuer of a suicidal millionaire. His message is unspoken, but universally understood: love is blind.

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Garbo Talks!, proclaimed ads when silent star Greta Garbo debuted in talkies. Nine years and 12 classic screen dramas later, the gifted movie legend was ready for another change.

Garbo Laughs!, cheered the publicity for her first comedy, a frothy tale of a dour Russian envoy sublimating her womanhood for Soviet brotherhood until she falls for a suave Parisian man-about-town (Melvyn Douglas). Working from a cleverly barbed script written in party by Billy Wilder, director Ernst Lubitsch knew better than anyone how to marry refinement with sublime wit. "At least twice a day the most dignified human being is ridiculous", he explained about his acclaimed Lubitsch Touch. That’s how we see Garbo’s lovestruct Ninotchka: serenely dignified yet endearingly ridiculous. Garbo laughs. So will you.

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Melville's most personal film, rooted in his wartime experiences in the French Resistance, Army Of Shadows is a hard, tense drama, depicting man's capacity for both bravery and evil. In the winter of 1942-1943, as France exist s under German occupation, an underground cell operates in the shadows.

In the clandestine world of the Resistance, the freedom fighters work against their enemies under the constant risk of betrayal, ordinary men and women in an extraordinary situation. Suffused throughout with a mood of foreboding, the suspense, heightened with directorial mastery, reaches its peak as the Resistance attempt to free a prisoner from the Gestapo headquarters, in one of Melville's trademark set-pieces of iconic action.

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Washed-up producer Barry 'Dutch' Detweiler (William Holden) attempts to lure the iconic but reclusive actress Fedora (Marthe Keller) out of retirement in a bid to revive both their careers.

But her privacy is hard won, and with good reason, and opening up the secrets surrounding her could spell disaster.

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Like a brand, the letter M has made it's mark on film history; it's disturbing theme having lost none of its impact or relevance. Sinister, dark and foreboding, M tells the story of Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) - child molester and murderer. Tension builds - a child late home - another child missing.

Posters reveal the fate of earlier victims, and the Police seem to have few clues as to the perpetrator of the crimes. Gangsters, beggars and petty criminals, incensed by both the crimes and the Police crackdown, track the killer themselves. Cornered, caught and dragged off to face an equally barbaric form of justice, Beckert endures his own personal torment.

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Set in the German prison camps of WW1, the film stars Jean Gabin as Marechal, and Marcel Dalio as Rosenthal.

Like the charming aristocrat Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), these two French aviators were shot down and now spend most of their time escaping from German prison camps before inevitably being recaptured. Between escapes, they do what they can to amuse themselves, but after a tunnel they've dug is discovered, the three are sent to Wintersborn, a forbidding fortress of a prison commanded by former ace pilot Von Rauffenstein (Erich Von Stroheim). Von Rauffenstein cannot help but strike up a friendship with Captain de Boeldieu, a kindred spirit from the doomed nobility.

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Mark (Carl Boehm), a focus puller at the local film studio, supplements his wages by taking glamour photographs in a seedy studio above a newsagent.

By night he is a sadistic killer, stalking his victims with his camera forever in his hand trying to capture the look of genuine, unadulterated fear - an obsession that stems from his disturbing and terrifying childhood at the hands of his scientist father. Mark slowly becomes enamoured with Helen (Anna Massey), who lives with her blind mother (Maxine Audley) in the flat downstairs, but how long before he turns the deadly gaze of his camera towards her?

At a local carnival in a small German town, hypnotist Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) presents the somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt), who can purportedly predict the future of curious fairgoers. But at night, the doctor wakes Cesare from his sleep to enact his evil bidding...

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After saving the lives of his platoon during the Korean War, Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is hailed as a bona fide American hero.

This couldn't have come at a better time for his mother (Angela Lansbury) who is hell-bent on boosting the career of his stepfather, a senator straight from the McCarthyite wing of the US political spectrum with designs on the Presidency. So far so familiar - but why does Shaw's former captain (Frank Sinatra) have recurring nightmares that suggest that his distinguished comrade-in-arms might not be all that he seems?

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During the last days of the Warsaw Uprising against Poland's Nazi occupiers, a ravaged band of Resistance fighters retreat into the city sewers to avoid capture. In this pit of darkness, engulfed by filth, they desperately strive to hang onto their lives, their hopes and their sanity.

Controversial for undermining a national myth of heroic sacrifice, Wajda's second feature is a nightmarish descent into a visceral, claustrophobic struggle for survival. Full of haunting images, 'Kanal' is a harrowing and unforgettable depiction of the horrors of war.

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Safe their picturesque chateau behind the front lines, the French General Staff passes down a direct order to Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas): take the Ant Hill at any cost. A blatant suicide mission, the attack is doomed to failure.

Covering up their fatal blunder, the Generals order the arrest of three innocent soldiers, charging them with cowardice and mutiny. Dax, a lawyer in civilian life, rises to the men's defense but soon realizes that, unless he can prove that the Generals were to blame, nothing less than a miracle will save his clients from the firing squad.