60 - THE CRYING GAME (Neil Jordan, 1992)
The daddy of all “twist” movies, Jordan’s gender-bending thriller puts the
revelations in films such as The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense
into what lead protagonist Fergus might call “The ha’penny place” (ie not
very good). However, the key to the movie, which details the botched
kidnapping of British squaddie Jody (Forest Whitaker) and the subsequent
romance between kidnapper Fergus (Stephen Rea) and Jody’s partner Dil (Jaye
Davidson) is that the twist itself (Dil is a man! I know! I couldn’t believe
it either!) is subservient to the drama. The deftly written relationships
between Fergus, Jody and Dil gave the movie its unexpectedly soft heart, and
ultimately earned Jordan a Best Original Screenplay Oscar. Kevin Maher
59 - PULP FICTION (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
Tarantino might have settled into a rut of semi-autistic genre pastiches, but
there was a time when his films got your pulse racing. He originally
intended the intersecting crime stories in his and Roger Avary’s
Oscar-winning script — tales of a wife, a watch and a corpse — to be handled
by different directors. Thankfully, he ended up doing all three himself,
shuffling them into a non-linear sequence which contrasted with the vivid
naturalism of the dialogue. Laughs and thrills were never in short supply:
one viewer had a seizure after watching John Travolta stab a syringe into
Uma Thurman’s chest. Tarantino’s response? “This movie f***ing works!” Ed
Potton
58 - DR ZHIVAGO (David Lean, 1965)
Reunited with Robert Bolt, the screenwriter of his earlier Lawrence of
Arabia, Lean produced another sprawling masterpiece. Lawrence veteran
Omar Sharif was surprised to be cast in a lead role that Lean had reserved
for Peter O’Toole. O’Toole, however, had other ideas after the difficult
shoot for Lawrence. Zhivago was critically panned on its release in
1965, but went on to make more money at the box office than all of Lean’s
other films put together. The shoot, in Spain, dragged on for 12 months. Nigel
Kendall
57 - RAGING BULL (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
Despite years of barracking from his leading man Robert De Niro, Scorsese was
reluctant to bring the turbulent life of granite-jawed middleweight Jake La
Motta to the screen. It was only when he found himself at death’s door,
bleeding internally after a decade of success and excess, that the director
began to empathise with a man who maimed himself as much as his opponents.
Convinced it would be his final film, he pulled out all the stops, shooting
the fight scenes, innovatively, from inside the ring and filming throughout
in apocalyptic monochrome. La Motta was played by De Niro as a
quasi-biblical figure, who paid for his director’s sins in an inferno of
blood, bile and, ultimately, flab. Ed Potton
56 - WHISKY GALORE! (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949)
For a magical period of ten years from the end of the Second World War, Ealing
Studios produced a run of gently satirical comedies which still command
affection. Whisky Galore! by Ealing regular Alexander Mackendrick is
perhaps the archetypal Ealing comedy, celebrating the eccentricity of its
characters and applauding their ingenuity when it comes to bending the law
and outsmarting those who would uphold it. A cast of Ealing regulars give
larger-than-life performances as the inhabitants of a tiny Scottish island
cursed by a wartime shortage of whisky. When a cargo ship filled with 50,000
cases of the stuff is wrecked just off the coast, the islanders plunder as
much as their boats will carry. Which is quite a lot, as it turns out. Wendy
Ide
55 - THE MATRIX (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999)
Arriving on the cusp of the new millennium, The Matrix was so
zeitgeisty it was almost painful. The idea of a computer hacker called Neo
(Keanu Reeves) who lives in a fake alternate reality, wears a leather
trench-coat and saves mankind through kung-fu and interballistic mayhem
spoke to the paranoia and alienation of an entire pre-9/11 generation. It
helped too that the coolly aloof Reeves was born to play Neo, that the
pacing was almost relentless and that the Wachowski brothers seemed intent
on ripping up the blockbuster rule book even as they reinvented it. Every
action movie since then (including its own sequels) has been derivative. The
genre is still recovering from the shock. Kevin Maher
54 - L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (Curtis Hanson, 1977)
Hanson’s labyrinthine noir homage is a tour de force police procedural and an
evocative glimpse of the seedier side of 1950s Hollywood. It’s a
magnificently corrupt town that feeds upon itself, discarding the weak and
attacking the strong in the pernicious gossip rags. The film launched the
careers of two Australian actors — Guy Pearce, who played ambitious golden
boy cop Det Lt Ed Exley, and Russell Crowe, who played the hot-tempered
Officer Bud White. Even Kim Basinger acquits herself admirably as the film’s
femme fatale, Lynn Bracken. Ambitious and multi-layered, this is an elegant
piece of film-making that lives up to anything produced in Hollywood during
the richly creative period in which the story is set. Wendy Ide
53 - MILDRED PIERCE (Michael Curtiz, 1945)
Joan Crawford suffers and then some in this archetypal women’s weepie in which
she plays a middle-class mother who strives tirelessly for her ungrateful,
vile daughter, Veda (Ann Blyth). Mildred is so withstanding that when she
snaps and slaps Veda you can only cheer. How horribly it goes, and Crawford
— playing the prototypical soap matriarch who really will do anything for
her child — provides a lavish, huge performance. Later she said: “I harness
that intensity and I hold it till it’s ready to go for the camera.” When she
had to slap Blyth, Crawford — who won the Best Actress Oscar for the role in
1946 — remembered: “I put my arms around her and said, ‘Darling, did I hurt
you?’ ” Tim Teeman
52 - LA DOLCE VITA (Federico Fellini, 1960)
Fellini’s prescient film (it coined the term “paparazzi”) is both a
celebration of hedonism and a cynical satire of a celebrity-obsessed
culture. Marcello Mastroianni stars as a tabloid journalist and man about
town torn between the shallow pleasures of Rome’s decadent café society and
the domesticity offered by his girlfriend; the allure of chasing titbits of
gossip from the glamorous set and the urge to become a serious writer. Some
of the most iconic images of Italian cinema came from this film: the statue
of Christ suspended over Rome by a helicopter, and Anita Ekberg, fully
clothed, wallowing in the Trevi Fountain. Wendy Ide
51 - CABARET (Bob Fosse, 1972)
The role of cabaret star Sally Bowles earned Liza Minnelli an iconic status to
rival her mother’s: the bowler hat and black stockings became inextricably
linked to her identity, as did the catchphrase “Divine decadence darling!”
There’s a forced gaiety and a desperate hedonism in the world she inhabits.
Under the glitter and the greasepaint is something dissolute and decaying.
The musical numbers are magnificent. The beer garden scene, where an angelic
Nazi sings Tomorrow Belongs To Me, remains one of cinema’s most
chilling moments. Wendy Ide
