Bangers only: A film-maniac's top 500 movies

The Satin Slipper is a near seven hour metafictional trans-continental theatrical epic, realised by Manoel de Oliveira from the staged period drama of Paul Claudel. It is weighty, inspiring, and exquisitely beautiful. The movie opens with two quotes, which frame the film, regarding the mysterious ways of God, the second of which, "etiam peccata", "even sins", is a reference to St Augustine, who added this to a then famous phrase, giving, "Omnia cooperantur in bonum, etiam peccata", which is to say that everything happens for the glory of God, even sin.

The opening scene contains an exhortation by a dying priest, that his brother, Don Rodrigo, who has given up his studying for the priesthood, in favour of an exploration of power, for yoking the world to his will, be led back onto the path of righteousness, and that his sins be Augustinian in nature. Rodrigo's journey provides a skeleton for the movie, which however contains numerous supplementary stories and messages.

After the introduction, I do not think that you could watch straight the next nearly seven hours of this film without going mad, or rather it would be like holding a cup and letting the continuous pouring of wisdom and beauty overflow and go all over the floor. The Satin Slipper has seven hours of content, of talking where it pays to listen.

There will be home truths for everyone here, but for me Dona Prouheze's condemnation of her husband Don Pelagio, "Or it may be he is so proud, to make me love him, he disdains to appeal to anything other than the truth.". I also liked pearls of wisdom such as couples only loving what they build together, and descriptions of love, such as the feeling of regret for the time you did not know your lover.

The excesses of God's plan seem often to be exorbitant, even for One so mysterious, twice a whole ship of people drown in aid of details of the destinies of two of the main characters, and highly winsome characters often exist on this earth only as auxiliaries to the blithe. The message here may well be about tyranny, but also that the vast majority of people on earth can only expect to hear stories and get used, with the implication that they should prepare for the next life. The fruits of Rodrigo's labour, a tremendous gift, are rudely compensated for by his humiliation.

I saw a re-release of Les Enfants du Paradis at a film festival and the announcer introduced it by saying, "If you have seen this film before, it needs no introduction, if you have not seen it before, I have only this to say, I envy you.". There are not many films that a hardened programmer might say this about, and I totally agree. Although I abhor objectivity Les Enfants du Paradis, is probably the greatest film ever made. The title refers to the section of a theater auditorium, paradise, which is at the rear of the theatre and is the cheapest part. The children of the paradise are the merry masses who make up the audience in this area of the theatre (the characters and the action revolve around a variety theatre). The movie covers love and heartbreak from many angles, there are many characters to associate with however for me Baptiste is the one, poor oversensitive Baptiste who does not apprehend the simplicity of love. Watching his emotions tearing him apart is perhaps the most savage thing I have seen in the cinema and speaks to the audacity of the filmmakers, so realistic it verges on the profane. The stage act he performs after his initial letdown made me feel that I was not watching a movie, but that some strange alchemist had distilled life and poured it on the screen, I was literally rapt with agony and ecstasy.

I first saw this film when I was a little boy in its English-language dub. It haunted me for years later, and all I could remember was that there was a this little boy like me lost in a strange forest with glowing red and yellow fruits. I came across it quite by chance in it's French-language version, which is what you should see if you're an adult. It has the most amazing upbeat but weird soundtrack and is staggeringly beautiful in every single way you could think of. It works for all ages and has themes regarding the importance of individuality, and the possibility for redemptive acts, the nature of childhood and loss, the passing of time, and metanoia. It is scary and tender, and wonderful and I am very grateful to all the artists involved.

A fundamentally perfect corker of a horror movie, with more emphasis on tension, suspension and implication than any actual violence. I absolutely adore Old Dark House movies, and will happily watch even bad ones, but this is not just for the likes of me. The premise of the movie is pretty nasty, there's a guy who likes to kill women with disabilities, which is quite unforgivable one must admit. The conceit here is that the girl who is mute (the protagonist) cannot scream when he comes for her. It's a gen-yoo-eyne old fashioned hide-behind-the-sofa cuddle-your-loved-ones horror movie that can set the hairs on your back standing up.

A troop of soldiers stranded on an island with only one woman. It is not an interesting premise! von Sternberg was however no ordinary director, and controls the movie like a God of cinema. Control is so complete that the only dialogue we here is his celestial voiceover. Each frame is dense, controlled, and fascinating. The movie is dreamlike, and elapses with all the ineluctability and strangeness of a Rube Goldberg machine. This is the view of the world a deity must have. Despite the ruthlessness and occasional brutality, von Sternberg never once abandons his humanistic perspective.

I've never personally experienced migration. However Elia Kazan's highly personal project America America had me fighting back tears all the time, with it's depiction of the peregrinations involved in searching for a safe life for yourself and your family. We're not talking about a small film here though, it's got it all going on, meditations about what it is to be a man, and how to become one, passion buried deep inside, screaming to escape, quiet desperate lives, friendship, the possibilty of altruism. It wasn't shot by any old chump either, double Oscar laureate Haskell Wexler here revelling in his first big budget shot at the big time. Over three hours of souls etched on film, buckle up!

Club de femmes is a story about a stylish modern hotel run for women in Paris. The young lady lodgers pay a nominal rent amount and the balance is picked up by a charity/league of decency that is trying to stop them being exploited (lured into prostitution or dishonored by men of ill repute). It's a loving and sympathetic film that follows a variety of these women during a formative period in their lives. It's as camp as you like. It is as elegant as you would want a film to be. The scene where Alice falls in love with Juliette, sketching her as she swims, is the most beautiful moment I have seen in film. Claire (Danielle Darrieux) kissing her boyfriend whilst he wears her pyjamas is somewhat blissfully confusing. It's just a wonderful film, directed by Patrick Deval and assisted by Jean Delannoy.

The Sword of Doom is about a Samurai, Ryunosuke Tsukue, who is brimful of contempt for society and its compromises, a one man army he ruthlessly murders anyone he sees fit. A man of extreme integrity, one senses that his fate could have gone either way depending on chance alone. As it is he turns his hand against every man, becoming an inhumanly isolated monomaniac who takes ostracisation and loneliness to its limits in his quest for purity. The Sword of Doom is an awe-inducing film about a man who cultivates his rage until it turns into a forest he becomes lost in. One cannot watch this film other than with respect and a sign to ward off the evil eye.

German's films are a joy to watch for any addict of film as an artform, the level of the technical achievement is practically miraculous. With Khrustalyov the entire film is composed of takes that most directors would never even try to attempt. The camera is in almost constant motion, close to a large number of actors coordinating with it with full intimacy. It is a bravura effort. To me it really outdoes Fellini in terms of a display of cultural colourfulness (stuff like Roma), and it's in black and white!

The film mostly follows General Klensky, a doctor with a military rank, who is in charge of a large dysfunctional hospital, and a large dysfunctional family, during a period where Communism had turned into a personlity cult of Stalin, and was hysterically lashing out at both friend and foe.

It makes me laugh a lot, all the silly little things which were happening all the time, tiny instances of slapstick. It's also a very subtle movie, there's a bit later on in the movie where Klensky looks out of quite a small window at a little bird that's staring back, pretty fleetingly, it's hard to describe how it made me feel, it was poetic in the way Pasolini can be at his very best. Hard to describe the sublime but I'll attempt, it was like the bird was a spectator, looking at the crazy humans from a much better off place (even though it's perched on a wintery branch), it just kind of made me feel the sheer madness of Russia at that time. Going back to Roma, it also has this connection with the past too, there's definitely a nostalgia for Tsarist times.

Reading up a little bit about the historical background helps a lot with this one, e.g. about the doctors plot and the anti-Zionist purge etc.

What does an intelligent man do in a crazy world? It's such a schizophrenic movie!

The Soundtrack of this stop motion collage short is indeed Satie's Gymnopedie #1. The movie is all footage of old engravings/etchings tinted blue. I absolutely love the innocence of the whole thing, such as an androgynous angel with a fig leaf fluttering along the screen. It's a sexless affair that luxuriates in naive Victorian fantasies of the world beyond the boarding school and the library. It's also about the protean nature of thought streams and the beauty of ideas and dreams. Something that I massively enjoy in terms of technique is seeing reversals in motion, which is why the micro-short Newark Athlete of 1891 (William K.L. Dickson) is more than a curiosity to me and indeed a pleasure (the movie shows a gent swinging Indian clubs, played forwards and then reversed back mid swing, at the current time both movies are available on YouTube)

Cesarée leaves me speechless with every watch, Duras' voice is magnetic. Rosenbaum has described her as a narcissist, if that's so, Cesarée is a splendiferous fragrant tiger-lily of narcissism. It's narrated by the inexorable and love-wracked voice of Marguerite Duras herself, the Prix Goncourt winning novelist. Duras, high priestess, prostrate at the altar of Venus in this film. How curious is cinema that, what would be my favourite film on another day, should prove to have been made from unused shots of another? That it should be made by a writer who considers the images secondary to the narrated text? The images themselves are mostly lovely tracking shots of the Tuileries Gardens, and the Malliol sculptures inhabiting it at the time. Amy Flamer's violin score is a harrow to the soul, making you wonder if there is any difference between love, longing, and grief.

Suetonius records in his "Lives of the Caesars" that Emperor Titus had fallen in love with Queen Berenice, but against both of their wills he had found it necessary to expel her from Rome. They never met again, this is the story Duras relates. On the subject of the images being leftovers from Le Navire Night, I have read that huge-hearted Marguerite, on occasion, cooked for the crew of her films, I bet she made a mean bubble-and-squeak!

So it turns out that Clint wasn't the man with no name here, because he's called Monco, even if you only hear that once! Anyway, the second two dollars movies I love the best, because they are so fluid. A Fistful of Dollars is all set in the same place, it's a static film, I have little interest in it. Why not watch Eastwood's own High Plain's Drifter instead, or the oneiric remake with Bruce Willis, Last Man Standing?

Monco and Colonel Mortimer, bounty hunters extraordinares, are out for el Indio's hide. The movie is ritualistic, features expanded time, and has one of the great soundtracks. Movies can save your life, and at university, when everything was caving in, I would slide the VHS of this in and everything was alright. I've watched this one tens of times, and it never loses anything.

Maya Deren's lasting legacy, shot with her first husband Alexander Hammid, and scored by her second, Toru Takemitsu, this film has had many interpretations. I've no real interest in rational interpretations of the film, for me it's title says it all. Why not the dreams of a woman sleeping in a house with a carbon monoxide leak, or on an acid trip. I know that from the instant I saw the first scene, from the moment the sunflower is handed down in front of me, that I had fallen in love with the film. It strips absolutely everything away, it is an animal film, I think about what I imagine a fox in a forest thinks when it skulks through the undergrowth and the pools of light, feeling and instinct only. The phone is off the hook, the connection to all this crud that makes humans so grotesque, the bills and the self-control and the conditioning. An Attenborough documentary on plants once showed an emerald-eyed black panther rolling around in the jungle, drunk on catnip, that's what this movie makes me for just a few minutes.

Deadfall is one of the great underrated movies, and I'll tell you why in a bit. What everyone seems more than appreciative about, is the greatness of the piece that John Barry wrote for it, Romance For Guitar And Orchestra, which he appears during the movie personally conducting, intercut with scenes from a robbery. People are mostly happy that the robbery scene is great as well.

What really chills my bones in that robbery scene is the triumph of the will (a phrase unfortunately robbed of it's awe by Leni Riefenstahl), how Henry bends matters to his will, and you can feel the bruises and lacerations that came with that in the scene.

It's unfortunate that the art house crowd haven't get round to this one, and it's more Michael Caine completists and genre fans, because it's truly exceptional. It probably has my favourite joke in a movie, deliciously dark, "What's the use in happiness, it can't buy you money.". Nietzsche's idea that, "Man does not strive after happiness; only the Englishman does that." always brings a smile to my face.

The movie is full of jaded, weary, and intelligent people, into whose web falls jewel thief Henry. The thing about these people is that they do actually all love, they have hearts, it's their great secret. It's really, despite the crazily beautiful robbing, a movie about love, bitterness, and youth versus growing old. I liked a lot of things in the movie, how Fé sees through the fatalism of the men, how facades come crumbling down, how there's all this lovely turquoisey colouring going on.

Anne Bancroft's grave has a statue of an angel weeping perched on top of it. There can be no doubt that this is merely a faithful representation of what was happening in heaven as the gift of her life left the earth. She was in my opinion a truly estimable person who makes the modern era's idols looks unutterably ridiculous. The Pumpkin Eater is a movie about a relationship and a family, of Jo and Jake Armitage (Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch). Jo is one of those wonderful people who shame you by comparison, a self-sacrificing mother, full of soul and passion, denying herself even the most minor of pleasures, an entity that exists only to give. Jake is a serial adulterer who tries his level best to stop this from damaging his marriage, but at the end of the day can only follow his nature. On a personal level, Jo reminded me very much of my mother. No less than Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay for this one. Yes, once upon a time adults went to see adult films like this at the cinema, deep films, though you can scarcely believe it if you see what they go and watch now. The only film approaching this in modern times that I can think of is Revolutionary Road.

This is a 10 minute Disney short that neatly points out that you should not be afraid of being different. Ferdinand the Bull likes sitting under his cork tree and smelling flowers whilst the other bulls butt heads and jump around. He has beautiful brown eyes, black velvet back, cream undercarriage, and a tuft of blue hair on his smiley head. I have fairly uncanny connections with this short, I was always bigger than the other kids, and I'm still taller than anyone I ever meet, always kept my own company, never wanted to be competitive, had a mother who was worried that I didn't play along with the other kids, have a childish grin, and I specialised in botany at university. It is hard for me to watch this and not cry. Ferdinand the Bull is a thoroughly lovely short and won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) in 1938.

Lovely is an excellent word. To me it describes someone or an aspect of someone you can't not love. The folks that made this movie transmitted and transmuted a lot of their beauty for the world to see when they made this movie. They are lovely, and Peau d'Ane is a lovely movie.

A movie without malice, set in a sugary Medieval noplace, it has a colour scheme from a Chagall painting, bright and joyful.

The story is about a princess who has to avoid marrying her father, and find true love. Despite some of the content theoretically being quite strong, the movie comes off as being utterly absent of ill feeling. Watching is like being a child again and sung a tale by your mother, if it ever takes a serious tone it's a faux serious tone.

Peau d'Ane singing a song about baking a cake for her love is a highlight for me.

The only actual problem with the film is that it ends.