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
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
