griggs's - Roger Ebert's Great Movies List

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‘City Lights’ begins with an uproarious skewering of pomp and formality, ends with one of the most famous last shots in movie history and, from start to finish, so completely touches the heart and tickles the funny bone that in 1998 it was named one of the American Film Institute’s Top-100 American

Films. Talkies were well entrenched when Charles Chaplin swam against the filmmaking tide with this forever classic that’s silent except for music and sound effects. The story, involving the Tramp’s attempts to get money for an operation that will restore sight to a blind flower girl, provides a star with an ideal framework for sentiment and laughs. The tramp is variously a street sweeper, a boxer, a rich 0poseur, and a rescuer of a suicidal millionaire. His message is unspoken, but universally understood: love is blind.

Agnes Varda's classic 'Cleo from 5 to 7' from 1962 manages to successfully capture Paris at the height of the sixties in this intriguing tale expertly presented in real time about a singer (Corinne Marchand) whose life is in turmoil as she awaits a biopsy test result.

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Left to his own devices when his fiancee goes to London, Adrien decides to spend his vacation experimenting with monastic life in the peace and quiet of a large house in St Tropez. However, the villa already has two occupants: his artist friend Daniel and Haydee, a woman he does not know.

Haydee collects lovers and comes home at all hours of the night, disturbing Adrien's ascetic pursuits, yet despite his resistance, Adrien finds himself beginning to surrender to her charms. The third in the 'Moral Tales' series.

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Celie. "Mr." Sofia (Oprah Winfrey). Nettie (Akosua Busia). Shug (Margaret Avery). The unforgettable characters of Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize novel brighten the screen in this rhapsodically cinematic adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg.

At the center of the tale is Celie (Whoopi Goldberg), whose search for fulfillment in a world closed to her becomes a triumph of cruelty overcome by love, of pain eclipsed by joy.

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"Come and See" is one of the greatest war films ever made and one of the finest achievements of Soviet cinema.

A devastating account of the Nazi occupation of Belarussia during World War II, it tells the story of a young boy's abrupt loss of innocence when he joins the Soviet resistance and is thrust headlong into the brutal horrors of combat. Featuring terrifyingly authentic battle scenes and poetic, almost surreal imagery, director Elem Klimov has fashioned a vivid and unforgettably powerful portrait of the terrible atrocities committed by men in the name of war.

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The exciting adventure of the day we make contact with life beyond Earth comes to the screen with a profound sense of wonder and a dazzling visual sweep that extends to the outer reaches of space and the imagination. Jodie Foster is astronomer Ellie Arroway, a woman of science.

Matthew McConaughey is religious scholar Palmer Joss, a man of faith. They're opposite ends of a spectrum - and sudden players on the world stage as the countdown to humanity's greatest journey begins.

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Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a respected but less-than-perfect surveillance expert who is wracked with self-doubt and carrying a heavy conscience since his work led to the death of two of his subjects.

So when he comes to believe that his latest assignment - eavesdropping on a pair of young lovers - may end in murder, Harry can no longer avoid confronting the moral consequences of his chosen profession.

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His crime: nonconformity. His sentence: the chain gang. Paul Newman plays one of his best-loved roles as Cool Hand Luke, the loner who won't - or can't - conform to the arbitrary rules of his captivity.

It recalls other hallmark Newman performances: Luke is The Hustler without a dream of victory, Harper without a moral mission, Hud without a father to defy. A cast of fine character actors, including George Kennedy in his Academy Award-winning role of Dragline, gives Newman solid support as fellow prisoners. And Strother Martin is the Captain who taunts Luke with the famous line, "What we've got here is...failure to communicate." No failure here. With rich humour and vibrant storytelling power, 'Cool Hand Luke' succeeds resoundingly.

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In rural Sweden around the turn of the century, three sisters reside in a vast manor house with their housekeeper. Agnes (Harriet Andersson) lives out the last days of her life in pain, hoping for companionship and affection.

Surrounded by her sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), Agnes takes comfort in the fact that her remaining time can be spent with those close to her. However, dissatisfaction in their day-to-day-lives, and the estrangement that they feel from one another, causes the sisters to become increasingly self-absorbed.

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Cliff Stern (Woody Allen) is an idealistic filmmaker…until he is offered a lucrative job shooting a flattering profile of a pompous TV producer (Alan Alda).

Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) is the pillar of his community…until he learns that his ex-mistress (Anjelica Huston) plans to expose his financial and extramarital misdeeds. As Cliff chooses between integrity and selling out, and Judah decides between the counsel of his Rabbi (Sam Waterson) and the murderous advice of his mobster brother (Jerry Orbach), each man must examine his own morality, and make an irrevocable decision - that will change everyone's lives forever.

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This legendary cartoonist-artist drew Keep on truckin' and Fritz the Cat amongst others, and played a major pioneering role in the genesis of underground comics - including the illustration of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor.

Through interviews with his mother, two brothers, wife and ex-girlfriends, as well as selections from his vast quantity of graphic art, we are treated to a darkly comic ride through one man's subconscious mind. As his acid-trip induced images flicker across our own retinas, Zwigoff's hilarious, disturbing film offers a unique insight into this complex and highly creative individual.

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John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) awakens alone in a strange hotel to find he is wanted for a series of brutal murders. His memories have vanished and even his beautiful wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly) has become estranged from him.

So begins a quest to unravel the mysteries of his pact; a quest that will take him into a fiendish underworld where he is relentlessly pursued by the police and a gang of shadow-like beings known as the Strangers and where only the sinister Doctor Schreber (Keifer Sutherland) is able to help him.

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At the Victorine Studios in Nice, a French movie-maker, Ferrand (Francois Truffaut) starts shooting his latest film: "Meet Pamela". As ever, this proves eventful from the outset: ups and downs on the shoot, actors whims, complicated love-lives and the producer putting on the pressure...

Ferrand wonders whether his film will ever get made. In 'Day for Night', Truffaut provides the answer to the question asked by all film lovers "what goes on behind the cameras?". He films the shoot as it really is, straightforwardly, without artefacts, with honesty and accuracy, making it seem like a documentary. Often funny, sometimes tragic, 'Day for Night' is one of Truffaut's most autobiographical films and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1973.

One of the most critically-acclaimed films of all time, 'Days of Heaven' is a moving story about two men who love the same woman. Bill (Richard Gere), a fugitive from the slums of Chicago, finds himself pitted against a shy, rich Texan (Sam Shepard) for the love of Abby (Brooke Adams).

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It is the Feast of Epiphany (6th January) 1904 in Dublin and time for one of the highlights of the season - the grand party thrown by Misses Kate (Helena Carroll) and Julia (Cathleen Delany) Morkan and their niece, Mary Jane (Ingrid Craigie).

Their favourite nephew, Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann) arrives with his beautiful wife, Gretta (Anjelica Huston), and acts as host. Although a splendid evening is had by all, Gretta is profoundly affected when she hears the words of a sentimental old song - The Lass of Aughrim. She weeps as she tells of a brief and innocent romance from her youth, cut short by the young man's death at the age of seventeen. In all their years of marriage, Gabriel has never heard her speak of this boy, locked away in her heart. His jealousy gives way to sadness as he realises he has never felt such passion, and his thoughts turn to death, for without passion there is only death. Gabriel's agony of self-doubt, the sudden awareness of his own frailty, becomes a vision of a bleak, wintry landscape, a revelation of universal truth uniting the living and the dead.