100 Best Hindi Movies

[Henrietta Naughton]

BillMurray is at the height of his (eventually) lovable schmuck powers as narcissistic weatherman Phil Connors. Andie McDowell brings the brains and the heart as distant-but-ever-closer-coming producer Rita Hanson. And Harold Ramis, directing and co-writing with Danny Rubin, manages to spin gold from the well-worn thread of a man stuck in time. Whilst this time-loop dramedy might not have been the first film to drink from this particular trope's well, it is inarguably head and shoulders above the rest. Murray's customarily snarky delivery gets the easy laughs flowing early doors, but it's the way the movie finds deeper things to say about existence and morals as it goes on, all whilst never feeling overly preachy or worthy, that keeps us coming back to it again, and again, and again.

A high school drama with a time traveling, tangential universe threading, sinister rabbit featuring twist, Richard Kelly's deliberately labyrinthine opus was always destined for cult classic status. A certifiable flop upon its theatrical release, Kelly's film was one of the early beneficiaries of physical media's move to DVD, with the movie gaining a fandom in film obsessives who could pause, play, and skip back and forth through it at will. Any attempt to synopsise the movie is a fool's errand, but there's more than a hint of It's A Wonderful Life in the way we see Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal, in a star-making turn) experiencing how the world would be worse off if he survives the jet engine that mysteriously crashes through his bedroom. That the film, with all its heavy themes and brooding atmosphere, manages to eventually land on a note of overwhelming optimism is a testament to Kelly's mercurial moviemaking. A mad world (mad world) Donnie Darko's may be, but it's also one that continues to beguile and fascinate as new fans find themselves obsessed with uncovering its mysteries.

Celine Sciamma's magnetic, masterful lesbian romance may be a recent addition to this list, but became an instant landmark of queer cinema upon its release. Starring Noumie Merlant as an 18th century painter and Aduele Haenel as her elusive subject, Portrait Of A Lady On Fire is a tale of an epic love developed in the quietest, most delicate way, formed in stolen moments and glances. Sciamma's carefully constructed, smouldering screenplay and our leads' electric chemistry are matched only by Claire Mathon's transcendent cinematography, with each impeccably framed, Renaissance inspired 8K shot bringing new meaning to the expression "every frame a painting". Pure poetry.

What to say about James Cameron's epic romantic tragedy Titanic? It's 'My Heart Will Go On'. It's "Paint me like one of your French girls." It's a steamy handprint on a cab's back window and a frosted breath on a floating door that's definitely big enough for two. It's sparks flying between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and Billy Zane being the ultimate shit-eating grinning baddie. It is, figuratively and literally, one of the biggest movies ever made. Sure, Cameron's fictive based on the 1912 sinking of the world's biggest cruise liner may have suffered a difficult, overrunning shoot, and sure it may have been predicted to be a career-ending flop. But it turned out to be one of the most successful films of all time, both at the box office and at the Oscars, and as Cameron himself proudly declared, it did indeed make him "King of the world!"

For many still the definitive exorcism film (sorry The Pope's Exorcist!), William Friedkin's 1973 masterwork is the stuff of horror legend. The movie, which sees Linda Blair's 12-year-old Regan possessed by demonic spirit Pazuzu, endures as a jump-out-of-your-skin shocker thanks to its still-gnarly pea-vomiting, spider crawling, head-spinning, and crucifix screwing sequences. But this is no mere jump-scare chiller, not by a long stretch. In fact, the real reason it continues to affect audience so deeply today is because of the way Friedkin, through the figures of Fathers Damien Karras (Jason Miller) and Lankester Merrin (Max Von Sydow), so skilfully stages a soul-shaking crisis of faith, sustaining and building an atmosphere of such dread, such spiritual torment, that you can't help but feel you've unleashed something Satanic simply by watching it.

Before its release, you might have been forgiven for thinking that Edgar Wright's proper feature directorial debut would be Spaced: The Movie. Which, honestly, probably would've been great actually. But what we got was so, so much more. A zom-rom-com made with real genre nous and a distinctly British sense of humour, Wright's movie strikes the perfect balance between laugh-out-loud comedy and seriously gruesome undead horror. From its perfectly synchronised 'Don't Stop Me Now' zombie beatdown, to Nick Frost and Simon Pegg's star-making, side-splitting performances, to Edgar Wright's go-for-broke gonzo approach to shooting and editing, this is British filmmaking at its finest. Fuck-a-doodle-doo!

Five criminals are brought together to pull off a jewel snatching heist and suspicion and shoot-outs abound. It sounds like Reservoir Dogs doesn't it? In fact, it was even marketed as such. But a Tarantino picture The Usual Suspects ain't. Taking the line-up team-up concept as a starting point for something altogether different in execution, Bryan Singer and writer Christopher McQuarrie's super-twisted, uber-cool crime thriller attains true greatness through its inventive use of a supernatural-horror style backdrop. In the shape of mythic crime lord Keyser Soze, the movie fashions a phantom menace terrifying enough to put the willies up even the most hardened of criminals. Turns out the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was actually convincing us all this was going to be just another crime movie.

Famously dense, knottily plotted, and told in a staccato style that sees the author almost abandon anything recognisable as a sentence altogether, James Ellroy's L. A. Quartet of epic crime novels hardly screams prime fodder for the big-screen treatment. The miracle of Curtis Hanson and Brian Helgeland's L. A. Confidential then, which adapts the third book in Ellroy's quartet, is that not only does it viscerally capture the author's noirish sense of Los Angeles as a dark-hearted labyrinth, a City of Angels whose angels are falling, but it also manages to trim all the fat off the original 500-ish page tome without losing any of its soul or meaning. That it also features exceptional performances across the board, especially from Russell Crowe as conscience-discovering bruiser Bud White and Guy Pearce as ramrod rookie Ed Exley only solidifies its position further as one of the great modern works of noir cinema.

Over the years, the phrase "Amblinesque" has come to be a calling card for family-friendly adventures thrumming with heart, wonder, and just a smidge of darkness. It only takes a look at the success of the Duffer brothers' Stranger Things to see the Amblin approach will never go out of style. Never has that moviemaking method been more perfectly encapsulated however than in Steven Spielberg's actual Amblin joint E.T. The Extraterrestrial. Equal parts stonking children's adventure and poignant meditation on familial dysfunction and our capacity for healing, E.T. carefully beds its supernatural elements in an utterly relatable everykid world, tempering its cuter, more sentimental moments with a true sense of jeopardy. Boasting an extraordinary lead performance from a 10-year-old Henry Thomas, one of John Williams greatest scores, and an ending that still has us in floods over forty years later, E.T. remains the gold standard for family filmmaking.

Take a simple concept (don't make a sound, or aliens will get you), a stellar cast (Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe) and a director with a laser-focused vision (John Krasinski) and what do you get? As it turns out, one of the most innovative, refreshing, and unbearably tense horror movies of the 21st century. From the second it starts, the imposed silence of A Quiet Place makes it a revelatory cinematic experience. As the Abbott family pad gently around their home, the store, the woods, you feel in your bones that one wrong step equals disaster. The (loudly) ticking time bomb of imminent childbirth sets the scene for a stellar scary finale, but it's the deeply endearing family dynamic at play and Bryan Woods and Scott Beck's subtle screenplay that really sets this apart.

For their follow up to the superb Shallow Grave, Danny Boyle (director), Andrew Macdonald (producer) and John Hodge (screenwriter) foolhardily elected to film the supposedly unfilmable: Irvine Welsh's scrappy, episodic, multi-perspective novel about Edinburgh low-lives. The result couldn't have been more triumphant: the cinematic incarnation of 'Cool Britannia' came with a kick-ass soundtrack, and despite some dark subject matter, came with a punch-the-air uplifting pay-off.

David Lynch messes with Hollywood itself in a mystery tale that's as twisted as the road it's named after, while presenting Tinseltown as both Dream Factory and a realm of Nightmares. It also put Naomi Watts on the map; her audition scene remains as stunning as it was 20 years ago.

Photographer LB Jeffries (James Stewart) is on sick leave, with a broken leg. He's bored to tears, so he starts spying on his neighbours. Then he witnesses a murder. OR DOES HE? Alfred Hitchcock really knew how to take a corker of a premise and spin it into a peerless thriller (that's why they called him The Master Of Suspense), but Rear Window also deserves praise for an astonishing set build: that entire Greenwich Village courtyard was constructed at Paramount Studios, complete with a drainage system that could handle all the rain.

Having Phil Lord and Chris Miller's names on a movie is regularly the guarantee of something great, but the full team behind this animated marvel (in both upper- and lower-case senses of the word) is what makes it work. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman all added something as directors (with Rothman co-writing alongside Lord) and their animators whipped up a visually dynamic, exciting, and heartwarming adventure that literally spans multiverses before the MCU introduced it. Bringing Miles Morales to the screen was a masterstroke, and Shameik Moore's vocal work gives him buckets of charm.

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