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

Jack Carter (Michael Caine) has rarely looked cooler as the well dressed heavy, attempting to uncover the facts behind the death of his brother. The film tracks Caine as he becomes embroiled in the sinister underworld of crime and pornography.

Show moreShow less

Having learned the ways of the world being brought up in a brothel, street hustler Sweetback (Melvin Van Peebles) has earned his name through his legendary sexual prowess, cementing his reputation night after night to an audience of hopheads and hipsters hungry for spectacle.

One night on a routine cover-up job with two crooked cops, Sweetback watches a young black man get beaten within an inch of his life and decides to fight back. His action set in motion a journey through the dark heart of 1970s urban America still writhing in the flames of the race riots, encountering motorcycle gangs, back power militants, fascist public officials and a torrent of insatiable women every step of the way.

Show moreShow less

Highly controversial on its release for its frank and non-judgmental portrayal of taboo subjects, Le Souffle de Couer is a touchingly honest coming-of-age comedy following 14 year old Laurent (Benort Ferreux) as he experiences the turbulent trials of adolescence and tries his best to lose his

virginity. Malle's satire of post-war French bourgeois family life is acknowledged by many as the director's most enjoyable film and features a mesmerising performance from Italian actress Lea Massari as Laurent's frustrated mother.

Show moreShow less

This is a collage-style exploration of the ideas of radical sexologist Wilhelm Reich.

Dusan Makavejev intermingles documentary material on Reich's own life, scenes reflecting late Sixties American sexual counter-culture, and the fictional story of the sexually liberated Milena who attempts to spread the Reichian doctrine to a handsome but leaden Russian skating star.

Show moreShow less

A middle-class schoolteacher, stuck in a government-enforced teaching post in an arid backwater, stops off in the mining town of Bundanyabba on his way home for the Christmas holidays.

Discovering a local gambling craze that may grant him the financial independence to move back to Sydney for good, the opportunity proves irresistible. But the bad decisions are just beginning and a reliance on local standards of hospitality in "the Yabba" may take him on a path darker than ever expected.

Show moreShow less

As the title suggests, 'Walkabout' is a journey not only in distance, but also in the transition for one Australian aborigine, from adolescence to manhood. While on a family picnic a beautiful teenager and her brother suddenly find themselves very much alone after the tragic death of their father.

As they wander through the outback they meet the young aborigine. The film unfolds and tells the tale of survival, resourcefulness and sexual awareness, as the travellers become lost in the Australian wilderness.

Show moreShow less

With her Oscar-winning turn in 'Klute', Jane Fonda reinvented herself as a new kind of movie star.

Bringing nervy audacity and counterculture style to the role of Bree Daniels - a call girl and aspiring actor who becomes the focal point of a missing-person investigation when detective John Klute (Donald Sutherland) turns up at her door - Fonda made the film her own, putting an independent woman and escort on-screen with a frankness that had not yet been attempted in Hollywood. Suffused with paranoia by the conspiracy-thriller specialist Alan J. Pakula, and lensed by master cinematographer Gordon Willis, 'Klute' is a character study thick with dread, capturing the mood of early-1970's New York and the predicament of a woman trying to find her own way on the fringes of society.

Show moreShow less

1902: John McCabe (Warren Beatty) turns up in a northwest mining town called Presbyterian Church, starts gambling and sets up a successful brothel with his girlfriend Constance Miller (Julie Christie), an opium-addicted madam.

They refuse an offer from the mine operators to buy them out, but the mine bosses refuse to take no for an answer.

Show moreShow less

Hotter than Bond. Cooler than Bullitt, movie posters proclaimed. John Shaft was indeed a shut-your-mouth detective to reckon with, a fact emphasized from the film's start by Isaac Hayes Academy Award-winning Best Original Song and Oscar-nominated score.

Richard Roundtree plays the smart, tough confident lead, a private investigator whose hunt for a kidnapped woman puts him in the middle of feuding syndicates. Gordon Parks directs from a screenplay that Ernest Tidyman co-scripted from his own novel. John Shaft is an icon of change from an era of change. Today, Shaft still tells it like it is.

With a golden ticket young Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum) wins a tour of the factory of wily mogul Wonka (Gene Wilder) and run by his Oompa-Loompa crew. There Charlie, his Grandpa Joe (Jack Albertson) and others discover a kind heart is a finer possession than a sweet tooth.

Show moreShow less

The Driver spins out of Los Angeles with The Mechanic after winning a late night drag race. The two young men head south east on the freeway, stopping only for food, gas or a delicate adjustment on their primer grey '55 Chevrolet. Outside of Flagstaff, they take time out for lunch at a diner.

When they return to their car, there is a new passenger in the back - a girl with a tear stained face. No questions are asked: No explanation is offered. They move off. When they hit Santa Fe, they cruise up and down the streets, looking for an unsuspecting country boy to challenge their beaten up Sedan. They find him sooner than expected in a '32 Ford Roadster, follow him to the outskirts of town, race him and beat him. That night the girl shares a hotel room with The Mechanic, while The Driver prowls the bars.

Show moreShow less

An unambitious painter named Gu (Shihjun) lives with his mother in the vicinity of an abandoned mansion rumoured to be haunted.

In actuality, the mansion has become a hiding place for the warrior Yang (Hsu Feng) and her own mother, both taking refuge following the assassination of their loyal minister father by the wicked eunuch Wei of East Chamber. After the eunuch sends an army to pursue the escapees, the group fortify the mansion with traps and false intimations of the terrifying ghosts within. But even after, things take yet more unsettling turns...

Show moreShow less

In seventeenth-century France, Father Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) uses his power to protect the city of Loudun from destruction at the hands of the establishment.

Soon, he stands accused of the demonic possession of Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave), whose erotic obsession with him fuels the hysteria that sweeps through her convent.

Show moreShow less

After the success of 'Easy Rider', its star and co-creator Peter Fonda was given the green light to shoot the movie of his choice. The result was 'The Hired Hand', an elegiac western that stands firmly as a classic of modern American cinema.

Chasing their dream of a better life, Harry (Fonda) and his good friends Arch (Warren Oates) have drifted across the plains of America together. However, Harry has grown tired of his transient existence and decided to return to the wife and the child that he left years before. At first, refusing to accept him back, his wife orders him to sleep in the barn and work the farm, strictly as a hired hand. Soon their romance rekindles, and they rediscover the happiness they had lost. But as bad news of Archie reaches Harry, he is forced to make the most costly choice of his life.

Show moreShow less

Released in 1971 to critical acclaim and public controversy, Peter Bogdanovich's 'The Last Picture Show' garnered eight Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture) and was hailed by many as the most important work by a young American director since Citizen Kane.

A surprisingly frank, bittersweet drama of social and sexual mores in small-town Texas, the film features a talented cast led by Jeff Bridges, Cybill Sheperd and Timothy Bottoms.