More to the point, it’s about a director discovering his unbridled love of moviemaking. It’s structured like a game of verbal tag – everyone talks their heads off no plot of any kind materialises. Here’s where it all started for Linklater, in a freewheeling debut which eavesdrops all over his hometown of Austin, Texas. Patched together from hundreds of video diaries submitted by amateur filmmakers around the world, Kevin Macdonald's global collage is remarkably fresh and stimulating, thanks mainly to regular jolts of human weirdness. Our dreamy introduction to Manderley is just about unimprovable.ġ4.
But it's remarkable how many personal touches he managed to sneak into this first Hollywood mega-production. Don’t watch the 2006 remake.Īlfred didn't consider it a "Hitchcock picture", undoubtedly because David O Selznick wanted it made his way. A solid B-list cast – Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder – makes it a cult curio. Joanne Woodward – then virtually unknown in Hollywood – won the Best Actress Oscar for her ingenious triplicate performance, in this hokily compelling psychological case study about Multiple Personality Disorder, based on a real-life report.Īn underrated Canadian horror, pre-dating Halloween in the slasher cycle, about a sorority house fending off Yuletide attacks from a mad stalker. The Three Faces of Eve (Nunnally Johnson, 1957) The red ball bouncing down the stairs will stay with you.ġ1. Scott) and a fine control of portentous atmosphere. Old-school haunted-house thrills done elegantly and well, with the virtue of an unassailably tremendous actor in the lead (George C. As Somerset Maugham’s heartless blonde waitress, Mildred, she nails everything but the cockney accent. Of Human Bondage (John Cromwell, 1934)Ī startling, early Bette Davis picture, released a year before her first Oscar (for 1935’s Dangerous), which was widely viewed as a consolation prize for this. The funniest of all silent comedies, it achieves something close to perpetual motion.ĩ. ITV/REX Shutterstock/ITV/REX Shutterstockīuster Keaton’s hurtling, one-man-and-his-train comedy about a Civil War railroad engineer contains the most sustained passages of virtuoso slapstick genius he ever shot. A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946) The ending came to seem shockingly serendipitous when Martin Luther King’s assassination was announced.ĥ. One of the great horror debuts of all time, and for many the definitive zombie movie, uncannily timed to comment on America’s Sixties culture wars. Fritz Lang’s Expressionist masterpiece indicts mob rule whatever its target.Ĥ.
Peter Lorre’s legendary performance, as a child-killer lurking in the harsh shadows of inter-war Germany, is especially provocative because it’s so daringly close to sympathetic. Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell are the divorced couple chasing the story of their lives, as a possibly innocent man awaits the gallows. Motormouth comedy joy, with an exhilarating Charles Lederer script cranking the old Broadway play The Front Page up to something like warp speed. Wizened, ghastly Max Schreck played the archetypal Dracula figure in this classic of vampire cinema, with its still-compelling fusion of shilling-shocker thrill value and challenging Expressionist style. Most of these films are out of copyright or have been made available by their creators, and as far as we're aware they are legal if that's not the case, please let us know. In no particular order, here's our rundown of 20 of the best. From one of Buster Keaton's greatest silent movies to Kevin Macdonald's cutting-edge digital documentary collage, there's a wealth of great films free to watch on YouTube.