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

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Look closer at the most talked about film of the year. A funny, moving and shocking journey through life in suburban America. Look closer at fortysomething ad man Lester Burnham and his status-seeking wife, Carolyn, as their marriage and lives slowly unravel.

Lester's wife hates him, his daughter Jane regards him with contempt, and his boss is positioning him for the axe. Look closer as Lester decides to make a few changes in his life; the freer he gets, the happier he gets. But Lester is about to learn that the ultimate freedom comes at the ultimate price. Look closer at an acclaimed cast led by the brilliant performances from Kevin Spacey as Lester and Annette Bening as Carolyn.

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Film documents the arrival of an engineer and his colleagues from Tehran in a remote village in Iranian Kurdistan.

Assumed by the locals - with whom they form an ambivalent relationship - to be archaeologists or telecom engineers, the visitors' behaviour and keen interest in the health of an ailing old woman appear strange and their true motives are shrouded in mystery. Haunting and visually stunning, feature is an absorbing, abstract meditation on life and death and the divisions between tradition and modernity.

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Perception: The Everyday World is Real. Reality: That World is a hoax, an elaborate deception spun by all-powerful machines of artificial intelligence that control us. Mind blowing stunts. Techno-slamming visuals. Megakick action.

Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne lead the fight to free humankind in 'The Matrix', the cyber thriller that you will watch again and again.

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Hollywood superstar Bruce brings a powerful presence to an edge-of-your-seat supernatural thriller that critics have called one of the best films in recent times. Dr.

Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) is a distinguished child psychologist haunted by the painful memory of a disturbed young patient he was unable to help. So when he meets Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osmen)... a frightened, confused eight-year-old with a similar condition... Dr. Crowe seeks to redeem himself by doing everything he can. Nonetheless, Malcolm is unprepared to learn the truth of what haunts Cole: terrifying, unwanted visits from the restless inhabitants of the spirit world. With a riveting intensity you'll find thoroughly chilling and utterly unforgettable, the discovery of Cole's incredible 6th sense leads them both to mysterious and unforeseeable consequences.

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In 2000 Agnes Varda travelled the France countryside and the markets of Paris to the study the lives of a collection of foragers and scavengers called The Gleaners. This remarkable collection of people insist of making use of materials that the public have so easily discarded.

Varda admits to being a gleaner of sorts herself, which gives this honest and intriguing documentary a very special connection.

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Set in Buenos Aires over the course of 24 hours, Nine Queens is a taut, highly seductive heist thriller in which nothing is what it seems and where no one can be trusted.

A naive young con artist (Gaston Pauls) teams up with an enigmatic, experienced master criminal (Ricardo Darin) for what could be the crime to end all crimes. But in a relationship propelled by brinkmanship and double-cross, corruption rarely has a happy ending.

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Acclaimed director Chantal Akerman becomes the latest filmmaker to take inspiration from Marcel Proust’s epic masterwork 'In Search of Lost Time'. Adapted from the fifth volume, 'The Captive' tells the story of Ariane, who lives under her lover Simon’s surveillance in a grandiose Parisian apartment.

Simon harbours an obsessional need to know everything about her. He has her accompanied everywhere she goes and subjects her to endless questioning. Knowing of Ariane’s attraction to women, Simon imagines that she leads a double life, which only serves to increase his desire for her. Akerman’s film is an elegantly constructed and compelling meditation on love, desire and obsession.

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Hong Kong, 1962. Chow (Tony Leung) is a junior newspaper editor with an elusive wife. His new neighbour Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) is a secretary whose husband seems to spend all his time on business trips. They become friends, making the lonely evenings more bearable.

As their relationship develops they make a discovery that changes their lives forever...

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Mektoub became one of the most successful and acclaimed features in Moroccan history. For Ali Zaoua, Ayouch cast homeless children from the streets of Casablanca. Ali Zaoua's urban landscapes are a far cry from the iconic images of the legendary film Casablanca.

However, Ayouchi's compassion toward the children and their plight is evident in every frame of the film as he contrasts their stark reality with the fantastic dream world to which they seek to escape.

Forced into slavery by the corrupt, incestuous heir to be throne, Roman general Maximus (Russell Crowe) becomes a gladiator. His prowess in the arena will eventually lead him to Rome, the Colosseum and a vengeful showdown with the new emperor.

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October 6th, 1973 is a special day. All is quiet, for it's Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). When war suddenly breaks out, Weinraub and his friend Rousso head quickly for the Golan Heights looking for Egoz, the special unit in which they served as conscripts.

Everything is chaotic, amongst the armed forces and civilians alike. They don't find the Egoz Unit but the next morning they meet Klauzner, a doctor, who is trying to reach the air force base of Ramat David. They decide to join an air force rescue team. Amos Gitai's autobiographical depiction of the experiences of a small medical unit on the front-line during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Syrian and Egyptian forces made a surprise attack on Israel on one of that country's holiest days, is a devastating and visceral insight into the horrors of war.

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Edward Yang's multi-award-winning film looks at several turbulent weeks in the life of the Jian family. Husband and father NJ (Nien-Jen Wu) is a partner in a failing software company, which might just save itself by teaming up with an innovative Japanese games designer.

Meanwhile his wife Min-Min (Elaine Jin) has gone off to a mountain retreat with a dubious guru, his teenage daughter Ting Ting (Kelly Lee) is getting her first, rough lessons in love, his young son Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang) is asking difficult questions and getting into trouble at school - and his mother-in-law has suffered a stroke and lies in a coma. In the middle of all the confusion NJ runs into his childhood sweetheart Sherry, the girl he jilted twenty years earlier, and starts to wonder about starting over.

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Darren Aronofsky follows up his acclaimed debut 'Pi' with this gritty, emotionally charged film set amidst the abandoned beaches and faded glory of Coney Island, Brooklyn. Based upon the novel by celebrated author Hubert Selby Jr.

, the story intricately links the lives of a lonely widowed mother (Ellen Burstyn), her son Harry (Jared Leto), his beautiful girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly), and his best friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans). Requiem for a Dream is a hypnotic tale of four human beings each pursuing their vision of happiness. Even as everything begins to fall apart, they refuse to let go, plummeting with their dreams into a nightmarish, gut-wrenching freefall.

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Beginning with a kinetic, bone-crushing car accident, 'Amores Perros' imaginatively interweaves the stories of its three victims: Octavio (Gael Garcia Bernal) a young man who has fallen in love with his violent brother's wife; Valeria (Goya Toledo), a beautiful Mexican model for whom physical

appearances are everything and El Chivo (Emilio Echevarria), a former political assassin now exiled from his family. The result is a moving, visceral eulogy to life, loss and dog fighting on Mexico's mean streets.

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Male nurse Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) is poised to propose to his girlfriend Pam (Teri Polo) during a weekend stay at her parents' home. But here's the catch... he needs to ask her father first.

Alas, the fur flies as Jack Byrnes, Pam's cat-crazy, ex-CIA father, played by Robert De Niro, takes an immediate dislike to her less-than-truthful beau. Greg's quest for approval gets seriously sidetracked as Murphy's Law takes over and a hilarious string of mishaps turn him into a master of disaster and total pariah in the eyes of the entire family... all except for his shell-shocked girlfriend, who can't believe she still loves her one-man wreaking crew.