Hi All,
Just found some great movies that are not known,
hope you all will enjoy watching all these :)
1 Salt Of The Earth
Herbert Biberman, 1953
Made at the height of McCarthyism by blacklisted left-wing artists (the director was jailed as one of the Hollywood Ten; screenwriter Michael Wilson's name was kept off Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia), this politically committed movie recreates a strike by Mexican-American zinc workers against the appalling conditions at their new Mexican mine. A marvellous mixture of naivety, passion, agitprop and forceful feminism, it was the subject of official harassment during production and banned from US screens for a decade but became a cult movie for young radicals in the 1960s.
See this if you liked ... Strike, Silver City
2 Petulia
Richard Lester, 1968
Richard Lester may be better known as the director of the Beatles movies A Hard Day's Night and Help! but he made Petulia in 1968 and it remains his masterpiece - bursting with the experimentation that typified his early career, but allied with a more adult sense of malaise and pessimism. Set against the backdrop of swinging Sixties San Francisco, Lester senses the darkness that would soon overwhelm the peace and love generation in the tale of the midlife crisis of George C Scott's doctor and his doomed romance with the much younger Julie Christie, playing it determinedly kooky. Edited in a bold, fragmented style, the story loops backwards and forwards to stunning effect. It's no surprise to discover that Nic Roeg was the film's cinematographer - he later employed not only the editing style but also Julie Christie for his own masterwork Don't Look Now.
See this if you liked ... Point Blank, Don't Look Now
3 The State Of Things
Wim Wenders, 1982
This is the film to show to all budding directors and producers as a warning of the calamities that can unfold. When production on his first US film, Hammett, started going awry, Wenders took time out to style this ultimate B-movie about a film crew attempting to make a sci-fi flick out on the Portuguese coast. They find themselves beached in more ways than one as one of the producers absconds with the money to America. When the unsurprisingly irked director tracks him down to LA, he meets his match in the Mob. Featuring a cameo from the great maverick director Sam Fuller, this is Wenders's wry meditation on an artform that asks the greatest sacrifices of its brethren.
See this if you liked ... Lost in La Mancha, The Big Knife
4 Newsfront
Phillip Noyce, 1978
Many of the early movies of the Australian new wave turned their attentions to the formative years of the new nation. This one looked at the crucial decade after the Second World War as reported on by rival teams of newsreel cameramen and it made a star of Bill Hunter as a photojournalist of Orwellian integrity, who actually looks like Orwell. Rarely seen nowadays but one of the finest Australian pictures and among the sharpest ever about postwar changes in the media.
See this if you liked ... Picnic at Hanging Rock, Robert Spottiswoode's Under Fire
5 Fat City
John Huston, 1972
In the early Seventies my local cinema was the Screen on the Green in Islington. During the week they screened low-budget American gems and I would go to these movies pretty much on my own until one day I plucked up the courage to ask a classmate, Jackie Littleton, to come with me to see Fat City. I was 16, on my first real date, and John Huston's elegiac tender boxing meditation really affected me. From the opening lyrics 'Take the ribbon from your hair', sung by Kris Kristofferson, I was hooked. And of course it starred probably the greatest unsung actor in cinema history, Jeff Bridges. I haven't seen Fat City since but I was too enthralled to make a play for Jackie, which I regret to this day, and although she did let me walk her home silently, I will never know what she thought of this American masterpiece.
See this if you liked ... Harold and Maude
6 I Wanna Hold Your Hand
Robert Zemeckis, 1978
Produced by Spielberg, this directorial debut by his star protege takes a delightfully affectionate comic look at a party of New Jersey high school kids invading Manhattan in February 1964 to catch a glimpse of the Beatles, in town to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. It's like A Hard Day's Night seen from the fans' point of view and looks back nostalgically to a turning point in popular culture, with a cast of then unknowns, Nancy Allen among them.
See this if you liked ... Back to the Future
7 The Swimmer
Frank Perry, 1968
Adapted from a John Cheever short story, this is Hollywood at its eccentric best. Burt Lancaster is mesmerising as the middle-class dropout whose nose dive from suburban society precipitates the strangest odyssey. Adorned only in swimming trunks and his startling muscle tone, he pool dips his way across his Waspish East Coast neighbourhood and attempts to understand his downfall. Structured episodically, there is an elegant craziness to this satire of sorts, as if it has been dreamt up in vivid Pucci-esque colours after one too many dry Martinis. But it captures the schizophrenic mood of late-1960s America - as one nation burned, another cooled off by the pool.
See this if you liked ... The Ice Storm
8 Under The Skin
Carine Adler, 1997
Carine Adler's debut is a visceral and moving exploration of grief. Samantha Morton drew much attention in her big-screen debut, playing Iris, a young woman whose mother's death prompts a breakdown of sorts. Her sense of self flatlines as she rejects her boyfriend, instead finding solace in a series of risky sexual encounters. Adler explores extremes with every element of the film, from Morton's heartbreaking performance to the visuals (suburban England is depicted in an exotic palate), to a soundtrack that had Massive Attack next to a delicate Chopin chorus. British cinema at its risk-taking best.
See this if you liked ... In the Cut, Breaking the Waves
9 The Front Page
Lewis Milestone, 1931
Hecht and MacArthur's classic newspaper comedy is frequently revived on stage and has been filmed four times. This first film version, a milestone work in every sense, helped, through its fast, wise-cracking dialogue and rapid editing, to change the sight and sound of the new talkies. Adolph Menjou as the suave, double-crossing editor Walter Burns and Pat O'Brien as his star reporter head a great cast.
See this if you liked ... His Girl Friday, The Front Page
10 The Damned
Joseph Losey, 1961
Losey, a McCarthy-era exile, was taking any respectable work he could get (initially under pseudonyms) until his major breakthrough with The Servant in 1963. Hammer didn't know what to do with this fascinating, visually dazzling sci-fi thriller centring on a top-secret research station housing radioactive children in Dorset. So they released it as the second half of a horror double-bill without a West End screening. It's one of the best nuclear-angst films. PF
See this if you liked... The Servant
11 Ace In The Hole
Billy Wilder, 1951
Wilder's first solo movie after ending his 12-year partnership with writer-producer Charles Brackett is a cynical study of mass hysteria and the yellow press with a stunning performance from Kirk Douglas as an unscrupulous journalist exploiting a local tragedy to get back into the big time. Among the great newspaper pictures, it was a flop (even when re-released under a different title) and has never been available here on tape or disc.
See this if you liked ... Citizen Kane
12 The Beaver Trilogy
Trent Harris, 2001
Receiving rare but rave screenings at festivals, this gives experimental cinema a great name. Set in Beaver, Utah, it is a triptych shot in the 1980s that repeats the same small-town tale of an Olivia Newton John obsessive who aspires to perform like her at the local talent show. A young Crispin Glover and Sean Penn appear in succession, dragging up for the central role. It's Stars in their Eyes as directed by Andy Warhol. Hilarious.
See this if you liked ... Fast Times at Ridgemount High, Back to the Future
13 Top Secret!
Jim Abrahams, David and Jerry Zucker, 1984
Many acknowledge Airplane! as a comic masterpiece but this follow-up from the team is just as funny, spoofing WWII movies with both affection and visual wit. It's more in the style of Mel Brooks than the frenetic gag-a-second joys of the Airport parodies. Val Kilmer's best-ever role was as the rock'n'roll spy sent behind German lines to resuce a scientist - cue Yiddish jokes and the French resistance fighters Chocolate Mousse and Deja Vu.
See this if you liked ... Bananas, Young Frankenstein
14 Bamboozled
Spike Lee, 2000
Spike Lee's angriest, most savagely funny film, this media satire about a network's ratings success with a minstrel show is the bravest film about race ever made, though it was too hot a potato for many. Lee rails against buppy culture, wiggas, institutional racism, faux-liberal whites, Jews and blacks. The music's still great and the superb tap dancing is from Savion Glover, currently the model for the penguin in Happy Feet.
See this if you liked ... Network
15 3 Women
Robert Altman, 1977
I tumbled out of the cinema in 1977 feeling like I had been inside someone else's head and very uncertain about who I was at all. Sissy Spacek is brilliant as Pinky, a gauche country girl who pitches up in Los Angeles and gets herself a job in a solarium. She's dazzled by a co-worker, Millie (Shelley Duvall), who believes herself to be very popular and cool even though it's horribly obvious that she's neither. Same themes but much less solemn than Bergman's portentous Persona.
See this if you liked ... Bridget Jones's Diary, Trash
