25-Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Dir: Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam
The list begins with an uproarious and iconoclast classic of British comedy at its most outrageous. Hot on the heels of their seminal TV series Monty Python's Flying Circus and its cinematic version, Holy Grail sees the incredible comedy troupe playing fast and loose with the Arthurian legend, turning the much-touted king into an insufferable snob, his knights into cowardly or casually psychopathic sword wielders and their quest for the Grail into one of the most surreally hilarious adventures committed to the screen, with endlessly quotable comic characters (John Cleese as the shouty, showboating enchanter Tim, particularly), gore, fourth-wall-busting tomfoolery and much tongue-in-cheek drollery.
24-Modern Times (1936)
Dir: Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin
There are many Chaplin classics that contend for everlasting greatness, from the unexpected romance of City Lights to the timely satire of The Great Dictator but none of them quite portrays the sheer pathos of the hapless human being as Modern Times. Made in the disillusioned aftermath of the Great Depression, this gem, that sees the Little Tramp and his streetwise love on a vain and foolhardy quest for livelihood and happiness, is the earliest example of comedy being prescient and profound. And it still tickles many a rib, especially as we see the Tramp dodging an industrial, capitalist world and even struggling to sing as a waiter.
23-The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957)
Dir: Sir David Lean
So many thrillers staged against the backdrop of World War II remain childhood favourites but few remain to be as brilliant and potent as Lean's magnificent, sweltering cinematic battle of wits and egos. Adapting Pierre Boulle's rattling novel with a brisk, businesslike air, the visually assured filmmaker delivers a complex, troubling character study with his regular Sir Alec Guinness turning in a majestic performance as Colonel Nicholson, a delusional British liaison who collaborates with his Japanese captors only to prove the benighted superiority of Englishmen. Parallel to it, he ratchets up a thrilling plot to blow up the bridge, culminating in an explosive travesty that has to be seen to be believed.
22-Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Dir- Quentin Tarantino
Yes, Pulp Fiction was the showier, more influential classic and yes, Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds had more punchy, provocative things to talk about. But Reservoir Dogs, for me, is Tarantino at his most thrilling, trailblazing and terrific. Turning the simple robbery-gone-wrong premise into a fiery, foul-mouthed feast of some of the angriest and most delicious banter, the film also packs in fascinatingly believable and even morbidly likeable crooks with whom the writer-director gets up close and personal. The paranoia and violence are sobering, the soundtrack roars and the performances, especially from Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth, are as real and raunchy as they can be.
21-Performance (1970)
Dir- Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg
One of the most ground-breaking British films of all time, Performance has lost none of its strange, anarchic and delirious glory as a sinful and sexy celebration of the most ludicrous excesses of the counterculture of the end of the sixties. Populated by pudgy, homoerotic mob bosses and filmed across the socio-economic sprawl of London, Cammell and Roeg's hyperkinetic film meshes recklessly the not-so-disparate worlds of gangster violence and anti-establishment cultural and sexual subversion. James Fox plays the slithery hitman Chas while Mick Jagger romps around rollickingly as jaded rockstar Turner and the film goes brilliantly, beautifully berserk as it lets these two men dissolve into each other.
20- Black Narcissus (1947)
Dir- Michael Powell
Call it an abstract, bewilderingly film fashioned like one of those dated but enjoyable colonial-era novels or a simmering Freudian inquiry into the fallibility of the stifling superego to the desperate desire of the id. But it is impossible to deny that Black Narcissus, helmed with an immersive, poetic eye by Powell and penned in ambiguous strokes by Emeric Pressburger, is a cinematic feast that has lost none of its pre-chroma key era glory. Filmed, for most part, in England and yet bringing painstakingly to life the dazzling exotica of the Himalayas, with Jack Cardiff's ethereal visuals and Alfred Junge's incredible sets, this is also a moody, seething drama of coiled erotic force.
19- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Dir- Stanley Kubrick
Like Black Narcissus, this is a film that wields not only intriguing, thought-provoking ideas to bother our minds but also utterly gorgeous audio-visual delights to keep our eyes riveted on the screen. Seldom has there been a film with such magnificent operatic effects, visuals and aural swells that you surrender to willingly, that is not when you are thinking with mind-numbing fascination. Shuttling from the dawn of man to the space race of the future and spanning a rich, protracted narrative of wide-eyed discovery and nerve-jangling apprehension, 2001 is also cinema at its most poetic and imaginative, rendered to crystallised perfection by the unyieldingly brilliant creator.
18- Touch of Evil (1958)
Dir- Orson Welles
Call Citizen Kane as the greatest film by Orson Welles or Hollywood for all you like but it is this frequently overlooked B-movie masterpiece that ranks as the most extraordinary of this auteur's accomplishments. As a hard-boiled piece of the seediest American noir, Touch Of Evil is also one of the most sweltering thrillers ever made, a whodunnit set in the sordid, sweaty Mexican border that soon turns into something more morbidly, maliciously entertaining. Cinematographer Russell Metty makes our minds swirl with sexy long-takes and Henry Mancini's jaunty, almost sneering score is hard to forget. And Welles himself plays a sleazy, drunk scoundrel of the highest order.
17- Brazil (1985)
Dir- Terry Gilliam
Even in a century that produced such prophetic works of dystopia as 1984 and Brave New World, it is the forever timeless vision of Terry Gilliam's bizarrely hilarious and beautifully poignant satire that endures even today. We are still living and working in a coldly manipulative world ruled by bureaucracy and officious apathy and like Jonathan Pryce's hapless and lovelorn Sam Lowry, we too yearn to be transported into the warmer, jollier space inside our dreams. And all the while, Gilliam orchestrates shenanigans both whimsical and scarily surreal, leading to an anarchic upsurge in the climax. Oh, that is not the end. There is also that lovely song playing somewhere in our dreams.
16- The Elephant Man (1980)
Dir- David Lynch
Warmth is a rare word in the lexicon of surrealist and extraordinary storyteller David Lynch, his universe populated, for most part, with femme fatales, mutually destructive love, white-hot erotica, perverted criminals and grotesque faces. And that is also why The Elephant Man stands out in his incendiary oeuvre as a deeply compassionate story told with such nightmarish grit and dreamlike beauty. This black-and-white and beautiful masterpiece, about the sad yet uplifting story of the deformed John Merrick (played with stunning credibility by John Hurt) in the dark and disturbing London of the 19th century, is impossible to look away from, especially when you cannot bear the sight of such pain or poignancy.
15- The 39 Steps (1935)
Dir- Sir Alfred Hitchcock
North By Northwest nearly made it to this list but let's admit it: without this breakneck and quick-witted early gem in his career, he would never have come close to making that perfect film. As the crowning point in the British thriller genre and easily the quintessential pursuit thriller of all time, The 39 Steps plays deliciously with John Buchan's seminal adventure novel, pours in a fragrant serving of streamlined comedy and Hitch's command of gripping tension and pace were as impeccable as always. Robert Donat's taciturn Richard Hannay makes for a wonderfully believable action hero and the English atmosphere of casual cheek and droll humour is also quite irresistible.
14- Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964)
Dir- Stanley Kubrick
Rarely has there been a satire set against the seething, simmering backdrop of war, cold or not, that has remained to be prophetic and prescient as ever. The gags are still delightful, coming especially from a director who is known for his high-minded seriousness but it is the crackling, almost despairing tenor of the deadpan one-liners that packs in such tension and urgency to the proceedings. Add to that a fantastic cast - Peter Sellers playing a troika of believably nonplussed men of authority and Sterling Hayden as a delusional and determined renegade - and a bitterly sardonic climax and you will be laughing till you are blown up in a nuclear holocaust.
13- Brief Encounter (1945)
Dir- Sir David Lean
Was Graham Greene thinking of this wartime romantic classic when he wrote The End Of The Affair, itself a searing and devastating tale of love and infidelity by chance set in a blitzed London? Sure, Lean's monochrome masterpiece is not quite as sexually explosive and subversive as that novel but it does linger in the memory as a sad, melancholy chronicle of the agony and ecstasy of a short-lived but special affection. Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson play star-crossed lovers with almost painful vulnerability and for once, the director restrains his epic flourishes in favour of tightly coiled, almost intense storytelling to lend this romance with stakes that feel so real.
12- Taxi Driver (1976)
Dir- Martin Scorsese
It is not just the greatest ad-libbed scene of all time that makes Taxi Driver pop up with unerring regularity on all top movie lists. Directed by Scorsese with the angry nihilism, written poetically by Paul Schrader and armed with an exquisitely sad Bernard Hermann score, this film, also literally a vvid and even haunting portrait of New York City in the 1970s, is the most unsettling portrait of a lonely, misunderstood man's gradual descent into the abyss of darkness and psychopathic evil. Robert De Niro's convulsive, heart-pounding performance as the sociopathic Travis Bickle is best to be witnessed to be admired in all its incendiary intensity and unexpected tenderness.
11- Apocalypse Now (1979)
Dir- Francis Ford Coppola
More than the extraordinary The Godfather movies, it is Apocalypse Now that demonstrates not only Coppola's natural flair at larger-than-life storytelling but also at adapting literature into the more expansive possibilities of subversive cinema. Taking Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness to a fiery and napalmed Vietnam was just one of the many bold, subversive gestures. To cast the debilitating, mind-numbing senselessness of the war as a tragedy of American suicidal bravado was even more provocative. As was the film's Colonel Kurtz (an unforgettable Marlon Brando), a decorated officer gone violently renegade who turns out to be a prophet of many inconvenient truths. Even more, Coppola's aural and visual canvas refuses to be dislodged from memory.
10- Trainspotting (1996)
Dir- Danny Boyle
No matter how many films take their viewers to the edge of anarchy and drugged insanity, none of them can ever be as poetic, profound, outrageous and thrilling as Danny Boyle’s adrenalin-pumping ride through the wastes of Edinburgh in the 1990s. Adapted with an exhilarating, provocative style from Irvine Welsh’ cult novel by writer John Hodge and featuring a raw, utterly believable cast of performances led by a terrific Ewan McGregor as the helpless but optimistic Renton, Trainspotting also marks a seminal moment in British cinema, as evidenced by Boyle’s no-holds-barred realism that also lends surprising dignity even to the most unsavoury characters without being preachy agitprop. Take that, Fight Club.
9- Schindler’s List (1993)
Dir- Steven Spielberg
It might seem a bit surprising why, for me, Spielberg, arguably a legend in the genres of action, adventure, science fiction and entertainment, should find his place here for possibly the saddest film he ever made. It is just that in his skilled, fluid hands, even the darkest chapters of history are illuminated with glittering, uplifting hope. Much is said about Schindler’s List’s absorbingly gritty, down and dirty realism that leaves the viewer devastated; so little is unfairly talked about how gracefully Spielberg ushers in stirring redemption for humanity, with the poignancy of an exquisitely composed melody. Nearly every actor, from Liam Neeson’s twinkling, if flawed, Schindler to Ralph Fiennes’ sadistic-eyed Amon Goethe, is in unforgettable form.
8- A Matter of Life And Death (1946)
Dir- Michael Powell
Star-crossed romances are indeed the stuff of legend; how about a romance that spans monochrome heavens and many-coloured Earth themselves? The breadth of imagination to be found in Powell and Pressburger’s breath-taking cinematic marvel is boundless, as is the film’s audacious, brilliant willingness to talk about more than just about love pitted against the certainty of death. There are ingenious metaphors and allusions to the love-hate dynamic between Britain and America and there is many a rousing argument in favour of free will against destiny. But love, painted in the glorious strokes of rosy Technicolour, between David Niven’s witty English pilot and Kim Hunter’s Bostonian volunteer girl, endures and lasts forever, like this gem of a film.
7- There Will Be Blood (2007)
Dir- Paul Thomas Anderson
No other American filmmaker has been this powerfully aware about the dysfunctional mythos of the American Dream as Paul Thomas Anderson. And while both Magnolia and The Master almost made it to this list, this towering, almost terrifying epic of American capitalism and its unwieldy battle with faux spirituality, refuses to lose its extraordinary stature. As the domineering, devilish yet surprisingly silver-tongued oilman Daniel Plainview, Sir Daniel Day-Lewis is something of a hypnotic, overwhelming marvel, a man whose ascent to wealth is mirrored in his descent to lurid evil. Guided by Anderson's prophetic, elegiac vision, the veteran performer creates an unforgettable figurehead of greed and venality as incredible and forbidding as Charles Foster Kane.
6- Don't Look Now (1973)
Dir- Nicolas Roeg
There is your average horror movie and there is Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, the purest and most perfect example of not only horror filmmaking but atmospheric, immersive storytelling. Adapted, with bold and subversive strokes, from Daphne Du Maurier's spellbinding and spine-chilling story, this film is a mesmeric dance of the supernatural and of the inexorable force of predestination, building up scene by scene into a nerve-jangling climax that makes us question reason, the nature of death and the timelessness of time itself. Shot gorgeously, hauntingly in a chaotic Venice, edited with Roeg's trademark psychedelic frenzy and also featuring the most sublime scene of raw, almost poignant sexuality, Don't Look Now is impossible to look away from.
5- Goodfellas (1990)
Dir- Martin Scorsese
The greatest gangster film ever made? There is no doubt about that. Scorsese, working in a fever pitch of stylistic artistry and gritty emotion, not only romanticised, to swooning, seductive effect, the allure of a life of crime but he also lamented, with a brutally dehumanising effect, the falsity of allegiances and the fragility of life inside the Mob. The actors are all on electrifying form, especially regulars Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci but let's not forget Ray Liotta's wide-eyed, manically laughing but surprisingly cautious wiseguy Henry Hill, a man who told us compellingly what it was to be a gangster. And the uproarious comedy and violence combine to make this a true, unrivalled crime classic.
4- Life of Brian (1979)
Dir- Terry Jones
How will we laugh at all things dull and ugly without Life Of Brian? What should be a potentially scandalous gag about the foibles of blind faith turns, with the devilishly funny brains and blistering performances of the legendary troupe, into a perfectly timed comedy both lethally acidic in its pointed jabs and genuinely clever and subversive by turns. And every single sting-tailed joke fires on all cylinders; in fact, everything, from violent fanatics at stoning ceremonies to fumbling anti-imperialist guerrilla groups,from blindly superstitious followers right down to centurions cracking schoolboy jokes and even fussing about Latin, is not only punchy but prescient as ever. Monty Python, we salute you. You boys are the Messiahs.
3- Psycho (1960)
Dir- Sir Alfred Hitchcock
No fancy concepts. No mind-boggling mystery. Just a woman being chased on the highway who decides to check into an isolated motel. That is it. And yet, one of the greatest directors of all time took the bare bones of Robert Bloch's novel and transformed it into a thriller like no other. Psycho is not just about the motel or even that still shocking shower scene set to the deranged swells of Bernard Hermann's stealthy score. It is about the littlest of things, from the stuffed birds to the grumbling sheriffs, the unusually sharp private eyes and car hire garages in sunbaked towns. And yes, it is also about boys whose best friends are their mothers.
2- The Third Man (1949)
Dir- Sir Carol Reed
Forget Chinatown. 70 years have come and gone and yet there has not been a more flawless slice of the darkest noir, like the finest chocolate, than Sir Carol Reed's zither-scored masterpiece, with a swift, seamless script by the one and only Graham Greene. There is not a white-hot femme fatale or a palm tree in sight; only a sad-eyed beauty, the cold, cobblestoned streets of war-torn Vienna where black marketeers ply their dirty trade and a slippery American hack novelist hunts for the wild goose of the truth. The pacing and photography (by Robert Krasker) are delirious and the film still has the power to pull the rug off your feet with the appearance of one of cinema's greatest scoundrels.
1- Mulholland Drive (2001)
Dir- David Lynch
All the other films in this list have been done more than once at some point of time. I am still waiting for one film that can be as sexy, dangerous, romantic, heart-breaking, exciting, eerie and extraordinary as David Lynch's unrivalled masterpiece. Blondes and brunettes melt into each other, gangsters and grotesque dwarfs control labyrinthine conspiracies and in the stunning, almost erotic backdrop, is Hollywood, a land of secrets and seduction, of beautiful wish-fulfilment and ugly, inconvenient truths behind breakfast diners. Add to this swirling wealth of Lynch's imagination a breakout actress in Naomi Watts, playing both a smiling newbie and a washed-up ruin with unforgettable sparkle and sadness. The result: Mulholland Drive, an unforgettable cinematic drive, a fever dream that you never want to end.
