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

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A fearless heroine...a kung-fu master in hiding...a seemingly invincible villain...and a film that's universally regarded as one of the greatest ever made in Hong Kong.

The heroine is Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-Pei) She is been dispatched by her powerful father to rescue her brother who's been taken hostage by bandits. The kung-fu master is Fan Da-Pei (Hua Yueh); he may look like a drunken beggar but he's one of the best fighters around. Trouble is, the only man who can beat him is helping the bandits...'Come Drink with Me' shook up martial arts movies and influenced everyone from Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan and beyond.

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To the enigmatic question "Who are Seconds?", the film's original poster responded: "The answer is almost too terrifying for words.... The story of a man who buys for himself a totally new life. A man who lives the age-old dream - If only I could live my life all over again.

" John Frankenheimer directs Rock Hudson as a "second": that is, the newly plastic-surgery altered "reboot" of, in this instance, a listless banker named Arthur Hamilton. Such procedures are carried out by a secret organization known only as "The Company," with the promise of giving an individual a chance at making a fresh start at life... but at what cost? Master lighting cameraman James Wong Howe provides the paranoiac atmosphere to the skewed reality of what came to be widely considered one of Frankenheimer's very best films.

In the Deep South, homicide detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) becomes embroiled in a murder investigation. When the bigoted town sheriff (Rod Steiger) gets involved, both he and Tibbs must put aside their differences and join forces in a race against time to discover the shocking truth.

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Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are ideal as malevolent marrieds Martha and George in first-time film director Mike Nichols' searing film of Edward Albee's groundbreaking 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'.

Taylor won her second Academy Award (and New York Film Critics, National Board of Review and British Film Academy Best Actress Awards). Burton matches her as her emotionally spent spouse. And George Segal and Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner Sandy Dennis score as another couple straying into their destructive path. The movie won a total of five Academy Awards and remains a taboo-toppling landmark over 40 years later.

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Bergman's masterpiece of self-doubt, identity and eroticism is an audacious example of cinematic art. The notional story centres on newly mute actor Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) recuperating at her coastal holiday home in the care of a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson).

As tensions between the pair grow, their very selves seem to blur, chronology becomes uncertain and what is real and unreal loses significance. Yet the true impact of Persona goes beyond mere storytelling, touching, as Bergman said, 'wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover'.

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Godard's seventh feature is set against a background of an edgy France gripped by political upheaval, the Vietnam war and an election year in which De Gaulle kept his grip on power, much to the frustration of the disgruntled left...

Told in fifteen precise vignettes, Goddard skilfully paints a picture of French youth using the oddball relationship between Paul (Jean-Pierre Leaud), just demobbed from the army and politically aware, and Madeleine (Chantel Goya), an aspiring pop star. Their relationship is a struggle between consumerism and idealism, which the director exploits with considerable wit and aplomb. Besides being a superb study of contemporary French society in the late Sixties, this film marked the emergence of Jean-Luc Godard as a powerful auteur boldly examining the attitudes of an emerging youth culture in the political climate of which he was a part.

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A profound masterpiece from one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema, Robert Bresson's 'Au Hasard Balthazar' follows the donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding.

Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly. Through Bresson's unconventional approach to composition, sound, and narrative, this simple story becomes a moving parable about purity and transcendence.

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Inspired by a real article on housewife prostitution, the film examines Godard's theory that if you lived in Paris, at that time, one had to prostitute oneself to survive.

This 'sociological fable' is shot through the eyes of Juliette (Marina Vlady), a housewife who spends one day a week in central Paris selling her body on the street in the hope that she will be able to escape the high rise suburban drudgery, in which she lives with her family, and find happiness.

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Deep in the suburbs of Pasadena, a bored, confused and alienated twenty-one year old graduate named Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) awkwardly drifts from moment to moment, in constant turmoil over his lack of direction and the uncertain, impending future.

Driven by a desire for experience and desperate to avoid the corporate, deluded and mediocre world of his affluent parents, Benjamin succumbs to the advances of an older woman and begins an affair with the persuasive and enigmatic Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) the wife of one of his father's business partners. But what starts as a farcical fling becomes painfully complicated when Ben finds himself falling in love with her daughter.

Featurete is a surreal, comic vision of modern life in which the director's much-loved character, Monsieur Hulot - accompanied by a cast of tourists and well-heeled Parisians - turns unintentional anarchist when set loose in an unrecognisable Paris of steel skyscrapers, chrome-plated shopping malls and futuristic night spots.

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John Russell (Paul Newman), a white man raised by an Arizona Apache tribe, is forced to confront the society he despises when he sells the boarding house he inherits. While leaving town by stagecoach, several bigoted passengers insist he ride with the driver (Martin Balsam).

But when outlaws leave them all stranded in the desert, Russell may be their only hope for survival!

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Undoubtly Luis Bunuel's most accessibly film, Belle de Jour is an elegant and erotic masterpiece that maintains as hypnotic a grip on modern audiences as it did on its debut 40 years ago.

Screen icon Catherine Deneuve plays Severine, the glacially beautiful, sexually unfulfilled wife of a surgeon, whose blood runs cold with ennui until she takes a day-job in a brothel. There she meets a charismatic but sinister young gangster (Pierre Clementi), and ignites an obsession that will court peril. Expertly dramatizing the collision between fantasy and reality, and between depravity and respectable bourgeois values, Bunuel, working from the novel by Joseph Kessel, fashions an immaculately designed (the fetishistic interiors and production designs are astonishing) and amoral comedy of manners.

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Following on from the success of 'Les Parapluies de Cherbourg' comes 'Les Demoiselles de Rochefort' - Jacques Demy's large-scale tribute to the Hollywood musical featuring screen legend Gene Kelly The story centres on twin sisters Delphine and Solange (played by real-life sisters Catherine Deneuve

and Frangoise Dorleac) who, tired of their humdrum existence, dream of finding success and romance in Paris. The superb ensemble, also featuring Danielle Darrieux, Michel Piccoli, Jacques Perrin, George Chakiris and Grover Dale, weave and wander around the town, looking for and just missing the love of their lives.

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"Weekend" follows a bickering, scheming bourgeois couple who leave Paris for the French countryside to claim an inheritance by nefarious means.

Almost immediately, they become entangled in a cataclysmic traffic jam, which is just the beginning of a journey fraught with violence and dangerous encounters: rape, murder, pillage and even cannibalism.

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In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts.

After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him. An elegantly stylized masterpiece of cool by maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville, 'Le Samourai' is a razor-sharp cocktail of 1940's American gangster cinema and 1960's French pop culture - with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology.