 48 Cover MovieView CoverThis Is Spinal Tap(1984)Director: Rob Reiner This - if you will - rockumentary founded a new mode of American screen comedy, and added more quotable soundbites to the culture than 20 seasons of The Simpsons. Read Review |  |  47 Cover MovieView CoverE. T. The Extra-Terrestrial(1982)Director: Steven Spielberg Spielberg turns his parents' divorce into a magical slice of sci-fi as autobiography. Subtle kid performances (especially Henry Thomas) make a great animatronic creation even more affecting. Read Review | |  46 On The Waterfront(1954)Director: Elia Kazan Brando's Terry Malloy maybe a landmark in screen acting, but Elia Kazan's still stunning hymn to individualism set new levels of realism, finding enough gritty atmosphere and street poetry to power 1,000 episodes of The Wire. Read Review | |  45 Psycho(1960)Director: Alfred Hitchcock "We all go a little mad sometimes." Hitchcock claimed this was a comedy - it does make cruel fun of everything Americans were supposed to take seriously in 1960: psychology, cleanliness, money and mothers. Read Review | |  44 Schindler's List(1993)Director: Steven Spielberg Spielberg's Oscar breakthrough strives hard for its masterpiece status, with masterful work from Liam Neeson and extraordinarily complex villainy from Ralph Fiennes. If it had subtitles, you'd swear it were a Polanski or Andrzej Wajda film. Read Review |
 43 Cover MovieView CoverThe Big Lebowski(1998)Director: Joel and Ethan Coen The Coens' colourful take on Raymond Chandler's LA noir is the shaggiest of shaggy dog stories, and evidently Joel and Ethan's most enduring by a long shot. Jeff Bridges' White Russian-downing 'Dude' is an iconic hero. Read Review | |  42 Kind Hearts And Coronets(1949)Director: Robert Hamer Ealing at its most entertainingly contradictory — a film of style, charm and Victorian literary elegance about (frankly) a social-climbing serial killer. An exemplar of British good taste built on corpses, snobbery and sex. Read Review | |  41 The 400 Blows(1959)Director: François Truffaut Jean-Pierre Leaud is Truffaut stand-in Antoine Doinel, here an unhappy child taking refuge in the freedom of the cinema and the bleakness of petty crime. Thematically grim, but joyous moviemaking. Read Review | |  40 Cover MovieView CoverVertigo(1958)Director: Alfred Hitchcock A mystery which takes such a sidetrack that the unmasking of the villain is an irrelevance. Beautiful Kim Novak is mysteriously haunted, while neurotic 'tec James Stewart turns worryingly obsessive. Read Review | |  39 Cover MovieView CoverThe Matrix(1999)Director: Andy and Larry Wachowski Mind-wipe the sequels from your brain, and recall the most significant science-fiction blockbuster of the turn of the millennium - even Keanu Reeves was cool, and the Wachowski brothers pioneered bullet-time. Read Review |
