50 - BLADE RUNNER (Ridley Scott, 1982)

Scott’s ravishingly dark vision of Los Angeles in 2019 is the ultimate old-fashioned movie dystopia: a fabulous hell of skyscrapers and monolithic factories. The sky is cluttered with fuming aircraft and floating neon adverts. It never stops raining on the cramped and seedy streets, and everyone, apart from Harrison Ford’s blade runner, smokes like a chimney. What does it mean to be human in such a diseased world? This is the thrust of Scott’s film noir, which charts Ford’s quest to terminate four genetically engineered replicants who want to exact revenge on the humans who invented them. The director has never ceased to tinker with the movie. The final cut is a slightly colder and lonelier place. Seminal sci-fi. James Christopher

49 - HIGH SOCIETY (Charles Walters, 1956)

A sore point for fans of The Philadelphia Story, the original 1940 comedy upon which this is based, High Society is a musical that’s smart enough to refocus attention on the Cole Porter standards and the louche milieu. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby provide the cocktail drinking insouciance as, respectively, a Life magazine journalist and an ex-husband of soon-to-be-remarried Rhode Island socialite Grace Kelly. The tunes include Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and True Love. But the highlight is Sinatra, glugging champagne, and slurring through a duet of Did You Ever? with a typically mellow Crosby. Kevin Maher

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Background

• 100 - 91

• 90 - 81

• 80 - 71

• 70 - 61

• 60 - 51

Background

• 50 - 41

• 40 - 31

• 30 - 21

• 20 - 11

• 10 - 4

Background

• 3 - ET: The Extra Terrestrial

• 2 - There Will Be Blood

• 1 - Casablanca

48 - SHOAH (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)

A nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust may sound like a difficult sell, but Lanzmann’s movie is unrelentingly gripping. Eschewing traditional historical documentary methods (there is no archive footage) Lanzmann instead puts human faces on camera and lets them talk. He divides his subjects into three categories — Jewish witnesses, Polish bystanders and German Nazis. With deft judgment he intercuts their testimonies with peaceful and benign footage of contemporary life in Poland. The effect, both in time and in intensity, can be dizzying and profound. A painful lesson, perfectly delivered. Kevin Maher

47 - FARGO (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 1996)

A pitch-black comedy set against a white winter in Minnesota and North Dakota: all the better to contrast with the liberal amounts of blood splattered by the film’s close. Eccentric characterisation is one of the trademarks of the Coen brothers’ films. But in Fargo they outdid themselves. William H. Macy has the look of a desperate man trying to claw his way out from under his own stupidity — he plays car salesman Jerry Lundegaard, cinema’s most inept would-be criminal. Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare are, respectively, a garrulous rodent and a stoic psychopath hired by Lundegaard to kidnap his wife to claim a ransom from her father. And heavily pregnant detective Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) is a movie heroine to be reckoned with. Wendy Ide

46 - ALL ABOUT EVE (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1960)

It’s the role that Bette Davis credited with resurrecting her career. But chain-smoking drama queen Margo Channing was almost played by another movie icon, Claudette Colbert, who had to pull out from the film after suffering an injury. Davis was going through an acrimonious divorce during the shoot, her distinctively raspy line-delivery was apparently the result of all the screaming rows with her soon-to-be ex-husband William Sherry. A peerless backstage drama, spiked with the kind of acidic wit that Davis could spit with joyous savagery, the film pits Davis’s Channing, a stage actress at the top of her game with everything to lose, against hungry newcomer Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter). Baxter’s Eve is terrifyingly driven, but it is Davis’s tough-cookie vulnerability that steals the film. Wendy Ide

45 - THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1943)

The Powell and Pressburger stable produced some of the great cinema of the 1940s. This glorious film introduces the central character, British officer Clive Candy (played superbly by Roger Livesey), in a Turkish bath in 1943. He’s a blustering old duffer wearing a walrus moustache and a towel. He seems little more than a relic. But then the film rewinds to the Boer War and we get to know him as a hero, a romantic and a thoroughly decent chap — a relic only in that his unwavering belief in good sportsmanship is sadly out of step with modern warfare. Wendy Ide

44 - A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (Ella Kazan, 1951)

Tennessee Williams’s most famous play will always be identified with Marlon Brando. No actor had displayed such raw machismo on screen before. His mesmerising performance as Stanley Kowalski — a blue-collar brute who is forced by his pregnant wife to put up her neurotic and delusional sister, Blanche (Vivien Leigh) — is also his best. What’s often overlooked is that the film features some of the finest ensemble acting ever committed to screen. It is one of the very few productions in our Top 100 that succeeded in making that perilous leap from Broadway to Hollywood. James Christopher

43 - TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (James Cameron, 1991)

It’s a decade since Sarah Connor destroyed the Terminator, an emissary from a machine-ruled future world. Its mission was to kill her, thus preventing her unborn son from leading a human uprising that threatens the dominance of the computers. In Terminator 2, Arnie is back, accessorised with a pair of Ray-Bans and just the hint of a sense of humour. The mission this time is to protect the young John Connor (Edward Furlong) from a newer, deadlier Terminator. Cameron’s sequel works on the principle that bigger is better. The whole film is pitched at the high-octane level that most action films reserve for their big climax. This is muscular, macho, ballsy film-making — and it’s tremendous fun. Wendy Ide

42 - BLUE VELVET (David Lynch, 1986)

From Twin Peaks to Mulholland Drive, David Lynch has long been obsessed by the gruesome monsters lurking behind the white picket fences of the American Dream. But this maelstrom of kinky torture, voyeurism and sado-masochistic sex remains the classic crystallisation of his preoccupation. In Kyle MacLachlan, Lynch had a leading man whose matinee looks concealed a more ambivalent psyche, while Dennis Hopper’s ether-inhaling Frank Booth was one of the most disturbing villains to stalk the screen. Steven Berkoff was among the actors who balked at the latter role; no such qualms for Hopper, who, legend has it, said, “I’ve got to play Frank. Because I am Frank!” Ed Potton

41 - A STAR IS BORN (George Cukor, 1954)

Cukor’s remake of the 1937 musical is now the one most people remember, thanks to a central performance of real class from Judy Garland, and James Mason’s memorable, tragic drunk. In the years since being fired by MGM in 1950, Garland had toured Europe to great acclaim, but the mental problems that had resulted in at least two suicide attempts were to resurface before the end of this long shoot as she became increasingly unreliable. She and Mason were both nominated for Oscars, just asJanet Gaynor and Fredric March had been 17 years before, the first time that actors playing the same roles had been nominated. Nigel Kendall