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

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The Spider's Stratagem (Italian: Strategia del Ragno) is a political film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. The screenplay was written by Bertolucci based on "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" story written by Jorge Luis Borges.

Athos Magnani, a young researcher, returns to Tara, where his father was killed before his birth, at the request of his mistress, Draifa. The father, also named Athos Magnani (a wartime anti-fascist hero) and looking exactly like the son, was killed by a fascist in 1936-or so says Draifa, the town statue, and everyone in the city. As the son untangles the web of lies this story is constructed from, he finds himself ensnared in the same web.

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In this sweeping epic that swings from high comedy to drama, Dustin Hoffman gives a "virtuoso performance" (Hollywood Reporter) as the 121-year-old sole survivor of Custer's Last Stand.

Narrating his colorful life story, he tells about everything from his adoption by Cheyenne Indians to his marriages and friendship with Wild Bill Hickok. His tall tales indicate he just may be one of the biggest liars who roamed' the West.

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Although made in 1970, The Ear (Ucho) was immediately banned by the Czech authorities and remained unseen for twenty years, being finally released only after the Velvet Revolution took place in Czechoslovakia.

This landmark film is an extraordinary mix of one of the most direct indictments of life under an oppressive totalitarian system and a not-so-private examination of a disintegrating marital relationship.

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A critically acclaimed film that won a total of eight 1970 Academy Awards (including Best Picture), 'Patton' is a riveting portrait of one of the 20th century's greatest military geniuses. One of its Oscars went to George C.

Scott for this triumphant portrayal of George Patton, the only Allied general truly feared by the Nazis. Charismatic and flamboyant, Patton designed his own uniforms, sported ivory-handled six-shooters, and believed he was a warrior in past lives. He outmaneuvered Rommel in Africa, and after D-Day led his troops in an unstoppable campaign across Europe. But he was as rebellious as well as brilliant, and as 'Patton' shows with insight and poignancy, his own volatile personality was one enemy he could never defeat.

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Hailed as one of the best comedies ever made and nominated for 5 Academy Awards including Best Picture, the story focuses on army surgeons who develop a lunatic life-style in order to handle every day horrors encountered in Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean war.

Though highly skilled and deeply dedicated, this irreverent mob of madcaps is equally adept at making a shambles of army bureaucracy.

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In underworld terms, Chas Devlin is a "performer", a gangster with a talent for violence and intimidation. Turner is a reclusive rock superstar. When Chas and Turner meet, their worlds collide - and the impact is both exotic and explosive.

James Fox and Mick Jagger indelibly play Chas and Turner in this spellbinder of illusion and reality, decadence and decay. Fugitive Chas hides in Turner's cavernous house. Events then spiral into an eerie breakdown of barriers and roles in which Chas sees his sense of reality vanish. And Turner's experiment of self-discovery leads to a shocking, final performance of his own.

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Cinema verite pioneers David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin's groundbreaking documentary follows the Rolling Stones on their 1969 U.S. tour. From New York to California in ten days, the filmmakers set out to record the raw sweat and swagger of the world's greatest rock band.

By the time the tour ends at the infamous free concert at the Altamont Speedway, the filmmakers have chronicled a combustive mix of violence, chaos and counterculture that has since come to define the end of the Love Generation.

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A young couple is at the centre of the movie maestro's keen-eyed lens. She (Daria Halprin) is a sometime secretary whose duties may extend to the boudoir of her boss (Rod Taylor). He (Mark Frechette) is a sometime student who may be involved in a cop's death.

The two meet, connect, play, love, move on: he to tragedy, she to an open road.

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Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante), an American writer living in Rome, inadvertently witnesses a brutal attack on a woman (Eva Renzi) in a modern art gallery. Powerless to help, he grows increasingly obsessed with the incident.

Convinced that something he saw that night holds the key to identifying the maniac terrorising Rome, he launches his own investigation parallel to that of the police, heedless of the danger to both himself and his girlfriend Giulia (Suzy Kendall)...

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Set at the outbreak of War, De Sica's film tells the story of the Finzi Contini, an aristocratic Jewish family protected by the walls of their idyllic estate.

Whilst outside Mussolini bans Jews from tennis courts, the Finzi Contini are not worried as they rally on their own, living in their dreamland. Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio) is the middle-class Jew in love with his childhood friend, Micol (Dominique Sanda) of the Finzi Contini family, but she is in love with a gentile and wanting of experiences outlawed by the new government. With Giorgio's separation of Micol, De Sica tracks the loss of an idyllic way of life, from the tennis courts to the waiting rooms where Jews await transportation to the concentration camps.

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With her first and only feature film - a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in - Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen.

Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate verite style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Barbara Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men - including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. An until now difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, Wanda is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society's margins.

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This is a collage-style exploration of the ideas of radical sexologist Wilhelm Reich.

Dusan Makavejev intermingles documentary material on Reich's own life, scenes reflecting late Sixties American sexual counter-culture, and the fictional story of the sexually liberated Milena who attempts to spread the Reichian doctrine to a handsome but leaden Russian skating star.

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Stomping, whomping, stealing, singing, tap dancing, violating. Derby-topped hooligan Alex (Malcolm McDowell) has a good time - at the tragic expense of others.

His journey from amoral punk to brainwashed proper citizen and back again forms the dynamic arc of Stanley Kubrick's future-shock vision of Anthony Burgess' novel.

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Marcel Ophuls' four-and-a-half hour portrait of the French town of Clermont-Ferrand under German occupation from 1940-44 is one of the greatest documentaries ever made, as important as Claude Lanzmann's 'Shoah' in its value not just as a film but as an essential historical record in its own right -

not least since its interviewees are all long dead. Describing the fall of France and the rise of the Resistance, with the aid of newly-shot interviews and eye-opening archive footage including newsreels and propaganda films, Ophuls painstakingly crafts a complex, nuanced picture of what really happened in France over this period. He also demolishes numerous self-serving national myths to such an extent that, although he made the film for French television, they wouldn't show it for over a decade. But, as he demonstrates again and again, the overwhelming majority of French citizens during this period weren't heroes, villains or cowards, but simply ordinary people trying to make the best of an impossible situation. And it's Ophuls' portrayal of these people, their hopes, their fears and their appalling moral quandaries, that remains unmatched in film history.

With a golden ticket young Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum) wins a tour of the factory of wily mogul Wonka (Gene Wilder) and run by his Oompa-Loompa crew. There Charlie, his Grandpa Joe (Jack Albertson) and others discover a kind heart is a finer possession than a sweet tooth.