Alejandro González Iñárritu's follow-up to Amores Perros is an agonisingly bleak film about death and the apparent pointlessness of things, with a dying Sean Penn getting involved with distraught widow Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro's sweaty born-again ex-con. Highly charged, intensely acted but eventually somewhat predictable.
With grim, grubby retro-future styling, Michael Radford's movie, originally released in the eponymous year, is the best adaptation of George Orwell's feel-bad totalitarian parable. As reluctant rebel Winston Smith, John Hurt is perfect—looks like he's spent his life in misery. The revelation is Richard Burton, weighed down with strange love, melancholy and menace in his final role as O'Brien, the investigator who takes Hurt under his wing to crush him.
The title translates as "I remember" in dialect, but Fellini's visionary 1973 work (an Oscar winner) wasn't the rosy nostalgia about childhood he'd originally planned. His unique, untethered imagination bleeds into every frame of these '30s-set seaside snapshots, with—of course—sex and religion figuring prominently. Warring parents, twisted priests, Fascists, fantasy, farce and melancholy. As they say, very Fellini.
It wasn't until Frank Tashlin's 1956 screwball comedy, starring Jayne Mansfield at her most buxom, that Hollywood finally exploited the nascent rock'n'roll boom. The result is a Technicolor feast of Gene Vincent, Little Richard and Eddie Cochran in their hip-swivelling prime, rivalled only by Julie London's (literally) haunting shiver through "Cry Me A River". Camp, corny, but classic.
This dark treasure from 1945 was Robert Bresson's second feature. Scripted by Cocteau, it's erotic longing and revenge, as spurned spider woman Maria Casares seeks the downfall of her ex and his lover. In contrast with the grey, static textures of Bresson's celebrated work, there's near-noirish lustre, but the intriguing, deceptive narrative bareness, the sense of forces moving beneath the surface, are his alone.
The simmering sexuality. The blood lust. The savaging of bourgeois restraint. The horse flagellation. Ken Russell and DH Lawrence were made for each other. The nude wrestling scene is the one that everyone remembers, but the satire bites best in the form of Hermione, Eleanor Bron's caricature of avant-garde pretence. Made in 1969, this is probably the last time Russell showed restraint before he hurtled into kitsch overkill.
Robert Altman's wry comedy tackles the origins of modern showbiz and media manipulation in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Paul Newman plays the legendary 'star' as a bundle of neuroses who more than meets his match when the show is joined by Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts)—a man of principles, unimpressed by the razzamatazz. An enjoyable indictment of Hollywood.
Every film buff knows Elia Kazan's On The Waterfront and East Of Eden, but his two greatest films are terribly overlooked. In the case of America, America (1963), it's probably because he didn't cast a star. In the case of Wild River (1960), it's almost inexplicable. Montgomery Clift is a government official trying to persuade an old woman she must leave her home before it's flooded. Complex, tender, rich and true, this is a masterpiece, lost and found.
Ken Russell's 1967 movie was the last in the original Harry Palmer trilogy, and it's lunatic great. Retired from MI5 and living on cornflakes as a flea-bitten private eye, Michael Caine's downbeat, kitchen-sink Bond has to deliver some eggs, and deal with a militaristic right-wing Texan oil baron who's planning to destroy Soviet Russia with his computer (the titular brain). Caine is quite brilliantly morose.
