Saturday 19 February 2011

Great films you might not have seen

Some films I love, about which I hope to spread the word. Please recommend me some back.


(I apologise for not offering some visual appetisers for the movies below).

La Regle Du Jeu - Dazed And Confused for your grandparents' generation. Directed by Jean Renoir, the painter's son.


The Odessa File - sits right up there with the original The Day Of The Jackal in terms of classic 70's thrillers. Simply great.

The Day Of The Beast
 - I will sing Alex de la Iglesia's praises until the day I die, and this is possibly his finest hour. How this man is not known outside Spain I do not comprehend.



Ace In The Hole - also known as The Big Carnival, this became particularly poignant, even 50 years later, during the Chilean miners' crisis.

Vanishing Point - Most probably you will have heard of it, but have you actually seen it? Genius. The pinnacle of the 70's road movie, and puts Duel in sobering perspective.

Hard Times
 - The Walter Hill movie starring Charles Bronson and James Coburn, not one of the myriad adaptations of Dickens' novel. Classic B-movie stuff. You might have spotted by now that I'm a sucker for 70's genre flicks...

Capricorn One - read my rant/review here.

Soylent Green - As long as no-one is fool enough to give away the twist (as was done for me), and you can ignore the cardboard sets and other cheapnesses, a really good, underappreciated movie. You will probably never hear me say this about any other movie, but it is ripe for a remake.

The Browning Version - Going back a bit now, I mean the Redgrave version. I was first shown this by my English GCSE teacher, which in retrospect smacks of pityfishing. Quite moving, and quintessentially English. The academic cousin of Brief Encounter, if you will... EDIT: I have since rewatched this on the big screen - see the post about my first BFI experience).

2 comments:

  1. nice list. some i've seen and some i have yet to.
    now i want to compile a list of my own.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I look forward to seeing it!

    ReplyDelete