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

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James Benning took the founding of the New York Times in 1851 as a departure point for his latest film, 'Deseret'.

In the best Benning tradition, 'Deseret' unfolds magnificent landscapes captured with a stationary camera during a dozen-odd trips throughout the calendar year - deserts, plains of snow, lonely trails, trees in bloom, cemeteries, ruins, unfriendly rocks, empty settlers' houses, roads that seem to be leading nowhere, a few isolated human figures. Deseret's starkly composed images suggest a space haunted by the official history written back East in the Times. Benning collected 93 stories about Utah, boiled them down to a few lines and used a different shot to 'illustrate' each sentence. As we reach 1900, his black and white footage spectacularly turns to color. The stories told recount the loss of American innocence: from the woes and persecution of the Mormons, the fights with the Indians, the struggle to become a state, to the turning of Utah into a testing ground for nuclear...

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Inspired by the true story of Australian child prodigy David Helfgott (Geoffrey Rush), Shine examines his journey from a childhood dominated by an overbearing father to his nervous breakdown as a young adult.

When David is accepted to a prestigious music school in London as a teen, he's only too happy to escape his home life and pursue his passion for classical music. But his father's rejection and the pressures of mastering such concertos as Rachmaninoff's lead to his downward spiral into mental illness. Only the love of the one woman who truly understands him (Lynn Redgrave) can help him re-enter society and his musical gift with the world.

Hilarious but harrowing, the film charts the disintegration of the friendship between Renton (Ewan McGregor), Spud (Ewen Bremner), Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), Tommy (Kevin McKidd) and Begbie (Robert Carlyle) as they proceed seemingly towards a psychotic, drug-fuelled self-destruction.

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Jerry (William H. Macy), a small-town Minnesota car salesman is bursting at the seams with debt... but he's got a plan. He's going to hire two thugs (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife in a scheme to collect a hefty ransom from his wealthy father-in-law.

It's going to be a snap and nobody's going to get hurt... until people start dying. Enter Police Chief Marge (Frances McDormand), a coffee-drinking, parka-wearing - and extremely pregnant -investigator who'll stop at nothing to get her man. And if you think her small-time investigative skills will give the crooks a run for their ransom...you betcha!

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A keen observer of America's social fabric, writer-director John Sayles uncovers the haunted past buried beneath a small Texas border town in this sprawling neowestern mystery.

When a skeleton is discovered in the desert, lawman Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), son of a legendary local sheriff, begins an investigation that will have profound implications both for him personally and for all of Rio County, a place still reckoning with its history of racial violence. Sayles's masterful film - novelistic in its intricacy and featuring a brilliant ensemble cast, including Joe Morton, Elizabeth Peña, and Kris Kristofferson - quietly subverts national mythmaking and lays bare the fault lines of life at the border.

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Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a young, black optometrist whose adoptive parents have recently died. Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn) is a sad, unmarried mother who works in a factory and lives in a shabby terraced house with her confrontational daughter, Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook).

Cynthia's brother Maurice (Timothy Spall) is a successful wedding photographer who lives comfortably in suburbia with his snooty wife Monica (Phyllis Logan). In a misplaced effort to re-unite the family, Maurice and Monica throw a small barbecue party for Roxanne's 21st birthday. When Cynthia brings along her new friend Hortense, chaos ensues as some painful truths are revealed.

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In the early 1970s a naive young girl, Bess (Emily Watson), living in a small community on the north west coast of Scotland, falls in love with oil-rig worker and man-of-the-world Jan (Stellan Skarsgård). Despite local opposition they marry and live out a brief but intense love life.

Jan returns to the rig, whilst Bess counts the days to his homecoming sure that their love is made in heaven. When an accident renders Jan paralysed he is worried that Bess will cut herself off from a normal life. Realising that he will be bedridden, he convinces her that she will aid his recovery by taking a lover and relating to him their sexual acts.

.Marcello Mastroianni stars as a man who shares four names and four personalities (which is the real one?). This mysterious figure is the link between four different, yet strangely similar, stories involving love, lust, crime and time.

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One of the biggest box office hits of all time delivers the ultimate encounter when mysterious and powerful aliens launch an all-out invasion against the human race. The spectacle begins when massive spaceships appear in Earths skies.

But wonder turns to terror as the ships blast destructive beams of fire down on cities all over the planet. Now the worlds only hope lies with a determined band of survivors, uniting for one last strike against the invadersbefore its the end of mankind.

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An elderly couple go about their routine of cleaning their Gabbeh (a intricately-designed rug), while bickering gently with each other. Magically, a young woman appears, helping the two clean the rug.

This young woman belongs to the clan whose history is depicted in the design of the gabbeh, and the rug recounts the story of the courtship of the young woman by a stranger from the clan...

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After a badly burned pilot (Ralph Fiennes) is pulled from the wreckage of his plane in the Sahara Desert, he's placed in the care of an army nurse (Juliette Binoche) and identified only as "the English patient".

As his memory slowly returns, a passionate and consuming love affair with a married woman (Kristin Scott Thomas) is unveiled, and lives from both the past and the present become inextricably altered.

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Neve Campbell leads an all-star cast in this iconic slasher thriller that launched the 'Scream' franchise and breathed new life into the horror genre.

After a series of mysterious deaths befalls their small town, an offbeat group of friends led by Sidney Prescott (Campbell) becomes the target of a masked killer. As the body count rises, Sidney and her friends turn to the "rules" of horror films to help navigate the real-life terror they're living in. Buckle up for an irresistible killer ride!

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Set against a background of deceit and wife swapping in the 1970s, 'The Ice Storm' is acclaimed director Ang Lee's extraordinary tale of sexual jealousy. Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) is having an affair with his neighbour Janey (Sigourney Weaver).

His wife (Joan Allen) is fast losing patience with his clumsy lies. Meanwhile his daughter Wendy (Christina Ricci), is finding new games to play with boys next door and son Paul (Tobey Maguire) has escaped to the city to try and seduce an alluring rich girl. As night falls and the members of the family embark on their separate sexual odysseys, an ice storm hits the East Coast, the worst in 30 years. The events of that night, both comic and tragic, force the Hood family to come face to face with the harsh realities that exist in their lives.

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The unforgettable original version of acclaimed filmmaker Michael Haneke's classic exploration of screen violence is an uncompromising, sometimes uncomfortable, but never less than compelling experience.

Arriving at their remote lakeside holiday home, a middle class family are alarmed by the unexpected arrival of two young men who soon begin to subject them to a twisted and horrifying ordeal of terror. With characteristic mastery, Haneke turns the conventions of the thriller genre upside down and, directly challenges the expectations of his audience, forcing viewers to question the complacency with which they receive images of casual violence in contemporary cinema.

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Director Curtis Hanson and a terrific cast serve up a 'ravishing, thrilling tale of police corruption and Hollywood glamour' (Marshall Fine, Gannett Newspapers) in this film version of James Ellroy's novel.

Three cops (Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce), a call girl (Kim Basinger), a mysterious millionaire (David Strathairn), a tabloid journalist (Danny DeVito), and the Chief of Detectives (James Cromwell) fuel a labyrinthine plot rife with mystery, ambition, romance and humor.