1,000 Films To See Before You Die | The Guardian Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951) Prescient satire on news manipulation, with Kirk Douglas as a washed-up hack making the most of a story that falls into his lap. One of Wilder's nastiest, most cynical efforts, who can say he wasn't actually soft-pedalling? He certainly thought it was the best film he'd ever made. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (Tom Shadyac, 1994) A goofy detective turns town upside-down in search of a missing dolphin - any old plot would have done for oven-ready megastar Jim Carrey. A ski-jump hairdo, a zillion impersonations, making his bum "talk" - Ace Ventura showcases Jim Carrey's near-rapturous gifts for physical comedy long before he became encumbered by notions of serious acting. An Actor's Revenge (Kon Ichikawa, 1963) Prolific Japanese director Ichikawa scored a bulls-eye with this beautifully stylized potboiler that took its cues from traditional Kabuki theatre. It's all ballasted by a terrific double performance from Kazuo Hasegawa both as the female-impersonator who has sworn vengeance for the death of his parents, and the raucous thief who helps him. The Addiction (Abel Ferrara, 1995) Ferrara's comic-horror vision of modern urban vampires is an underrated masterpiece, full- throatedly bizarre and offensive. The vampire takes blood from the innocent mortal and creates another vampire, condemned to an eternity of addiction and despair. Ferrara's mob movie The Funeral, released at the same time, had a similar vision of violence and humiliation. The Adjuster (Atom Egoyan, 1991) An insurance adjuster and his film-censor wife-who both have boundary issues when it comes to their work-catch the attention of a voyeuristic couple, with bizarre consequences for all involved. Spinning with plot twists, Atom Egoyan's deadpan comedy casts an impassive gaze on an elaborate ballet of desire and compulsion. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (WD Richter, 1984) Peter Weller plays the titular scientist/surgeon/inventor/presidential adviser/rock star defending the world from trans-dimensional aliens - all called John - in one of the most unusual mainstream movies of the 1980's. It pulls off the trick of being nearly incomprehensible yet sharply funny. Of course, it was a massive flop but that just makes it more of a joy to discover. The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz, William Keighley, 1938) The supreme Robin romance, with Technicolor hues from stained glass. Here, Errol Flynn's charm is dew-fresh and his athleticism is effortless. Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone are the scoundrels, and every vault and sword-thrust is made more thrilling by Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score. After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985) Joseph K's travails influence this tale of a data programmer lost in downtown New York and bouncing from one weird woman to another. Shot quickly with a low budget, this nocturnal odyssey marked Martin Scorsese's (brief) return to independent film-making, and it pulses with anxiety and paranoia. Aguirre, Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972) Wild-eyed Klaus Kinski is a 16th-century explorer in search of El Dorado who is slowly undone by fever, tribal incursions and delusions of grandeur. From its stunning first shot of ant-like human voyagers descending the Andes to its final hallucinatory rain of monkeys, Aguirre is an unforgettable journey into the void. Airplane! (David Zucker, 1980) Airplane!'s comic philosophy is simple: let there be yuks! Wall-to-wall puns, a joke every 8 seconds, visual gags by the zillion: sheer comic overload is what counts. Its cast of stone- faced 50s has-beens found new careers thanks to the film, and the smart-ass American comedy was revivified overnight. Akira (Katsuhiro Ôtomo, 1988) Japanese anime's unarguable classic compensates for the genre's traditional pitfall - rampant overplotting - with its adrenalised portrayal of Tokyo in 2019, a city which has become the plaything of biker gangs, military-industrial goons and a psychic mummy's boy. Superlatively animated (by hand), it's the kind of deep-seated apocalyptic wet dream only manga could dream up. Alexander Nevsky (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1938) Russian nationalism, a battle on the ice and some rousing Prokofiev music are the ingredients in Eisenstein's propaganda pic. The setting may be the 13th century, but Nevsky's defeat of the Teutons had a topical resonance at a time when the threat from Hitler loomed ever larger. Stalin was a fan: during the second world war, he named an award "The Order Of Alexander Nevsky For Bravery" after the hero the movie celebrated. Alfie (Lewis Gilbert, 1966) Often misappropriated as some kind of Loaded readers' hymn-sheet, Alfie is actually a deeply ambiguous study of the permissive society, luring you in with those iconic to-camera monologues. Caine alternates effortlessly between caddish charm and hood-eyed dispassion, and the abortion scene is another reminder of the chill aftermath of those 60s freedoms. Alice (Jan Svankmajer, 1988) The Czech surrealist's part live-action, part stop-motion adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland odyssey reinvented animation, infusing the children's fantasy with a dark, disturbing undertow of menace. Presented as a fever dream, it shows Alice as a lost, troubled heroine, adrift in a strange and sometimes frightening low-fi world of jack-in-the-box pandemonium. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) Dirty realism and sexual symbolism combine to brilliant effect in the mother of all space horrors. Scott's relentlessly measured direction induces real dread as a slithery creature infests the dark corners of an industrial spaceship and begins picking off its crew one by one. A darkly adult sci-fi masterpiece that made a star of Sigourney Weaver - and a mess of John Hurt. All About My Mother (Pedro Almodovar, 1999) This story of grieving mother Cecilia Roth finding a new life caring for pregnant nun Penelope Cruz and veteran actress Marisa Paredes richly deserved its best foreign film Oscar. Almodovar keeps the old flamboyance, but exhibits a new emotional maturity that's entirely gripping. All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955) A textbook lesson in saying two (or more) things at once, Sirk's finest movie is both a lush melodrama and a progressive social comment - not to mention something of a camp classic. Jane Wyman plays a respectable widow who scandalously steps out with her beefcake gardener (still-closeted Rock Hudson). No wonder it has been remade by both Fassbinder (Fear Eats the Soul - no 159) and Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven). All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979) Song-and-dance man Fosse's grandly ambitious, autobiographical movie stars a rampant Roy Scheider as the self-centred, manically driven, sex-and-death-obsessed Joe Gideon. Giuseppe Rotunno's photography is superb and the choreography - particularly in the hallucinatory operating room numbers - quite stunning: all in all, a hell of a testimony to Fosse's wild talent. All the President's Men (Alan J Pakula, 1976) The ink on Nixon's resignation letter was barely dry when this chronicle of the Watergate scandal came out. Never did investigative journalism look so much like police work, as reporters Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford piece together the political scandal through a combination of patience, legwork, cunning and shady informants. Alphaville (Jean Luc Godard, 1965) Ground-breaking sci-fi thriller/fable about a hard-boiled secret agent (surly Eddie Constantine), who travels across space to the futuristic city of Alphaville, ruled by a giant computer. It's Orwell's 1984 stylishly revisited in grainy black and white, warning us about cyber-tyranny and the death of individualism. Amadeus (Milos Forman, 1984) Peter Shaffer's smash stage-play, imagining a plot to murder Mozart. F Murray Abraham won the best actor Oscar as the glowering Salieri, the court composer whose plodding, time- serving mediocrity is brutally revealed by the blazing revelation of Mozart: a shrieking boor who has done nothing to deserve his genius. A gripping tale which holds up well. Les Amants Du Pont Neuf (Leos Carax, 1991) Brash, harrowing and melodramatic, Carax's movie created a sensation at the time. It is about homeless people on Paris's Pont Neuf bridge: Juliette Binoche is Michele, an artist who is going blind; Denis Lavant is the druggie street performer who falls for her, and then fears that a new eye treatment could end her reliance on him. Watching it needs a sense of humour, and a sense of absurdity. Amelie (Jean Pierre Jeunet, 2001) Parisian life took on a fresh romantic sheen when Audrey Tautou's naive cafe waitress sets out on a quest for love and beauty after finding a stranger's forgotten childhood treasure. Jeunet's whimsical, neo-nostalgic blockbuster put Montmartre back on the map and catapulted Tautou into stardom. American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999) Crisply written, lustrous-looking satire on the American Dream. Kevin Spacey gives a wickedly droll performance as self-confessed loser Lester Burnham, who quits his job and pitches headlong into dope-smoking, iron-pumping, mid-life meltdown. American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980) Richard Gere, dressed by Armani and objectified by Schrader, gleams with cool sexuality in a redemptive story of a male prostitute framed for murder in Beverly Hills. Schrader's hyper- stylish, hyper-alienated study of materialism anticipated the foibles of the yuppie generation, conveying an icy, calculating eroticism with unnerving precision. American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) Where were you in '62? asks George Lucas in his only perfect movie, still the quintessential 50s/60s nostalgia-piece, whose distilled essence is reprised in movies as diverse as Diner, Porky's and Dazed & Confused.