If you watch only one film … the greatest movies by the greatest directors – The Guardian

Where once our movie options were restricted by physical schedule, now we have apparently limitless uncurated digital material; the mind reels at its vastness. So sometimes we need a “entrance” movie for directors, an entry point which might not necessarily be that film-maker’s most popular work– being, as it may be, unhelpfully industrial or irregular. For Nagisa Oshima, you might not wish to begin with the raunchy In the Realm of the Senses or the David Bowie automobile Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence: it could be more productive to start with his more indirectly disturbing Max Mon Amour. For Howard Hawks … where to begin? Red River is the traditional western however maybe the beautiful funny His Girl Friday will much better smooth the course to the rest of his work. And yet frequently the most famous is the most direct course: for Satyajit Ray, Pather Panchali is the most seductive method. We require the keynote films to generate all the rest. Peter Bradshaw

Mike Leigh

Nuts in May, 1976

Pitch perfect … Alison Steadman, Roger Sloman and Anthony O’Donnell in Mike Leigh’s Play for Today, Nuts in Might. Picture: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

The most reliably doleful voice in British movie theater rings loud and clear through the misadventures of Keith and Candice Marie, innocents on a Dorset camping vacation. The comedy is flawlessly sharp, the simple laughs of soaked cagoules whittled to a point by the eye for detail. If the couple’s natural piety feels ahead of its time, a great deal of the laughs echoed into the future. It was just a short action from Keith’s ultimate crisis to Alan Partridge assaulting a BBC officer with a wheel of blue cheese. But something darker ticks away too, Leigh’s world filled with the prevented and put-upon. And here, moist camping sites become a battleground of tribal identities, the sort of civil war we have actually all been residing in recently. The best of Mike Leigh always peers into places no one else has actually thought to look. In Nuts in May, that location is England, the little spot of surroundings where none of us can stand another. Danny Leigh

Agnès Varda

Vagabond, 1985

Mutinous, unconcerned, inscrutable … Sandrine Bonnaire in Vagabond. Photo: Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy

Varda’s traditional Vagabond, or Sans Toit Ni Loi (No Shelter No Law), is a film with the authentic spirit of the French New Wave: complex, questioning, requiring, passionate. Sandrine Bonnaire plays Mona, a young homeless woman whom we see dead in a freezing ditch in the film’s opening and whose life is opened up through a series of flashback episodes and interviews with the people who encountered her on the road. It is a statement story that bears contrast to Welles’s Person Kane. Mona declines her life as a wage-slave secretary and removes with her tent on her back, sleeping in fields or on roadsides, getting cash-in-hand jobs where she can– and facing harsh misogyny and assault. She is mutinous, unconcerned, inscrutable. As she states: “Je m’en fous– je bouge” (“I don’t care– I just carry on”). Wherever she goes, Mona spreads anxiousness. Some individuals are considerate; some even admire and envy her freedom and defiance. Some are resentful of her lack of gratitude when they assist her. Mona is a parodic version of the workings of divine grace; a mysterious force in the lives of those she crosses. PB

Spike Lee

Do the Right Thing, 1989

Street life … Spike Lee, Robin Harris and Frankie Faison in Do the Right Thing Year. Photo: Image 12/Alamy

Spike Lee’s classic is not so much prophetic as enduringly, tactlessly appropriate– starting with a cautioning about environment change and ending with a Black male eliminated in an authorities chokehold. It is an unbearably hot day in the Bed-Stuy area of Brooklyn, New York City– then in the first phases of gentrification– and racial tension is increasing on the streets. “If this heat continues, it’s going to melt the polar ice caps and the entire broad world,” states somebody outside Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, which uses Mookie (played by Lee himself) as a shipment guy. Rosie Perez plays Mookie’s sweetheart Tina, who rules the movie by virtue of her explosive dance series over the opening credits to Public Opponent’s Battle the Power. Sal himself is thinking of quitting and turning the dining establishment into an apartment called Trump’s Plaza. His two sons are otherwise depressed and racist, and things come to a head when a good friend of Mookie’s takes a look at the displayed black-and-white images of Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro and needs to understand why there aren’t any “bros on the wall”– a culture war declaration, made decades before the discourse caught up. The zing, energy and passion of Spike Lee’s early work of art are as strong as ever. PB

Jane Campion

The Piano, 1993

Key of life … Anna Paquin and Holly Hunter in The Piano. Picture: Jan Chapman Productions/Allstar

The purest location to begin with New Zealand film-maker Campion is with her 3rd movie, The Piano. A period drama embeded in the 1850s, it stars Holly Hunter as Ada, a mute pianist who travels from Scotland to New Zealand to satisfy a set up marriage to Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill). When her brand-new partner offers her precious piano to Harvey Keitel’s scary-sexy George Baines, she is forced to strike a deal with her instrument’s brand-new owner. She can make it back, essential by key, through a series of Victorian sexual favours. All the things I enjoy about Campion’s movies are present here: her eye for rich natural landscapes; the way her work is typically hazy around the edges, like wading through a dream; her fascination with imagination (An Angel at My Table and Bright Star likewise include artists). She is extremely attuned to the cruelty of patriarchal violence, the frisson of risk and even the tiniest sexual charge. Simran Hans

Steve McQueen

Fans Rock (part of the Little Axe anthology), 2020

Amarah-Jae St Aubyn and Micheal Ward in Lovers Rock. Picture: Parisa Taghizadeh/BBC/McQueen Limited

Steve McQueen is obsessed with the human body. He lingers on Bobby Sands’s squandering frame in Cravings, jail cell smeared with human faeces; on sex addict Brandon, full frontal in Embarassment; on the graphic embarrassments suffered by cotton picker Patsey in 12 Years a Slave. In Enthusiasts Rock, the second instalment of his Small Axe anthology, a series of stories that centre on London’s West Indian neighborhood, bodies are necessary, too. The movie takes place in Ladbroke Grove in 1980, throughout a house party, and develops to a transcendent 10-minute set piece soundtracked by Janet Kay’s Ridiculous Games. Hands search waists, hips sway, lips lock, sweat drips and the crowd sings in unison. For better or even worse, his camera refuses to avert. McQueen’s movie theater is associated with duration and discomfort, but he pays calm attention to tender moments, too. It is barely his most conventional movie– plot-wise, nearly absolutely nothing occurs– but begin here anyhow, working backwards through his filmography to appropriately value his range. SH

Hayao Miyazaki

Kiki’s Delivery Service, 1989

Space on the broom … Kiki’s Delivery Service. Photo: Image 12/Alamy

My intro to the mild wisdom and gorgeous hand-drawn animation of Hayao Miyazaki was a woman in a big red bow, soaring through the sky. I liked Kiki’s Delivery Service as a kid, and still get in touch with it as a grownup. Kiki is a 13-year-old witch in training who flies the nest and finds out how to take care of herself. She establishes in a new town with her black feline Jiji, gets a job at a bakery, and starts her own organization, providing bundles via broom. Kiki’s newly found self-reliance is its own magical adventure but the stakes are subtle. Her greatest challenge is to guarantee she doesn’t burn out. Exhausted from overpromising herself, her self-confidence and her powers begin to fade. The females in her life encourage her to hang out in nature, to paint, to rest and to heal. People pleasers will determine, and be comforted as Miyazaki advantages a child’s perspective with the utmost empathy and seriousness. SH

Michael Bay

Armageddon, 1998

Bay watch … Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck in Armageddon. Photo: Moviestore/Shutterstock

Michael Bay’s movie theater is the movie theater of the vulgar, which’s what makes him so compulsively watchable. All of us require a little indecency in our lives once in a while; to make every effort continually after taste is, after all, a completely tasteless endeavour. Armageddon is the naffest, funniest and most scrumptious of the hollow however addicting deals with that make up the Bayhem canon. It is the simultaneous zenith and nadir of all-American cheese as a cinematic aesthetic. It has everything. That Aerosmith tune. Ben Affleck romancing Liv Tyler with Animal Crackers. Bruce Willis as a sort of straight-talking, beer-drinking, world-saving Jesus figure, drafted in by Nasa to save humankind from being wiped out by a huge asteroid. If I had to select a single sequence that encapsulates Armageddon’s worldview, it would be Bay’s negative climactic montage of modest folks from different countries increasing to their feet in slow movement versus a background of well-known international landmarks, to applaud their saviour, the basic American blue-collar oil driller. Simply in case you missed out on the point, an American flag then fills the screen. This is America. And it’s spectacular. Catherine Bray

Pedro Almodóvar

Bad Education, 2004

Gael García Bernal and Javier Camara in Bad Education. Photograph: Everett Collection/ Alamy

It’s hard to go too incorrect when popping your Pedro Almodóvar cherry. The Spanish director’s method operandi is to bring telenovela plots to life through lively image-making that owes as much to Fauvism as anything in movie theater. Weaving together the homoerotic identity games of The Talented Mr Ripley and the honeysuckle-scented seductions of Double Indemnity, this is one slippery fox. All noir needs a magnetic femme fatale, and Bad Education sends a never-better Gael García Bernal as Ignacio, AKA Ángel, AKA Zahara, AKA trouble with a capital T. However Bad Education thrums with its own power, most keenly expressed in the motif of the composed word as an active representative, cutting to the core of characters who get off on their dual functions as author and character. CB

Claire Denis

Problem Every Day, 2001

Eaten mess … Problem Every Day.Trouble Every Day isn’t necessarily

a typical Claire Denis, however it’s an excellent location to start. Set mainly in Paris, the minimalist plot unfurls gradually, though we understand from the off that horrific, compulsive violence is the engine pulsating beneath the hood. The movie’s extreme sex scenes tend to go south pretty quickly, in every sense, with meat very much back on the menu, boys. Blending sex and cannibalism in movie theater is not brand-new, but Denis goes all-in with an unyielding combination of moody arthouse languors and specific gore. The roving, casually exact cam changes the framing of bodies, offering us brand-new angles from which to view the familiar, the mise-en-scène strategically dissecting the human form, presenting a piece of thigh, an uncertain tuft of hair, a navel close-up. It’s not a movie that cares whether you warm to it, which chimes totally with its splendidly fearless author. CB Kathryn Bigelow Point Break, 1991 Chuting stars

… Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze

in Point Break. Photo:

Pictorial Press/Alamy Bigelow had currently messed with category films 3 times before her unusual and brilliant break-in thriller, Point Break. There were riffs on vampires(Near Dark), cop procedurals (Blue Steel) and cyclist gangs in The Loveless. They were the work of a woman unafraid to flex old tropes into new shapes. But with the tale of surfer guys turned bank burglars, her brand name of cool delirium snapped totally into place. The film was slick Hollywood home entertainment and still clearly the vision of a female sprung from the downtown Manhattan art scene. So with Point Break, you get a popcorn movie as ridiculous as the facility indicates, made more so by the yin-yang double act of Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves. You likewise get weirdly chewy ideas about the road from adrenaline to Zen, a clingy hero and spiritually informed bad person. And the glue for these inner tensions were God-level action scenes: another Bigelow hallmark, her female look concentrated on a mayhem of male bodies. DL Martin Scorsese Good fellas, 1990 Gangster paradise … Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. Photograph: Warner Bros./ Barry Wetcher/Allstar The richness, scrumptious dark humour, jukebox slams and rocket-fuelled storytelling of Goodfellas

make it one of Scorsese’s classics

. It hooks you from the extremely initially, with

Ray Liotta’s gravelly voiceover:” As far back as I can remember, I constantly wished to be a gangster … “It is the true story of the fluctuate of Irish-Italian mobster Henry Hill, gloriously played by Liotta, holding his own versus Scorsese’s A-team: Robert De Niro as Jimmy”The Gent “Conway, the Oscar-winning Joe Pesci as the psychopathic Tommy DeVito and Paul Sorvino as the slow-moving capo Paulie Cicero. Lorraine Bracco(later on to gain a second famous status as Tony’s expert in the HBO show The Sopranos)plays Henry’s partner. Pesci’s iconic”Funny how?” scene, in which he pretends to be upset by Henry calling him”amusing”is an excellent presentation of Scorsese’s present for black funny: all the mobsters consider themselves as comedians (for this reason,”wiseguys “), whose aggressive humour is a prelude to violence. A compelling, legendary drama. PB Andrei Tarkovsky Stalker, 1979 Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy and Anatoliy Solonitsyn in Stalker. Photograph: TCD/Prod. DB/Alamy By now, the forbidding aura that once surrounded Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker has all but liquified. The backstory to the Soviet director’s post-industrial sci-fi is oft retold nowadays: how a very first variation was shot on film messed up back in Moscow, demanding it be started once again from scratch; the places downriver of a chemical plant stated to have actually caused Tarkovsky’s death.

Then there was the prophecy of Chornobyl in the story. A whole subculture has flowered out of the movie’s unusual soil: the Stalker video game series, author Geoff Dyer’s cine-memoir, Zona. I wager Etsy has all kinds of stuff. Which is fantastic. Since Stalker should be commemorated, not feared

. For all the mystique, it has an unusual availability: a quest movie even if the mission is unknowable, performed by 3 vibrant characters. If the liminal spaces of the”Zone”they travel through are simple to get lost in, they likewise orient you to the rhythm of Tarkovsky. So see it for its own sake, or as an entrance drug. In either case, the Zone waits for. DL

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jul/09/the-greatest-movies-by-the-greatest-directors