frankie's - 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die List

Seven Oscar nominations were the result as celebrated director Martin Ritt guided Paul Newman to an Academy Award-nominated performance as Hud Bannon, the rebellious son of a respectable rancher who's continually at odds with his aging father.

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The second of Ingmar Bergman's trilogy on faith, 'Winter Light' springs from Bergman's desire to define man's relation to God - if He exists. A village pastor, unloved and empty of faith, reveals his bitter failure to offer spiritual consolation to his flock.

Sombre and poignant, the film sketches a world of half empty churches - but a world not entirely without hope in God's universe. The story brings together four personalities in a shared quest for spiritual reassurance. A susceptible and disillusioned fisherman (Max Von Sydow) is urged by his wife (Gunnel Lindblom) to seek solace from his local priest (Gunnar Bjornstrand). However, the priest is struggling to regain his own belief - a tragic and intimately depicted conflict, in which he is eventually supported by the cynical resilience of the local school mistress (Ingrid Thulin).

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In 1943, the Germans opened Stalag Luft North, a maximum security prisoner-of-war camp designed to hold even the craftiest escape artists.

In doing so however the Nazis unwittingly assembled the finest escape team in military history - brilliantly portrayed here by Steve McQueen, James Carner, Charles Bronson and James Coburn - who worked on what became the largest prison break-out ever attempted.

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Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), an ambitious journalist, is determined to win a Pulitzer Prize by solving a murder committed in a lunatic asylum and witnessed only by three inmates, from whom the police have been unable to extract the information.

With the connivance of a psychiatrist, and the reluctant help of his girlfriend, he succeeds in having himself declared insane and sent to the asylum. There he slowly tracks down and interviews the witnesses - but things are stranger than they seem...

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Luchino Visconti's masterpiece, The Leopard, is now available on DVD for the first time.

Featuring the complete and uncut version of the film, with fully restored picture and sound, this stunning high definition digital transfer from the film's original 70mm negative materials, overseen by the film's director of photography Giuseppe Rotunno, is presented here in its original widescreen aspect ratio..

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Filmed with a strong sense of compassion for the impoverished and an underlying hatred for the injustice which forces them into the lives they must live, this is one of the first works from Brazil's Cinema Novo.

A poor Brazilian family struggle to earn a living when they take a job overseeing the livestock of a wealthy rancher. They move into an abandoned house, and their fortunes begin to take an upward turn. The father is duped into a card game with a crooked local policeman. The ranch hand protests, and a fight ensues that results in his beating by the cop. Despite being the victim of injustice, the man believes there should be some semblance of law and order and makes no protest about the incident. A severe drought has the man moving on from the ranch with his family to earn their living elsewhere.

A short film documenting the seas and shores of the Mediterranean Sea...

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A revelation of staggering force, lyrically composed by one of the leading poets of the 20th century, Forough Farrokhzad. Her first and only film, it depicts the lives and bodies of people tragically deformed by leprosy.

A film of stirring and powerful images, and a beautifully, tragically poetic narration that heavily influenced the modern Iranian cinema of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

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"It was an evil house from the beginning, a house that was born bad". The place is the 90-year-old mansion called Hill House. No one lives there. Or so it seems. But please do come in. Because even if you don't believe in ghosts, there's no denying the terror of 'The Haunting'.

Robert Wise returned to psychological horror for this much admired, first screen adaptation of Shirley Jackson's 'The Haunting of Hill House'. Four people come to the house to study its supernatural phenomena. Or has the house drawn at least one of them to it?

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This wildly melodramatic tale of a kabuki female impersonator who exacts a long-delayed revenge on the men who drove his parents to suicide is played out against a backdrop of comic rivalries between thieves in the Tokyo underworld.

Kazuo Hasegawa plays the dual role of the actor and the thief in a film which celebrates his 300th screen appearance. A heady mixture of swooning romanticism and stylised action, with a soundtrack that ranges from traditional Japanese music to lush Hollywood strings and cocktail jazz, 'An Actor's Revenge' is a cinematic tour de force.

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Experienced manservant Barrett (Dirk Dirk Bogarde) starts working for foppish aristocrat Tony (James Fox) in his smart new townhouse. Much to the chagrin of Tony's girlfriend (Wendy Craig), Barrett slowly insinuates himself in the house and manipulates his master by slyly rearranging the decor.

The arrival of Barrett's alluring and sexually permissive 'sister' (Sarah Miles) fatally severs the class barriers and the boundaries between master and servant, as Tony succumbs to the will of his stronger adversary.

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From the opening bomb blast outside a steamy nightclub to a last-minute escape from the President's personal jet, James Bond's third screen adventure is an exhilarating, pulse-pounding thrill-ride! Sean Connery returns as Agent 007 and faces off with a maniacal villain bent on destroying all the

gold in Fort Knox - and obliterating the world economy!

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Decried as obscene upon its initial release, this short documentary style feature from avant garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger contains no dialogue and rapidly inter-cuts images against a score of slyly selected pop tunes, predating the advent of the music video by a decade and a half.

Delving into the homoerotic world of bikers, Anger focuses his camera on Scorpio (Bruce Byron), a leather-wearing, crystal methamphetamine-snorting bad boy who is alternately compared to Jesus Christ, Adolf Hitler and the Devil, depending on his activities. Scorpio is seen strutting his stuff, racing his bike, vandalising a church and attending a rowdy party where a fellow reveler is tortured and humiliated by the bikers. Through it all, Anger draws clear parallels between Scorpio's crowd, sadism and homosexuality, with alternately subtle and obvious montages depicting snippets of other films, comic strips, plenty of gleaming phallic chrome, and symbols like the Nazi swastika. Considered by many to be one of the first post-modern films, Scorpio Rising (1964) was a controversial hit only on the underground circuit, but its style greatly influenced a generation of popular filmmakers, most notably director Martin Scorsese.

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Guy Foucher (Nino Castelnuovo), a 20-year-old French auto mechanic, has fallen in love with 17-year-old Genevieve Emery (Catherine Deneuve), an employee in her widowed mother's chic but financially embattled umbrella shop.

On the evening before Guy is to leave for a two-year tour of combat in Algeria, the pair share a passionate night. Genevieve becomes pregnant and then must choose between waiting for Guy's return or accepting an attractive offer of marriage from a wealthy diamond merchant (Marc Michel).

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The Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock creates a spellbinding portrait of a disturbed woman, and the man who tries to save her, in this unrelenting psychological thriller.

'Tippi' Hedren is Marnie, a compulsive thief and liar who goes to work for Mark Rutland (Sean Connery), then attempts to rob him. Mark impulsively marries the troubled beauty and attempts to discover the reasons for her obsessive behaviour. When a terrible accident pushes his wife to the edge, Mark forces Marnie to confront her terrors and her past in a shattering, inescapable conclusion.