90 - TRAINSPOTTING (Danny Boyle, 1996)
You need both hands to count the number of careers this heroin-laced black
comedy helped to launch. On screen, there’s Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner,
Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald and Shirley Henderson, and
off it the author Irvine Welsh, the director Danny Boyle, and the
photographer Lorenzo Agius, whose publicity shots for the film still adorn a
million student bedsits. The film was shot in just eight weeks. For its
first hour, Boyle’s frenetic editing style produces a rush that perfectly
matches his subject matter. Nigel Kendall
89 - TOUCH OF EVIL (Orson Welles, 1958)
Touch of Evil may not have the dazzling virtuosity of Welles’s debut, Citizen
Kane. But it has far uglier, darker and truer things to say. The agile
opening tracking shot, which follows a car across the US-Mexican border, is
legendary. Atmosphere and words conspire as Charlton Heston’s self-righteous
Mexican narcotics agent goes toe-to-toe with Welles’s monumentally sleazy
detective, Hank Quinlan, over the motives behind a fatal bombing. The moral
corruption is as ripe as Welles’s enormous gut. His relationship with
Marlene Dietrich’s gypsy brothel keeper is an unconsummated mystery. James
Christopher
88 - WILD STRAWBERRIES (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
This beautiful film gives the lie to Bergman’s reputation as difficult to
watch. An ageing professor, as dusty as the tomes on his study wall, makes
the trip across Sweden to collect a prestigious award, and memories of his
youthful, playful self flood back. An elegy to lost youth and the regretted
compromises of adult life, the film is notable for its spectacular camera
work, and for the performance of Swedish film pioneer Victor Sjöström in the
lead role. Sjöström, who directed Lillian Gish in the silent classic The
Wind (1928), died three years after Wild Strawberries was
released. This was his last acting role. Nigel Kendall
87 - THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (Jonathan Demme, 1991)
A stunning movie that introduced the greatest monster of them all. Brian Cox
had already played Hannibal “Lecktor” in Michael Mann’s adaptation of Thomas
Harris’s novel Red Dragon, but it was Anthony Hopkins who
turned the erudite, Chianti-loving cannibal into an unforgettable icon. The
brilliance of the film is that it excels on every level: as a
nerve-shredding whodunnit, horror film, chase movie, and vertiginous
psycho-drama. The inspired idea of using a psychopath to catch a serial
killer reinvigorated a genre that had been flat-lining since Dirty Harry.
The mental chess between Jodie Foster’s Agent Starling and Anthony Hopkins’s
perfectly still, perfectly precise Lecter will forever send shivers down the
spine. James Christopher
86 - NOSFERATU (F.W. Murnau, 1922)
As the disturbing flipside to the patrician Draculas of Bela Lugosi and
Christopher Lee, the vermin-like bloodsucker in Murnau’s silent masterpiece
is a creature not from Hollywood, but from the id itself. The film, which
brazenly pilfers Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the German production
company was later sued into bankruptcy by Stoker’s widow), follows the
misfortunes of real-estate agent Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) who
is summoned to the Carpathian hideout of bald-headed, crooked-framed,
kohl-eyed, bat-eared, rat-toothed Count Orlock (Max Schreck). Much
neck-biting ensues, Orlock moves to Hutter’s home town, and the film
produces some seminal horror images, including Orlock’s final agonising fade
in the morning light. Kevin Maher
85 - DOG DAY AFTERNOON (Sidney Lumet, 1975)
A real-life botched Brooklyn bank robbery is the subject of this fascinating
portrait of a charismatic criminal caught in the glare of the media
spotlight. Al Pacino gives the wildcard performance of his career (he was
beaten by Jack Nicholson’s Cuckoo’s Nest turn at that
year’s Oscars) as Sonny, the skittish bisexual Vietnam veteran who’s robbing
the bank to fund his gay lover’s sex-change operation. His incendiary
relationship with the gathering crowds, the police and the rapacious news
media quickly becomes the real focus of the film. Director Lumet’s depiction
of the flimsy and treacherous nature of instant celebrity seems eerily
prescient. Kevin Maher
84 - FESTEN (Thomas Vinterberg, 1999)
This incredibly savage comedy about a Danish family reunion was a genuine
breath of fresh air. It is the first, and finest, of the Dogme films whose
collective ambition was to rescue cinema’s credibility as an art form by
stripping it to the bone. Vinterberg duly ditched every prop except his
camera, and the result has influenced a generation of guerrilla film-makers.
The splintered story about grown-up siblings who fail to bury their
differences at their father’s 60th birthday party has a documentary
intensity that is cleverly aggravated by an almost alarming lack of
editorial control. The oldest son (Ulrich Thomsen) is manhandled out of the
dining room before the main course for toasting his father’s sexual abuse of
himself and his twin sister. The way the guests plough politely on is
horribly real. An extraordinary piece of story-telling: chaotic,
spontaneous, and refreshingly unpredictable. James Christopher
83 - SPARTACUS (Stanley Kubrick, 1960)
The making of Kubrick’s epic tale of slave rebellion under Roman rule would
make an epic in itself. Kubrick was summoned by the film’s star and producer
Kirk Douglas, who was at daggers drawn with the original director, Anthony
Mann. Douglas also insisted that the script be written by the blacklisted
Dalton Trumbo, and the finished film therefore emphasises the power of mass
uprising against a tyrannical state. Kubrick found the experience so
draining that he returned to the UK, never to work in Hollywood again. The
original director Mann’s work is uncredited, as it had been on the earlier
epic Quo Vadis. The veteran western director finally got back into the epic
saddle with El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire. Nigel
Kendall
82 - CHUNGKING EXPRESS (Wong Kar Wai, 1994)
Wong Kar Wai’s parallel stories of lovelorn Hong Kong cops is an
impressionistic feast of vivid neon and jewel-like colour. With its
trademark slow motion and artful blurring, this was one of the films to
launch the career of the maverick cinematographer Christopher Doyle. The two
stories are slight, as disposable as the fast food and pop culture that form
the movie’s backdrop. But there’s something seductive about the
half-realised love affairs. Story one has a femme fatale and a lost soul
looking for meaning in the sell-by dates of cans of pineapple; story two
stars Faye Wong as a fast-food waitress obsessed with a cop in a
half-hearted relationship with an air hostess. Wendy Ide
81 - NORTH BY NORTHWEST (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
Hitchcock’s classic contains many elements familiar to viewers of his films,
notably the theme of mistaken identity, the “MacGuffin” (a term coined by
Hitchcock to denote an object that the cast is chasing, in this case a
microfilm), a beautiful blonde, and a monumental climax, here on Mount
Rushmore. But the film also leavens its thriller components with humour. The
makers of the Bond films, three years later, would use this formula,
MacGuffin and all, to create the most successful franchise in cinema
history. Serious critics, notably the French, point out that every single
character in the film is playing a part and that even Cary Grant’s hero, the
executive mistaken for a government agent, works in advertising: his
profession is deception. The crop-dusting chase scene is rightly fêted. Nigel
Kendall
