NOTHING CAN EXCITE LIKE CANNES CAN (GREAT FESTIVAL FILMS)
Venice and Berlin have a fine cinematic pedigrees while Toronto is good for spotting early Oscar frontrunners. Sundance and TriBeCa are also good for identifying the next hip film.
However Cannes is the greatest because of its classy list of Palme d'Or winners.
Here are 10 personal favourites.
ROME, OPEN CITY (1945)
Roberto Rossellini's Nazi occupation drama is a classic of Italian neorealist cinema, with its natural locations and lighting, hand held camera and largely non-professional cast.
Written by Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini, the movie was widely praised for giving filmgoers a vivid sense of what it must have been like to live under the Nazis in war torn Italy.
At the centre of its plot is a Catholic priest, Don Pietro Pelligrini (Aldo Fabrizzi) who risks his own life by assisting members of the Resistance.
Fabrizzi's stirring performance won widespread praise but there are stunning supporting turns too from Marcello Pagliero as the Resistance leader, Harry Feist as a German commander and Anna Magnani, in particular.
THE THIRD MAN (1949)
Carol Reed had already made his mark as a filmmaker with the Belfast thriller 'Odd Man Out' but he managed to trump it with this beautifully executed film noir.
With an intelligent screenplay by the novelist Graham Greene, the movie features Joseph Cotten as the pulp writer, Holly Martins who arrives in post-War Vienna hoping to link up with a friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) only to learn that he is being buried and was involved in the black market trade of penicillin.
Often cited as the greatest British movie of all time, Reed's atmospheric film has a number of memorable set pieces - Welles' dramatic and beautifully lit first appearance in a doorway as the enigmatic Lime, the famous cuckoo clock speech in a fairground and the climactic pursuit through the sewers of Vienna.
Brilliantly shot by cinematographer Robert Krasker, it has one of cinema's best musical scores by Antonio Karas and in addition to Welles and Cotten's mesmerising performances, solid supporting roles for Trevor Howard as Major Calloway and Alida Valli as Lime's girlfriend Anna.
MIRACLE IN MILAN (1951)
Vittorio de Sica charmed the world with his 1948 neo-realist classic 'Bicycle Thieves' and followed it up with this delightfully surreal satire about capitalist greed.
De Sica, who had acted in Rossellini's 'Rome, Open City', begins his film with the discovery of a baby in a cabbage patch by an old woman. Christened Toto, the boy is raised in an orphanage and returns to the adult world at the age of 18, only to end up in a shanty town.
Despite his circumstances, Toto (Francesco Golisano) reminds optimistic, kind and courteous and helps his neighbours but the shanty town soon starts to attract the interest of a greedy industrialist Mobbi (Guglielmo Barnabo) after its inhabitants accidentally strike oil.
A bit like an Italian Frank Capra movie, de Sica stretches the possibilities of sight and sound to generate some wonderful moments of surreal humour and the plot features a magic dove and an angel. However it is Golisano's charming central performance that most impresses.
MARTY (1955)
Penned by the legendary New York playwright, screenwriter and novelist Paddy Chayefsky, this charming Delbert Mann movie tells the story of a lovelorn Italian-American butcher.
Chayefsky had originally penned the story for television with Rod Steiger in the lead role but two years later it hit the big screen with Ernest Borgnine as the eponymous hero.
Borgnine deservedly won a Best Actor Oscar for his touching performance as a sweet natured man who is self conscious about his looks, awkward around women and badgered by his family and friends.
Mann's film is laced with rich characters, smart dialogue and wonderful acting, with Betsy Blair touching as Clara, the schoolteacher Marty eventually falls for, and Esther Minciotti amusing as his mother.
LA DOLCE VITA (1960)
Federico Fellini's scathing critique of Rome's cafe society often ends up on lists of the greatest movies of all time and features some of the most iconic images in cinema history.
From the very beginning, it grabs its audiences by the lapels with an image of a helicopter pulling a statue of Jesus over Rome but is best remembered for Anita Ekberg's uninhibited starlet cavorting in the Trevi Fountain.
Marcello Mastroianni is hugely charismatic as the tabloid showbiz journalist Marcello Rubini, whose starstruck illusions about Rome's glamorous party scene are gradually stripped away. There are also fine performances from Anouk Aimee as a wealthy heiress and Alain Cuny as the intellectual Steiner.
As he would for most of his career, Fellini playfully and provocatively mixes the sacred with the profane but his film also has a sophisticated narrative structure and is beautifully shot by cinematographer Otello Martelli.
THE CONVERSATION (1974)
While 'The Godfather' and 'Apocalypse Now' are always on television to remind us just how brilliant a filmmaker Francis Coppola was in the 1970s, this menacing thriller is a hugely accomplished work.
In one of the finest performances of his career, Gene Hackman stars as the secretive surveillance operator Harry Caul - a man totally consumed by his job - who is asked to spy on a couple (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forest).
Caul, who is very much a Watergate era take on James Stewart's LB Jeffries in 'Rear Window', becomes obsessed with a tape recording of the couple and, fearing for their safety, tries to decipher one section of their conversation which has been obscured initially by the sound of a street musician and may be critical to their future.
Brilliantly edited by Richard Chew, Coppola's movie features clever sound editing by Walter Murch and Howard Beals and a smart supporting cast which includes John Cazale, Robert Duvall and Harrison Ford.
TAXI DRIVER (1976)
"Are you talking' to me? Are you talking' to me?" With this classic piece of improvisation as he brandishes weapons in front of a mirror, Robert de Niro confirmed he was the true heir to Marlon Brando in Martin Scorsese's taut psychological thriller.
Penned by Paul Schader, Scorsese's movie is even more scathing and graphic in its depiction of hedonism and brutality in 1970's New York than Fellini's critique of Rome in 'La Dolce Vita' and it taps into post-Kennedy assassination, post-Vietnam and post-Watergate paranoia.
De Niro plays disturbed Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle, a sleep starved loner who lands a job driving a yellow cab at night and is a bundle of contradictions. Increasingly repulsed by the world he views from behind his steering wheel, he is obsessed with rescuing a teenage prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster) from her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel) and is smitten by a political campaign staffer, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) and yet frequents porn cinemas.
With a stirring musical score by Bernard Herrman, the movie remains one of Scorsese's finest and features jaw dropping performances from de Niro, Foster, Keitel, Shepherd, Albert Brooks, Peter Boyle as well as an explosive cameo from the director himself.
PARIS, TEXAS (1984)
With its evocative Ry Cooder soundtrack, German director Wim Wenders' film also has a damaged lead character called Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) who emerges out of the South Texan desert looking for water and collapsing in a saloon, four years after walking out on his family.
Hospitalised, Travis refuses initially to speak and is reunited with his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) who takes him back to Los Angeles where he and his wife Anne (Aurore Clement) have been raising Travis's son Hunter (Hunter Carson) as their own.
On the journey home, Travis breaks his silence and in LA gradually reconnects with the boy but some old home movies trigger a new quest to locate Hunter's mother Jane (Nastassja Kinski).
Beautifully written by Sam Shepard and LM Kit Carson and stunningly shot by Robby Muller, Wenders movie is a gripping cinematic experience, intelligently executed by a director and a cast very much on top of their game.
PULP FICTION (1994)
After his stunning blood soaked directorial debut with 'Reservoir Dogs', Quentin Tarantino cemented his place in 1990s cult cinema with this rollercoaster of a movie.
With its confident non-linear narrative, bravura performances and its barrage of quotable lines, 'Pulp Fiction' was a box office smash which combined brains with blood soaked action.
The movie revived John Travolta's floundering career with his charismatic performance as Vincent Vega, gave Bruce Willis his best role as the boxer Butch and turned Uma Thurman and Samuel L Jackson into household names as Mia Wallace and Jules.
With eye popping supporting roles for Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Ving Rhames, Maria de Medeiros, Eric Stoltz, Patricia Arquette and an appearance by Derry's Bronagh Gallagher in the infamous overdose scene, Tarantino's movie never disappoints, is cleverly edited by Sally Menke and smartly shot by Andrzej Sekula. It also features one of the best music soundtracks ever assembled.
SECRETS AND LIES (1996)
Mike Leigh's improvised family drama about a black optometrist in London who sets out on a quest to find her birth mother is an absolute joy and his best work.
In star-making roles, Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Hortense Cumberbatch who discovers Brenda Blethyn's white working class Cynthia Purley is her mum.
Both actress excel in this touching and funny examination of racial and class prejudices but the movie is also packed with wonderful performances from Timothy Spall as Cynthia's brother Maurice and Phyllis Logan as his buttoned up upwardly mobile wife, Claire Rushbrook as Cynthia's angry daughter Roxanne and Lesley Manville as a social worker, Lee Ross as Roxanne's boyfriend, Paul and Ron Cook as an alcoholic.
The film has a host of memorable set pieces - Hortense's encounter with the social worker, Ron Cook's bitter cameo, Maurice's powerful and revelatory appeal for family harmony at a disastrous barbecue but, especially, the look on Brenda Blethyn's face when her character realises she actually is Hortense's mother, despite initially denying she ever gave birth to a black child.
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