Cary Grant cranks the Cary Grantness to 11 as Roger Thornhill, a New York ad man mistaken for a spy and pursued across America by a shady cabal, sending him scurrying through cornfields, scaling Mount Rushmore and flirting royally with femme fatale Eva Marie Saint. It’s also his most compulsively watchable, a caper that is at once suave, sexy, genuinely suspenseful and frequently, joyfully ridiculous. Declaring his most ‘definitive’ film is largely a matter of personal preference, but North By Northwest is perhaps the best at encapsulating his particular ability to appeal to mass audiences, critics and dedicated cineastes, all in the same moment. Matthew SingerĮvery film fan intrinsically knows what it means for a movie to be deemed ‘Hitchcockian’, but the truth is that Alfred Hitchcock himself made many different kinds of movies in his career, encompassing many different moods and narratives. And as it turns out, working for the mafia isn’t much different than any other job - you spend 30 years busting your hump to climb the ladder, only to end up face down on a bloody carpet in some tacky house in the burbs. Where Coppola went inside the walls of organised crime’s one percent, Scorsese’s gangsters are more blue collar. And for a movie about violent career criminals, it’s also strangely relatable. Certainly, the former is more easily rewatchable, owing to its breakneck pacing – its two and a half hours (and three decades) just whiz by. Based on the true life of mobster Henry Hill, Goodfellas was born in the shadow of The Godfather, but as the years go on, the question of which is more influential becomes mostly a matter of generation. ‘As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.’ Ray Liotta’s opening line is the crime movie equivalent of ‘Once upon a time…’, and what follows is Martin Scorsese’s version of a fairy tale – the story of a starry-eyed Brooklyn kid who realises his boyhood dream and still comes out a schnook in the end. Kubrick’s frighteningly clinical vision of the future – AI and all – still feels prophetic, more than 50 years on.- Phil de Semlyen Were it not for them, 2001 might have faded into obscurity, but it’s hard to imagine it would have stayed there. An audience of stoners, wowed by its eye-candy Star Gate sequence and pioneering visuals, adopted it as a pet movie. Clarke was actually living in Ceylon (not in India, or a tree), but the pair met, hit it off, and forged a story of technological progress and disaster (hello, HAL) that’s steeped in humanity, in all its brilliance, weakness, courage and mad ambition. ‘I understand he’s a nut who lives in a tree in India somewhere,’ noted Kubrick when Clarke’s name came up – along with those of Isaac Asimov, Robert A Heinlein and Ray Bradbury – as a possible writer for his planned sci-fi epic. The greatest film ever made began with the meeting of two brilliant minds: Stanley Kubrick and sci-fi seer Arthur C Clarke. □ The 100 greatest ever TV shows you need to binge □ The 100 greatest horror films ever made Written by Abbey Bender, Dave Calhoun, Phil de Semlyen, Bilge Ebiri, Ian Freer, Stephen Garrett, Tomris Laffly, Joshua Rothkopf, Anna Smith and Matthew Singer Whether you fall in love with something new or get mad about what’s not on here, we’re confident you’ll feel something one way or another – and really, that’s what all great movies should do. You almost certainly won’t agree with everything, or even most of it, but we’ve still made a point of covering as much ground as possible, from bank-breaking blockbusters to indie classics, absurd comedies to disturbing horror, from mind-melting thrillers to adrenaline-pumping action flicks. And even if you’ve seen every movie here already, perhaps it’ll force you to reconsider your own preconceived notions about what makes any movie one of the greats. If you’re filling in the gaps of your movie knowledge, just starting to build it, these 100 movies make for an excellent starting point. Well, we like to think of this exercise as less of an attempt to craft a definitive canon and more as a springboard – or perhaps ‘roadmap’ is the better word. (Okay, maybe not vice-versa, but you get the idea.) Why bother even attempting to rank the best movies ever made at all, then? Tastes vary, and one person’s The Godfather is another’s Gotti. And that’s what makes putting together a list of the greatest movies of all-time a particularly gruelling challenge. The issue is not everyone loves the same movies.
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