griggs's - Roger Ebert's Great Movies List

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After saving the lives of his platoon during the Korean War, Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is hailed as a bona fide American hero.

This couldn't have come at a better time for his mother (Angela Lansbury) who is hell-bent on boosting the career of his stepfather, a senator straight from the McCarthyite wing of the US political spectrum with designs on the Presidency. So far so familiar - but why does Shaw's former captain (Frank Sinatra) have recurring nightmares that suggest that his distinguished comrade-in-arms might not be all that he seems?

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Forty-two-year-old Manhattan native Isaac Davis (Allen) has a job he hates, a seventeen-year-old girlfriend (Mariel Hemingway) he doesn't love, and a lesbian ex-wife Jill (Meryl Streep) who's writing a tell-all book about their marriage... and whom he'd like to strangle.

But when he meets his best friend's sexy, intellectual mistress, Mary (Diane Keaton), Isaac falls head over heels in lust! Leaving Tracy, bedding Mary and quitting his job are just the beginning of Isaac's quest for romance and fulfillment in a city where sex is as intimate as a handshake - and the gate to true love... is a revolving door.

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Maria and Hermann Braun marry in Germany close to the end of World War II but are shortly separated.

Just after being sent to the Russian Front, Hermann is reported missing and, although Maria believes he is still alive, her brother in law, just returned from a POW camp in Russia, confirms his death. Alone, Maria uses her beauty and ambition to prosper in Germany's "economic miracle" of the 1950s. 'The Marriage of Maria Braun' is heartbreaking study of a woman picking herself up from the ruins of her own life, as well as a pointed metaphorical attack on a society determined to forget its past.

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This blackly comic minimalist masterpiece stars Kati Outinen as Iiris, a shy and dowdy young woman stuck in a dead-end job on a match factory production line.

She dreams of finding love at the local dancehall, but her attempts are constantly foiled by her selfish parents and the callous behaviour of would-be suitors. Finding herself pregnant after a one-night stand and abandoned by the father, Iiris finally decides the time has come to get even and she begins to plot her revenge.

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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.

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Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel star as Johnny Boy and Charlie; Italian-American cousins and small time criminals hustling, fighting and carousing, doing whatever it takes to survive in the mean streets of New York.

Johnny Boy spends his life getting into trouble, leaving Charlie to get him out of it. Charlie wants to rise up in the local mafia, but when Johnny Boy reneges on a debt, the local loan shark seeks revenge.

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As the Nazis rise to power, German actor Hendrik Hoefgen (Klaus Maria Brandauer) faces a stark choice: political compliance or professional outer darkness. So eager is Hoefgen for applause that he opts for the former and becomes a star of the Nazi propaganda machine.

But in pre-World War II Germany, there is a terrible price to pay for selling one's soul to the devil.

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Shortly after that 1927 release, an entire quarter of Lang's original version was cut by Paramount for the US release, and by Ufa in Germany, an act of butchery very much against the director's wishes.

The excised footage was believed lost, irretrievably so - that is, until one of the most remarkable finds in all of cinema history, as several dusty reels were discovered in a small museum in Buenos Aires. Argentina in 2008. Since then, an expert team of film archivists has been working at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung in Germany to painstakingly reconstruct and restore Lang's film.

An ambitious and successful drama that takes on the life and beliefs of Japan's most celebrated author, Yukio Mishima. Mishima was passionate about merging life and art, which eventually resulted in his ritualistic suicide in 1970, a moment when he felt he could reconcile the two polarities.

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Mr and Mrs Arpel live in a remarkably modern house in a bland, clean neighbourhood. In this excessively controlled universe there is no room for play, chance or humour, and their son Gerard is bored.

However the calm is broken with the sudden eruption of his eccentric misfit uncle, Monsieur Hulot, Madame Arpel's brother. His family and entourage resent his whimsicality, especially as he becomes a role model for Gerard...

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The holiday season in a small Quebec village provides the basis for this bittersweet slice-of-life comedy, directed by Claude Jutra.

Orphaned 14-year-old Benoit comes to live with a foster family in a Canadian mining village in the 1940s - his Aunt Cecile and Uncle Antoine run a general store, and Antoine also serves as the local undertaker. Their Christmas celebrations are interrupted by news of the death of a boy at a distant home, which brings Antoine and Benoit out in a sleigh with a casket to retrieve the body. But the casket and corpse are lost in an accident caused by Antoine's drinking. Screenwriter Clement Perron, who grew up in a French-Canadian village, writes from experience with a poet's delicacy and sensitivity, and director Jutra has masterfully captured the comical foibles and small and large heartbreaks of his subjects. And Gagnon gives a hauntingly realistic portrayal of an innocent discovering life's funny and tragic turns.

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Rene (Gerard Depardieu) is successful manager in a textile factory facing the prospect of down-sizing with his position under threat; Pierre (Roger Pierre) is a political star on the rise but whose marital life is in tatters; and Janine (Nicole Garcia), is a struggling actress who works for Rene

and is having an affair with Pierre, connecting the two men.

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A young girl is found murdered and the police are lead to the reclusive Monsieur Hire. His neighbours dislike him and think him strange. Living a mundane existence his greatest pleasure is to watch Alice who lives in the opposite apartment.

One night she catches sight of his pallid face at the window, illuminated momentarily by a flash of lightning. Her initial fear gives way to seemingly intentions as they are dawn into each others lives.

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In a small village in Burkina Faso, four young girls have fled the ritual of 'purification' and seek protection - moolaade - with Colle (Fatoumata Coulibaly), a circumcised woman who helped her own daughter escape excision seven years earlier.

In defiance of the traditionalists within the village, Colle grants the girls sanctuary and the scene is set for a tense confrontation between opposing sets of values.

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Cher is devastatingly funny, sinuous and beautiful as Loretta, an unlucky-in-love Italian widow who finds romance through the intervention of the Manhattan moon.

With her wedding to a close friend just weeks away, she meets - and falls hopelessly in love with - his younger brother (Nicolas Cage)! Her dilemma - and her equally passionate and hilariously eccentric family - make for an unforgettable film you'll find beguiling, enchanting and irresistible.