Films beginning with O | Film
1000 films to see before you dieFilmFilms beginning with O
(Steven Soderbergh, 2001)
Monumentally enjoyable Vegas caper, based on the Rat Pack movie of the same name. Director Soderbergh basks in kitsch inconsequentiality, flipping out high-stakes action sequences, urbane camaraderie and spring-loaded romantic exchanges like poker chips. Brad Pitt's sunkissed Rusty Ryan seems particularly at home.
(Carol Reed, 1947)
Reed's imaginary Belfast in Odd Man Out is as phantasmagoric and filled with menace and edgy comedy as John Ford's Dublin in The Informer. James Mason's tragic, wounded IRA man must make it across the night-time city before the RUC closes in on him and his gang. Of special note: a psychedelic hallucination in beer bubbles.
(Aleksei Balabanov, 1998)
An elegantly salacious Russian portrait of 20th century decadence that draws uncomfortable connections between pornography, class barriers, voyeurism and cinema itself. It's set in sepia-tinted turn-of-the-century St Petersburg, where a corrupt manufacturer of erotica infiltrates the households of the nobility, accumulating a strange coterie along the way.
(Mike Judge, 1999)
Worker drones fighting stapler wars years before The Office. Ron Livingston's efforts to do as little as possible from the confines of his cubicle inadvertently find him targeted for promotion by the powers-that-be in this spot-on workplace satire from the Beavis and Butthead creator. With Jennifer Aniston's McJob waitress as a suitably downbeat love interest.
(Park Chan-wook, 2003)
After 15 years of imprisonment in a dank room, a man bent on retribution swears to hunt down his assailants in Chan-wook's queasy shocker. It's a gonzo adventure in grievous bodily harm (crimes against teeth and tongue; a virtuoso hammer fight) and a Greek tragedy that erupts with the madness of vengeance.
(David Lean, 1948)
Despite Polanski's recent version, this is still the best screen Oliver, and perhaps the best Dickens of all. Wonderful larger-than-life characters lurking and chirping in a grimy workhouse London: John Howard Davies' angelic, plummy Oliver; Robert Newton's black-hearted Sikes; and Alec Guinness's comic-caricature Fagin.
(Luis Bunuel, 1950)
Bunuel, in Mexican exile from Francoist Spain, had his first postwar international success since the early Dali collaborations with this playful upending of the moral certainties of the Italian neorealist boom. His protagonists are slum children of Mexico City, deserving of our pity, yet never earning it thanks to their frequent acts of guilt-free brutality.
(Leni Riefenstahl, 1938)
In her summing-up of the 1936 Berlin Olympiad, Leni Riefensthal created the grammar for modern sports coverage: close-ups, low-angle shots, multiple cameras - she did it all first. When you watch the utterly lumpen official film of the 1948 London Olympics, you realise how brilliant she was. It is just a pity that her paymaster was Hitler.
(Richard Donner, 1976)
Coming across like an action-oriented version of The Exorcist, this delivers solid thrills and standout set-piece deaths - with still the greatest decapitation scene in movie history. A slick tale of satanic reincarnation with an OTT score and Billie Whitelaw's devilish nanny stealing the show.
(Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1949)
This scintillating musical was the first to be shot (in one madcap week) outside the studio, on location. It fizzes with life and excitement: Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin are sailors on leave in New York and searching for the delectable Ivy (Vera-Ellen), all of them upstaged by gingham-clad Ann Miller.
(Elia Kazan, 1954)
Two brothers in the back of a New York cab, Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando, the smart guy and the one who could have been a contender. It's a classic scene in a strange picture that excuses informing (Elia Kazan had done this before he directed it) and says: don't let your son work in the docks.
(Sergio Leone, 1984)
Leone applies the soaring, operatic approach of Once Upon a Time in the West to this sprawling, time-spanning saga of four teenage New York gangsters (Jewish this time, not Italian), and childhood friends who rise to power through violence and guile, but are brought down by treachery and unrequited love.
(Tsui Hark, 1991)
Jet Li cemented his "new Bruce Lee" status with this perfect showcase. Both the lightning elegance of his martial artistry and the coolness of his acting are given full reign in the struggle of reluctant hero Wong Fei-Hung to fight the colonial powers in 19th century China.
(Sergio Leone, 1968)
More Puccini opera than horse-opera - thanks to Ennio Morricone's score - this Marxist western is one of the pinnacles of the genre, encompassing, by visual and thematic reference, and then subverting almost every other great (non-Spaghetti) western. Leone's enduring masterpiece.
(Marlon Brando, 1961)
Originally developed by control-freak Stanley Kubrick for outta-control freak Brando, the latter's erratic work methods meant he ended up directing this violent, oddball Oedipal western himself, with a cast that mixes the Elia Kazan stock company (Karl Malden et al) with Ford/Peckinpah saddle-tramps (Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens). Like no other western.
(Carl Franklin, 1992)
After a gruesome first few minutes, Carl Franklin's sleek and chilling neo-noir settles into a crosscut rhythm, alternating between a trio of criminals on the lam and law enforcement on their trail. With a script co-written by star Billy Bob Thornton, the movie deepens through slow reveals of crucial power shifts.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
(Milos Forman, 1975)
If he'd never made another movie, the cult of Jack Nicholson might have endured on the strength of his turn as Randle P McMurphy, doomed embodiment of the counterculture in the day ward that is mid-century America. The movie is both comedy and tearjerker, and the ending can still give you shivers.
(Don Chaffey, 1966)
The movie that Quest For Fire was meant to obliterate, with absurdly overripe cave-gal Raquel Welch making her first indelible impact on the collective male libido. Equally memorable for Ray Harryhausen's tremendous (albeit anachronistic) stop-motion dinosaur fights.
One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing
(Robert Stevenson, 1975)
Disney does London (with help from Derek Nimmo and Peter Ustinov) in a spiffing kids' caper concerning spies, nannies, some secret microfilm and much attendant ballyhoo. OK, the Chinese-baddie stereotypes are rather old hat, but they're not really nasty; and the sight of a dino skeleton's head bobbing along above the London fog is an all-time treat.
(Kaneto Shindo, 1964)
An artfully macabre horror movie that uses avant-garde flourishes and a primordial reed-bed location to bring an old folk tale to life. The focus is on two women who lure lost warriors into a hole in the ground then plunder their weapons. But a returning soldier, and a strange mask, bring out their savagery.
(Sally Potter, 1992)
An impressively-mounted adaptation of Virginia Woolf that remains one of the high-water marks of British art cinema and gave Tilda Swinton an early high-profile role. With a narrative that starts in Tudor England and races through the centuries, it's still a riveting and seductive watch.
(Jean Cocteau, 1950)
Cocteau's modern interpretation of the Orpheus myth proves that the most poignant magic can be realised with primitive special effects. Mixing classical mythology with his own obsessions, he set this fantastical fable of morbid love in beatnik Paris, resplendent with motorcycle boys and poet-toughs, where smitten lovers are transported into the underworld via magic mirrors.
(Siddiq Barmak, 2003)
The first post-Taliban film, Barmak wears the badge of a contemporary Asian film-maker - scrupulous naturalism and emotional fidelity - but with an extra, harrowing note of outrage. Marina Golbahari stars as a 12-year-old forced to disguise herself as a boy. Her unmasking is a clarion condemnation of a nightmare regime.
(Alejandro Amenábar, 2001) A haunted-house movie that conjures terror out of thin air, most of it directed towards a convincingly frazzled Nicole Kidman. As the mother of two photosensitive children, she's a housebound victim of increasingly strange goings-on. There are no special effects, just unbearable tension and unfathomable mystery.
(Steven Soderbergh, 1998)
Best-known for putting George Clooney's suave bank robber and Jennifer Lopez's curvy federal agent in the trunk of a car for a smoldering meet-cute, Soderbergh's jazzy, often hilarious caper is more than the sum of its heartthrobs. Toying with linear time, this wry nocturne is cool, sexy, and mysterious.
Out of the Past (AKA Build My Gallows High)
(Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
The most lyrical of all films noir, thanks to Daniel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) Mainwaring's exquisitely poetic screenplay, Tourneur's tasteful, unforced direction, and the infernal erotic interplay between jaded idealist Robert Mitchum and manipulative femme fatale Jane Greer, ("I only ever saw her at night..."). The greatest of all B-pictures.
(Clint Eastwood, 1976)
Eastwood also stars in this classic American civil war movie, his Josey Wales moving from embittered avenger to peace-seeker, picking up a surrogate family of stragglers - notably Chief Dan George as a not-so-wise old Cheyenne - along the way. Eastwood the director employs a fine eye for landscape and battle and a wry sense of humour.
(Francis Ford Coppola, 1983)
Seminal teen angst from Coppola that jump-started the career of many a future A-lister. The nostalgic style enfolds SE Hinton's teen rebels into a full-blooded melodrama, while the visuals are infused with golden hues as a reference to the narrator's literary loves: Gone with the Wind and the Frost poem, Nothing Gold Can Stay.
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