griggs's - Roger Ebert's Great Movies List

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Eleven jurors are convinced that the defendant is guilty of murder. The twelfth has no doubt of his innocence.

How can this one man steer the others toward the same conclusion? It's a case of seemingly overwhelming evidence against a teenager accused of killing his father in "one of the best pictures ever made".

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"2001: A Space Odyssey" is a countdown to tomorrow, a road map to human destiny, a quest for the infinite. It is a dazzling, Academy Award-winning visual achievement, a compelling drama of man vs. machine, a stunning meld of music and motion.

It may be the masterwork of director Stanley Kubrick (who co-wrote the screenplay with Arthur C. Clarke) and it will likely excite, inspire and enthrall for generations. To begin his voyage into the future, Kubrick visits our prehistoric ape-ancestry past, then leaps millennia (via one of the most mind-blowing jump cuts ever conceived) into colonized space, and ultimately whisks astronaut Bowman (Keir Dullea) into uncharted realms of space, perhaps even into immortality.

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Academy Award nominee Edward Norton heads an amazing all-star cast in the critically acclaimed Spike Lee film 25th Hour. In 24 short hours, Monty Brogan (Norton) goes to prison for seven long years.

Once a king of Manhattan, Monty is about to say goodbye to the life he knew - a life that opened doors to New York's swankiest clubs but also alienated him from the people closest to him. In his last day on the outside, Monty tries to reconnect with his father (Brian Cox), and gets together with two old friends, Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Slaughtery (Barry Pepper). And then there's his girlfriend, Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), who might (or might not) have been the one who tipped off the cops. Monty's not sure of much these days, but with time running out, there are choices to be made as he struggles to redeem himself in the 25th hour.

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The film tells the story of three women who live in an apartment block in the California desert. Shy, quiet girl Pinky (Sissy Spacek), arrives without a past or identity and starts working in a nursing home. Here she meets Millie (Shelley Duvall), they strike up a friendship and become roommates.

A third woman Willie, (Janice Rule) is a pregnant artist. She expresses her fears and fantasies by painting murals of male aggression and victimized women on the bottom of swimming pools. Willie is a silent troubled character, whose husband is a drunk. Willies' troubled ways and the extraordinary characters of Mille and Pinky are at the centre of a series of strange events that cause their identities to change and morph in unexpected ways, creating one person.

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Marcello Mastroianni is (Fellini's alter ego) Guido, a successful filmmaker who, embarking on his next film, discovers he has a complete "director's block": he has no story to tell! Harassed by his producers, his mistress (Sandra Milo) and his wife (Anouk Aimee), while struggling to find the

inspiration for his film, he increasingly retreats in dreamy recollections of his life and lovers, until fantasy, memories and reality merge in the director's mind - and on screen, in an astonishing, masterful spectacle, culminating in an electrifying triumph of optimism. As Guido-Federico says at the end of 8 1/2: "Life is a party, let's live it together!"

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Director Spike Jonze delivers a stunningly original comedy that seamlessly blends fictional characters and situations with the lives of real people: obsessive orchid hunter John Laroche (Cooper), New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean (Streep), Hollywood screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Cage), and his

twin brother Donald (also Cage). As Charlie struggles to adapt Orlean's best-selling book "The Orchid Thief," he writes himself into his own movie. The various stories crash into one another exploding into a wildly imaginative film. .

When Prince John (Claude Rains) and the Norman Lords begin oppressing the Saxon masses in King Richard's absence, a Saxon lord fights back as the outlaw leader of a rebel guerrilla army.

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Jason Patric stars in this mesmerizing thriller of erotic tensions that explode into violence when a kidnapping goes wrong. Collie is an ex-boxer who seems the perfect pawn to pull off a kidnapping planned by a sexy widow and a cop-turned-con man.

What they don't know is that Collie is an escapee from a mental institution. When he realizes the woman he loves had been manipulating him Collie turns the tables - playing a game of deceit and raw desire that can only end in death.

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Desperate to escape his mind-numbing routine, uptown Manhattan office worker Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) ventures downtown for a hookup with a mystery woman (Rosanna Arquette).

So begins the wildest night of his life, as bizarre occurrences - involving underground - art punks, a distressed waitress, a crazed Mister Softee truck driver, and a bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweight - pile up with anxiety - inducing relentlessness and thwart his attempts to get home. With this Kafkaesque cult classic, Martin Scorsese-abetted by Michael Ballhaus's kinetic cinematography and scene-stealing supporting turns by Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, Catherine O'Hara, and John Heard - directed a darkly comic tale of mistaken identity, turning the desolate night world of 1980s SoHo into a bohemian wonderland of surreal menace.

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A ravishing romance about three wealthy New Yorkers caught in a tragic love triangle, The Age Of Innocence chronicles the grandeur and hypocrisy of high society in the 1880's. Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an upstanding lawyer who secretly longs for a more passionate life.

Engaged to the lovely but ordinary socialite May Welland (Winona Ryder), Newland resigns himself to a life of quiet complacency. But when May's unconventional cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) returns to New York amid social and sexual scandal, Newland becomes captivated by her mysterious authority and outstanding beauty. Now he must choose between May and the world he knows, and Ellen and the world he dreams of having.

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A band of Spanish conquistadors, led by Aquirre (Klaus Kinski), self-styled 'Wrath of God' go up the Amazon in search of gold, but Aquirre's megalomania turns the expedition into a death trip.

Eleven hundred men, two women, horses, Ilamas, pigs and rifles descend from the Andes highlands down into the steaming primeval forest where the waters of the Amazon begin, in quest of El Dorado, the fabled city of gold. Aquirre has with him his beautiful 14-year old daughter who he intends to marry and found a new 'pure' race to rule over a golden empire.

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A.I. -- Artificial Intelligence, directed by Steven Spielberg (Jurassic Park), explores the fine line between robots and humans. David (Haley Joel Osment--The Sixth Sense), a young robotic boy, is the first android ever programmed to feel human emotions.

As an experiment, he is used as a temporary subsitute for a couple who have had their own son cryogenically frozen until a cure is found for his terminal illness. The film portrays the journey made by David and the "sexually compromising" robot Gigolo Joe (Jude Law--The Talented Mr Ripley), to find their place within the society that created them. Together with ground-breaking special effects and shocking images of half-human, half-mechanical creatures, this film will blow your mind!

Emmi (Brigitte Mira), a widowed cleaning lady in her sixties, meets Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a Moroccan immigrant in his thirties. Seeking companionship, the pair marry to the outrage Emmi's family (including Fassbinder himself as her aggressive son-in-law), herfriends and her colleagues.

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"Alien" is the first movie of one of the most popular sagas in science fiction history, and introduces Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, the iron-willed woman destined to battle the galaxy's ultimate creature.

The terror begin when the crew of the spaceship Nostromo investigates a transmission from a desolate planet and makes a horrifying discovery - a life form that breeds within a human host. Now the crew must fight now only for its survival, but for the survival of all mankind.

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From the moment she glimpses her idol at the stage door, Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) moves relentlessly towards her goal: taking the reins of power from the great actress Margo Channing (Bette Davis).

The cunning Eve maneuvers her way into Margo's Broadway role, becomes a sensation and even causes turmoil in the lives of Margo's director boyfriend (Gary Merrill), her playwright (Hugh Marlowe) and his wife (Celeste Holm). Only the cynical drama critic (George Sanders) sees through Eve, admiring her audacity and perfect pattern of deceit. Thelma Ritter and Marilyn Monroe co-star in this acclaimed classic, which won six Academy Awards and received the most nominations (14) in film history.