griggs's - Sight and Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time 2022 List

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A two-fisted adventure tale set in South America, feature stars Cary Grant as the tough-talking head of an air-freight service operating in the dangerous Andes Mountains. Jean Arthur co-stars as a vacationing showgirl competing with Rita Hayworth for Grant's affections.

A potent combination of humor, romance and action...

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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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Daniel Plainview and son are independent oil men, looking for prospects in California at the turn of the 20th century. They are challenged by a young preacher, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), whose own ambition is matched by Plainview's.

Their battle forms the centre of a scary, darkly-comic historical journey into an abyss of madness.

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Joan Crawford plays Vienna, a saloon owner with a sordid past. Persecuted by the townspeople, Vienna must protect her life and her property when a lynch mob led by her sexually repressed rival, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge), attempts to frame her for a string of robberies she did not commit.

Enter Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden), a guitar-strumming ex-gunfighter who has a history with Vienna.

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Sergei Paradjanov's celebrated, dreamlike masterpiece paints an astonishing portrait of the 18th century Armenian poet Sayat Nova, the 'King of Song'. Paradjanov's aim was not a conventional biography but a cinematic expression of his work, resulting in an extraordinary visual poem.

Key moments in his subject's life are illustrated through a series of exquisitely orchestrated tableaux filled with rich colour and stunning iconography, each scene a celluloid painting alive with stylised movement. One of cinema's most revered and beautiful films, The Colour of Pomegranates is a unique and rewarding experience that haunts the memory long after viewing.

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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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In the darkest days of World War II, two partisans, Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) and Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) set out for supplies to sustain their beleaguered outfit, braving the blizzard swept landscape of Nazi occupied Belorussia.

When they fall into the hands of German forces and come face-to-face with death, each must choose between martyrdom and betrayal, in a spiritual ordeal that lifts the film's earthy drama to the plane of religious allegory. With stark, visceral cinematography that pits blinding white snow against pitch black despair, 'The Ascent' finds poetry and transcendence in the harrowing trials of war.

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Chicago Morning Post editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant) is about to lose his ace reporter and former wife Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) to Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy).

Then a late breaking story involving the impending execution of an anarchist who escapes and is hidden from the police by the former husband and wife throws the pair together once again.

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Hollywood's hottest director Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs) assembles an all-star cast for a skillfully woven tale of small-time gangster life in a most ambitious and provocative film, 'Pulp Fiction'.

Bruce Willis (Die Hard) and Oscar Nominees John Travolta (Best Actor) and Samuel L Jackson (Best Supporting Actor) deliver career performances as petty thugs in LA's criminal underworld - where gritty confrontations, fast talk and perverse humour are all part of the daily grind. Nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award 1995, this boldly inventive and expertly orchestrated crime sage is hailed by critics as a landmark achievement in modern filmmaking!

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"Raging Bull" is arguably the finest work from the Scorsese and De Niro partnership. De Niro gives and amazing portrayal of a man whose animal side lurks just beneath the surface, ever ready to erupt.

Vivid and unremitting in its uncompromising brutality and honesty, the fight sequences are famed for their realism. Violent throughout, this film is a testament to Scorsese's and De Niro's skills, creating a thoroughly absorbing film about such an unlikable character. Renowned for throwing himself into the roles of his character, De Niro went on a diet to gain fifty pounds during production for the role of the faded star.

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"Fanny and Alexander" is Bergman's dreamlike family chronicle. The Ekdahl's are an upper-middle-class theatrical family sheltered by their own theatrics from the deepening chaos of the outside world.

One tumultuous year in the life of the Ekdahl family is viewed through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve), whose imagination fuels the magical goings-on leading up to and following the death of his father. His mother's remarriage to a stern prelate banishes Alexander and his sister Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) from all known joys, and thrusts them and the movie into a kind of gothic horror. The bishop is a Bergmanesque character whose severity has gone awry - he has become sinister - and the film's round rejection of him in favour of "kindness, affection and goodness" may be Bergman's fondest farewell to cinema.

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Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) gains notoriety when her father, a Nazi spy is convinced of treason against the US following World War II. At a party thrown soon after, Alice meets a handsome stranger named Devlin (Cary Grant) who reveals after a clash of wits and temperament that he is a U.S.

Intelligence Agent. Because she has fallen in love with the dashing FBI Agent, Alicia is persuaded into helping Devlin trap and catch Nazi mastermind Alex Sebastian. The more she gets involved in her work, the more at risk she becomes...

This true life story follows the struggles of T.E.Lawrence (Peter O'Toole) in uniting the hostile Arab factions and leading them to victory over the ruling Turkish Empire during the First World War.

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George Bailey (James Stewart) has spent his entire life in the small town of Bedford Falls.

Despite his yearning to see the world, George has always sacrificed his personal ambitions for the sake of his family and the local community, settling down to marry his childhood sweetheart, Mary (Donna Reed), and raise a family. However, when a huge amount of money goes missing from the savings and loans company he panics and finds himself preparing to commit suicide. However, he is shown the error of this idea by Clarence (Henry Travers), an angel who has been sent to Earth in order to earn his wings. To this end, Clarence shows George just how badly Bedford Falls and its residents would have turned out had he never been born.

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Finally released in 1946, ten years after it was shot, Jean Renoir's Partie de campagne was hailed as an 'unfinished masterpiece'. Since then, his masterly adaptation on a Maupassant story has grown in reputation to the point where it has become Renoir's best-loved film.

On an idyllic country picnic, a young girl leaves her family and fiancé for a while, and succumbs to an all-too-brief romance. Shot on location on the banks of two small tributaries of the Seine, Renoir's sensuous tribute to the countryside - and to the river - has seldom been surpassed. In its bitter-sweet lyricism, its tenderness and poetic feel for nature, its tolerant satire of bourgeois conventions and its poignant sense of the transience of innocence and love, 'Partie De Campagne' seems to distil the essence of all that is most personal of Renoir's art.