Kubism, Epilogue: Stanley Kubranked

You probably thought you'd seen the last of my Stanley Kubewaffle, what with Eyes Wide Shut being his last film and all. Well, I didn't come all this way just to make phenomenally incisive and original observations into each of his thirteen features and three shorts, you know: this is a film blog, so I am bound by convention to rank each of those films in order of my irrelevant preference. So here we go, and if you want to start at the start, head this way!

16

Catatonically boring corporate video for life on the ocean waves, shot entirely on dry land. It's literally ridiculous that you have to include this in the films of Stanley Kubrick, yet here we are. Completists gonna complete. Review

15

A dull and amateurish doc about a priest with a plane that struggles to wring interest out of its dry subject matter. Little wonder that this wasn't the film that would help Stanley Kubrick's career... (*puts on sunglasses, leans into mic*) take off. Review

14

There's a clear eye for the dramatic and an experimental approach to temporality in this short documentary, but Kubrick's first foray into filmmaking reveals more about his past as a photographer than his future as as a cinematic genius. Review

13

Stan's first feature is an admirable failure: saddled with ponderous, preposterous dialogue, Fear And Desire examines the absurdity of war through a filter of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. Primordial elements of Kubrick's future are there to be discovered, but my goodness you have to shovel a lot of shit out of the way first. Review

12

Kubo finds himself accidentally in charge of somebody else's film, and the results are predictably unhappy. Kirk Douglas looks great in his spray tan and weird underpants, but after three and a quarter hours you wish the film had concentrated on its real MVPs: Peter Ustinov and Charles Laughton. Review

11

The Kube's Cold War-era-defining satire is admirable and often brilliant, but its uneven comedic tone and one-note characters make it a tough sell. I'm virtually alone in this viewpoint but give it a few more decades and history will doubtlessly catch up with me. Review

10

A second-rate film noir with a standout visual aesthetic, Killer's Kiss shows Stanley Kubrick very much learning on the job. It looks fantastic, but in a genre where most films do, that's not enough. Review

9

A film of two halves, the first of which is top-notch, balls-out, classic Kubrickian eye-and-ear-candy that's arguably the last truly great thing he made. The second, sadly, is a bog-standard war flick which, in the shadow of Part One, could only ever disappoint. Review

8

Slow, boring and totally lacking in incident are just three of the wrongest opinions about Stan's artfully realised, 18th century take on toxic masculinity. A lavish treat for the eyeballs, Barry Lyndon contrasts visual beauty with mannered beastliness in minute, subtle detail. Review

7

A decent budget and a savvy producer helped Kubo make his first great film: a taut, experimental heist movie laced with the themes of hubris and absurdity that would distinguish much of his career. Characters sleaze off the screen and you could crack the dialogue with the back of a spoon. Review

6

Kubrick ponders free will, state control and the effects of violence on screen in the cinematic equivalent of a ferocious kick in the yarbles. Absolutely unique in concept and execution, A Clockwork Orange is the work of a fearless filmmaker that really make u think. Review

5

Stan signed off with his most mature, and arguably most misunderstood, work of art. Far from the A-list fuckfest its (mis)marketing suggested, Kubrick's meditation on marriage, fidelity, temptation, jealousy and sex people in daft masks took him in a new direction but stayed true to his lifelong preoccupations. Review

4

Stanley Kubrick makes you pity a paedophile in this indefinable oddity. Controversial, sure, but more importantly funny as fuck, with fully-drawn characters that blow The Kube's false rep as a cold, dispassionate director out of the water. Review

3

The Kube's first masterpiece is a devastating, furious assault on the injustices committed in wartime in the name of patriotism. Staggering in all the best and worst ways, with Kirk Douglas magnetic as one of Stan's few heroes. Review

2

Aided by a holy trinity of flawlessly OTT performances, Kubrick crafts the purest expression of psychological horror in all of cinema. The setup might have become cliché but the execution is timeless: after forty years every scene still oozes dread, every shot still spawns unease. Review

1

It's impossible to overstate the mesmerising fear and wonder 2OO1 elicits on every viewing: Stanley Kubrick's greatest achievement is a beautiful, terrifying mindfuck that asks all the biggest questions and answers precisely none (except how to do a poo in zero gravity). When highly evolved mankind looks back at its own primitive daubings, this will be the only clue that we belong to the same species. Review

*

OK, that really is it for Kubism. Thanks for your indifferent tolerance!

Title cards stolen from Christian Annyas

Kubism, Part 11: The Shining (1980)

With a Napoleon-shaped bee still buzzing around in the Kubrick bonnet, it occurred to Big Stan that if he was ever going to get his dream project about the short dead dude off the ground, he was somehow going to have to make a metric fucktonne of money for a studio in order for them to finance it. Barry Lyndon had spectacularly failed to do this, so - much as he had once had the terrific wheeze to make the ultimate science fiction flick - The Kube expressed an interest in making a truly great, crowd-pleasing horror. Warner Brothers had already offered him both The Exorcist and Exorcist II, but neither tickled the Kubrick pickle. It wasn't until he read Stephen King's The Shining, about a psychologically flawed man whose assumption that he can regain control of his destiny is proven catastrophically optimistic, that Stan found his favourite boxes being ticked. So he packed his toothbrush, dug out his passport, realised he didn't need it because he was only going from St Albans to Elstree, and checked in for an extended stay at the Overlook Hotel. It's all inclusive, go mahoosive!

King was invited to submit a screenplay based on his novel, which he cheerfully did, and Stanley Kubrick cheerfully ignored it entirely and set to work on his own version, co-writing with novelist Diane Johnson. Swathes of backstory were jettisoned, along with King's preferred explanations for the somewhat unusual events that take place at the Overlook. Kubrick's filleting of so much exposition laid the ground work for the film's eventual reputation as a bafflingly ambiguous and inconclusive work of art open to a multitude of diverse interpretations, some of which are so insane they were gathered together into the even more unfathomable documentary Room 237, a film which ultimately proves only one theory beyond doubt: that it's possible to overthink these things.

Essentially, The Shining is the story of the Torrances, a family so fucked up that their very presence in a hotel causes it to shit out all manner of unpleasant business at them, including sexy naked ghost ladies that turn into cackling rotten hags, and vast amounts of blood that flow through the lift shafts in a haemophobic plumber's nightmare. Although even this is debatable: do the freaky psychic abilities of lil' Danny Torrance - and, to some extent, those of his dad Jack - awaken the sleeping terrors of the Overlook? Or does the hotel's gruesome history send Jack round the twist and strengthen Danny's powers? The truth is, it doesn't matter. It's a testament to The Shining's enigmatic aura that it's so frequently discussed and debated, but at the end of the day Stan's intention was simply, in his words, "to produce a sense of the uncanny". It's just a fucking great, enormously unsettling horror film. No answers are provided, only more questions; even the final shot just confuses things further. Kubrick gonna Kubrick.

The Shining is only Kubrick's second film not to feature a voiceover; instead, the Overlook's manager Stuart Ullman assumes the role of exposition dealer. He's doing exactly the same job as a non-diegetic narrator though, because none of the characters pay a blind bit of notice to anything he says. He's simply there to put the willies up the audience, with his casually tossed-off remarks about the hotel being built on an ancient Indian burial ground and former caretakers who turned out to be psychopathic axe murderers. His dialogue does offer the interested viewer a glimmer of potential meaning, however: those comments about the desecration of a Native American cemetery inform a reading about past crimes coming back to haunt us. Jack, who probably has more skeletons in his closet than just a brief dalliance with child abuse, bears the brunt of a karmaic retribution that combines his and his predecessor caretaker's indiscretions with those of capitalist white America. A failure to learn from past mistakes leads to their repetition, the result being an eternity spent in purgatory trying to clean up the mess. "You've always been the caretaker".

Kubrick loved to torture his lead characters, appalling examples of men that they are, and that failure of perceived masculinity gets a thorough going over from the Overlook's spectral staff. Jack's alcoholism (it's surely no coincidence that Stephen King gives his lead character the forenames Jack Daniel) appears in the form of genial barman Lloyd, who encourages him to "drink up, Mr Torrance". Meanwhile, waiter Delbert Grady - whose relationship to Charles Grady, the aforementioned family-chopper-upper, mutates a possible continuity error into yet another unsolvable mystery - represents Jack's capacity for domestic violence, urging him to "correct" his wife and son with chilling authority. If Jack brought his demons with him, the Overlook gave them uniforms and put them on the night shift.

And then there's the maze, that central motif that spirals out to trap the entire film in its winding, inescapable dead ends. Simultaneously representative of order and chaos, the maze is everywhere in The Shining: it's the hotel's corridors, its carpet design, the increasingly confused psyche in which Jack eventually loses himself forever. You can't swing an axe in critical analysis of The Shining without hitting an academic pointing out that the film itself is a maze, its apparently infinite outcomes and possibilities leading to endless, frequently pointless, conclusions. And yet none of them adequately explain how the Torrances got that mountain of luggage in their VW Beetle.

You can bang on all you like about how great a director Stanley Kubrick is, and indeed I appear to have done just that, but much of The Shining's success rests on the shoulders of its three lead actors. Danny Lloyd is alarmingly good as the equally cursed and blessed child, radiating mop-topped lovability while scaring the bejesus out of us with his delivery of the word "redrum" and his drooling fits of psychic botheration. Shelley Duvall went through sheer fucking hell at the hands of her single-minded, frequently cruel director to get to the point where she becomes the physical embodiment of fear, panic, exhaustion and terror all at once. Variety somewhat callously described Wendy Torrance as "a simpering, semi-retarded hysteric", which I think is a bit harsh. With her snooker ball eyes popping out of her Munch's-Scream skull she's equal parts sympathetic and annoying, because Kubrick would just love it if you sided with her bastard husband, even for one guilty second.

Lloyd and Duvall also provide the film's biggest scares, with their own unique terrified faces. Their slack-jawed, boggle-eyed, convulsive reactions to the smorgasbord of mind-fuckery going on around them (or, in Danny's case, inside his head) never fail to erect the hairs on the back of my neck, no matter how many times I peek at them from between my fingers. And then there's Jack Fuckin' Nicholson, going full Jack Fuckin' Nicholson for the entire running time in a performance that's literally impossible to imagine in anyone else's hands. The Shining is the film where Kubrick's habit of shooting millions of takes became big news, and you can see it in every shot of Nicholson going batshit crazy, his face contorting as if being tugged by invisible goblins, because he's done this scene eight hundred times now and he no longer possesses any grasp of long-forgotten concepts like reality and sanity. These are the strongest, most powerful performances in the Kubrick canon; only R Lee Ermey's Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket comes close.

Even those performances, though, need a canvas from which to leap out, and Stanley Kubrick weaves a mean cloth. The Overlook hotel, tiresomely but admittedly correctly described by just about everyone as "as much a character as the people within it", isn't your average haunted house. Almost every scene takes place in brightly lit rooms or blinding daylight; the hotel itself isn't remotely scary, unless you suffer from a crippling fear of beige. But Kubrick moves around it with sinister foreboding, employing the then new-fangled Steadicam to menacing effect. Those low, wide-angle tracking shots provide a new, weird way to capture the scene of the crime, arguably more effectively and certainly more innovatively than the hand-held POV shots favoured at the time by John Carpenter and Brian De Palma. It heightens the fear of what's round the corner, and with good reason once you know what awaits you there.

Despite all this technical and creative wonder, The Shining did not prove to be the film that would help Kubrick get Napoleon made. Contemporary audiences familiar with the novel were disappointed and confused, and criticisms came thick and fast. Mostly thick, to be fair, not least from Stephen King, who got the bang hump with his vision being so efficiently and masterfully perfected. "I think [Kubrick] wants to hurt people with this movie," King complained, before ironically producing a rival TV miniseries based on his book that is literally painful to watch. Kubrick was nominated for Worst Director in the inaugural Golden Raspberry awards, immediately marking the Razzies out as the awards equivalent of Armond White: tediously contrarian and staggeringly irrelevant.

History, of course, has judged them all, and found the naysayers to be a forgotten clump of potato-brained numpties. The Shining is a hypnotic, blood-curdling masterpiece that crawls under my skin and slowly picks my nerves apart until I can barely take it. And yet every viewing feels like it could all end differently: watch closely and you'll spot a surprising number of shots inside the Overlook where there's a clearly signposted exit, yet none of the characters seem to even see them, let alone choose to use them. Even we choose to ignore them. The Torrances could escape at any time, but they don't, and thank God. We don't want them to leave. We want them to stay there, for ever, and ever, and ever.

Please join me again soon for more Kubism with Full Metal Jacket, or I will gouge out your eyeballs and skull-fuck you. Thanks!

← Part 10: Barry Lyndon

Part 12: Full Metal Jacket →

The Incredible Suit is 10 years old, so here are its 100 best films obviously!

Unbelievably (despite time being a constant), it's one-tenth of a century today since this ridiculous excuse for a website winked into existence. 1,168 blog posts later, somebody at The Incredible Suit HQ thought it would be a good idea to celebrate by collating the entire team's 100 favourite films and ranking them for you to ignore at your leisure. So we took all the votes, assigned points, divided the results by the total number of staff, fed the whole lot to a diarrhitic cow and what fell out of the other end can be found below.

Now this is very much a combination of what might loosely be described as "best" and "favourite" films, so yes it's quite Hitchcock-heavy, yes there are a few Bond films that probably won't be troubling the Sight & Sound top ten any time soon, and no Citizen Kane isn't in there even though it's obviously brilliant. It's just, what would you rather watch, Kane or Licence To Kill? Exactly.

So without further ado, and the obvious caveat that despite the wealth of knowledge and experience across the board, nobody at The Incredible Suit has seen all of the films ever made, here goes. See you in another ten years for the 100 worst films.

*

100. THE MACHINE THAT KILLS BAD PEOPLE (Roberto Rossellini, 1952)

Rossellini blends social commentary with commedia dell'arte in a politically turbulent post-war Italy; the result is as incisive and comprehensive a jab at human failings as you'll find in all of cinema. An underrated, underseen gem.

99. BARRY LYNDON (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)
Long, slow and low on incident, yet hypnotically wonderful and - thanks mainly to Michael Hordern's droll voiceover - devilishly funny. Show me a better 18th century period tragicomedy and I'll pretend I can't hear you.

98. RAISING CAIN (Brian De Palma, 1992)
John Lithgow at his most deliciously hammy, a ridiculous surprise every five minutes and some inspired twists on De Palma's mandatory Hitchcock nods. The best film with a two-word title wherein the second word is, or is a slight variation of, "Cain".

97. DAISIES (Věra Chytilová, 1966)

The Thelma & Louise of the Czechoslavakian new wave tear society a new one in this gleefully provocative, adorably bonkers blast of kaleidoscopic anarchy. Features the kind of cinematic women I'd love to hang out with if I didn't think they'd eat me for breakfast.

96. PILLOW TALK (Michael Gordon, 1959)
Gloriously 1950s in its production design yet driven by surprisingly modern sexual attitudes, Pillow Talk boasts a crackling, innuendo-laden script in which Doris Day and Rock Hudson become embroiled in a hilarious battle of the sexes. Delightful.

95. THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (Robert Wiene, 1920)

A multi-layered murder-mystery set in a splintered, spiky dreamscape, this bastard-mad nightmare is a skewed comment on its own unique historical context and an undeniable template for the next century of filmmaking: Alfred Hitchcock and Tim Burton would have been fucked without it.

94. DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE (John McTiernan, 1995)
Obviously not a patch on the original, but this final film in the Die Hard series is a fitting end to the trilogy. It's a pity they never made any more Die Hard films, but there you go. Nothing lasts forever.

93. ANIMAL KINGDOM (David Michôd, 2010)

Michôd treats his audience with absolute respect in this intelligent and shattering drama about loyalty, conscience and finding your place in the world. Also features terrifying bastard Ben Mendelsohn at his most terrifyingly bastardy.

92. BATMAN BEGINS (Christopher Nolan, 2005)
More gripping and emotionally complex than the Burton/Schumacher years, Begins gave me everything I wanted from a Batflick: ferocious fight scenes, a Gotham City risen from Hell itself and a Batman who, if you met him in a dark alley, would actually make you do a poo in your trousers.

91. THE DARK KNIGHT (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
Nolan takes the duality motif that drives the Batman mythology and cranks it up to 11 in his sequel, but never lets the immense scale of his film overwhelm it. Obvious MVP: Heath Ledger, for straight up pretending Jack Nicholson never existed.

90. DRIVE (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)
Genre-defying retro-neo-noir in which Ryan Gosling does very little apart from pootle about in a car and beat a few people up, but does it in such inimitable style and backed by an achingly hip soundtrack that it's impossible to take your eyes off him.

89. BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (Spike Jonze, 1999)
Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich, Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich. Malkovich Malkovich: Malkovich Malkovich, Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich.

88. E.T. THE EXTRA TERRESTRIAL (Steven Spielberg, 1982)

Like the best kids' films, E.T. deals with the misery of growing up: the magical twilight of the first half, with its faceless grown-ups (except for Mom) and literal wide-eyed optimism, gives way to a harshly-lit second full of mean adults, death and loss. Fun for all the family!

87. MEAN STREETS (Martin Scorsese, 1973)
Scorsese's youth splashed across the screen in deathly blacks and hellish reds. Evocative and original, this is effectively Ground Zero for both the Scorsese brand and decades of pale imitations to come.

86. LOLITA (Stanley Kubrick, 1962)
Kubrick makes you pity a paedophile in this indefinable oddity. Controversial, sure, but more importantly funny as fuck, with fully-drawn characters that blow Kubrick's false rep as a cold, dispassionate director out of the water.

85. THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)
To me this is much richer than that other Jimmy Stewart Christmas film they keep banging on about: I love Lubitsch's effortless blend of frothy romcom with a darker edge that opens up the comedy like the bitters in a martini.

84. PADDINGTON 2 (Paul King, 2017)
As bursting with heart, charm and barely-tolerable delightfulness as its predecessor. Everything here is wonderful, from Peter Capaldi's all-too-brief turn as the Daily Mail in human form to Ben Whishaw's unfailingly affable delivery in his role as the ultimate care bear.

83. MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (Maya Deren, 1943)

Deren's wacky avant-garde adventure still has the power to baffle and unsettle in equal measure. Unbelievable that chrome ping-pong-ball glasses didn't take off after this was released.

82. JAWS (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
I still maintain the first half is the best: the island-based tension, the pig-headedness of Mayor Vaughn (the film's true villain), Spielberg's impeccable deep staging and the terror that comes from never seeing the shark are all more fun than the second half's Alien-on-a-boat stuff. But, you know, it's Jaws.

81. THE LODGER: A STORY OF THE LONDON FOG (Alfred Hitchcock, 1927)
Hitchcock's first masterpiece: a mesmerising combination of German Expressionism, Hollywood stylings and distinctly British humour. Even Ivor Novello's decision to act like he has an awkwardly-shaped object stuck up his bum can't spoil the mood.

80. TRAINSPOTTING (Danny Boyle, 1996)
I don't actually remember most of the time I spent shooting up skag in mid-'90s Edinburgh, but Trainspotting is so exquisitely evocative of that time that I'm convinced I must have done.

79. THE CLOCK (Christian Marclay, 2010)
I'll be honest, I haven't seen it all (it's twenty-four hours long, do me a favour) but what I have seen was so unbelievably well done and dangerously addictive that there's no way it shouldn't be on this list.

78. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (Brian De Palma, 1996)
Still the best Mission, yeah whatever Chris McQuarrie. The Langley break-in is one of the greatest set-pieces in action cinema, and all that train stuff is fab too. Let's not talk about the "internet" bits.

77. ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (Peter Hunt, 1969)

Takes more risks than any Bond film before or since, and it's all the better for it. The first act plays out like a romantic melodrama and culminates in a full-on cheesegasm that sits oddly in the canon, but from then on it's vintage Bond action all the way to its shattering climax.

76. ROBOCOP (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)
Mild-mannered police officer Rob O'Cop is shot to shreds and reborn as a walking justice machine, with hilariously gory consequences! Verhoeven makes his villains so unbelievably horrible that every splattery death is air-punchingly satisfying.

75. THE FLY (David Cronenberg, 1986)
Stomach-churningly gross but razor sharp critique of the dangers of technological hubris, or useful primer on home preserving and pickling? Hard to say.

74. CLOVERFIELD (Matt Reeves, 2008)
Twenty minutes of zippy setup followed by fifty minutes of sheer balls-out action, nerve-shredding tension and sphincter-clenching terror. Found footage movies peaked with this, as did the Cloverfield franchise.

73. SKYFALL (Sam Mendes, 2012)
Probably the most thematically rich Bond film, with notions of honour, loyalty and mortality woven into almost every scene. Bond as a character and a franchise undergo some surprising existential evaluation before deciding that yes, it's all brilliant, keep up the good work. And then they made Spectre.

72. JURASSIC PARK (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
The grand convergence of all Spielberg's talents in one glorious, toothy package. Everything he ever did well, he does perfectly here, aided by across-the-board technical excellence in an opus of peerless entertainment.

71. SCHOOL OF ROCK (Richard Linklater, 2003)

Joan Cusack and a bunch of schoolkids hold their own against Jack Black at his Jackest Blackest. An absolute happy place of a film.

70. SPEED (Jan de Bont, 1994)
Absolutely shameless popcorn flick that has no right to be as good as it is, nor as emotionally affecting. Every time the bus ploughs through the pram I want to hold Sandra close and tell her it's fine, it's just full of cans. It's just full of cans.

69. THE LORD OF THE RINGS (Peter Jackson, 2001-2003)
Lumping the trilogy together because its constituent parts are beautifully consistent in tone and style, which is just one of the many things that makes it one of the greatest achievements in cinema. Maybe one day they'll make a film of The Hobbit?

68. FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (Terence Young, 1963)
Shot through with paranoia, double-crosses and shadow-cloaked deaths at every turn, this is Bond's greatest Cold War adventure. The formula hasn't settled yet so it's not quite A James Bond Film, but it is a great film with James Bond in it.

67. BEFORE SUNSET (Richard Linklater, 2004)
Romantic idealism meets cold reality in a stream of Parisian waffle, and it's as lovely as (but, crucially, even shorter than) the first one.

66. THELMA & LOUISE (Ridley Scott, 1991)

Cinema's greatest female double act since Daisies leaves a trail of empowering, feminist destruction across the US and a scar across my heart. Makes me want to rush to the Grand Canyon with a massive net.

65. THE MAN WHO HAUNTED HIMSELF (Basil Dearden, 1970)

Roger Moore's best film, this sees him in a dual role as a starched exec and his mysterious, antagonistic doppelgänger, a womanising bounder intent on taking over his dull counterpart’s life. As mad as it sounds, and then some.

64. NOTORIOUS (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)
With impressively tight storytelling across a bare minimum of scenes, Hitchcock handles the script's various discoveries and revelations impeccably, driving the film to its perfect climax in typically classy style. Bergman and Rains are untouchable.

63. TOY STORY (John Lasseter, 1995)
It's one thing to make an entire film inside a computer; it's another thing entirely to make it THIS GOOD. I mean that computer must have been amazing, like a Spectrum 128K +2 or something.

62. MONSTERS, INC. (Pete Docter, 2001)
The point at which it became clear Pixar were just going to be tossing these masterpieces off like clipped toenails every couple of years. Imagine knowing then that they'd eventually be doing it every six months or so.

61. CASINO ROYALE (Martin Campbell, 2006)
Daniel Craig grabs James Bond by the lapels and turns him into a box office juggernaut, a sharply-dressed bricklayer and an emotional wreck. The long-term effect on the franchise is still anyone's guess, but as a standalone film this is one of the 21st century's greatest action movies.

60. WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)

Possibly the most effective method of contraception on the market. If you still want kids after seeing this then you should probably consider some kind of therapy. Tilda Swinton predictably knocks it out of the park, but the three youngsters who play Kevin give the film its spine-chilling spine.

59. INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (Steven Spielberg, 1984)
Breathlessly exciting and gleefully dark se/prequel. Every fight and stunt matters, every set-piece is seared into action cinema lore and the script is emblematic of the wit that characterises the Golden Age of Spielberg. Temple Of Doom is Raiders' evil twin, and anyone who prefers Last Crusade is an unbearable goody-goody.

58. GOLDFINGER (Guy Hamilton, 1964)
Established the formula the series would employ repeatedly, with varying degrees of success, over the next forty-odd years, so cannot be underestimated. Every frame oozes impeccable style, 1960s cool and a sense of fun that mark it out as the definitive Bond Film.

57. THE APARTMENT (Billy Wilder, 1960)

Despicable, Fred MacMurray-wise; adorable, Jack Lemmon-wise; delightful, Shirley Maclaine-wise and wonderful, otherwise-wise.

56. BEFORE MIDNIGHT (Richard Linklater, 2013)
The best of the trilogy, only because it's so brutally honest and real. Hard as fuck to watch, mind, like seeing your mum & dad rowing (as in having a row, not rowing a boat).

55. THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (John Glen, 1987)
Timothy Dalton reboots Bond as a vaguely realistic human being twenty years before audiences were ready for it. Audiences are fucken idiots.

54. LICENCE TO KILL (John Glen, 1989)

Dalton ensures that Ian Fleming's James Bond - largely absent from his own film series since From Russia With Love - makes a welcome reappearance in this, the best James Bond film shut up.

53. MOULIN ROUGE! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)
Like shoving a lit firework up your bottom and having it explode behind your eyeballs for two hours. Audacious contemporary songs and retina-terrorising production design combine with a beautiful, passionate love story. Also Nicole Kidman is well fit.

52. THE INCREDIBLES (Brad Bird, 2004)
Still one of Pixar's finest, with their most thrilling set pieces, the coolest music and Samuel L Jackson’s greatest ever scene, in which he attempts to locate his costume against the wishes of his obstreperous missus.

51. THE LADY VANISHES (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)
A deliciously tongue-in-cheek love letter to Hitchcock's fellow countrymen, The Lady Vanishes simultaneously embraces and mercilessly lampoons the idiosyncracies of the English like a 1930s Paddington.

50. THE TERMINATOR (James Cameron, 1984)
The simplest of plots spiced up with a little cheeky time travel and some hilarious ultraviolence are all well and good, but Schwarzenegger knocks everything up a notch. Who can forget his brilliant catchphrase, "I'll come back later on, say 7ish"?

49. FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940)

Absolutely belting wartime thriller that racks up more inventive set-pieces, humour and diabolical intrigue than most of its modern-day counterparts: the sixteen-minute Amsterdam sequence alone is slicker and more exciting than most of what Ethan Hunt or James Bond have managed recently.

48. X2 (Bryan Singer, 2003)

Roughly the point where superhero films stopped being silly and became epic, thoughtful metaphors for real-world issues. Also the point where it became clear that Hugh Jackman is a god amongst mortals.

47. SPIDER-MAN 2 (Sam Raimi, 2004)
Still the best Spidey film, mostly down to Doc Ock, who's written and played to perfection. Also my favourite superhero film; everything both amazing and shitty about being a super are in here. Looks exactly like a comic book, too.

46. REAR WINDOW (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
The way Jimmy Stewart pieces a murder mystery together from the available information is a delicious reflection of Hitchcock's own storytelling technique. A film about films, full of tiny cinema screens, told by a master manipulator.

45. INSIDE OUT (Pete Docter, 2015)
A party bag of visual delights backed up by Pixar's trademark emotional wallop, Inside Out packs enough of a punch to put you in intensive care at Feels General. A ridiculously triumphant comeback for the studio after a run of lesser films and a miserable hiatus.

44. BRIEF ENCOUNTER (David Lean, 1945)
The most buttock-clenchingly British film ever made, in which two painfully repressed toffs meet, fall in love when they shouldn't and fuck like Duracell bunnies whenever they're off camera. So classy.

43. PATHS OF GLORY (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)
Kubrick's first masterpiece is a devastating, furious assault on the injustices committed in wartime in the name of patriotism. Staggering in all the best and worst ways, with Kirk Douglas magnetic as one of Stan's few heroes.

42. TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (James Cameron, 1991)
An object lesson in how to make a bigger, better sequel without shitting on the spirit of the original (all other Terminator films have failed to learn this lesson). Arnie is absolutely perfect; never has a star been so irreplaceable in a role.

41. SPIRITED AWAY (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)

Everything Miyazaki cares about, and everything he was a master of, is woven into this film in exactly the right proportions, making it both the ideal introduction to his work and the definitive Miyazaki masterpiece.

40. TOY STORY 2 (John Lasseter, 1999)
Themes of friendship and belonging, wrapped in an existential crisis undergone by a cowboy doll made of pixels, masquerading as a hilarious action adventure. Still Pixar's greatest achievement, which is really saying something.

39. 12 ANGRY MEN (Sidney Lumet, 1957)
Gloriously sweaty courtroom drama about tolerance, selflessness and not being a prick that everyone who is an intolerant, selfish prick should watch. Henry Fonda is cinema's least exciting (but genuinely heroic) hero.

38. THE COLOR PURPLE (Steven Spielberg, 1985)

Whoopi Goldberg is terrific as the downtrodden housewife who just about keeps a slender grip on her pride in Spielberg’s first “grown up” film. The Colo(u)r Purple wrings joy from small kindnesses, lacing a potentially crushing experience with the sweet potential of hope. Cried my tits off.

37. THE BIRDS (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)
Hitchcock's fourth masterpiece in a row ends cinema's most phenomenal purple patch in technically breathtaking style. A story about men and women, mothers and children, and birds and bees. Mostly birds, to be fair. The clue's in the title.

36. THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (George Cukor, 1940)
Delightfully perfect and perfectly delightful example of Hollywood's Golden Age at its goldenest. Jimmy Stewart's drunk chat with Cary Grant is bigger than Jesus.

35. FUNNY GAMES (Michael Haneke, 1997)
Enough to put you off films for life. (This is a recommendation)

34. ARRIVAL (Denis Villeneuve, 2016)
The kind of smart, elegant sci-fi that Christopher Nolan routinely overcomplicates. Takes time to get where it's going, but when it does, WOAH.

33. THE YOUNG GIRLS OF ROCHEFORT (Jacques Demy, 1967)

The Frenchest thing I've ever seen, and also among the most delightful musicals. Michel Legrand's songs are ooh la la, Gene Kelly is magnifique and the serial killer subplot is incroyable.

32. TAXI DRIVER (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
A hallucinatory tale of shattering loneliness and misguided vengeance. Scorsese commands a din of inscrutable characters and mysterious stylings to accompany one man's descent from amusing social awkwardness to ferocious, guns-blazing psychopathy.

31. ALIENS (James Cameron, 1986)
Two ideologically-opposed mother figures snipe at each other like they're on a sci-fi Mumsnet, while James Cameron amps everything up for a change in this tremendous, balls-to-the-wall sequel.

30. PADDINGTON (Paul King, 2014)
A sweet, intelligent, tears-streaming-down-your-chops joy which celebrates and commemorates the idiosyncracies of the English with pinpoint accuracy.

29. TOP HAT (Mark Sandrich, 1935)

Almost unbearably delightful hoofer in which weapons-grade farce is deployed to bring Fred & Ginger together against all odds. Spellbinding dancing, gorgeous songs and high camp combine to spoil the audience rotten.

28. SCHINDLER'S LIST (Steven Spielberg, 1993)
Few directors have been in a position to adequately convey such inexplicable evil to a mass audience; Spielberg recognises and respects his awesome responsibility, and the result is a devastating lesson in the consequences of intolerance that's no less relevant now than it was 25 years ago.

27. GROUNDHOG DAY (Harold Ramis, 1993)
I've watched this over and over and over and over and over again but no matter what I do, it always ends up being hilarious, touching and totally brilliant.

26. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1952)
An absolutely charming film, full of delightful songs and dances, that whimsically tells the tale of how three smug bastards conspire to publicly humiliate and destroy the career of an established actress, leading to her offscreen depression and eventual suicide.

25. KING KONG (Merian C Cooper & Ernest B Schoedsack, 1933)
Few monster movies have come close to the genius of the genre's grandaddy; most of them fail hopelessly at the first roar. Kong oozes personality thanks to the groundbreaking special effects, and that's why he's King.

24. 12 YEARS A SLAVE (Steve McQueen, 2013)

An astonishing true story of tenacity and endurance so harrowing and excruciating that it's near-unbearable, yet buoyed by hope and the kindness that exists in a world of horror.

23. GROSSE POINTE BLANK (George Armitage, 1997)
There's a reason why I connect with this film so hard but I'm not sure I want to know what it is. Cinema's most enjoyable existential crisis, featuring an adorable pair of leads with genuine chemistry, flawless support all round and shit hot action ("Thank you for the pen"), all set to a catalogue of '80s bangers. Popcorn!

22. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
Alfredson pitches every moment of horror and trope of vampire lore with the accuracy of a marksman, slowly but inexorably building towards that triumphant and deliriously satisfying swimming pool scene. Gorgeously terrifying.

21. NAPOLEON DYNAMITE (Jared Hess, 2004)

Everything about this weird little gem is adorable. It has a bigger heart than romcoms and love stories with ten times the budget, and it's ridiculously funny to (sweet moon)boot. I love it like Tina loves ham.

20. DIE HARD (John McTiernan, 1988)
Nobody puts a glass-shredded foot wrong in this masterpiece of tension, wit and perplexing F-bombs. Still no idea what “I’ll kiss your FUCKIN’ dalmatian!” is supposed to mean.

19. THE GODFATHER PART II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
A sequel that fucked with the rules of what sequels were supposed to be, GF2 expands the Corleone legacy in every direction, all of them amazing.

18. THE GODFATHER (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
This insanely ambitious and lavish epic is so rich in detail and character that you can't afford it. Michael Corleone's arc might be the greatest combination of writing and acting in all of cinema. All critics please note I am putting this and Part II separately because THEY ARE TWO TOTALLY DISTINCT FILMS.

17. GOODFELLAS (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
Breathlessly entertaining and unconventionally structured, GoodFellas feels like the picture Scorsese had been building to since film school. A handful of his movies since have come close, but this would be the Lufthansa heist of his career: spectacular, audacious and long-investigated.

16. ALIEN (Ridley Scott, 1979)
Unbearably atmospheric pant-shitter that launched the movies' greatest heroine / villain combo. Shame Ridley Scott shat all over his own legacy worse than George Lucas ever did.

15. RAGING BULL (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
Scorsese put himself into therapy with Raging Bull: a bruising comeback fight that spatters the director's own self-destructive tendencies across the canvas in stark, unforgiving monochrome.

14. THE GENERAL (Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1926)

Buster Keaton’s greatest comedy is as dazzling now as it was 93 (NINETY-THREE) years ago. Still hard to believe it was all done for real, but it’s that blend of breathtaking stunts and timeless wit that makes it what it is, which is the 14th best film I’ve ever seen.

13. STAR WARS (George Lucas, 1977)
Still as magically exciting, beguiling and brilliant as ever. Obviously nostalgia is a massive variable in the Star Wars Amazingness Formula, but let's be honest, EVERYTHING works here.

12. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (Irvin Kershner, 1980)
The Empire Strikes Back deserves every ounce of pomp heaped on it over the last 40 years, and I'm not about to change that. Every character and their connections to each other are deepened, the significance of every action is dramatically weighty and everything is accomplished with cast iron confidence.

11. PSYCHO (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
So Hitchcock it hurts, but Psycho is very much a team effort: the slicing score, crisp, high-contrast cinematography, flawless editing and Anthony Perkins' bewitching performance all stamp their own mark on the film. Even Janet Leigh's mascara feels like it should get its own credit.

10. THE 39 STEPS (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)
Perhaps Hitchcock's most efficient thriller: an episodic odyssey in which an innocent chump-on-the-run is bounced from one adventure to another like an immaculately-moustachioed pinball, it swings from tragedy to comedy with breathless economy.

9. NORTH BY NORTHWEST (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
A Bond film from the girl's point of view, with Cary Grant as the girl and Eva Marie Saint as the secret agent using sex to further the mission. Hitchcock's slickest version of The 39 Steps surfs a rogue wave of ludicrous fun from start to finish.

8. ROPE (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948)
Lip-smacking chamber piece about the smug entitlement of the over-privileged, and therefore never not relevant. Jimmy Stewart is incredible as the smart-arse who inadvertently radicalises a sycophantic psychopath; his final speech, in which he tries to extricate himself from his own terrible responsibility, is spine-tingling.

7. SE7EN (David Fincher, 1995)

The last great serial killer movie, and one which is as grand and horrific a statement of intent from its director as John Doe’s gruesome, misguided retribution is.

6. THE SHINING (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Not many horrors on this list because I’m a massive pussy and they’re mostly rubbish, but The Shining gets everything just right in its quest to entertain and terrify. It crawls under my skin and slowly picks my nerves apart until I can barely take it.

5. CASABLANCA (Michael Curtiz, 1942)
I always get depressed after watching Casablanca because it feels like nothing else could possibly be as good so what’s the point? Turns out there are four films just as good, if not better, so this list hasn’t been a complete waste of time after all. (Narrator: "It has")

4. BACK TO THE FUTURE (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
Proof that if your script is good enough (and this one is flawless), you can make a great family film about a teenager who hangs around with a weird old man and actively encourages his mum to try and fuck him.

3. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (Steven Spielberg, 1981)
Heroes don't get more heroic than Indiana Jones, and his first outing is the greatest action adventure of all time, combining thrills and LOLs with copious Nazi-punching and Harrison Ford's winning everyman performance.

2. VERTIGO (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
A tall tale about a tall tale, with manipulated actors and sadistic directors in both, Vertigo's storytelling audacity and refusal to limit the depths to which it plunges its characters make it Hitchcock's most awful, brilliant achievement.

1. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Kubrick's greatest triumph is a beautiful, terrifying mindfuck that asks all the biggest questions and answers precisely none (except how to do a poo in zero gravity). For a film with almost no plot and whose only interesting character is a computer, It's a miracle 2001 is even watchable, let alone THE GREATEST FILM EVER MADE ACCORDING TO THE INCREDIBLE SUIT WHICH IS TEN YEARS OLD TODAY.

*

What have I missed? What should be number one? What have I got against the MCU? Leave your valued comments in the goddamn toilet where they belong.

Kubism, Part 4: Paths Of Glory (1957)

Act I of Stanley Kubrick's career is complete: over the course of three shorts and three features we've seen him grow from pretentious faux-intellectual with a keen eye into an accomplished storyteller with an even keener eye. It hasn't always been easy viewing (I refer you, once again, to The Seafarers), but the upward trajectory in quality has at least formed the kind of narrative arc every traditional first act follows. Now, though, it's time to get serious. Paths Of Glory is, objectively, The Kube's first masterpiece: a film that tears the insanity of war a new asshole, dives into that asshole to examine the very rectum of humanity, and emerges caked in the shit of man's most unspeakable behaviour towards his fellow man. I hope it washed its hands.

Things begin with the ever-present (but, this time, mercifully brief) Kubrickian voiceover filling us in on the current state of affairs: it's France, 1916, there's a war happening, and it's not going well for anyone. In the first of several chess references that pepper the film, we discover there's a stalemate situation between the French and German forces, it's nil-nil with everything to play for and both teams are snookered (it's possible I don't fully understand chess). Pompous old twat General Broulard convinces weaselly turd General Mireau that if his men can take a German stronghold known as the Ant Hill - which both men acknowledge is a logistically unachievable task - there might be a tasty promotion in it for him, setting in motion a chain of events that made me so fucking cross about how awful people can be that I immediately tore up my application for the job of high-ranking military officer in a time of horrific global conflict. The hours were rubbish anyway so they can whistle.

Passing the buck as quickly as he can, Mireau assigns the job of taking the Ant Hill (renamed from "the Pimple" in the original novel: both names reflecting the cosmic insignificance Kubrick loved to assign his characters' efforts to control forces beyond their comprehension) to Colonel Dax and his Impossible Missions Force - basically a platoon of knackered soldiers with little to no clue about why they're there or what they're doing. Dax, one of precious few heroic characters in the Kubrick canon, is played by Kirk Douglas and is therefore carved from solid granite; an anchor of decency in a sea of madness and abandoned morality. Like every other Frenchman in Paths Of Glory he also speaks with a broad American accent, which is offputting to begin with, but once you fully appreciate, like, the universality of the film's themes, man, you begin to respect Kubrick's decision not to ask the cast to go all 'Allo 'Allo.

By this time we've descended from Broulard's opulent chateau to Dax's sewer-like trenches, giving Kubrick the perfect excuse to literally roll out some stunning tracking shots through the carved-out scars in the earth that pass for Dax's workplace. Not only do these shots look incredible, prefiguring 2001's hamstery jogging wheel scene and the corridors of The Shining's Overlook Hotel, but they also lend a sense of doomed inevitability to the soldiers' journey: where Kubrick's camera followed Broulard and Mireau's flamboyant dancing stroll around the chateau, that freedom of movement is entirely absent from the linearity that, by design, characterises the trenches.

Over the top the Ant Hill Mob go, then, with Kubrick unleashing hell in a spectacular three-minute scene that sees Dax, centre frame at all times, lead the charge across No Man's Land. This is the opening-of-Saving-Private-Ryan of its day, and still has the power to drop jaws over six decades later. It's an incredible display of acting, directing and editing, part Hollywood epic and part documentary realism, with extras flailing about all around Douglas while Stan crash zooms into his lead's grimacing face, fixed in grim determination as it's spattered in blood and dirt.

The assault, unsurprisingly, is a disaster, the platoon sensibly scurries back to the trenches rather than risk having their bits blown off, and General Mireau naturally decides to court martial three random soldiers for cowardice as an example to the rest of the army. What has up until now been a thundering war film transforms unexpectedly into a thundering courtroom drama, with the unstoppable force of Colonel Dax (who, as a civilian, was conveniently the "foremost criminal lawyer in all of France") meeting the immovable object of military pig-headedness as he struggles to defend his men in a shambolic kangaroo court. Kubrick's effortless swinging between genres would be a trope of his later career, but it's easy to forget that here he seamlessly blends two narrative archetypes into the same film.

The trial is just as harrowing to watch as the earlier scenes on the battlefield, with the script wringing the maximum amount of hear-tearing frustration out of the army's total failure of common decency and Kubrick repeatedly placing his camera in the absolute perfect spot to tell his story. The dialogue here is glorious (Dax's closing argument, in which he professes his shame at being a member of the human race, is chilling), but if you muted the volume you'd still know exactly what's going down - specifically the three soldiers, sentenced to death by firing squad. Kubrick goes on to tease steel cables of tension out of the run-up to the execution (the constant drum roll is no help for those with high blood pressure), with the chance of a reprieve dangled in front of the viewer like a lifebuoy, and he plays with audience expectation with all the mercy of a bored cat pawing at a terrified mouse.

In the event that you've got this far but haven't seen Paths Of Glory I won't spoil the remainder of the film, except to say that it doesn't have much more to say in the way of positive appraisals of humanity in wartime; if there's a moral to the story, it's the survival of the shittest. This is arguably Kubrick's first fully-formed plunge into his characters' psyches: while his previous films were largely populated with cyphers employed to operate the machinery of their respective plots, the men (and woman) of Paths Of Glory are conduits for some searing psychological evaluation. Look at the convicted soldiers' responses to the verdict of their court martial, for example: incarcerated in the chateau's stables, treated like animals and stripped of their dignity, one turns to God, one to booze and the other falls apart in the face of a total absence of reason. Look at the smiling photographer who snaps them on their way to the firing squad. And look at Dax's reaction in the final scene, as he realises the men he's been trying to save are as "degenerate" as the men who send them to certain death - before, thanks to the future Mrs Kubrick's appearance as a terrified German girl, the soldiers reveal an appreciation of life and beauty that offers a glimmer of hope for the future of humanity.

And let's not forget Kubrick's continual development as a composer of actual works of art on screen. On the one hand obsessed with detail and authenticity, then on the other concocting a five-second theatrically operatic horror in which a nighttime wide shot of No Man's Land is suddenly illuminated by a flare, revealing mangled corpses that were hidden by the darkness, Stan truly finds his visual groove here. He may be schooling us on the worst aspects of mankind, the futility of honour in the face of cold ambition and the travesties of justice that are meted out in the name of patriotism, but at least he's making it look fucking horrific while he's doing it.

Join me again soon for more of Captain Kirk in Spartacus, the story of the slightly-above-average hero of Lazy Town and his quest to get the slaves of ancient Rome to eat more fruit and veg.

← Part 3: The Killing

Part 5: Spartacus →