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

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A young couple is at the centre of the movie maestro's keen-eyed lens. She (Daria Halprin) is a sometime secretary whose duties may extend to the boudoir of her boss (Rod Taylor). He (Mark Frechette) is a sometime student who may be involved in a cop's death.

The two meet, connect, play, love, move on: he to tragedy, she to an open road.

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Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante), an American writer living in Rome, inadvertently witnesses a brutal attack on a woman (Eva Renzi) in a modern art gallery. Powerless to help, he grows increasingly obsessed with the incident.

Convinced that something he saw that night holds the key to identifying the maniac terrorising Rome, he launches his own investigation parallel to that of the police, heedless of the danger to both himself and his girlfriend Giulia (Suzy Kendall)...

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Stephane Audran plays a lonely schoolteacher who develops an inexplicable draw toward an ex-army butcher who may or may not be a serial killer plaguing a small town.

Drawing on Hitchcockian themes of exchanged guilt and shared secrets, Chabrol constructs an extraordinary relationship between the two characters that marries unspoken self-awareness with constant suspense over the unresolved nature of their bond.

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The Academy Award - winning "Woodstock" by wide consensus the best concert film ever made, has never looked or sounded better than in this director-approved edition with its sights restored and its sounds revitalixed.

Best of all, 40 minutes of previously unseen footage has been incorporated into the film by director Michael Wadleigh. Seen in its ground-breaking widescreen multi-image format, it's a once-in-a-lifetime celebration that captured its era like no other movie before or since.

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Set in Toledo in the early 1930s, Bunuel regular Fernando Rey stars as Don Lope, an aging figure of respectability who becomes the guardian of Tristana (Catherine Deneuve), a young woman with whom he is soon completely smitten.

Finally accepting Don Lope's proposal of marriage after having her tumorous leg amputated, Tristana chooses a passionless union rather than be subject to the harsh realities of society that refuses to change to the needs of women.

The story begins in Rome, 1938. Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a young fascist who takes on the job of assassinating his former professor who has fled to Paris. With his girlfriend (Stefania Sandrelli) in tow he meets the professor and his young wife (Dominique Sanda)...

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In underworld terms, Chas Devlin is a "performer", a gangster with a talent for violence and intimidation. Turner is a reclusive rock superstar. When Chas and Turner meet, their worlds collide - and the impact is both exotic and explosive.

James Fox and Mick Jagger indelibly play Chas and Turner in this spellbinder of illusion and reality, decadence and decay. Fugitive Chas hides in Turner's cavernous house. Events then spiral into an eerie breakdown of barriers and roles in which Chas sees his sense of reality vanish. And Turner's experiment of self-discovery leads to a shocking, final performance of his own.

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With her first and only feature film - a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in - Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen.

Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate verite style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Barbara Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men - including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. An until now difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, Wanda is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society's margins.

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The Spider's Stratagem (Italian: Strategia del Ragno) is a political film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. The screenplay was written by Bertolucci based on "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" story written by Jorge Luis Borges.

Athos Magnani, a young researcher, returns to Tara, where his father was killed before his birth, at the request of his mistress, Draifa. The father, also named Athos Magnani (a wartime anti-fascist hero) and looking exactly like the son, was killed by a fascist in 1936-or so says Draifa, the town statue, and everyone in the city. As the son untangles the web of lies this story is constructed from, he finds himself ensnared in the same web.

Newly employed at a run-down London swimming baths, Mike (John Moulder-Brown) obsesses after his sassy and self-assured co-worker (Jane Asher) whilst collecting tips for the 'special services' he is expected to perform for clients (including Diana Dors).

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Although a brilliant, classical pianist from an intellectual, well-to-do family - Robert Dupea (Jack Nicholson) has made a career out of running from job to job and woman to woman.

Presently working in an oil field, Dupea spends most of his free time downing beers, playing poker and being noncommittal with his sexy but witless girlfriend Rayette (Karen Black). But when he is summoned to his father's deathbed, Dupea returns home with Rayette, where he meets and falls for a sophisticated woman. Now caught between his conflicting lifestyles, the gifted but troubled Dupea must face issues that will change his life forever.

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Set at the outbreak of War, De Sica's film tells the story of the Finzi Contini, an aristocratic Jewish family protected by the walls of their idyllic estate.

Whilst outside Mussolini bans Jews from tennis courts, the Finzi Contini are not worried as they rally on their own, living in their dreamland. Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio) is the middle-class Jew in love with his childhood friend, Micol (Dominique Sanda) of the Finzi Contini family, but she is in love with a gentile and wanting of experiences outlawed by the new government. With Giorgio's separation of Micol, De Sica tracks the loss of an idyllic way of life, from the tennis courts to the waiting rooms where Jews await transportation to the concentration camps.

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Cinema verite pioneers David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin's groundbreaking documentary follows the Rolling Stones on their 1969 U.S. tour. From New York to California in ten days, the filmmakers set out to record the raw sweat and swagger of the world's greatest rock band.

By the time the tour ends at the infamous free concert at the Altamont Speedway, the filmmakers have chronicled a combustive mix of violence, chaos and counterculture that has since come to define the end of the Love Generation.

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In this sweeping epic that swings from high comedy to drama, Dustin Hoffman gives a "virtuoso performance" (Hollywood Reporter) as the 121-year-old sole survivor of Custer's Last Stand.

Narrating his colorful life story, he tells about everything from his adoption by Cheyenne Indians to his marriages and friendship with Wild Bill Hickok. His tall tales indicate he just may be one of the biggest liars who roamed' the West.

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With 'El Topo', Alejandro Jodorowsky gave birth to the countercultural phenomenon of the Midnight Movie and carved out a place in history as one of cinema's most unique and visionary filmmakers, impressing John Lennon and Yoko Ono so much that they enthusiastically endorsed the film at one of its

first New York screenings. Part Luis Bunuel, part Sergio Leone, this bizarre, ultra-violent Western features a brutal, black-clad gunslinger who, accompanied by his young son, sets off on a murderous mission to challenge four zen masters of gun-fighting. When his mission is complete he then goes on a quest for peace and personal redemption, but finds that death is never far away.