Films beginning with S (part 1) | Movies
1000 films to see before you dieMoviesFilms beginning with S (part 1)
(Billy Wilder, 1954)
One of the all-time great love triangles; chauffeur's daughter Audrey Hepburn, playboy William Holden, and his businessman brother Humphrey Bogart. Which will she choose? You'll have to watch it to find out. So unashamedly romantic it's astounding the normally acid-dripping Billy Wilder had anything to do with it.
(Todd Haynes, 1995)
Housewife Carol (Julianne Moore) develops a mysterious illness that begins to seem like an allergy to her very life. As Carol's body dwindles and she falls prey to New Age quackery, she retreats into increasingly extreme seclusion until she is utterly alone - the devastating final shot is a masterstroke of raw simplicity.
(Mira Nair, 1988)
Set in Bombay's red light district, against a backdrop of Bollywood's dream-laden billboards, Nair's ultra-realist debut is a bleak, harrowing offering that chronicled the lives of Bombay's junkies, prostitutes and homeless. Using real street children as actors Salaam Bombay's understated reportage feel recalled Satyajit Ray at his best.
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975)
Most viewers of this film will have to turn their heads from the screen at some point - if not all points. It is one of the most notorious and shocking ever made, replete with scenes of rape, torture, coprophagy, mutilation and general degradation. It's certainly not a film anyone could profess to love, and if they did, you'd probably want to recommend them an analyst. But to dismiss Salo as mere trigger-happy taboo-breaking would be to deny the questions it raises. Certainly, only an outsider like the Marxist, homosexual Pasolini would even contemplate adapting the Marquis de Sade's already-infamous 120 Days of Sodom and fusing it with the last days of Mussolini's fascist regime: Salo was the Italian resort town where Mussolini briefly set up a government after the Nazis rescued him from the hands of the partisans. The basic story involves four powerful men - "The Duke", "The Bishop", "The Magistrate", and "The President" - who round up a group of young peasants, male and female, and subject them to an onslaught of horrific acts. No conventional narrative is followed: we are offered a series of tableaux, Sadean discussion interspersed with brutal torture. A blunt political allegory, maybe, but Salo aims at wider targets: the social rituals we hold dear, human compulsions; greed, consumption, even corporate culture. It confronts our society in a way few art forms ever have or will. And as if in a coda to this ultimate act of cinematic brutalisation, Pasolinio himself was murdered shortly before its release.
Steve Rose
(Jean Pierre Melville, 1967)
Melville's first film in colour, Le Samourai tracks Alain Delon's doomed assassin through the Parisian night as he tries to slay the beautiful witness to a botched contract-killing. Ice-cold and existential, trapped in muted, crepuscular hues, it's as much about mood and tone as about plot or noir conventions.
(Chris Marker, 1983)
A dreamy, freeform contrivance from Marker, as an anonymous narrator recounts an absent traveller's poetic meditations on his roamings, mostly around Japan. Part anthropology doc, part photographic tone poem, it's perhaps only occasionally as profound as it thinks it is, but there's great pleasure to be had in surrendering to its tyranny of image.
(Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)
"Without mercy, a man is like a beast. Be sympathetic toward others," the young protagonist is told early on in Kenji Mizoguchi's heart-rending epic, set in feudal Japan. The lines sum up the film's themes in a nutshell, as a mother is forced into prostitution while her son and daughter become slaves of the villainous Sansho. This drama about a family torn apart is on a Shakespearian scale.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(Karel Reisz, 1960)
A groundbreaking slice of social drama, adapted by Alan Sillitoe from his acclaimed novel: working-class passions were uncharted territory, but this actually showed a couple in bed. It also made the names of Reisz, and of a young Albert Finney, whose cocky Nottingham factory worker Arthur Seaton seduces married woman Rachel Roberts.
(John Badham, 1977)
Don't let the disco throw you: John Travolta's breakthrough movie is much grittier than people give it credit for. It might be best remembered for the soundtrack, the suits and the sashays, but at its heart is a bleak tale about American working-class hopelessness.
(Cyril Collard, 1992)
Collard's savagely anti-sentimental, autobiographical movie about HIV-AIDS, based on his own novel Les Nuits Fauves, now looks like a pre-emptive counterblast to the more cautious liberal approach of Hollywood in Philadelphia. Collard played a version of himself in the 1980s, a bisexual author and film-maker who engages in promiscuous, unsafe sex, even after he discovers he is HIV-positive. Many were affronted by this bacchanal of self-destruction, and the destruction of other people. Collard himself died shortly after the film came out.
(Steven Spielberg, 1998)
No glamour or heroics for Spielberg in this relentlessly gripping war movie. The opening combat scenes achieve a rare horror and immediacy, as jerky camerawork captures GIs landing on the beaches at Normandy only to be cut down and blown apart. The subsequent search sees Tom Hanks and his tiny squad set off in a gruelling search for missing soldier Matt Damon.
(Brian De Palma, 1983)
De Palma's biggest hit, Pacino's craziest performance and to this day a model piece of career counselling for goons, thugs and wannabe rappers of every stripe. Chainsaws, incest, mountains of cocaine, guns-a-mundo and Cuban racist stereotypes by the dozen: "Say hello to my leeeeetle friend!"
(Anh Hung Tran, 1993)
Favouring placidity and tenderness over plot histrionics, this beautiful Vietnamese film refreshes the senses. Through the eyes of our heroine, an angelic orphan sent to work in a wealthy household, the world becomes a place of delicate little pleasures â" until she grows up, at least.
(Michel Gondry, 2006)
Directing his own script for the first time, Gondry's prodigious visual imagination runs free in the home-made dream sequences for this tale of a flaky young artist ineptly chasing his next-door neighbour. It's daffily indulgent, but with Gael Garcia Bernal a charming surrogate for his director, it also bears the invaluable imprimatur of a unique mind.
(Kenneth Anger, 1964)
Inter-cutting fetishistic images of leather-clad Tom of Finland-style bikers, James Dean, gleaming souped-up hogs and shots of Jesus from cheesy religious epics, all overlaid with aching rock-n-roll songs and ballads. Anger homoeroticised the biker demimonde for evermore, and revolutionised the use of rock music in movies a decade before American Graffiti.
(Ricky Tognazzi, 1993)
Tough-nosed, riveting account of a Mafia judge's bodyguard unit in modern Sicily - the "escort" of the title - with a magnificent central performance from brooding Enrico Lo Verso. Both a film swimming in topicality and a counterpoint to the stylizations of the traditional organized-crime movie.
(Wes Craven, 1996)
Wes Craven's career has come back from the dead more times than his hard-to-kill dream-haunter Freddy Krueger. His 1970s high-tide, which produced such barnstorming horror hits as The Hills Have Eyes and Last House On the Left, ebbed long before his second act was inaugurated by the first A Nightmare On Elm Street in 1984. Eight or so sequels later, Wes was once again treading water, this time in the ceaselessly self-referential age of Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith, when he might have had cause to feel a bit past it. So it was a good day when Kevin Williamson's smart, violent and very witty script for Scream came in over the transom. Williamson was a diehard fan of the late-70s/early-80s horror-gore boom, and his script was a mash-up of every ridiculous and predictable scenario thrashed out by the blood-merchants in those years. It was clever, funny and best of all, it knew how to be scary when needed. The opening sequence, featuring Drew Barrymore as a woman menaced and murdered by an assailant in an Edvard Munch mask, flipped enough people out for opportunistic politicians to demand a screening in Congress. But audiences - primed by the success of Pulp Fiction to mine every new movie for cultural references of every kind - fell hook, line and sinker for Scream, and a newly knowing mass audience came along too. Craven fell back into the sequel game again almost immediately, knocking out 2 and 3 to increasing box-office returns, but none was ever quite as loveably, wittily malign as this original.
John Patterson
(John Ford, 1956)
Five years back, the Comanche made off with Ethan Edwards's niece. By now she must be a squaw and she might look like Natalie Wood. So is John Wayne's Ethan searching for her to save her, or to stamp out the racial crime? John Ford's finest and most disturbing film, thanks to John Wayne as Ethan â" too wild to live in the house.
(Jacques Audiard, 1996)
Mathieu Kassovitz turns his delicate touch as an actor to darker ends as a compulsive fabulist who reinvents himself as a Resistance hero after the second world war. A patient, sad character study, A Self-Made Hero confirmed Audiard as a modern French director with something serious to say and the savoir-faire to make you listen.
(John Waters, 1994)
The central gag of a suburban homemaker turned serial killer is a good one, and Waters gives it his all with a slew of gags aimed at the hypocrisy of middle-class American life. Kathleen Turner gives an anything goes performance as the wife who acts upon those "oooh, I could kill someone" moments we all get when faced with video tapes that aren't rewound or uncaring neighbours.
(Joseph Losey, 1963)
A claustrophobic battle of wills in a posh Georgian house in Chelsea, with Dirk Bogarde the valet who gradually enslaves diffident, upper-crust James Fox. The allegory looks a little obvious now, with its heavy symbolism (look deep into the much-polished distorting mirror . . .), but it's a breathtakingly savage portrait of the English class system by the US outcast Losey.
(Robert Wise, 1949)
Wise has to be one of the most underrated and versatile of Hollywood directors â" his CV includes The Haunting, The Day The Earth Stood Still and The Sound Of Music. This boxing noir unfolds in real time as Robert Ryan's failing fighter refuses to take a dive and has to face the unpleasant consequences.
(David Fincher, 1995)
Although the success of The Silence Of The Lambs had flooded the market with serial killer movies, Fincher's film managed to offer something new - not only for the viewer to enjoy but also something for less imaginative film-makers to copy. Unlike the imitations that followed, the darkness here is not just cosmetic; it has real impact and resonance.
(Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
For decades in the west, Kurosawa simply defined Japanese cinema: his muscular, accessible dramas were massively influential here, and none more than this story. A poor village, continuously under attack by bullying bandits, pools its resources to hire seven unemployed samurai for a last, desperate stand. The villagers are redeemed by their courage, and the rackety swordsmen-for-hire by their fight for the underdog. Tremendously exciting and affecting.
(Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
"Bin to Atlantic City a million times - ain't never[ITAL] seen Death walkin' on the beach!" says Steve Guttenberg in Diner, but here he is, playing chess with the young and fearsomely blond Max von Sydow. Ponderous but unforgettable high-water mark of Ingmar Bergman's international career.
(Steven Soderbergh, 1989)
A frigid housewife, her adulterous husband, her deceitful sister, and an impotent voyeur: these are the ingredients of the film that won 26-year-old Soderbergh the Palme d'Or. Cerebral and dense with talk, it's mostly devoid of cheap thrills - despite that fabulous title.
(Jonathan Glazer, 2000)
An intelligent, lucidly-shot rebuff to the Guy Ritchie school of gangsterism, you realise Sexy Beast's loyalties are a little closer to the weirdness of Performance when one character hallucinates an Uzi-toting bunny. Ben Kingsley's demented turn as the unwelcome interloper on the Costa del Crime is on the same surreal level, and, as his reluctant host, Ray Winstone is intriguingly soft; feminine even.
(John Cassavetes, 1959)
A family portrait and an interracial love story, this was the sensational debut of the man who would become the godfather of indie film. With a fantastic jazz score and fluid on-location photography, the movie also introduces the volatile domestic dramas and identity crises that would become touchstones of Cassavetes' career.
(Gordon Parks, 1971)
Blaxploitation starts here, with esteemed Time photographer and novelist Gordon Parks making his biggest hit and branding into our collective retina Richard Roundtree's two-fisted loverman detective and mean-ass mother, in a world where the white man's taxicab won't stop for a brother.
(George Stevens, 1953)
Buckskin-clad Alan Ladd is the reluctant gunfighter who rides in to town to defend the homesteaders against a ruthless rancher and his hired gun - grinning Jack Palance. What elevates the film is Shane's emotional ties with honest-toiler Van Heflin, his wife Jean Arthur, and their boy, Brandon de Wilde: it's among the top fistful of westerns.
(Edgar Wright, 2004)
George A Romero comes to London's Crouch End in this funny zombie movie. Simon Pegg stars as the slacker trying to win back his girlfriend while apocalypse rages, but Nick Frost steals the film as his laidback drinking buddy helping to fight the undead with a very British armoury of cricket bats, shovels and mug trees.
(Frank Darabont, 1994)
Stately melodrama, based on a Stephen King novella, that is a moving study of hope and friendship. Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman are the convicts who find redemption through acts of common decency. Sentimental, for sure, but also a gripping, well-acted yarn.
(Spike Lee, 1986)
Lee's effervescent debut, telling the polysexual adventures of Nola Darling with great wit and faultless sense of authenticity. It seems a long time ago now, but it was a genuine breakthrough in independently-envisioned African-American cinema.
(Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Kubrick's last masterpiece, a deeply pessimistic consideration of modern man's capacity for violence and bloodshed, underpinned by a soundtrack filled with threnodies to the dead of Auschwitz and the gulag, and powered by a demented Nicholson performance. Also the first great SteadiCam movie.
(Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
Overwhelming 500-minute documentary that sought to record eye-witness testimony of the Holocaust - no archive footage is used at any point - while the participants are still alive. In its simple accrual of detail, it's a devastating riposte to anyone even flirting with the obscenity of Holocaust denial.
(Samuel Fuller, 1963)
A journalist feigns mental illness to get himself admitted to a psychiatric hospital in order to solve a murder. It's an ill-conceived plan on his part and Fuller's stark direction does a great job of creating a world where madness permeates everything.
(Ramesh Sippy, 1975)
The most popular Indian movie ever made, and one that has acquired the same iconic status as Star Wars or Gone With the Wind. The presence of future superstar Amitabh Bachchan has a lot to do with that, but it's a great crowdpleaser all round, filled with vivid characters, rousing action and a classic score.
(Francois Truffaut, 1960)
After his groundbreaking debut Les 400 Coups, Truffaut retreated from autobiography to embrace serie-noir genre film-making as a breather before the ambitious Jules et Jim, upending many of the crime movie's stylistic conventions in adapting David Goodis's pulp classic for the screen. Energetic, wistful and fatalistic, and Aznavour's gloomily sardonic presence is a bonus.
(Robert Altman, 1993)
Altman interweaves Raymond Carver's short stories (and one original thread of Altman's own) for a poisoned valentine to Los Angeles. The bitterly funny mosaic that results is so full of standout performances and subtle textures that it rewards repeat viewings even at three-plus hours.
(Kyzystzof Kieslowski, 1988)
The best-known, and best, of Kieslowski's extraordinary Dekalog, 10 films based on the 10 commandments, enacted on a dour Warsaw housing estate. This is a masterly account of two murders: a youth's whimsical, hideous killing of a taxi driver, and the state's equally brutal revenge/execution.
(Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson, 2001)
Infectious animation that inverts the stereotypes of its fairytale cast to great effect. Mike Myer's Shrek is a less-than-jolly green giant, forced into uncharacteristic heroics after his swamp is invaded by exiled fable characters. Irrepressible sidekick Donkey is one of the best fits for Eddie Murphy's motormouth skills since Beverly Hills Cop.
(Alexander Payne, 2004)
Two barely mature adults - one a sad-sack alcoholic, the other about to be married - take a bachelors' road trip through California wine country with disastrous results. Payne's wry buddy movie confronts self-loathing and despair while rarely neglecting the laughs - particularly memorable is the pair's messy encounter with an amorous, ample-bodied couple.
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