griggs's - 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die List

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Undoubtly Luis Bunuel's most accessibly film, Belle de Jour is an elegant and erotic masterpiece that maintains as hypnotic a grip on modern audiences as it did on its debut 40 years ago.

Screen icon Catherine Deneuve plays Severine, the glacially beautiful, sexually unfulfilled wife of a surgeon, whose blood runs cold with ennui until she takes a day-job in a brothel. There she meets a charismatic but sinister young gangster (Pierre Clementi), and ignites an obsession that will court peril. Expertly dramatizing the collision between fantasy and reality, and between depravity and respectable bourgeois values, Bunuel, working from the novel by Joseph Kessel, fashions an immaculately designed (the fetishistic interiors and production designs are astonishing) and amoral comedy of manners.

In the Deep South, homicide detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) becomes embroiled in a murder investigation. When the bigoted town sheriff (Rod Steiger) gets involved, both he and Tibbs must put aside their differences and join forces in a race against time to discover the shocking truth.

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Adrift in the Depression-era Southwest, Clyde Barrow(Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) embark on a life of crime. They mean no harm. They crave adventure - and each other. Soon we start to love them too. But nothing in film history has prepared us for the cascading violence to follow.

Bonnie And Clyde turns brutal. We learn they can be hurt - and dread they can be killed.

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They double-crossed Walker, took his $93,000 cut of the heist and left him for dead, but they didn't finish the job. Big mistake. He - someday, somehow - is going to finish them.

Lee Marvin is in full antihero mode as remorseless Walker, talking the talk and walking the walk in John Boorman's (Deliverance) edgy neo-noir classic filled with imaginative New Wave style, blunt dialogue and Walker's relentless quest that, one by one, smashes into the corporate pecking order of a crime group called the Organisation. Angie Dickinson plays the accomplice who uses her seductive wiles to ensnare one of Walker's prey.

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Shot in 1967, 'David Holzman's Diary' is a milestone in contemporary film history. Brilliantly conceived and executed, it manages to simultaneously be very much of its time and very many years ahead of its time.

The film tells the story of David Holzman, a young man infatuated with film and filmmaking. Newly unemployed and beset with doubts and worries, Holzman thinks that filming his everyday existence will 'bring life into focus'. Staged to seem like a documentary of a real person's life, Holzman's filming of his life starts to take over his life. Arguably the first 'mockumentary', it has been little seen but hugely influential on filmmakers over the years. The film is also enormously prescient about our current times, when seemingly everyone records everything to do with their lives for the camera.

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Meet the most unforgettable characters and embark on a thrilling adventure with Mowgli, as he journeys deep into the jungle and learns “The Bare Necessities” of life from happy-go-lucky Baloo the bear. Meet Bagheera, the wise old panther and crazy King Louie the orangutan.

But watch out for cunning Shere Khan the tiger and Kaa, the ssssneakiest snake in the jungle. Bursting with wild fun, toe-tapping music and beloved characters, this timeless masterpiece celebrates the true meaning of friendship.

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In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts.

After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him. An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville, 'Le Samourai' is a razor-sharp cocktail of 1940's American gangster cinema and 1960's French pop culture - with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology.

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His crime: nonconformity. His sentence: the chain gang. Paul Newman plays one of his best-loved roles as Cool Hand Luke, the loner who won't - or can't - conform to the arbitrary rules of his captivity.

It recalls other hallmark Newman performances: Luke is The Hustler without a dream of victory, Harper without a moral mission, Hud without a father to defy. A cast of fine character actors, including George Kennedy in his Academy Award-winning role of Dragline, gives Newman solid support as fellow prisoners. And Strother Martin is the Captain who taunts Luke with the famous line, "What we've got here is...failure to communicate." No failure here. With rich humour and vibrant storytelling power, 'Cool Hand Luke' succeeds resoundingly.

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In the brutal Civil War which took place, Hungarian volunteers supported the 'Red' revolutionaries in a war against the 'White' counter-revolutionaries who were seeking to restore the old Czarist order.

through its stylistic virtuosity, ritualistic power and sheer beauty, Jancso invites us to study the mechanisms of power almost abstractly and with a cold eroticism that clearly portrays the utter futility of war. Although the film was an Hungarian-Russian co-production, the Russian authorities banned it from being shown anywhere in the Soviet Union.

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Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) is a washed up Broadway producer forced to romance old ladies to finance his plays.

When timid accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) is brought in to do his books, he inadvertently reveals to Bialystock that under the right circumstances, a producer could make more money with a flop than a hit. Bialystock cajoles Bloom into helping him achieve this end and together they come up with what they consider to be a sure-fire disaster waiting to happen - a musical version of Adolf and Eva's love story entitled 'Springtime for Hitler'. But is it possible that they might actually have the most unlikely hit of all time on their hands?

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Voted the best Czech film of all time, 'Marketa Lazarová' is a powerful and passionate medieval epic set in the mid-13th Century.

Based on avant-garde writer Vladislav Vancura's novel, it follows the rivalry between two warring clans, the Kozlíks and the Lazars, and the doomed love affair of Mikolá Kozlík (Frantisek Velecký) and Marketa Lazarová (Magda Vásáryová). Vlacil draws upon remote historical sources to recreate an authentic primitive world and fashion a film with surprising contemporary impact. Owing as much to the stylistic vigour of Kurosawa's 'Seven Samurai' as it does to the rich tapestry of Czech fiction, this ambitious and poetically extraordinary film is the crowning achievement of Vlacil's career and an undiscovered cornerstone of world cinema.

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Khoma (Leonid Kuravlyov), a young novice Monk, travels across the Ukrainian countryside whilst on a break from his seminary, and stays for one night in a barn belonging to a seemingly harmless old woman. Whilst sleeping the old woman attacks him, displaying supernatural strength.

The scared novice fatally wounds her while fending her off. But before dying, she transforms into a beautiful young woman. Some time later Khoma, is called to the estate of a rich Kosack landowner, grieving the death of his daughter. Khoma has been personally requested to attend, and against his wishes taken by force to the estate. There he must pray for three nights in the chapel until the body of the landowners daughter is buried. On the first night, the woman Khoma had killed rises from the coffin and tries to kill him. Khoma must use every skill he knows for the next 3 nights to prevent this from happening.

Featurete is a surreal, comic vision of modern life in which the director's much-loved character, Monsieur Hulot - accompanied by a cast of tourists and well-heeled Parisians - turns unintentional anarchist when set loose in an unrecognisable Paris of steel skyscrapers, chrome-plated shopping malls and futuristic night spots.

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In their small-town meeting hall, a maladroit committee of volunteer fire-fighters holds a ball to celebrate the retirement of one of their own, but thanks to poor planning and lack of leadership, the evening quickly devolves into a catastrophe.

Nobody can prevent the lottery prizes from being stolen out from under the very noses of those guarding them. A beauty contest turns into an embarrassing farce, and the brigade can't even respond properly to a real fire next door. The Firemen's Ball was Czechoslovakian director Milos Forman's final film in his home country; he was scouting locations in Paris when the Russians moved their tanks into Prague in 1968 causing Forman to decide to remain an expatriate.

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Deep in the suburbs of Pasadena, a bored, confused and alienated twenty-one year old graduate named Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) awkwardly drifts from moment to moment, in constant turmoil over his lack of direction and the uncertain, impending future.

Driven by a desire for experience and desperate to avoid the corporate, deluded and mediocre world of his affluent parents, Benjamin succumbs to the advances of an older woman and begins an affair with the persuasive and enigmatic Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) the wife of one of his father's business partners. But what starts as a farcical fling becomes painfully complicated when Ben finds himself falling in love with her daughter.