NUMBER 50
.
Thunderheart
Director: Michael Apted
Writer: John Fusco
Featuring: Val Kilmer, Sam Shepard, Graham Greene, Fred Ward, Fred Dalton Thompson
Summary: There has been a series of mysterious homicides on a Sioux Indian reservation in the Badlands of South Dakota. The investigation of homicides on Native American territory is within Federal jurisdiction, but the FBI is finding it difficult to gather information from the native Sioux. Ray Levoi, a promising but inexperienced field agent who happens to be one-quarter Sioux, is called in to assist in the investigation. As he probes deeper into the events on the reservation, he is torn between his duty to the FBI and his awakening sense of duty to the Sioux nation. Based on actual events in the 1970s.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 49
.
A Place Called Chiapas
Director: Nettie Wild
Writers: Nettie Wild, Manfred Becker
Featuring: Subcomandante Marcos
Summary: A look at the world’s first postmodern revolution. This documentary takes us into the heart of Chiapas, Mexico and the people’s struggle for land, liberty, and survival. Represented by the pseudonymous and anonymous Subcomandante Marcos and his band of masked revolutionaries, the people of southern Mexico are engaged in a nonviolent battle again violent opposition from all sides—the Mexican military and a fascist paramilitary organization ironically called “Peace and Justice.” We are shown the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement upon the indigenous peoples of southern Mexico, and their support of the masked revolutionary who uses words and modern media as his weapons against systemic injustice. The revolution continues more than fifteen years after it began. In the words of Subcomandante Marcos, “If you ask us what’s going to happen in the near future, we have no fucking idea. Sorry for using the word ‘idea.’”
.
.

NUMBER 48
.
A Face in the Crowd
Director: Elia Kazan
Writers: Budd Schulberg
Featuring: Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Walter Matthau
Summary: “A Face in the Crowd” charts the rise of a raucous hayseed named Lonesome Rhodes from itinerant Ozark guitar picker to local media rabble-rouser to TV superstar and political king-maker. Marcia Jeffries is the innocent Sarah Lawrence girl who discovers the great man in a back-country jail and is the first to fall under his spell.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 47
.
My Name Is Nobody
Directors: Sergio Leone, Tonino Valerii
Writers: Segio Leone, Ernesto Gastaldi
Featuring: Henry Fonda, Terence Hill
Summary: Jack Beauregard, once the greatest gunslinger of the Old West, only wants to move to Europe and retire in peace. But a young gunfighter, known only as “Nobody,” idolizes him and wants to see him go out in a blaze of glory. He arranges for Jack to face the 150-man gang known as The Wild Bunch and earn his place in history.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 46
.
Brother
Director: Takeshi Kitano
Writer: Takeshi Kitano
Featuring: Takeshi Kitano, Omar Epps
Summary: A Japanese Yakuza gangster is exiled to the United States. He settles in Los Angeles where his younger half-brother lives, and finds that although the turf is new, the rules are still the same as they try to take over the local drug trade. The exile shows the American gangsters the meaning of honor and brotherhood.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 45
.
Leon
Director: Luc Besson
Writer: Luc Besson
Featuring: Jean Reno, Natalie Portman, Gary Oldman, Danny Aiello
Summary: Leon is a first-class hit man, but is also a sensitive guy who loves his potted plants. He is moral: “No women, no children” is his professional motto. He is sympathetic to his neighbor, Mathilda, a typically rebellious twelve-year-old who has trouble with her family. But when her father runs afoul of drug kingpin Norman Stansfield, Mathilda turns to Leon for assistance.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 44
.
Ikiru
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Writers: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto
Featuring: Takashi Shimura, Shinichi Himori
Summary: In a Post-War Tokyo, when low-level city hall bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe finds that he has a terminal cancer, he decides to live his last months of life intensively. While dying, he leanrs the meaning of life, and fights for the construction of a playground in a poor zone of the city.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 43
.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
Director: Peter Greenaway
Writer: Peter Greenaway
Featuring: Helen Mirren, Michael Gambon, Tim Roth
Summary: The wife of a barbaric crime boss engages in a secretive romance with a gentle bookseller between meals at her husband’s restaurant. Food, colour coding, sex, murder, torture and more are the exotic fare in this beautifully filmed but brutally uncompromising modern fable which has been interpreted as an allegory for Thatcherism.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 42
.
Bob Roberts
Director: Tim Robbins
Writer: Tim Robbins
Featuring: Tim Robbins, Giancarlo Esposito, Alan Rickman, David Strathairn, James Spader, Gore Vidal, Helen Hunt, Jack Black, Susan Sarandon, John Cusack, Bob Balaban, Jeremy Piven
Summary: Documentary-style look at the fictional Senatorial campaign of Bob Roberts, an arch-conservative folk singer turned politician. This political satire includes several original songs co-written and performed by writer/director/star Tim Robbins, and cameo appearances by other stars as reporters and news anchors.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 41
.
Land of Plenty
Director: Wim Wenders
Writer: Wim Wenders
Featuring: Michelle Williams, John Diehl
Summary: The Gospels, preached at a Skid-Row mission, contrast with images of LA’s homeless, post-9/11 mistrust, and anti-Muslim violence. Lana cares about the poor—she’s the American daughter of missionaries to South Africa and the Middle East, just returned to L.A. from the West Bank to work at a homeless mission. She seeks her uncle Paul, a burned out Agent-Orange-addled Vietnam War vet, now a vigilante security cop, watching for terrorists two years after 9/11, suspicious of everything, including a Muslim carrying boxes of Borax. Lana and Paul drive to Death Valley, Lana to take the body of a murdered homeless Muslim to his brother, Paul to follow the Borax trail. What they discover together is terrifying, in a post-9/11 world.
.
.
.

NUMBER 40
.
Until the End of the World: Director’s Cut
Director: Wim Wenders
Writer: Wim Wenders
Featuring: William Hurt, Solveig Dommartin, Sam Neill, Max von Sydow, Ernie Dingo, Tom Waits
Summary: Set in the future (1999), a woman has a car accident with some bank robbers, who befriend and enlist her help to take the money to a drop in Paris. On the way she runs into another fugitive from the law, an American who is being chased by the CIA. The charges are false, he says. The CIA want to confiscate a device his father invented which allows you to record your dreams and vision. On the run from the bank robbers and the CIA, they span the globe, ending up in Australia at the research facility of his father, where they hope to be able to play back the recordings Hurt has made to his blind mother. (Be sure to watch the four and a half hour director’s version, not the butchered two and a half hour studio release. If you can’t find the director’s cut, contact me.)
.
.

NUMBER 39
.
The Brave
Director: Johnny Depp
Writers: Johnny Depp, D.P. Depp, Paul McCudden, from the novel by Gregory McDonald
Featuring: JOhnny Depp, Marlon Brando, Marshall Bell, Frederic Forrest, Luis Guzman, Iggy Pop
Summary: A down-on-his-luck American Indian recently released from jail is offered the chance to “star” as the victim of a snuff film, the resulting pay of which could greatly help his poverty stricken family. A parable of the plight of the Native American.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 38
.
The Color of Paradise
Director: Majid Majidi
Writer: Majid Majidi
Featuring: Hossein Mahjoub, Mohsen Ramezani
Summary: Mohammad, a boy at Tehran’s institute for the blind, waits for his dad to pick him up for summer vacation. While waiting, he realizes a baby bird has fallen from its nest. He chases away a cat, finds the bird, climbs a tree, and puts it back. His father finally comes and takes him to their village where his sisters and granny await. The lad is a loving student of nature and longs for village life with his family, but his father is ashamed of him, wanting to farm the boy out to clear the way for marriage to a woman who knows nothing of this son. Over granny’s objections, dad apprentices Mohammad far from home to a blind carpenter. Can anything bring father and son together?
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 37
.
Breaking the Waves
Director: Lars von Trier
Writers: Lars von Trier, Peter Asmussen
Featuring: Stellan Skarsgård, Emily Watson, Udo Kier
Summary: Drama set in a repressed, deeply religious community in the north of Scotland, where a naive young woman named Bess McNeil meets and falls in love with Danish oil-rig worker Jan. Bess and Jan are deeply in love but, when Jan returns to his rig, Bess prays to God that he returns for good. Jan does return, his neck broken in an accident aboard the rig. Because of his condition, Jan and Bess are now unable to enjoy a sexual relationship and Jan urges Bess to take another lover and tell him the details. As Bess becomes more and more deviant in her sexual behavior, she comes to believe that her actions are guided by God and are helping Jan recover. Has she gone insane for love, or is the hand of God with her?
.
.

NUMBER 36
.
The Seventh Seal
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Writer: Ingmar Bergman
Featuring: Max von Sydow, Bengt Ekerot
Summary: A Knight and his squire are home from the crusades. Black Death is sweeping their country. As they approach home, Death appears to the knight and tells him it is his time. The knight challenges Death to a chess game for his life. The Knight and Death play as the cultural turmoil envelopes the people around them as they try, in different ways, to deal with the upheaval the plague has caused.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 35
.
Smoke
Director: Wayne Wang, Paul Auster
Writers: Paul Auster
Featuring: William Hurt, Harvey Keitel, Forest Whitaker, Giancarlo Esposito, Stockard Channing, Ashley Judd, Jared Harris
Summary: The plot of this movie, like smoke itself, drifts and swirls ethereally. Characters and subplots are deftly woven into a tapestry of stories and pictures which only slowly emerges to our view. This film tries to convince us that reality doesn’t matter so much as aesthetic satisfaction. In Auggie’s New York smoke shop, day by day passes, seemingly unchanging until he teaches us to notice the little details of life. Paul Benjamin, a disheartened and broken writer, has a brush with death that is pivotal and sets up an unlikely series of events that afford him a novel glimpse into the life on the street which he saw, but did not truly perceive, every day.
.
.
.

NUMBER 34
.
The Spanish Prisoner
Director: David Mamet
Writers: David Mamet
Featuring: Campbell Scott, Steve Martin, Rebecca Pidgeon, Ben Gazzara, Felicity Huffman
Summary: Joe Ross is a rising star. He’s designed a process that will make his company millions. He wants a bonus for this work, but fears his boss will stiff him. He meets a wealthy stranger, Jimmy Dell, and they strike up an off-kilter friendship. When the boss seems to set Ross up to get nothing, he seeks Dell’s help. Then he learns Dell is not what he seems, so he contacts an FBI agent through his tightly-wound assistant, Susan Ricci. The FBI asks him to help entrap Dell. He accepts, a sting is arranged, but suddenly it’s he who’s been conned out of the process and framed for murder. Bewildered and desperate, he enlists Susan’s aid to prove his innocence.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 33
.
House of Games
Director: David Mamet
Writers: David Mamet
Featuring: Joe Mantegna, Lindsay Crouse, Ricky Jay, J.T. Walsh
Summary: A famous psychologist, Margaret Ford, decides to try to help one of her patients get out of a gambling debt. She visits the bar where Mike, to whom the debt is owed, runs poker games. He convinces her to help him in a game in exchange for the cancellation of her patient’s debt. Her assignment is to look for “tells,” or give-away body language. Her task proves simple enough, but what she didn’t count on was the itch.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 32
.
Zero Effect
Director: Jake Kasdan
Writers: Jake Kasdan
Featuring: Bill Pullman, Ben Stiller, Ryan O’Neal, Kim Dickens
Summary: Daryl Zero is a private investigator. Along with his assistant, Steve Arlo he solves impossible crimes and puzzles. Though a master investigator, when he is not working, Zero doesn’t know what to do with himself. He has no social skills, writes bad music, and drives Arlo crazy. In his latest case, Zero must find out who is blackmailing a rich executive, and when his client won’t tell him, why. All goes well until Zero allows himself to become romantically involved with the suspected blackmailer and Zero’s own deepest secrets are threatened with exposure.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 31
.
A Perfect World
Director: Clint Eastwood
Writers: John Lee Hancock
Featuring: Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, Laura Dern
Summary: After escaping from a Huntsville prison, convict Butch Haynes and his partner Terry Pugh kidnap a young boy, Philip Perry, and flee across Texas. As they travel together, Butch and Philip discover common bonds and suffer the abuses of the outside “Perfect World.” In pursuit is Texas Ranger “Red” Garnett and criminologist Sally Gerber.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 30
.
Vanya on 42nd Street
Director: Louis Malle
Writer: Andre Gregory, from a play by Anton Chekhov
Featuring: Wallace Shawn, Julianne Moore
Summary: An uniterrupted rehersal of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” played out by a company of actors. The setting is their run down theater with an unusable stage and crumbling ceiling. The play is shown act by act with the briefest of breaks to move props or for refreshments. The lack of costumes, real props and scenery is soon forgotten.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 29
.
My Dinner with Andre
Director: Louis Malle
Writers: Andre Gregory, Wallace Shawn
Featuring: Andre Gregory, Wallace Shawn
Summary: Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, apparently playing themselves, share their lives over the course of an evening meal at a restaurant. Gregory, a theater director from New York, is the more talkative of the pair. He relates to Shawn his tales of dropping out, traveling around the world, and experiencing the variety of ways people live, such as a monk who could balance his entire weight on his fingertips. Shawn listens avidly, but questions the value of Gregory’s seeming abandonment of the pragmatic aspects of life.
.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 28
.
Miller’s Crossing
Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen
Writers: Joel and Ethan Coen
Featuring: Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, John Turturro, Albert Finney, Jon Polito, Steve Buscemi
Summary: A highly stylized genre film which can perhaps be seen as a pastiche of all gangster movies. Tom Reagan is the laconic anti-hero of this amoral tale which is also, paradoxically, a look at morals within the criminal underworld of the 1930s. Two rival gangs vie for control of a city where the police are pawns, and the periodic busts of illicit drinking establishments are no more than a way for one gang to get back at the other. Black humour and shocking violence compete for screen time as we question whether or not Tom, right-hand man of the Irish mob leader, really has a heart.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 27
.
Barton Fink
Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen
Writers: Joel and Ethan Coen
Featuring: John Turturro, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Juday Davis, Michael Lerner, John Mahoney, Tony Shalhoub, Jon Polito
Summary: A movie about a screenwriter with writer’s block, written by the Coen Brothers when they were stuck between acts two and three of Miller’s Crossing, and produced in the same year. In 1941, New York intellectual playwright Barton Fink comes to Hollywood to write a Wallace Beery wrestling picture. Staying in the eerie Hotel Earle, Barton develops severe writer’s block. His neighbor, jovial insurance salesman Charlie Meadows, tries to help, but Barton continues to struggle as a bizarre sequence of events distracts him even further from his task.
.
.
.
.
.

NUMBER 26
.
Europa
Director: Lars von Trier
Writers: Lars von Trier, Niels Vørsel
Featuring: Jean-Marc Barr, Udo Kier, Barbara Sukowa, Max von Sydow
Summary: An American of German descent arrives in post-war Germany 1945. His uncle gets him a job on the Zentropa train line as a sleeping car conductor. The American’s wish is to be neutral to the ongoing purges of loyalists by the Allied forces and do what he can to help a hurting country, but he finds himself being used by both the Americans and the influential family that owns the railroad. After falling in love with the railroad magnate’s daughter, he finds that he can’t remain neutral and must make some difficult choices.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.