10 - THE GODFATHER (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
Nobody makes fully blown mobster movies like Francis Ford Coppola. They
started with Brando and Pacino as Corleone father and son in the original
Godfather, with the latter a revelation as the reluctant mobster enforcing
the family tradition. In The Godfather : Part II, Pacino’s Michael is still
concerned with legitimacy, while Brando’s Don is given a sprawling back
story and a younger self in Robert De Niro. The film is longer than the
first, and regarded as the best of the series. The Godfather: Part III,
often derided, has another magnetic turn from Pacino, and, most importantly,
reveals that the story is utterly incomplete without it. Kevin Maher
9 - ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (Michel Gondry, 2004)
It should never have been this good. The story of an introspective New Yorker,
Joel (Jim Carrey), who erases his memories of a recent doomed romance with
the irascible Clementine (Kate Winslet) emerged from a smart yet solipsistic
school of tricksy movies that included Being John Malkovich and Adaptation.
Eternal Sunshine took this same innovation, with non-linear narrative and
berserker-style visual storytelling, and injected it with the agony and
ecstasy of genuine human relationships. The result was a magnificent pairing
in Winslet and Carrey, who transformed Clem and Joel’s chemistry into a
relationship as painfully touching as it was tragic. Kevin Maher
8 - SUNSET BLVD. (Billy Wilder, 1950)
Wilder turns his razor-blade cynicism onto a subject close to home — Hollywood
— and reveals it as a relentless machine that digests and discards its
stars. It’s a brilliantly cold-hearted piece of film-making, featuring
several cruelly apposite pieces of casting. Forgotten silent star Norma
Desmond was played by Gloria Swanson, whose career had stalled in the 1930s.
Her butler was played by Eric von Stroheim, the silent-movie director who
worked with Swanson on Queen Kelly in 1929. Screenwriter Joe Gillis is
played by William Holden. The film’s longevity is evident in Norma’s
endlessly quotable, magnificently deluded line: “I’m still big. It’s the
films that got small.” Wendy Ide
7 - KES (Ken Loach, 1969)
This beautifully judged adaptation of a novel by Barry Hines is never
permitted to lapse into sentimentality or “it’s grim oop North” clichés.
Instead, the story of a lad from Barnsley who escapes the bullying of his
older brother, the sardonic indifference of his teachers and the depressing
inevitability of his future by training a kestrel is a clear-eyed portrait
of a boy with few options and the bird that represents hope for him. The
naturalistic performances are universally impressive but it’s the teenaged
David Bradley, who won the central role of Billy at an open audition, who
dominates the film. He later said that he was more excited by the free food
and drink at the audition than the role itself. Wendy Ide
6 - VERTIGO (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
A disappointment on its original release, described as tedious and overlong,
Hitchcock’s Vertigo has grown in stature over time and has become,
ironically, easily his best feature. It is, of course, a deeply creepy film,
and the story of an obsessive relationship between a neurasthenic detective
(James Stewart) and a suicidal blonde (Kim Novak) was hardly going to appeal
to a contemporary audience expecting a cutesy Catch a Thief redux. Yet
Vertigo gets more eerily modern as the years progress. When, for instance,
Stewart’s Scottie witnesses the “death” of his new lover, Novak’s equally
fragile Madeleine, he has a complete nervous breakdown. When he meets Judy
(Novak again) her low-grade doppelganger (she has bad lipstick and hairy
eyebrows), his bullying attempts to remake her in Madeleine’s likeness cut
to the heart of Hitchcock’s project. Thus the film, it is said, is the
director’s most autobiographical, and speaks of his compulsive desire for,
and brutish treatment of, icy blonde women. Yet it’s also a testament to an
image-obsessed culture that believes, like ours, in re-creating and
re-moulding to create an archetype that doesn’t exist — a culture, like
Scottie, that has fallen completely for the allure of fantasy over reality. Kevin
Maher
5 - THE SHINING (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
The supernatural and the precarious nature of sanity are the themes explored
in Stanley Kubrick’s outstanding horror movie. Adapted from a novel by
Stephen King, the film stars Jack Nicholson as former schoolteacher turned
aspiring writer Jack Torrance and Shelley Duval as his wife Wendy. Jack has
taken a job as a winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, where he and his
family will be snowed in for several months. His son, Danny, senses that
something is amiss at the hotel — a feeling confirmed by the hotel chef Dick
Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), who shares Danny’s telepathic gift. Danny’s
fears are well-founded. Before long his dad is conversing with the dead and
pursuing his mother with an axe. Kubrick’s perfectionism ensured that it
wasn’t the easiest film to make: he allegedly demanded 127 takes from
Shelley Duvall in one scene, and reduced the 69-year-old Crothers to tears.
But the film that resulted is one of the scariest yet made. Wendy Ide
4 - CHINATOWN (Roman Polanski, 1974)
This ultra-stylish thriller was the last film that its director Polanski made
in the United States before his exile to Europe. By all accounts, Chinatown
was not the easiest of shoots. Polanski apparently argued violently with
both his leads. The movie truism that the more difficult the production, the
better the film would seem to hold true. It is a masterful piece of work:
superbly crafted and bleakly brilliant, it was one of the films that defined
the golden era of Hollywood of the 1970s. Jack Nicholson plays small-time
private detective Jake Gittes, Faye Dunaway plays Evelyn Mulwray, the
mysterious blonde who hires him to investigate whether her husband is guilty
of infidelity. The role of Evelyn was originally destined for Ali MacGraw,
until she had the temerity to divorce the film’s producer, Robert Evans, for
Steve McQueen. It’s evocatively set in the sun-baked Los Angeles of 1937, a
city in the middle of a crippling drought where corruption is rife and
nobody is trustworthy. Wendy Ide
