Written as a student project with future Alien writer Dan O'Bannon, John Carpenter's ingenious no-budget directorial debut, named after a Grateful Dead song was the first stoner sci-fi pic. On a scuzzy spaceship far away, four furry freak surf dude astronauts are bored out of their skulls on a long-haul mission to destroy unstable planets, and plagued by troubles when their talking bomb gets ideas of its own and the alien "pet" O'Bannon has smuggled aboard escapes. Sideswipes at Kubrick's 2001 are entirely intentional; the attack of the munchies the movie brings on pure coincidence.
Orson Welles' darkly comic 1963 adaptation of Kafka's paranoid fable is still visually stunning, with an unforgettable performance by Anthony Perkins as the hapless Josef K, placed on trial for reasons unknown. "He's guilty as sin," was Welles' verdict, and so Perkins plays it all the way as a shifty, twitchy ball of nerves. Superb.
Jack Lemmon is the boozy PR man. Lee Remick is the teetotal secretary. He buys her a brandy. They're hooked! They lose their jobs, have an unwanted baby and get stuck into the hard stuff. He reforms. She doesn't. "You and I were a couple of drunks on the sea of booze, and the boat sank!" Hysterical yet Oscar-worthy stuff from Blake Edwards.
The 1932 and 1941 adaptations of Stevenson's landmark work of horror fiction on one disc. The earlier movie finds director Rouben Mamoulian going heavy on the claustrophobic atmosphere and sexual undercurrents with Frederic Marsh on Oscar-winning form as the doctor and his bestial alter ego. The later version teams Spencer Tracy (transformed via a bad wig and bushy eyebrows) with Ingrid Bergman (putting on an appalling cockney accent). Enough said.
And at least an hour too long. Representing the tail-end of the epic war movie wave, Richard Attenborough's 1977 superproduction reconstructs the disastrous Allied attempt to seize half-a-dozen Dutch bridges behind enemy lines. Ponderous, but with a cast featuring everyone from Laurence Olivier, Dirk Bogarde, Sean Connery and Michael Caine to Gene Hackman, Robert Redford, James Caan and Elliott Gould, it's satisfyingly star-studded.
Pacino is electric in this shamefully overlooked, brilliantly scripted parable of an ageing New York PR man reaching the end of his tether. Footage of the Twin Towers meant its release was screwed up by cuts, but a charged, engrossing film remains, with druggie starlet Téa Leoni and 'good' woman Kim Basinger adding to the heat Al's getting from his health, clients and politicians. No one does stressed like Al: a neglected gem.
This fictitious backstory to the creation of Vermeer's best-known painting looks so impressive, and so precisely mimics the colours the 17th-century Dutchman used, it's a while before you realise it's just a prissy costume drama starring Colin Firth and pouty Scarlett Johansson. A dainty tale of repressed lust, perfectly pitched at its middlebrow audience.
To explode a myth: in 1966 Antonioni's first English film was pitched not on the Italian director's vision or its meditations on the interface between reality and fantasy, but on its 'unflinching' portrayal of Swinging London—ie, much nudity. The original trailer, included here, makes that perfectly clear: it was popular because of breasts, not because it asked what 'meaning' meant.
And photographer David Hemmings' romps with models and Vanessa Redgrave remain icons of "yeeeah, baby" wish fulfilment for lensmen everywhere.
Irrespective of the now infamous intra-generational doggie-doggie, this steely little tale concerning a granny (Anne Reid) and a horny builder (Daniel Craig) is a visceral attack from writer Hanif Kureishi on the hateful London middle classes. The merciless depiction of harsh money-grabbing sons and neurotic, self-obsessed daughters gives the flick its genuinely dark heart.
